Skip to main content

Calvary

Thinking about The Greater Trumps (which I'll be rereading in the next few weeks), The Place of the Lion, and That Hideous Strength (not by Williams, but written in his style for his honor) and the significance of the single house outside the city where everything comes to a head. It should have been obvious, I suppose, but I hadn't thought the phrase 'outside the city' until I came upon some old college notes remarking on the importance of the city as a place of interdependence and coinherence. Picturing Anthony riding through the city on his flaming horse, then the car carrying Lothair out of the city and his daughter's strange vision... to a house on a hill, or in a valley, or between the trees, where the Fool dances or the fire rages or the beasts of the earth and the birds of the air flock with graven insistence. It always comes to a head outside the city.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can someone please explain why my Quicktime isn't working? Anyone with prophetic awareness of my little Atlas, none so old but recently behaving so?
8 comments
Read more
because you were all wondering what I'm writing my dissertation on, here's a brief synopsis of my 'research context': When James Macpherson published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry in 1760, he went to great lengths to make the Fragments appear to be authentic remains of an ancient, heroic oral tradition. His reasons for this were largely political, and as such, influenced the content of the epics themselves. As an attempt to establish a particularly Scottish identity, the poems were quite effective. However, to do so required both a simplification and a manipulation of traditional mythology. Stripped of anagogical significance, the Ossian epics more or less represented an Enlightenment version of history, tradition, and mythic heritage. The stories themselves were changed by their very purpose and in turn changed the manner of representing myth in future narratives. Moreover, the emphasis on the Ossian epics as authentic tales from the past, as ‘fragments,’ served...
6 comments
Read more
Rounding out my year of dwelling in the Athens of the North, as Edinburgh was called during the Enlightenment, I have experienced the shortest night of my memory. Around eleven o'clock last night, I closed the curtains to a sky streaked with the dark blue of a finally setting sun. I fully intended to drop off to sleep immediately after, but as I usually do, found myself still putting around after two in the morning. Between the curtains, which I had not closed as well as I should have, I noticed something unusual. There was unnaturally natural light streaming through. I opened them wide only to find the sky streaked with the same blue they had been filled with but three hours before. Had there been any night at all? If so, I had closed my curtains to it, only to find morning rising just as sleep found me - morning in the middle of the night. Long live Scotland.
5 comments
Read more