From the beginning of An Esphesian Tale I found myself wondering just how vain of a people the ancient Greeks were, around the time this was written. What value was placed on beauty back then? Was it the same as it is now? How could Habrocomes and Anthia be as beautiful as the Gods. Either the author was exaggerating for the benefit of his story, or there must have been a lot of ugly people, which would add substance to any beauty. I mean, the ordinary ugly people bowing down to the beautiful people, wondering out loud if they are Gods? Where would this happen? Maybe the author has deeply repressed insecurities about his own aesthetic output. Maybe deep inside the chambers of his soul he wants to be Habrocomes, or maybe he even wants to be Anthia.
The next question I found myself asking had to do with the lustful natures of said Greeks. Nearly every man Anthia encounters tries to rape her. And miraculously, no one acccomplishes the task. Come on now. We're supposed to believe that these barbaric men that have her alone, churning in the waves of their own passsion, all of a sudden discover their civilized sides and take the higher road. Not believable to me. Once again, was ancient Greece like this? How horrible would it have been to be a very beautiful girl? How horrible would it have been to be Habrocomes, and have all kinds of gay men hitting on you? What a weird place.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Victory Over Death
I was reading around in Frye and kept returning to a part that I think Dr. Sexson read. It starts on page twenty four, after Frye talks about Alice in Wonderland:
The only companion who accompanies us to the end of the descent is the demonic accuser, who takes the form of the accusing memory. The memory is demonic here because it has forgotten only one thing, the original identity of what it accompanies. (Frye 124)
What the hell is he talking about? I think he is talking about the "lowerworld" of literary imagination. I am taking a stab in the dark because I have been skipping around this book and have not read it from the beginning. I'll skip back a little:
This lowerworld judgement is in marked contrast to the upperworld apocalypses in Christianity and elsewhere: institutional Christianity gets them mixed up, but the poetic imagination knows the difference. The upperworld is essentially a form of revelation or full knowledge: in the underworld the central figureis not only a prisoner and accused, but he himself knows nothing and yet is known. (Frye 122-123)
I imagine this lower world to be a very cynical, non-fictional type of place. Desolate and grey and reeking of sulfur. A place where a person cannot recall there own name or what they are doing there. Where all memories have forgotten thier own identity, so perhaps they attach themselves to the wrong owners and confuse things more. Dark mountains rising above thorny, tangled forests. Castles upon the mountains and all of it in glimpses like a dream as lightning stabbed the night. Memory here would be a mischevious thing which could not be relied upon. Stories themselves, if they made sense at all, would have some sinister purpose to them. If stories existed at all, which probably they would not. Maybe eveyone would float around and forget everything as it happened. A life without memory is no life at all. Stories would become only speculation and would not tug at the strings of our soul. Without memory we have no connection to the stories we create in our own lives everyday and that add up to who we are. A person could become disconnected from not only the cummalative world around them but also from their own selves and lives. And with this un-knowing of their own selves may come a knowing of the void, where there is darkness and fire and gnashing of teeth. He goes on to say:
...It conveys to us the darkest knowledge at the bottom of the world, the vision of the absurd, the realization that only death is certain, and that nothing before or after death makes sense. The white goddess may sweep on to a renewed life, take another lover, and forget her past, but man can neither forget nor renew. But although in a world of death nothing is more absurd than life, life is the counter-absurdity that finally defeats death. And in a life that is a pure continuum, beginning with a birth that is a random beginning, ending with a death that is a random ending, nothing is more absurd than telling stories that do begin and end. Yet this is part of the counter-absurdity of human creation the vision that comes, like the vision of the Bhagavadgita, to alienated figures on a battlefield of dying men, and ends with finding one's identity in the body of the god of gods who also contains the universe. (Frye, 124-125)
What's the use of stories that aren't even true? Because there is something else written into us that we cannot read but that we know exists. There is more to this life than what we see with our eyes and we need to communicate this even though we do not know how. Without imagination, which is clearly suppressed memories from another life or world, we are in danger of falling into the quicksand of death. So we drink from streams of stories and find life and wisdom passed down from generations of imaginative souls. Without them we would be sucked into the void like Dorothy into the tornado (was she sucked into a tornado, I can't remember...) or we would just be boring.
The only companion who accompanies us to the end of the descent is the demonic accuser, who takes the form of the accusing memory. The memory is demonic here because it has forgotten only one thing, the original identity of what it accompanies. (Frye 124)
What the hell is he talking about? I think he is talking about the "lowerworld" of literary imagination. I am taking a stab in the dark because I have been skipping around this book and have not read it from the beginning. I'll skip back a little:
This lowerworld judgement is in marked contrast to the upperworld apocalypses in Christianity and elsewhere: institutional Christianity gets them mixed up, but the poetic imagination knows the difference. The upperworld is essentially a form of revelation or full knowledge: in the underworld the central figureis not only a prisoner and accused, but he himself knows nothing and yet is known. (Frye 122-123)
I imagine this lower world to be a very cynical, non-fictional type of place. Desolate and grey and reeking of sulfur. A place where a person cannot recall there own name or what they are doing there. Where all memories have forgotten thier own identity, so perhaps they attach themselves to the wrong owners and confuse things more. Dark mountains rising above thorny, tangled forests. Castles upon the mountains and all of it in glimpses like a dream as lightning stabbed the night. Memory here would be a mischevious thing which could not be relied upon. Stories themselves, if they made sense at all, would have some sinister purpose to them. If stories existed at all, which probably they would not. Maybe eveyone would float around and forget everything as it happened. A life without memory is no life at all. Stories would become only speculation and would not tug at the strings of our soul. Without memory we have no connection to the stories we create in our own lives everyday and that add up to who we are. A person could become disconnected from not only the cummalative world around them but also from their own selves and lives. And with this un-knowing of their own selves may come a knowing of the void, where there is darkness and fire and gnashing of teeth. He goes on to say:
...It conveys to us the darkest knowledge at the bottom of the world, the vision of the absurd, the realization that only death is certain, and that nothing before or after death makes sense. The white goddess may sweep on to a renewed life, take another lover, and forget her past, but man can neither forget nor renew. But although in a world of death nothing is more absurd than life, life is the counter-absurdity that finally defeats death. And in a life that is a pure continuum, beginning with a birth that is a random beginning, ending with a death that is a random ending, nothing is more absurd than telling stories that do begin and end. Yet this is part of the counter-absurdity of human creation the vision that comes, like the vision of the Bhagavadgita, to alienated figures on a battlefield of dying men, and ends with finding one's identity in the body of the god of gods who also contains the universe. (Frye, 124-125)
What's the use of stories that aren't even true? Because there is something else written into us that we cannot read but that we know exists. There is more to this life than what we see with our eyes and we need to communicate this even though we do not know how. Without imagination, which is clearly suppressed memories from another life or world, we are in danger of falling into the quicksand of death. So we drink from streams of stories and find life and wisdom passed down from generations of imaginative souls. Without them we would be sucked into the void like Dorothy into the tornado (was she sucked into a tornado, I can't remember...) or we would just be boring.
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