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Dec. 31st, 2010
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Dec. 31st, 2010 03:16 amI have never understood what precisely is happening in Marvell's "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn."
At the same time I'm afraid to think about it too long because the answer may somehow be Jesus. Which it tends to be in Marvell (and Gene Wolfe, which makes solving his elaborate puzzles equally annoying), though not as bad as in Herbert, whose Jesus annihilates him so thoroughly that he pretty much just is the-annihilation-of-Herbert, a universe-destroying masochism pretty close to the worst moments of Kafka (and at least with Kafka you can grab him and say no, no, no and lift him back up and shake him and remind him of where he'd been taking you). With Herbert it's like he came up with every possible riddle where the answer was Jesus, thus making you hate riddles, while implying that everything in the world is such a riddle, thus rendering hateful life.
But Marvell's Jesus-land is also nature-land, like in Spenser, which makes no sense but permits moments of innocence and beauty composed with the assurance of Jesus promises - as though the world, and they really believed it, were a fulfilled Jesus promise. As though the imperfect were okay because the perfect had said so. Being able to look at nature with the awe of true religion, rather than saying you should like we never cease to, is a startling thing, a delicate one, an almost Renaissance-only rarity. Clearly one needs to avoid the siren song of sense-making, with Marvell - but it's difficult, because you think, what if the sense when you find it proves Jesus is just a mist who smiles and waves bye and dissolves and there you are in nature in its innocence and beauty and Marvell meant to take you there?
What if he's never been talking about sin etc. but about what Kafka's talking about in his best moments, how you're at home in what you're made of when you can fight sufficiently free of - or into - what you're made for? How the person called God, the intention, or rather the thought of such a person with such an intention, perverts the intentionless place called Heaven, which is Earth, which is here, which you're made of?
I'd like the statue part to be a mockery of the Christian afterlife. I'd like the soldiers to be the idiotic God-warriors of the 17th century. I'd like Sylvio to be the most God-like thing in a godless world, the plan to our natural heritage, that has indeed betrayed us and must not again be trusted but that has given us such marvelous things. Not even Heaven is perfect, but it's full of most marvelous things.
(But also it's unclear if we're talking sex or masturbation or a green-red-white daydream subsuming them.)
At the same time I'm afraid to think about it too long because the answer may somehow be Jesus. Which it tends to be in Marvell (and Gene Wolfe, which makes solving his elaborate puzzles equally annoying), though not as bad as in Herbert, whose Jesus annihilates him so thoroughly that he pretty much just is the-annihilation-of-Herbert, a universe-destroying masochism pretty close to the worst moments of Kafka (and at least with Kafka you can grab him and say no, no, no and lift him back up and shake him and remind him of where he'd been taking you). With Herbert it's like he came up with every possible riddle where the answer was Jesus, thus making you hate riddles, while implying that everything in the world is such a riddle, thus rendering hateful life.
But Marvell's Jesus-land is also nature-land, like in Spenser, which makes no sense but permits moments of innocence and beauty composed with the assurance of Jesus promises - as though the world, and they really believed it, were a fulfilled Jesus promise. As though the imperfect were okay because the perfect had said so. Being able to look at nature with the awe of true religion, rather than saying you should like we never cease to, is a startling thing, a delicate one, an almost Renaissance-only rarity. Clearly one needs to avoid the siren song of sense-making, with Marvell - but it's difficult, because you think, what if the sense when you find it proves Jesus is just a mist who smiles and waves bye and dissolves and there you are in nature in its innocence and beauty and Marvell meant to take you there?
What if he's never been talking about sin etc. but about what Kafka's talking about in his best moments, how you're at home in what you're made of when you can fight sufficiently free of - or into - what you're made for? How the person called God, the intention, or rather the thought of such a person with such an intention, perverts the intentionless place called Heaven, which is Earth, which is here, which you're made of?
I'd like the statue part to be a mockery of the Christian afterlife. I'd like the soldiers to be the idiotic God-warriors of the 17th century. I'd like Sylvio to be the most God-like thing in a godless world, the plan to our natural heritage, that has indeed betrayed us and must not again be trusted but that has given us such marvelous things. Not even Heaven is perfect, but it's full of most marvelous things.
(But also it's unclear if we're talking sex or masturbation or a green-red-white daydream subsuming them.)
(no subject)
Dec. 31st, 2010 09:38 pmFinal 2011 reading plan is 10,000 pages. This way I won't just read short books, and I won't be discouraged from reading individual stories and poems and whatnot; that way I can finish the Chekhov stories I've missed, which are scattered over a number of volumes. But what I read has to be complete in some sense, to count toward the total. I think the completed reading from 2010 ran to about 10,000, so this shouldn't be a strain. I'll have to keep track of what's read somehow; I should probably write down what page I'm at in the various books I'm still reading. Though I guess I could encourage myself to finish those books by including their whole page count toward the '11 total. These simple schemes get complicated fast.
Toying with requiring half that total come from the ten or twelve core authors. Yes, why not: half, 5000. Proust plus War and Peace and Anna Karenina would cover it. Or just Emerson's unabridged journals. Though neither of those projects is likely. And we'll make it the ten.
Strict enough to get you somewhere you wouldn't have by yourself, free enough that you don't fight or much regret the rules, is the idea.
What do I want to read at the moment? The Chekhov. Several Shakespeare plays. A long novel - I've missed those. Some Alice Munro, since she and Carson are the local powers. To help cope with my first Ontario winter (delightful so far, I've missed this kind of cold).
Maybe a lot of short stories at first, by random people, now I'm free to. Poems? Might drive me crazy to count little individual ones. Rule: they can only count if ten plus pages or in a sequence that is or as part of a collection.
Okay, party to go to.
Toying with requiring half that total come from the ten or twelve core authors. Yes, why not: half, 5000. Proust plus War and Peace and Anna Karenina would cover it. Or just Emerson's unabridged journals. Though neither of those projects is likely. And we'll make it the ten.
Strict enough to get you somewhere you wouldn't have by yourself, free enough that you don't fight or much regret the rules, is the idea.
What do I want to read at the moment? The Chekhov. Several Shakespeare plays. A long novel - I've missed those. Some Alice Munro, since she and Carson are the local powers. To help cope with my first Ontario winter (delightful so far, I've missed this kind of cold).
Maybe a lot of short stories at first, by random people, now I'm free to. Poems? Might drive me crazy to count little individual ones. Rule: they can only count if ten plus pages or in a sequence that is or as part of a collection.
Okay, party to go to.