Brink / Man / Ship (2)

London-based Spanish artist Gemma Pardo this year exhibited (in Nottingham and Hastings) a video work entitled "Finisterre." The video offered over- and under-water explorations of the coast of the English channel. "Finisterre" is a word I've been thinking about lately in relation to my previous post on brinkmanship. From the Latin Finis Terrae, land or earth's end, the word has always seemed evocative of the negotiations between land and water, not simply their meeting point. Further poetic resonances attach to the word through its appearance in the shipping forecast (although not, alas, since 2002, when the name for this sea area became the considerably less poetic FitzRoy). The word is perhaps most familiar as a French departement in Britanny, although it's interesting to note that the Breton term for that region is Penn-ar-bed, meaning not end of the earth, but "head of the earth." Such reverse perspectives are drawn out in Pardo's film. 

"Finisterre" is also one of the best known of Sylvia Plath's poems (in full here), which begins:

"This was the land's end: the last fingers, knuckled and rheumatic,

Cramped on nothing. Black

Admonitory cliffs, and the sea exploding

With no bottom, or anything on the other side of it, 

Whitened by the faces of the drowned."

[...]

Aside from ruining the operation of "(There'll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover" as a successful exercise in patriotic romanticism, the poem is also worth noting for its image of the last grasp of the earth - a real sense of the brink.

Brink / Man / Ship

In a recent RSA-sponsored collaboration between poets Melanie Challenger and John Kinsella (here), the word “brink” makes an appearance. Mel is a poet interested in, amongst other things, mining the English language for resonances associated with place and landscape. She reminds us that “brink” is an “East Anglian Fen dialect term for riverbank.” Attempts to evoke the Fens, and in particular the uneasy relationship between man, land and water in that landscape, have challenged writers and musicians in recent times. Perhaps the most famous example is Graham Swift’s prize-winning novel Waterland, but other Fen-dwellers have undertaken similar endeavours – Robert Macfarlane’s recent radio essay looked at musical (The Great Fen Project), and poetic (Benjamin Morris) elaborations on the region.

The term “brink” remains in common usage, although it is now perhaps most often used in a metaphorical sense, indicating not geographical but temporal transition – a point (or, more accurately, moment) of no return. The OED confirms that “brink” refers to an “edge, margin or border,” often involving a steep drop, and that its secondary sense relates specifically to “the edge of land bordering a piece of water.” A further historical usage has the term refer to the edge, or brim, of a vessel. It can be no coincidence that Brinkley is a Cambridgeshire village, given that county’s shifting lands, multiple waterways and numerous boat-dwellers.

The various uses of “brink” are drawn together in the related word “brinkmanship.” The latter term denotes a brave (or foolhardy) attempt to advance “to the very brink of war” without actually engaging in battle. But the addition of the “-manship” suffix creates a portmanteau word that combines “brink” (point where land meets water), man (person negotiating the land / water borderline) and “ship” (means of making a transition from one element to another). “Brinkmanship” might very well be used to refer to our current attitudes to climate change, concerned as we are with tipping points and projected futures. But the term has additional implications if we borrow Mel’s Fenland use of “brink” and return “brinkmanship” to its roots in the negotiations between man and landscape. The two interpretations of brinkmanship suitable for our times – the arrival at the point of (climate) war, and a means of working with the natural environment – are not of course unrelated. Particularly if we factor in the issue of sea level rise…