Indiana Jones, Moab, and Tintern/Edward Abbey

I have a starting point for my discussion on Tintern Abbey other than the actual text. Does anyone remember that T.V. series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles? At the end of the first season, Sean Patrick Flanery falls in love with a young Elizabeth Hurley. There's a scene in the the last episode of the season which details a portion of how they fall in love. I think it's fantastic and I hope all 3 people who read my blog watch it. The scene starts just before the 5 minute mark but the linguistic battle begins after the 6 minute mark after Sylvia Pankhurst leaves the table.



This exchange of language is one of the most memorable moments of television for me. It's right up there with the first time I watched Highlander The Series. This representation of linguistic dexterity is brought out of their childhood memories of world travel and it is made beautiful with a nice mixture of competitive human nature and physical beauty (Elizabeth Hurley). This attraction based upon similar memories of foundational experience is a terrific lead in to this next video selection. Young Indy and Young Elizabeth head off to the country and part of their time is spent wandering around Tintern Abbey! Starts just after 3 minutes.



Tintern Abbey is Eliot's old stone that cannot be deciphered yet it absorbs light and creates a new building in the form of it's ruins. Tintern Abbey is Dillard's stone which talks and doesn't need a hermit to teach it anything (in the poem Wordsworth's hermit sits by a fire and that's it). Tintern Abbey is a mix between Stonehenge, the Sistine Chapel, and a marriage bed on wedding night. When we see the image, even without knowing any of it's history, we connect it with love, the memory of love and all else love can mean.

Now this is something everyone interprets in Wordsworth's poem on their own. Is the religious expression contained in the poem (in great quantity) a manifestation of the awesome presence of nature/love or is the amazing natural world/existence of love created to fit the religious expression? I lean on the side of nature/love creating a religious interpretation. Three different times he mentions the body of the man and afterwords the spirit, indicating that the spirit follows the body and not the other way around. Near the end, "Nature" comes before "holier love".

Tintern Abbey once acted as an incidental religious building in which monks made a beer of only local renown (if I recall correctly). Without changing into the ruins of today, the building would never have reached it's true potential. This leads me to think change is a necessary ingredient for ascension into the sublime state. We are the ones who must change and recognize the change. The first time Wordsworth went there, he didn't compose the poem. It took revisiting it for him to write this poem.

What else could be a parallel with Tintern Abbey? That's easy. Go to the town of Moab in Utah and visit Canyonlands National Park and Arches National Park. It's only 10 hours away. Every time I return, I feel a magnetic pull to the land around me stronger than I recall from my previous visit. I'm not religious and I doubt I ever will be yet a place like this has me nearly convinced that god could actually exist. The land itself breaths an expression of love and I become more and more addicted to the constant inhalation of it during my visits. I imagine it's a good deal more powerful than Tintern Abbey and until you've seen it with your own eyes you will not know what it is I speak of.

Now it's too late to go and find visual media to link these two together so I'll leave you with only words. If you've ever watched the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (the best movie of the series), then you've seen some of Moab. They shot the opening scene leading up to and outside of the "caves" in Arches National Park. The whole opening for the movie is a reminiscing as Indy chases after an artifact he's searched for his entire life, beginning with his childhood. Memory. Change over time. The stone (or Indy's sought after treasure) indecipherable and yet by absorbing light it speaks to us deep in our souls. It's all right there.

Go to Moab. And don't bring Tintern Abbey with you. Instead, bring Edward Abbey.