Author: secessio

Péguy Against the Modern World

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by Fabien Benoit

The poet and essayist Charles Péguy, who died more than a century ago, was not only a brilliant wordsmith. He was also, and above all, an uncompromising socialist and a ferocious critic of progress and scientism. Excoriating a world corrupted by money and by men who think themselves gods, Péguy’s mystical thought resonates with our own times, with techno-prophets seeking to force on us their algorithmic approach to life and essentially redefine the very nature of what it means to be human.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in France, everyone’s a Péguyist!” It’s hard to argue with Matthieu Giroux, editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Philitt and author of Charles Péguy, un enfant contre le monde moderne (Éditions Première Partie, 2018). Péguy has this particular quality – he inspires admiration from figures with diverse, even antagonistic, political backgrounds and traditions. “And they’re not fake Péguyists,” adds Giroux. “You have Alain Finkielkraut, the right-wing, Barresian Péguyist. There’s Edwy Plenel, the left-wing, socialist Péguyist. In politics, there are François Bayrou and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan… They all say they love Péguy for his freedom. Péguy is the socialist against the Socialist Party. He’s the Catholic against the Catholic institution. He’s the mystical republican against the gravediggers of the Republic.” He remains the guarantor of a certain purity, of uncompromising standards.

Late rehabilitation

For a long time, Charles Péguy suffered from a bad reputation, in particular thanks to his appropriation by the Vichy regime and Catholic nationalists. For them, Péguy was nothing more than that Christian peasant who died a patriot in the war. This man who praised the virtues of rootedness and forged a philosophy of the land and attachment. This mystical intellectual who spoke of a “French race.” But for several years now, and more precisely since the centenary of his death on the battlefield (September 5, 1914, in Villeroy, Seine-et-Marne), something seems to have changed. Péguy is back, more contemporary and respectable than ever, ready to help us understand the mysteries of our time: “It is urgent and necessary to read him for the burning relevance of his thought and the antidotes he provides to the poisons that are eating away at our society,” declares philosopher Damien Le Guay, who published Les Héritiers Péguy (Bayard) in 2014. As left-leaning journalist and historian Jacques Julliard comments, “Péguy rules the world, and increasingly so.”

Why reread Péguy today? Why discuss him here? Why is the author of Notre Patrie [Our Fatherland] (1905), Notre jeunesse [Our Youth] (1910), and L’Argent [Money] (1913) revered by his fans like a cult figure whose work had a decisive, but all too often ignored influence? To answer these questions, it is necessary to revisit the short but eventful life of this prolific author, whose “total conviction commanded respect,” in the words of André Gide.

The virtues of poverty

Charles Péguy was born in 1873 in Orléans. His mother was a chair caner, his father a carpenter. The latter died when Charles was only a few months old. Nevertheless, Péguy had a happy childhood, which he remembered fondly. He would later extoll the virtues of this simple, dignified life, the virtues of poverty in a world still untouched by capitalism, speculation and the power of money. “We earned nothing; we spent nothing; and everyone lived. There wasn’t this economic strangulation of today, this scientific, cold, rectangular, regular, clean, neat, flawless, implacable, wise, common, constant, convenient strangulation, like a virtue, where there is nothing to say, and where the one who is strangled is so obviously in the wrong,” he wrote in 1913 in L’Argent (Money). In this same text, as in the rest of his work, Péguy celebrates craftsmanship and manual labor. “Throughout my childhood,” he writes, “I saw chairs being re-caned with exactly the same spirit and the same heart, and with the same hand, with which this same people had carved their cathedrals.”

Péguy was a brilliant, if somewhat insolent, student. He certainly caught the attention of Théophile Naudy, the director of the teacher training college in Orléans, who took him under his wing. Graduating first in his class in the primary school leaving certificate exam in 1884 and earning his baccalaureate in literature in 1891, he gained admission to the École Normale Supérieure on rue d’Ulm in 1894. This was a crowning achievement and a pivotal moment. The young provincial discovered the capital and left childhood behind.

The harmonious socialist city

The École Normale Supérieure (ENS) was then a vibrant melting pot, a space of freedom and intense debate. Péguy attended lectures by Romain Rolland and Henri Bergson, and he became friends with the school librarian, Lucien Herr, a philosophy professor and early socialist. Herr was a wellspring of knowledge. He was reputed to have read everything, in every language. He would later become, incidentally, one of the founders of the League of Human Rights and the daily newspaper L’Humanité. Above all, he introduced and converted several generations of students to socialism. Like Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum before him, Péguy was captivated, and began what he called “his first conversion.” At the ENS library, he met Jaurès, 14 years his senior, and began to spend considerable time with him. He published his first articles in La Revue socialiste and in 1897 published Jeanne d’Arc, an early, more literary text, which he described as a “lyrical mystery.”

Péguy’s socialism is utopian and libertarian. As a young man he dreamed of a fraternal society, an ideal of love and equality among humankind. “He embodies a French-style socialism, such as can be found in Proudhon or Leroux. A socialism that will not be contaminated by Marxism,” explained Camille Riquier, lecturer in philosophy and author of Philosophie de Péguy, ou les mémoires d’un imbécile (PUF, 2017). “A primitive socialism,” adds Matthieu Giroux. Two texts attest to this vision at the time: De la cité socialiste (1897) and Marcel, premier dialogue de la cité harmonieuse (1898).

Péguy lays out the principles that should govern his ideal socialist city. First and foremost, the idea of ​​an inclusive city that leaves no one behind and allows everyone to live decently. “The first social duty is to rescue the wretched from their misery. He made it a categorical imperative,” notes Camille Riquier. No one is excluded in Péguy’s socialist city: “The harmonious city has as its citizens all living beings who are souls, all animated beings, because it is not harmonious, because it is not fitting that there should be souls that are strangers, because it is not fitting that there should be animated beings who are strangers,” he writes. The young author speaks of “animated beings” and considered animals – although elsewhere described as “adolescent souls” – to be fully-fledged citizens of his city, anticipating by several decades the animal rights reflections prominent in today’s discourse. “All animals have become citizens of the harmonious city,” he explains.

Péguy can be seen as one of the forerunners of ecological thought. He demonstrates a particular attention to a form of harmony and osmosis with nature. This concern aligns with his vision of work: it is about ensuring “the physical life of the city” through gathered natural products and “the products of non-unhealthy labor” – that is, labor that does not deform either the souls or the bodies of the workers. Superfluous goods and luxury have no place in the world imagined by Péguy. It is a matter, though he does not use the term, of thinking about and building a frugal city.

Competition in the workplace, however, is rejected as the source of all evils. “Competition is bad in principle: it is bad for men to work against one another; men should work with one another; they should work to do their best at their work, and not to use their work to defeat other workers,” wrote Péguy in De la cité socialiste [On the Socialist City]. “Competition is often distorted by advertising, which tends to give an advantage to the most well-known work over the better-done work […]. Ultimately, international competition is the cause of war, armed peace, and the evils that follow, just as interpersonal competition is the cause of lawsuits, veritable private wars, most public and private hatreds, and the evils that follow.” Above all, for Péguy, work is not an end in itself but a means which allows citizens, once their physical needs are met, to devote themselves to other, more fulfilling activities, such as art or philosophy. In Péguy’s city, there is no longer any property or inheritance. Free access is the principle of everything.

Intransigence and solitude

“Péguy’s socialism is a way of restarting the French Revolution. The revolution had to be renewed every day. The socialist revolution was meant to be the culmination of the bourgeois French Revolution, which had failed because it was unprepared,” explains Camille Riquier in an interview with France Culture . The Dreyfus Affair, which shook French society at the end of the 19th Century, provided Péguy with another opportunity to affirm and deepen his commitment. For him, this affair, like socialism itself, was a moral issue, a matter of humanity. Despite failing the competitive examination for a teaching position in philosophy, Péguy was one of the first to throw himself into the fray. He decided to leave the École Normale Supérieure and, with Lucien Herr and Léon Blum, founded the Librairie Bellais bookstore in the Latin Quarter, the headquarters of the Dreyfusards.

Herein lies one of the essential dimensions of Péguy’s personality: his rejection of institutions, his wholehearted commitment to the struggles of his time, his aspiration to a pure socialism. This is reflected in his way of life. “One had to live like a socialist. To live as a wretch among the wretched. I see no better example of an authentic man, an authentic socialist,” emphasizes Camille Riquier.

Gradually, he reproached his friends – Jaurès in particular – for transforming the Dreyfus Affair into a political affair, whereas he saw it as a mystical struggle. His famous axiom – “Everything begins in mysticism and everything ends in politics” —was already emerging. He committed it to paper in 1910 in his book Notre jeunesse [Our Youth], in which he extensively revisited the Dreyfusard struggle.

“For Péguy, mysticism is fidelity to the early days of commitments,” explains Matthieu Giroux. “In socialism, it means being faithful to Fourier, to Saint-Simon, to early socialism. To be mystical in the Dreyfus Affair is to remain faithful to Bernard Lazare, whom they betrayed and left for dead in a corner, but who was the first to defend Dreyfus. In Catholicism, it is being faithful to the teachings of Christ rather than to the Church of Rome.” Contrary to this logic, there is politics, understood as the game of parties, compromises and capitulations – that which would later be called, in a pejorative way, ‘politicianry’. “The republican mystique was when one died for the Republic” wrote Péguy in Notre jeunesse; “Republican politics is now when one lives off it.”.

The Bellais bookstore didn’t last long, quickly teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Péguy drifted apart from his friends Lucien Herr and Léon Blum. In response to a motion passed by the Socialist Congress recommending that the various socialist factions refrain from publishing anything likely to harm the struggles for party unity, particularly those led by Jean Jaurès, he founded the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, which would become his life’s work, his sacred duty. With the Cahiers, his aim was “to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, to tell the stupid truth plainly, the boring truth tediously, the sad truth bleakly.” It was an extension of his Dreyfusard commitment, this fight for “the” truth and against the official version of the truth.

With this publication, which remained relatively obscure, never exceeding 1,500 subscribers, Péguy opened numerous fronts. He fought against anti-Dreyfusard nationalism, the anti-militarism of academics, the anti-clerical Combes movement (named after Émile Combes, President of the Council of Ministers from 1902 to 1905, known for his fight against the Church, which notably instituted the ban on teaching by religious orders), colonial abuses, racial persecution, and the oppression of national minorities in imperial Europe. “I am a journalist for a fortnightly publication, and I work on the miseries of the present,” he wrote. Decades before Sartre, Péguy is undoubtedly one of the first great figures of the engaged intellectual. “For him, there is a spiritual dimension to commitment,” emphasizes Edwy Plenel, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Mediapart website, “the idea that by committing oneself, one can rise above oneself.”

Péguy met many prominent figures of his time and, through his Cahiers de la Quinzaine, helped to introduce new writers, such as Romain Rolland, Julien Benda, Georges Sorel, Daniel Halévy, and André Suarès. However, his uncompromising nature and fervor led to a falling out with everyone: “In the end, the Cahiers de la Quinzaine was just Péguy on his own,” observes Alexandre de Vitry, a Doctor of Literature and author of Conspirations d’un solitaire, l’individualisme civique de Charles Péguy (Les Belles Lettres, 2015). “In Péguy’s work, there is a tension between the individual and the city,” he continues, “a tension that is concentrated in the idea of ​​mysticism, this primal impulse that animates every beginning of civic life. The price to pay for this mysticism is solitude, and this gives Péguy’s work an individualistic dimension. He constantly creates division, and he does so in the name of harmony, of the city. It’s a kind of squaring the circle.” Péguy, in fact, succeeds in creating a void around himself.

Metaphysics versus progress

In 1908, Péguy returned to the Christian faith of his childhood. This was his “second conversion.” But once again, he rebelled against the Catholic institution, which, in his view, distorted the message of Christ. Institutions, by their very nature, seemed oppressive to him. As the conflict with Germany loomed, his longstanding friendship with Jean Jaurès was no longer relevant. Péguy criticized Jaurès for his involvement in Combes’s political maneuvering and partisan politics, and for his pacifism, and even went so far as to wish for his death. “As soon as war is declared, the first thing we will do is shoot Jaurès. We will not leave behind a traitor to stab us in the back,” he wrote, unaware that Raoul Villain, a nationalist student close to Action Française, would assassinate the socialist leader on the evening of July 31, 1914.

When war broke out, Péguy enlisted in the army and, on September 5, 1914, died, sword drawn, killed by a bullet to the forehead while urging his company to hold their position. He was 41 years old. “Péguy’s true heart lies in his legacy,” argues the philosopher Damien Le Guay. “During his lifetime, he remained on the margins. He only achieved fame after his death. Everything he thought during his lifetime, we understand today.”

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So, what do we understand from this? What is most striking, beyond his involvement in the struggles of his time, is his critique of modernity and his prescience regarding the world that awaited us. For Péguy, the modern world is the one that has taken the place of the socialist world he anticipated. A world corrupted by money, which turns its back on the past and distrusts all cultures. “This modern world is a world that wants to eliminate metaphysics in the name of progress,” explains Charles Coustille, author of Parking Péguy (Flammarion, 2019). “It’s the idea that progress and science can save us from everything. Péguy criticizes the scientist’s confidence in the accuracy of their results, whereas reality, by its very nature, is unpredictable. The scientist, for his part, always imposes units onto living things.”

Péguy’s critique of history, directed at Ernest Renan, champion of positivism in France and a prominent figure at the Sorbonne, challenges the idea of ​​history as linear, a march forward. This undoubtedly represents a substantial part of Péguy’s relevance today. “It’s the question of progress for its own sake,” emphasizes Damien Le Guay, “and it’s a question of our time. Péguy explains that reducing everything to a matter of calculation, organization, and progress fosters a new metaphysics, that of money. So when you have something like Google, a hyper-capitalist company that aspires to correct humanity’s flaws and makes the eschatological promise of abolishing death, it seems to me that we’ve reached the end of the disenchantment Péguy spoke of.”

Péguy, the spiritual father of resistance to transhumanism? If you like, says Alexandre de Vitry: “There are elements in Péguy that resonate with this; he often criticizes his contemporaries for wanting to break free from their order, for thinking they are God. We see this today, but Péguy was not the Jacques Ellul [a pioneer of technological critique in France, author of, among other works, The Technological Society] that some would like to make him out to be.”

Edwy Plenel, for his part, primarily remembers Péguy for his (prescient) critique of capitalism and the reign of money. “Péguy was angry at his era, which is very similar to our own,” he explains in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur. “An era of transition, of industrial revolution, of financial speculation, an economic, geopolitical, and social upheaval. And he is angry at the universal commodity. That is his target: the degradation caused by commodities, by money. And that is the foundation of his anger: the universal commodity, which takes everything, which prostitutes everything, which standardizes everything.” Words that directly inspired one of François Mitterrand’s most famous speeches, delivered on June 13, 1971, at the famous “founding congress” of Épinay: “The real enemy […] is Monopoly! A broad term to signify all the powers of money: money that corrupts, money that buys, money that crushes, money that kills, money that ruins, and money that rots even the conscience of men!”

The elevation of science and money to the status of new gods – that is the problem for Péguy, who denounces “the world of those who play the smart aleck,” who believe in nothing and are proud of it. “If Péguy were alive today, he would be deeply saddened,” says Matthieu Giroux, “but at least he could breathe new life into disenchantment.” Rereading Péguy for his inspiration and his extraordinary writing, his art of rhythm and language, is a reasonable imperative for many of our contemporaries.

This article originally appeared in French in issue 28 of Usbek & Rica, published in Autumn 2019. Translation by Secessio.

Visual Regimes and Postmodern Imaginaries

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by Fabio La Rocca

Gaston Bachelard’s claim that “the image can only be studied by the image” encapsulates the difficulty of theorising a phenomenon that is at once epistemic, symbolic and affective. If, as Georg Simmel argued, every historical period must be grasped through its “style,” then the current conjuncture is characterised by a specifically oculocentric orientation. Postmodernity is less a discursive formation than a visual regime: a social order in which images proliferate, circulate, and mediate collective life. Continue reading →

Ever Building, Ever Falling

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by The Editors

It’s not unreasonable to assume, as many do, that the halls of academia are the natural home of the essay as a literary medium. But that’s not entirely true. Certainly many academics are prolific essayists, their extramural output consumed by a broad and diverse readership beyond the narrow audience of peers upon whose approval their employment depends. But the scholarly journals in which these people’s careers are made are rarely amenable to publishing work that strays beyond a strict set of fixed requirements – regarding style, structure, content, and so on. Despite the historical centrality of the essay in the development of modern academia, there is, paradoxically, woven into the fabric of the academy, a distinct aversion to the essay as a literary form. Indeed, its elasticity as a medium – and arguably also its intrinsic modesty (essayer: ‘to attempt’, or ‘try out’) – could even be said to place it inherently at odds with the world of the professional scholar, with whose role comes the expectation that they should be dealing in conclusions, authoritative statements of truth, rather than mere ‘attempts’.
    The dominant mindset in the social sciences insists that the production of such statements demands a particular way of thinking. From Day 1, students are cajoled into adopting a scientific, almost legalistic approach based on a positivistic, conceptual, structured mode of thought concerned with objectivity, definition and order, and which proceeds through the development of an argument. “Make your case” is the foundational mantra in a process of instruction that teaches us to organise and articulate our thoughts as if addressing a courtroom. Any proposition brought to our readers’ attention must be supported by evidence and authority, assessed by reference to the established, the new judged against the yardstick of the old. Once thusly judged and found to be sufficiently deferential to all that has gone before, it may be assimilated into the canon, added to the reports of cases argued and determined in the court of peer review as the judgment of a court is integrated into a body of common law. And so the cycle continues, until the substance at the core of a discipline is that which has been most thoroughly and comprehensively drained of its juices: literally, ‘disciplined’.
    A way of thinking that discards and disparages anything not strictly relevant to the judicial function demands a corresponding mode of expression, a way of writing in which words are corralled into singularity of meaning, denuded of their generativity, stripped of their imaginal potential and their power to move the reader and to stir feeling, memory and emotion.
    For those disciplines whose very purpose is to try to understand the workings of human society, this presents something of a contradiction. On the one hand, social scientists are always ready to trot out the familiar axiom that the social world is a living ‘object’ – fluid, dynamic, multifaceted and in constant mutation – and that it is therefore wrong to approach it as a dispassionate observer looking at a static or completed entity. And yet on the other hand, a residual fixation on scientific rigour more often than not leads these very same people to do exactly that, falling back into a mechanical way of thinking and writing about their subject deliberately designed to separate out individual pieces of the world and systematically drain them of their colour, richness and ambiguity: a mode of critique fundamentally rooted in the urge to separate.
    Think about how much of the language around the scientific method, with its obsession with categorising and distinguishing, is based on the metaphor of cutting: a scholar is said to possess a sharp mind. We cut through a mass of evidence. An analysis is incisive. Definitions foster precision. And so on and so forth. Everything is based on separation (all rooted in the fundamental separation of subjective and objective, observer and observed), the implicit assumption being that the best way to understand the world around us is by separating out its constituent parts. A mechanical conception of reality then, mirrored by a mechanical thought process, and in turn, mechanical ways of expressing it.
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Henry David Thoreau once said that no definition of poetry is sufficient unless it is itself poetry. What he meant was that nothing can be grasped in its quality of ‘being alive’ without adopting an intellectual posture in harmony with the object of study: a complicity or intimacy between the observer and the phenomenon being observed. As Michel Maffesoli remarked in an essay published on this site a few years ago, the positivist rejection of anything incompatible with what Peter Sloterdijk calls the “a priori of objectifying distance” leads to a refusal of such intimacy, instead opting for an approach that attempts to understand phenomena by submitting them a priori to abstract and instrumental reason and thus forcing them to conform in one way or another to the prejudices of the observer.
    This mode of inquiry is underpinned by what C.G. Jung referred to as ‘directed thought’: a quasi-legalistic process whereby thoughts are ‘directed’ through purely rational and conceptual frameworks. Against directed thinking, Jung juxtaposed ‘non-directed’ or ‘archaic’ thinking. Where the former “produces innovations and adaptations, copies reality, and tries to act upon it”, the latter “sets free subjective tendencies”. Whereas directed thought “operates with speech elements for the purpose of communication, and is difficult and exhausting”, archaic thought is “effortless, working spontaneously, with the contents ready to hand, and guided by unconscious motives.” Where directed thought tends to be slow, lumbering and unwieldy, archaic thinking is associative: image piles upon image, feeling upon feeling; ideas swell and undulate of their own motion. What is valued is the free flow of the process, and the sense of immersion in a drama not entirely of one’s own making. It is this kind of thinking, Jung argues, that provides “the means to releasing creative forces and contents”.
    Unlike what we ordinarily call thinking, which, as Robert Sardello puts it, is “not thinking at all, but rather the stringing together of already completed thoughts”, Jung’s ‘archaic thought’ occurs through us. We might connect it to a particular Ancient deity, known to the Romans as Mercury, and to the Greeks as Hermes: god of the imagination, Hermes crosses boundaries, making connections which cast new light on both sides, sometimes in unexpected and fruitful ways. Indeed, whereas directed thought only engages with the world that we think, which is at the best of times only incidentally concerned with the world that we imagine and experience, imagination as directed by Hermes allows for a particular receptivity to chance finds made along the road that may ultimately feed into a deeper understanding of our subject.
    From the point of view of Hermes, a form of interpretation and expression which fails to evoke the imagination or convey the reader into different states of being, instead merely restating what has already been written somewhere else in slightly different terms, is a low-grade one. Hermes, by contrast, as the messenger of the gods, patron of “rule breakers, border crossers, and go-betweens”, is able to make connections between phenomena and their archetypal roots.
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The pliability of the essay as a literary medium makes it ideally suited to this endeavour, allowing for an internal logic and structure mirroring such a movement of thought and enabling the free play of devices typically spurned by academia as anathema to the objectifying distance traditionally upheld as the criterion of academic integrity: subjectivity, imagery, metaphor, and so on – devices that may not be conducive to “precision” or “incisiveness” in any formal sense, but which can nonetheless invoke a great deal of content in very few words. Feelings, atmospheres and emotions cannot be described in the colourless and undelightful prose of academia, but these are the very things that lie at the heart of the human experience. In contrast to all those ‘cutting’ words, proper to a science which seeks first and foremost to separate, cut, divide and define, poetic forms of expression, freeing the reader to think in images that foster an intimacy with the phenomenon being described, have a ‘reconnecting’ function. Communicating through rhythm, sound and emotion as well as by intellect, a poetic phrase or image conveys a kind of synaesthesia whereby multiple senses are brought into play all at once, and entire worlds conjured up in a few strokes.
    For someone trained in academic writing, this can be an incredibly difficult mode of expression to get comfortable with. Indeed, uneasiness with this refusal of distance no doubt goes some way towards explaining why many academics resist the pull of the personal essay so forcefully. But it might equally be argued that it is precisely this very quality that makes the essay a mode of expression so well suited to the development of new ideas: breathing space for the articulation of a thought process paralleling that of its object; a supple impressionism that does not shy away from repetition – indeed, openly embraces it – each iteration like a brush-stroke contributing in its own way to the gradual perfection of the picture.
    When Secessio came into being a little over a decade ago, it aspired to be a meeting place for these kinds of explorations: a collection of “attempts”, overlapping, complementary, mutually reinforcing, bleeding into one another, each emerging theme given new richness, a new layer, another nuance or a subtle difference in shade with each new brush stroke. Navigating the chaos that surrounds us, however we go about it, is, after all, a creative process: the unending endeavour to build (poiesis: ‘to create’) an understanding of the world. We are indeed, all of us, every day, moving through a reality that is fluid, ever evolving, and in constant mutation; a world which, as Sardello puts it, is “an ongoing creative action of soul, taking place rhythmically, in time with the rhythmic activity of heart that creates our bodies.” In his poem “Milton”, William Blake speaks of the “golden builders” of imagination who will never finish their work on “Golgonooza, the spiritual Four-fold London eternal, // In immense labours & sorrows, ever building, ever falling”. In “Jerusalem” he describes the work as “continually building & continually decaying desolate”. With these lines in mind, Kathleen Raine writes of “the archetype of the ever-present, never-realized pattern of the sancta civitas, the pattern of the ‘golden builders’ be they architects or poets, painters or musicians”. In this sense, the final cause of building – Aristotle’s “that-for-the-sake-of-which” what we are contributing to is constructed – is not so much the functional use of the end product, as interiority: life, in other words, as an endless series of attempts.

Don’t Look Left

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by James Smith Harris

Pavey Ark

From down in the valley, Pavey Ark doesn’t have an immediately obvious role in the drama of Langdale’s towering battlements. In the jagged arrangement of peaks and crags cutting out into the mist, it sits back, a sullen wall of black stone sunk obliquely into the mountainside high above the dale. From below, it’s more a presence than a peak, standing over its neighbourhood with a quietly threatening demeanour of dignity and calm. Up close, when it slides into view over the crest of the hike from the valley floor, its effect is breathtaking.
   A quarter of a mile across and some seven hundred feet in height, the face of the precipice rising from the north shore of Stickle Tarn forms the back wall of an immense natural amphitheatre. Lodged in the slopes of Harrison Stickle to the west and tapering down to nothing at its eastern shoulder, it appears on first sight as a giant, stegosaurid ridge, slashed top to bottom with deep, yawning gullies and embroidered with grassy terraces and vegetation, its rocky spine saw-toothed against the sky and massive, cracked black slabs hanging still and silent over the lake. So flawless is the configuration of mountain, tarn and crag that it’s almost as though the whole arrangement has emerged from the imagination of a Romantic painter – an impression somehow reinforced by the stone barrage that dams the southern shore of the tarn, doubling as a viewing platform from which to take in the grandeur of the composition.
   This masterpiece of geology was a playground for the pioneers of British alpinism who flocked to the north of England in the late 19th century. Walter Parry Haskett Smith, the ‘father of rock climbing’, visited in 1882 on one of his first trips to the Lakes; Owen Glynne Jones, Cecil Slingsby, Norman Collie, Aleister Crowley and the Abraham brothers would all put their mark on it, as would more or less every luminary of twentieth century British rock climbing. Successive generations have bequeathed their own legacies to the rock in the invisible lattice of climbing routes that snake around its giant slabs and gullies. The stories they inscribe into its fictive inscape keep the mountain’s past quietly present in the jagged lyricism of the stone: some disingenuously picturesque (Little Gully, Gwynne’s Chimney), others openly malevolent in the chthonian toponymy favoured by the type of people whose accomplishments they weave into the philological contours of the land: Crescent Slabs, Arcturus, Fallen Angel, Cruel Sister, Mother Courage, Rainmaker, Impact Day, and a long list of others that would look as at home on an Iron Maiden setlist as in any climbing logbook.
   For most visitors, the calls of the climbers echoing around the cirque are just one of a million brush strokes that make up the spectacular vista that bursts upon the senses at the end of the climb from the valley floor. But while the poetry of their route names might go unnoticed except by those for whom it provides the reference system of their sport, the name of the mountain itself, of course, rarely does. ‘Ark’ seems like an unusual toponym in these parts, yet even without knowing anything of its provenance it somehow feels strangely appropriate: a vessel of secrets, sacred things, unknowable; ‘arcane’ – as if a statement of the mystery the human animal ascribes to these great natural monuments that have stood in place since the planet was in its fiery infancy.
   For many years the name was thought to derive from the Anglo-Saxon hearg, a holy grove or temple (from the Old Norse hörgr, meaning a heathen altar, a place of worship or sanctuary), and the Icelandic paufi – a “lurking fiend” (according to some sources; to others, a “dark and mysterious corner”): “Altar of the Lurking Fiend”. Current consensus puts the etymology of the term ‘Ark’ in the Old Norse element ‘erg’, a relative of the Gaelic airigh, meaning ‘shieling’ or ‘hill-pasture’. The element appears in more subtle forms (-er, -ergh, -argh etc.) in many place names of northern England, as in Mansergh, Cleator and Torver in Cumbria, Grimsargh in Lancashire and Arkengarthdale in Yorkshire. Arklid, at the south end of Coniston Water, is the hlíð (fellside) of the erg. Little Arrow near Coniston, formerly known as Little Ayrey, and Airey Force at Ullswater derive from an alternative form of the word, also found in Orkney, Shetland and the north of Scotland in Askary, Halsary and others. As for ‘Pavey’, ‘Pavia’ is now thought to have been a woman’s name (a 1902 study of the region’s Viking history notes Pavy-fields on the Solway, named after Pavia, the widow of a local landowner named Robert de Grinsdale); so, ‘Pavia’s Shieling’.
   Oddly enough then, the obvious Noachian connotations aren’t actually a million miles from the most probable etymology of the name, suggesting a place of sanctuary. Put it to a vote among anyone who’s ever visited Pavey Ark on a rainy day in winter though, and I’d hope that ‘Altar of the Lurking Fiend’ would be a stronger contender. For while the cavernous topography of this remote corrie tarn no doubt provides shelter from the arctic winds sweeping down over the fells, the primeval giant rising from its northern shore looks anything but beneficent, especially through the murk of the crepuscular months when the mountain’s summit is shrouded in cloud and the specks of primary colour against the gunmetal grey are few and far between.

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