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Jun. 22nd, 2006 02:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoception[We took the computer into the living room this week to watch Lost Season 2, downloaded from the American I-Store, and our internet setup was too delicate for me to move that too. An enthusiastic entry I typed onto Wordpad:]
It's lovely, a shy, fragmented echo of the mighty Prelude. I must have thought it was a "drug book," along the lines of Burroughs or something, immature trauma-waddling. Or thought the prose was pedantic and overwrought. Only in the last few years have I come to appreciate slow, articulated prose, where the point isn't to get somewhere but to precisely delineate the present topic, get the feel down. I think my deepest sympathies will always stay with the headlong, but I'm capable of delighted tourism now.
I was happy to see De Quincey quote from Shelley, from his Revolt of Islam no less--acid test for the Shelley lover--especially in light of their wide political differences. And some beautiful passages stuck out--
On music:
The mistake of most people is to suppose that it is by the ear, they communicate with music, and, therefore, that they are purely passive to its effects. But this is not so: it is by the reaction of the mind upon the notices of the ear, (the matter coming by the senses, the form from the mind) that the pleasure is constructed: and therefore it is that people of equally good ear differ so much in this point from one another. Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind generally, increases, of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are able to construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure. But, says a friend, a succession of musical sounds is to me like a collection of Arabic characters: I can attach no ideas to them! Ideas! my good sir? there is no occasion for them: all that class of ideas, which can be available in such a case, has a language of representative feelings...A chorus, &c. of elaborate harmony, displayed before me, as in a piece of arras work, the whole of my past life--not as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music: no longer painful to dwell upon: but the detail of its incidents removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction; and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed.
(Viva multiple colons!) On contemplating the sea, surely a passage Pater took to heart:
...And more than once it has happened to me, on a summer night, when I have been at an open window, in a room from which I could overlook the sea at a mile below me, and could command a view of the great town of L---, at about the same distance, that I have sat, from sun-set to sun-rise, motionless, and without wishing to move...I say, then, that it has often struck me that the scene itself was somewhat typical of what took place in such a reverie. The town of L--- represented the earth, with its sorrows and its graves left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly forgotten. The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it. For it seemed to me as if then first I stood at a distance, and aloof from the uproar of life; as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife, were suspended; a respite granted from the secret burthens of the heart; a sabbath of repose; a resting from human labors. Here were the hopes which blossom in the paths of life, reconciled with the peace which is in the grave; motions of the intellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon calm: a tranquillity that seemed no product of inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms; infinite activities, infinite repose.
(L=Liverpool, apparently.) An anticipation of theories of the unconscious:
The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived. I could not be said to recollect them; for if I had been told of them when waking, I should not have been able to acknowledge them as parts of my past experience. But placed as they were before me, in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I recognized them instantaneously. I was once told by a near relative of mine, that having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of death but for the critical assistance which reached her, she saw in a moment her whole life, in its minutest incidents, arrayed before her simultaneously as in a mirror; and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part. This, from some opium experiences of mine, I can believe; I have, indeed, seen the same thing asserted twice in modern books, and accompanied by a remark which I am convinced is true, namely, that the dread book of account, which the Scriptures speak of, is, in fact, the mind itself of each individual. Of this, at least, I feel assured, that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind. Accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever; just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas, in fact, we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil; and that they are waiting to be revealed, when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn.
From the most famous part, the series of terrible opium dreams near the end (of the first edition):
The waters now changed their character,--from translucent lakes, shining like mirrors, they now became seas and oceans. And now came a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll, through many months, promised an abiding torment; and, in fact, it never left me until the winding up of my case. Hitherto the human face had mixed often in my dreams, but not desperately, nor with any special power of tormenting. But now...the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself...Now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to appear: the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens: faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries:--my agitation was infinite,--my mind tossed--and surged with the ocean.
(He associates this with memories of his period as a starving teenage runaway in the city, poignantly described earlier on.) The final dream, starting off as a startlingly apt Little, Big epitome (complete w/ "somehow") and continuing as an improved (and anticipated) "Dover Beach":
The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in dreams--a music of preparation and of awakening suspense; a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that gave the feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day--a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where--somehow, I knew not how--by some beings, I knew not whom--a battle, a strife, an agony, was conducting,--was evolving like a great drama, or piece of music; with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I, as is usual in dreams (where, of necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement), had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself, to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. "Deeper than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake; some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives. I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed,--and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then--everlasting farewells! and, with a sigh, such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of death, the sound was reverberated--everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated--everlasting farewells!
And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud--"I will sleep no more!"
Opium was De Quincey's Permission-Slip God, clearly. These are things we feel, dream, know about our real lives.
It's lovely, a shy, fragmented echo of the mighty Prelude. I must have thought it was a "drug book," along the lines of Burroughs or something, immature trauma-waddling. Or thought the prose was pedantic and overwrought. Only in the last few years have I come to appreciate slow, articulated prose, where the point isn't to get somewhere but to precisely delineate the present topic, get the feel down. I think my deepest sympathies will always stay with the headlong, but I'm capable of delighted tourism now.
I was happy to see De Quincey quote from Shelley, from his Revolt of Islam no less--acid test for the Shelley lover--especially in light of their wide political differences. And some beautiful passages stuck out--
On music:
The mistake of most people is to suppose that it is by the ear, they communicate with music, and, therefore, that they are purely passive to its effects. But this is not so: it is by the reaction of the mind upon the notices of the ear, (the matter coming by the senses, the form from the mind) that the pleasure is constructed: and therefore it is that people of equally good ear differ so much in this point from one another. Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind generally, increases, of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are able to construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure. But, says a friend, a succession of musical sounds is to me like a collection of Arabic characters: I can attach no ideas to them! Ideas! my good sir? there is no occasion for them: all that class of ideas, which can be available in such a case, has a language of representative feelings...A chorus, &c. of elaborate harmony, displayed before me, as in a piece of arras work, the whole of my past life--not as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music: no longer painful to dwell upon: but the detail of its incidents removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction; and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed.
(Viva multiple colons!) On contemplating the sea, surely a passage Pater took to heart:
...And more than once it has happened to me, on a summer night, when I have been at an open window, in a room from which I could overlook the sea at a mile below me, and could command a view of the great town of L---, at about the same distance, that I have sat, from sun-set to sun-rise, motionless, and without wishing to move...I say, then, that it has often struck me that the scene itself was somewhat typical of what took place in such a reverie. The town of L--- represented the earth, with its sorrows and its graves left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly forgotten. The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it. For it seemed to me as if then first I stood at a distance, and aloof from the uproar of life; as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife, were suspended; a respite granted from the secret burthens of the heart; a sabbath of repose; a resting from human labors. Here were the hopes which blossom in the paths of life, reconciled with the peace which is in the grave; motions of the intellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon calm: a tranquillity that seemed no product of inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms; infinite activities, infinite repose.
(L=Liverpool, apparently.) An anticipation of theories of the unconscious:
The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived. I could not be said to recollect them; for if I had been told of them when waking, I should not have been able to acknowledge them as parts of my past experience. But placed as they were before me, in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I recognized them instantaneously. I was once told by a near relative of mine, that having in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of death but for the critical assistance which reached her, she saw in a moment her whole life, in its minutest incidents, arrayed before her simultaneously as in a mirror; and she had a faculty developed as suddenly for comprehending the whole and every part. This, from some opium experiences of mine, I can believe; I have, indeed, seen the same thing asserted twice in modern books, and accompanied by a remark which I am convinced is true, namely, that the dread book of account, which the Scriptures speak of, is, in fact, the mind itself of each individual. Of this, at least, I feel assured, that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind; a thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions on the mind. Accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever; just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas, in fact, we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil; and that they are waiting to be revealed, when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn.
From the most famous part, the series of terrible opium dreams near the end (of the first edition):
The waters now changed their character,--from translucent lakes, shining like mirrors, they now became seas and oceans. And now came a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll, through many months, promised an abiding torment; and, in fact, it never left me until the winding up of my case. Hitherto the human face had mixed often in my dreams, but not desperately, nor with any special power of tormenting. But now...the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself...Now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to appear: the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens: faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries:--my agitation was infinite,--my mind tossed--and surged with the ocean.
(He associates this with memories of his period as a starving teenage runaway in the city, poignantly described earlier on.) The final dream, starting off as a startlingly apt Little, Big epitome (complete w/ "somehow") and continuing as an improved (and anticipated) "Dover Beach":
The dream commenced with a music which now I often heard in dreams--a music of preparation and of awakening suspense; a music like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and which, like that gave the feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day--a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then suffering some mysterious eclipse, and labouring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where--somehow, I knew not how--by some beings, I knew not whom--a battle, a strife, an agony, was conducting,--was evolving like a great drama, or piece of music; with which my sympathy was the more insupportable from my confusion as to its place, its cause, its nature, and its possible issue. I, as is usual in dreams (where, of necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement), had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could raise myself, to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. "Deeper than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake; some mightier cause than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives. I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed,--and clasped hands, and heart-breaking partings, and then--everlasting farewells! and, with a sigh, such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of death, the sound was reverberated--everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated--everlasting farewells!
And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud--"I will sleep no more!"
Opium was De Quincey's Permission-Slip God, clearly. These are things we feel, dream, know about our real lives.
