“Bread crumbs”(perhaps how you got here)

(Originally posted January 3rd, 2009)

From James Cowan, A Troubadour's Testament (Boston, 1998):

Saracen galleys may blockade
Tripoli, citadel of our hope
And guardian of fin' amors.
Though in these days I see
Meanness in flower, a paltry
Bloom disguised as courtliness,
And turn and twist like an eel
In a net, never think that I,
Marcebru, will not sing
Of green meadows and fruit
Heavy on the branch.

This is the first half of a two-stanza poem; it purports to be the work of Marcabru (spelled "Marcebru" in Cowan's book), a twelfth-century troubadour. (So far as I know, the poems are Cowan's; several dozen poems or songs attributed to Marcabru survive.)

The nature of the troubadours remains, to our eyes, confused and mysterious in the extreme. It is not at all clear who they really were or what they really did; what we do know is that a substantial body of poetry (or song) and some music survives from them. Marcabru seems to have been one of the most erudite and sophisticated.

Probably everything in the passage quoted above should be taken as symbolic or allusive; one possible (but superficial) interpretation would be to read the poem as saying that the treasure of love is under assault by insincere poetasters, but Marcabru will remain faithful to the true art and content of Poetry. Many other interpretations are easily possible; since this poem is not genuine, it can be seen only as a modern imitation - but it is not the less interesting and useful for that.

Apparently central to the idealism of the troubadours was the posited ideal of "fin' amors," a concept now almost beyond understanding. As a first pass at understanding it, we might take the phrase as meaning "pure love," although the English only slightly suggests the subtle and complex tapestry of connotations that was woven about the phrase. But the details of interpreting fin' amors are not my interest here - rather, I want to think about Cowan's notion that something very good and beautiful is under attack from those that pretend to be the servants of art, but are not. The poet pledges to remain true; he will not "turn and twist like an eel in a net." Instead, he will sing of "green meadows and fruit heavy on the branch." Perhaps "green meadows and fruit heavy on the branch" are meant as signs of the direct, pure center of beauty.

Cowan's book is a sweet, somewhat subtle work that holds out the hope (if it is a hope and not a fear) of a connection between the troubadours and their approximate contemporaries, the Cathars. The Cathars were something like a survival of the Arians of an earlier age, a deviant Christian sect. They were eventually fiercely persecuted by the established Christian church; most were slaughtered in the Thirteenth Century, maybe a little before the period in which the troubadours ceased to practice, although surviving records make little connection between the two events.

Today we no longer understand much about either the Cathars or the troubadours; particularly in the case of the troubadours, we may be making the mistake of treating as a single phenomenon what is really a (more or less close) bundle of similar strains of development. But scholars and popular writers want very much to find something there, to find fin' amors, as if it were some sort of salvation that can only be grasped mystically, or perhaps by some form of gnosis, some secret and special revelation to which the great run of people are not privy.

And that may well be the great lesson: Cowan's poem says that the Philistines posture in the pretense of being poets, but they really threaten "Tripoli, citadel of our hope." Could it be, rather, that for all their inferiority in skill, for all their dim vision, the drab and largely fraudulent poets that competed with the troubadours were the ones that actually guarded the treasure? Could it be that the galleys that laid siege were not the enemy, but the guardians? Those that love the ideal of the troubadours cannot imagine that shabby and lame pedestrians would be the true singers; there always has to be this notion that the Heart of Beauty is somewhere beyond, or maybe I should write Somewhere Beyond.

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