(no subject)

[proximoception]

Unmoored allegories need noplaces (utopia's taken) or strangers.

Are there different types of noplace? There's the vision of the real world, usually one of flowing, shifting forces (Lucretian?) or of dark, settled presence, seen through the phenomenal one.

Flowing: Simplon Pass, Mont Blanc, Intellectual Beauty (?), Two Rivers, River of Rivers in CT, Plain Sense of Things, At the Fishhouses, maybe Cabin in the Clearing...perhaps the ocean in Coleridge? In Melville? Surely something in Frost, too - the world seen through the Apple-Picking ice-pane? The west-running brook? The decaying woodpile always struck me as allusive of "woods decaying, never to be decayed". Which makes me think the Garden of Adonis must belong here too.

Dark Presence: WW's boat-stealing episode...anything else? Maybe Mont Blanc counts here too.

And then there's the Command Center, some visionary location where the truth/falsehood of the world is confronted, or perhaps fails to show - named for the amusingly literal one in Matrix 2.

Command Center: the temple in Laon & Cythna, the vast hall in Fall of Hyperion, Demogorgon's cave, the Witch of Atlas' cave, the water Shelley sails out on in Adonais, the cave and valley (and then trampled Life-lit plain) in Triumph, the clearing in Goodman Brown, the prairie in Earth's Holocaust, the wasteland and tower in Childe Roland, its antithesis in Thamuris Marching, Eliot's Waste Land - esp. the chapel, the Cathedral in The Trial & even more the gate told of there, the falling palace of Housman's queen of air and shadows, the place underground in Strange Meeting, wherever the hell Cuchulain is in Cuchulain Comforted, the sea of death in Ship of Death, Underhill's House in LB (how frequently is this noplace just the approach to one?)...Perhaps in Lynch: The red room. The cabin on the lost highway. The Lost Highway Hotel. Club Silencio. Probably something or other in Inland Empire...the tv room?

Is Luke Havergal's western gate in this category, or is it more like a -

Dream House: the place we maybe lived or thought we lived and/or the place we yet might live or will never live but is nevertheless real to us, inseparable from the life and family we had or might have or will never have there. A Way You'll Never Be, but also How to Live, What to Do.

"My Kinsman, Major Molineux" - The golden home of prenatal memory, a shaft of whose light hits the bible in the closed church.
"Walking" - The house in the woods.
"Directive" - The house that is no more a house.
"The End of March" - The house they turn back before reaching, the dream house.
Engine Summer - Little Belair
Little, Big - Edgewood

The happy highways where I went, perhaps the house on the hill.

Not sure if the vision of the mountaintop in "Kilimanjaro" should count here, or the invisible home of the man and baby at the end of a path of flowers in "Cape Breton." Perhaps the sounds of home life in "The Moose"? And "One Art" may spell such a house across the losses of a lifetime - doesn't the use of (imperative) 2nd person reveal it as a child of "Directive"?

I need to reread Invisible Cities. And avoid turning into Northrop Frye.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

A little bit as though all mythologies are the key to Lost.

This is really good.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Heh! I find Lost flirts with allegory continuously, but always ends up having to literalize those elements into the merely supernatural (b/c anything they throw in there needs to be reused somewhere else in the plot, has to be essentially physical)- a variation on the Radcliffe/Chesterton method.

[localcharacter.livejournal.com]

Frye(d) or not, I like this. Are there three, though, for both the Nature and House versions--benign, malign, and simply Other? The Command Center is so troubling because we're looking for the Dream House, or (failing that, or driven by Fate or History) the Nightmare House, and we can't tell which one it is—it doesn't even know which one it is. And the human-built (or -imagined) House is just the Enlightenment update of the Nature spot, yes?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Benign/malign/other true face of nature: I think it's going to always be Other, in this tradition, or at least uncanny - the strangeness under the lid of our home. And generally these authors finally agree that 'malign' and 'benign' either don't apply or do only because of our perspective - "Auroras of Autumn" is one I left off the list, where a frightening flowing, invisible presence behind nature will eventually murder us, but entirely innocently. Even in Wordsworth, noplaces and strangenesses are usually set apart from his vague, optimistic nature-worship - the episodes mentioned, but also "Nutting" comes to mind; not even he interprets the intentions of the powers he glimpses. But yeah, troubled guesses about the implications of what one has seen are a part of this Sublime tradition.

Command Center/Dream House: Troubling point. "Auroras" provides some support for your scenario, where the troubling arctic effulgence drains the color out of Stevens' dream/nostalgia house and leaves him outdoors thinking about the lair of the creature behind reality. I resist seeing them as versions of one another, but can't deny part of the horror of the Command Center can be that it's unclear that it's not some paradise you're unable to recognize. In some versions you never know if it's you that's the asshole - in Goodman Brown, for example.

Nature spot? I'm not sure. There's already House vs. Woods in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a key source of this tradition ("local habitation and a name" passage is very noplace). You mean something like the pastoral 'bower'?

Nightmare house...so, proof that the universe is a horror show put on to distress us, the consolation prize Hardy was failing to find in "Hap"? Might account for the odd serenity of Thomson's "City of Dreadful Night" - by being absolutely evil, the dark city (and poem describing it) oddly becomes kind of beautiful and peaceful.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Sonic Youth's The Diamond Sea. I can't find a good version on youtube alas. Great entry.