Edgar Allan Poe: "In Our Time" - BBC Radio 4

 As mentioned in class when we were looking at the Gothic influences behind the opening to Dickens' Great Expectations, here is the link to the recent programme on BBC Radio 4 on the American writer Edgar Allan Poe. 

I recommend 'In Our Time', and the wonderful Melvyn Bragg for all sorts of other interesting programmes.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Poe (1809-1849), the American author who is famous for his Gothic tales of horror, madness and the dark interiors of the mind, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Tell-Tale Heart. As well as tapping at our deepest fears in poems such as The Raven, Poe pioneered detective fiction with his character C. Auguste Dupin in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. After his early death, a rival rushed out a biography to try to destroy Poe's reputation but he has only become more famous over the years as a cultural icon as well as an author.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001svfv

Shakespeare's world - a recording

 In class we have begun thinking about Shakespeare by listening to an episode of the BBC's excellent radio series, "Shakespeare's Restless World", which takes an object found from the time, and brings out its significance socially, politically, and in terms of Shakespeare's plays. This episode, called 'City life, urban strife', takes a woolen cap worn by the lower echelons of society. There was even a parliamentary statute which stipulated that males over the age of six had to wear a wool cap on Sundays and holidays!

The programme also considers how the very many apprentices of the day would wear one, and often get into trouble in town and go wild particularly on Shrove Tuesday just before the rigours of Lent set in. In fact, disorderly behaviour was commonplace, and the crowds could easily become a 'mob' and a serious threat to power structures at the time. 

Listen to the episode by clicking on the link below. And prepare a fully summary of its main ideas:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nYeRynW04vN-B8uLpuYfWm-KGeFrvzoh/view?usp=sharing

BBC: Five minutes with Peter Ackroyd

Author Peter Ackroyd talks to Matthew Stadlen about the diverse nature of his work, the importance of time, and his fascination with London. Amazing what you can fit into five minutes. Do listen! This is one of the great writers of our age, with his novels, histories, and biographies, including an exceptional one on Dickens, and one on his favourite city, London: https://www.amazon.co.uk/London-Biography-Peter-Ackroyd/dp/0099422581/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=peter+ackroyd&qid=1682347789&sprefix=peter+ack%2Caps%2C116&sr=8-3

Ackroyd has a phenomenal mind; he manages to garner encyclopedic knowledge of his subjects, and rework it into a brilliantly imaginative vision. 

William Blake and his Business of Creation | Cultural Insights with Susanne Sklar

 Valuable insights into the English poet, painter, draughtsman, and printmaker William Blake (1757-1827) by scholar Susanne Sklar, who will be giving a series of Blake seminars from 1st June to 6th July at the Temenos Academy. Venue: the Rudolf Steiner House, London NW1.
Here is a short interview and video to give some idea of this towering figure of the Imaginative Vision, more relevant to our times than ever. Blake is a healthy figure to have around, to take issue powerfully with some of the more questionable premises of our times:

 http://www.theculturalaficionado.com/cultural-insights-with-susanne-sklar-2/

She says: "The humanities are being eradicated. Blake scholars are becoming an endangered species – though we continue to write, to teach, and reach outside academia where Blake’s vision is warmly welcomed. He’s inspired Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Gregory Bateson (the cybernetics pioneer), R.Crumb, Philip Pullman, and environmental activists (among others). Scholarship, of course, is necessary, for entering into Blake’s greatest works requires the kind of rigorous critical and imaginative thinking an archaeologist must have when uncovering hidden cities. William Blake cannot be compartmentalised. His vision goes beyond political correctness; he’s uninterested in subverting dominant paradigms. Where there is no hierarchy subversion isn’t necessary. His work can change the way we think about the deep structures of relationship and reality."

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

 In the Western world, there can be few Christmas stories, outside the Biblical ones of course, that have had such an enduring influence on our celebrations at this time of the year as Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843). It has even been said that Dickens invented our modern idea of Christmas through his yearly offering of Christmas Tales. I have my grandmother's copy of these timeless stories that she inscribed with her name when a young lady, and I began reading A Christmas Carol on that most suitable of days, and the day on which the story begins, Christmas Eve. 

I don't think any writer outside Shakespeare has created such imaginatively powerful characters as Dickens has. They are larger than life, fairy-tale-like in their familiar magical otherness, have entered our imaginative consciousness and become part of the furniture of our minds; the Pantheon of the English imagination. Ebenezer Scrooge features strongly among them, the archetypal miser whose meanness and cold heart slowly melt away as four supernatural presences manifest to show him the truth: his deceased associate Marley, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, of Christmas Present and the last visitor, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. 

What an extraordinary opening line!: 'Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.' We know what we have on our hands, another installment from our greatest storywriter, 'the inimitable Dickens'. We know we will be entertained with his infectious humour, we know we will be treated to a supernatural tale, and all within the first six words. 

As I wander wide-eyed through the magic world of Scrooge's Counting House, the London Streets at Christmas, the visions summoned up by the Ghosts of Scrooge's childhood and youth and the modest household of his clerk Bob Cratchet, I am amazed by the breadth of this imaginative vision, the richness and density of the prose, a prose which even after a hundred and eighty years is as fresh and delightful as it was when it was first penned. It gives us humbling food for thought to consider that these stories were read by 'all and sundry', the rich, the not so rich, the barely literate, the poor, the uneducated; and understood, and loved. It is true that people did not have today's distractions, the screens of telephones, computers, televisions, and endless media chatter, but most people struggled to get by, like today, and very many lived in the deepest poverty. But the world of mass production of standardised products was limited, people lived more sedentary lives, communities still flourished on the bedrock of age-old customs and traditions, language, although cheapened by a largely mercantile society, retained some of its density. And Dickens' world is dynamic, everything, even the most ordinary of objects, have a liveliness and life of their own. Here is an early description of the mid-winter London outdoors:

The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. The cold became intense.

And here, the lively bustling streets of ice, and the glow and warmth of human habitation and activity; again we note that objects are not 'inanimate'in this world, they have expressions, personality, even feelings:

 In the main street, at the corner of the court, some labourers were repairing the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered: warming their hands and winking their eyes before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug being left in solitude, its overflowings sullenly congealed, and turned to misanthropic ice. The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers’ and grocers’ trades became a splendid joke: a glorious pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe that such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to do. The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his fifty cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor’s household should; and even the little tailor, whom he had fined five shillings on the previous Monday for being drunk and bloodthirsty in the streets, stirred up to-morrow’s pudding in his garret, while his lean wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.

 And what about the description of the first supernatural apparition, Marley, his associate, seven years dead, whose face first appears in the place of Scrooge's ... doorknocker:

And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change—not a knocker, but Marley’s face. Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless.

 In our televised or film versions of Dickens, we can forget what a most perculiar, strikingly original, and downright out-of-this-world imagination he has. What a strange image!: "a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar". Surely, something utterly surreal, nightmarish.

What mind would then think the next imaginative thought, when Scrooge closes the door behind him?

'and he did look cautiously behind it first, as if he half expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley’s pigtail sticking out into the hall.'

And the comically strange sight of the transparent ghost of Marley, standing in Scrooge's room:

His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind. 

This detail of the buttons is amusing; and very human too in its perceptiveness; we know in the oddest, even most extreme circumstances, how our attention can alight on the most apparently trivial detail. The 'two buttons' observation is also a reminder that although this might be in part a ghost story, it is not a 'horror' or 'gothic' story, it is not entirely serious; the ghosts are not a threat, but a reminder of a higher order of things, a reminder of what remains to be done in our precious time on earth. 

Finally, in this first part, and on a graver note, the ghost of Marley carries in him the weight of a spiritual sickness, brought about by never having lived his life on earth outside the narrow perimetres of the counting house, never having lived generously with a thought for others' wealthfare - and his visit from beyond the grave is an act of grace, to warn Scrooge not to live like this and to avoid the tortured wanderings of a disincarnate soul after death. Marley and Scrooge have both 'forged' the chains of their own present misery and self-confinement. 

“It is required of every man,” the Ghost returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world—oh, woe is me!—and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!”

Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain and wrung its shadowy hands.

“You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”

“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”

Scrooge trembled more and more.

“Or would you know,” pursued the Ghost, “the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!”

New Simon Armitage poem on our times

The current poet laureate, Simon Armitage, has recently published a striking, original poem on our unstable disturbing times, whose final vision is perhaps what he himself calls 'hope'. It is an imaginative response to the COP-26 climate summit taking place in Glasgow. I particularly like the powerful line, 'It's T minus zero/of the Petroleum Era' (T minus... is a term used for the countdown prior to a rocket launch). The short lines create a sense of impending doom, or perhaps of a world teetering on the brink of a new dawn, the central ambiguity of this poem. Here is his introductory piece, followed by the poem, published on the Guardian website today:

I wanted to react to COP-26  – so many of my friends and colleagues have been emboldened by the conversation it has generated. And strange times sometimes lead to strange poems.

I was trying to chart the peculiar dream-like state we seem to be in, where the rules and natural laws of the old world feel to be in flux, one of those dreams which are full of danger, but not completely beyond the control of the person who sleeps.

The speaker in the poem is watching a world out of kilter, and is full of doubt and distrust, but seems to pluck up enough personal courage to face the future. Let’s call it hope.

 

Futurama

I crawl out onto the rooftop

above the world’s junkshop,

lean against the warm chimney

and eyeball the city.

The vibe is … let’s say ethereal,

rows of TV aerials

spelling out HEAVEN,

spelling out ARMAGEDDON.

It’s T minus zero

of the Petroleum Era –

all my neighbours

are burning tomorrow’s newspapers

in their back-gardens,

getting their alibis sharpened.

As the hours evaporate

I say to my spirit

I can’t really pilot

this smouldering twilight

over the scars and crevasses,

but I’ll put on my best sunglasses

and steer the cockpit of morning

into the oncoming.

William Blake, the Bible and Western culture

I'm currently reading the poet and critic Kathleen Raine's great work on William Blake and Job. Blake was a poet and painter/engraver from the end of the 18th and early 19th century. Her book is on Blake's illustrations to the Old Testament book The Book of Job. Blake, like most western artists until relatively recently, drew inspiration from the Bible. This was seen as normal, and was sometimes even unconscious, so ingrained was Christianity in the collective mind and spirit, the "DNA" of even the most modest person socially and economically. So it is impossible to understand the West's artistic heritage on the deepest levels (often, even on the most basic levels) without a knowledge and appreciation of biblical text, particularly in the form of the stories, because the Judeo-Christian scriptures embody meaning essentially as story, "mythos". The meaning unfolds largely in narrative form. This is what is meant by "myth", which is not some invention to be opposed to "real historical fact". In any case, the deepest levels of meaning revealed to us when we hear a story are not on the historical level. They disclose themselves to us in the present encounter with the text, our experience of the text, as it were.

The Book of Job is the story of a wealthy and pious man who falls prey to a series of terrible events depriving him of all he had: family, material goods and pĥysical health. It is an archetypal story of Man's suffering, and transcending this suffering, thus prefiguring the Christ story itself. The Bible is made up of patterns of story in this way.

To be ignorant of these narratives (the Creation Myth, the Fall of Man, Noah and the Flood, exodus and exile in Egypt, Samson and Delilah, and the Christ narrative and the narratives within this narrative in the form of Jesus's parables, the list is endless) is to be alienated from one's own culture (and spiritual foundations, if one is open to such a thing as a spiritual nature). This on one level is nothing to do with "belief". We might begin more easily with "meaning". It is more than useful for example to have a Biblical knowledge when reading or watching Shakespeare. This takes its form mainly symbolically, including symbol in movement, as unfolding dramatic narrative. Even in King Lear, a play which takes place in pagan Britain, the blueprint is largely Christian.

Click below to access examples of Blake's illustrations (Job surrounded by his family at the beginning, Job suffering scorn, Job's final blessings), and the extract from Raine's work:  

Chaucer - The Knight's Tale

A while ago I published a brief post on Medieval literature, and have been meaning for a long time to put up texts from this wonderfully creative period. It is about time I did! So here is an example from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.  This is regarded as the greatest work of the period, and Chaucer as the father of English poetry. The English language had been growing in status during the Middle Ages, both as a scholarly and literary medium. Since the Norman invasion, French had become the language of the court, and Latin had maintained its position as the medium for the highest levels of thinking and creativity. But the winds were changing in the fifteenth century. The Canterbury Tales contain a series of stories related by individuals from varied strata of society: the Wife of Bath, the Knight, the Miller, the Franklin etc. Each character entertains his or her companions with a tale during the famous pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral where Thomas à Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered on the orders of King Henry II on 29th December 1120. As a consequence, he became a martyr and a saint. 

Each tale is wonderfully rich and entertaining, full of action, love stories, philosophical reflections, and sometimes bawdy humour! They are written in the classic iambic pentametre of English verse, more precisely in 'Herioc Verse' (ten syllable rhyming couplets). 

Below is an extract from The Knight's Tale, the point at which the young Theban lover Arcite, banished from Athens, and pining for his belovéd Emyle, decides to pull himself together and out of his hopelessly languishing lover state, dress up as  a pauper and return in disguise to the Greek city. Do not be put off by Middle English. This is not Old English (which would be incomprehensible, and needs to be learned as another language), but the English language gradually blossoming into what we know today. There are lexical difficulties (well explained by the notes from the Norton Edition), and syntactical intricacies which come from a naturally poetic style, and convention, and a more germanic word order: 'Whan that Arcite to Thebes comen was...' - nothing too obscure! I have a particular fondness for this tale, because it is the one I studied at school when I was seveneen/eighteen. Click on the link below to access the excerpt:

Aldous Huxley recording: The Ultimate Revolution

 The great twentieth century literary figure and thinker Aldous Huxley should need no introduction. He is most famous for his dystopian novel Brave New World (1932), in which he imagines a society, prophetically when we consider the contemporary world and where it is going, under a form of 'soft' dictatorship, in which suffering has been 'banished' through medication, and types of people are conceived and brought up artificially to fulfull ideologically defined roles. It is a 'comfortable' world, in which individual freedom has been confiscated, and responsibility abdicated. Sound familiar?

In this recording, made in front of an audience on March 20th 1962 at Berkeley Language Center in the United States, he goes back over his dystopian work, comparing it to Orwell's 1984, which he admires greatly. However, he feels that the future forms of dictatorship will not be Orwell's 'terroristic' ones, a vision influenced by the recent context of its composition, world war, Nazism, and Stalinism, but a 'soft' one something in line with his own prediction. This will be enabled by the advances of technology combined with the modern media, biotechnology and pharmacological methods, making people, as he says, 'love their servitude':

 “There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”

Click on the link below to acces the 44 minute recording. He also considers the future influence of automation, and transhumanism. All in 1960! 

Poet Laureate's verse for HRH the Duke of Edinburgh

 This afternoon the funeral of HRH Prince Philip the Duke of Edinburgh took place at Windsor in the presence of thirty guests. Our thoughts go out to all the Royal Family, particularly Queen Elizabeth II, his wife for seventy-three years.  As is befitting for such a moment, the country's Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, has composed the following poem:

The Patriarchs – An Elegy

The weather in the window this morning
is snow, unseasonal singular flakes,
a slow winter’s final shiver. On such an occasion
to presume to eulogise one man is to pipe up
for a whole generation – that crew whose survival
was always the stuff of minor miracle,
who came ashore in orange-crate coracles,
fought ingenious wars, finagled triumphs at sea
with flaming decoy boats, and side-stepped torpedoes.

Husbands to duty, they unrolled their plans
across billiard tables and vehicle bonnets,
regrouped at breakfast. What their secrets were
was everyone’s guess and nobody’s business.
Great-grandfathers from birth, in time they became
both inner core and outer case
in a family heirloom of nesting dolls.
Like evidence of early man their boot-prints stand
in the hardened earth of rose-beds and borders.

They were sons of a zodiac out of sync
with the solar year, but turned their minds
to the day’s big science and heavy questions.
To study their hands at rest was to picture maps
showing hachured valleys and indigo streams, schemes
of old campaigns and reconnaissance missions.
Last of the great avuncular magicians
they kept their best tricks for the grand finale:
Disproving Immortality and Disappearing Entirely.

The major oaks in the wood start tuning up
and skies to come will deliver their tributes.
But for now, a cold April’s closing moments
parachute slowly home, so by mid-afternoon
snow is recast as seed heads and thistledown.

Charles Williams on Poetry

 One of my all-time favourite figures in the literary world of the last century is Charles Williams. For some, for very few, he needs no introduction, but he has been obscured by his more famous friends, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Together, with other extraordinary people, notably Owen Barfield who died relatively recently, they formed a group called The Inklings in Oxford during the nineteen thirties and forties. These men met in each others' homes to discuss literary and philosophical matters, and read out their own work before publication. C.S. Lewis would read from his novels and religious and philosophical writings, Tolkien from the later-to-be-published The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. They would also meet up in an Oxford pub 'The Eagle and Child' (a wonderful place I recommend) over a few pints of the best English ale.

As for Charles Williams, the least formally 'educated' of the group, and from the most modest background, he worked for the Oxford University Press (at the time they would place the definite article in front of OUP) as editor, writer and critic. He was a singular and remarkable poet himself, and wrote a series of extraordinary novels, seven in total, which bring the supernatural into the everyday world of England. I would strongly recommend them, they were popular in their day, T.S. Eliot encouraged his writing, and they stand as a monument to a remarkable mind. They are: War in Heaven, Many Dimensions, The Place of the Lion, The Greater Trumps, Shadows of Ecstasy, Descent into Hell, and All Hallow's Eve. 

He wrote plays too, and books of literary criticism (for want of a better term; I prefer 'reflection'), and I recently found a first edition from 1932 which I am thoroughly enjoying. As with most of Williams' prose, it is curious in style, dense and challenging in its insights. This one is called The English Poetic Mind, in which he attempts to define, or at least touch upon, what characterises this phenomenon, looking in particular at Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Milton. I have scanned below a section from the opening, "What makes great poetry', in which he quotes Wordsworth's insights into poetic creation. For the Romantic poet, it needs 1) 'the vital soul' 2) 'general truths' 3) 'external things - Forms, images'. Williams expands upon this, by saying that the great poets 'arouse in us an actual sense of our own faculties' for such things as heroism, love, exile, although these things may be alien to or limited in us. This makes me think of the poem 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' by the War Poet Wilfred Owen, which we have been looking at in class recently. We could not possibly understand the terrible experience of trench warfare ourselves, but the poem awakens in us a deep sympathy, and at least shades of understanding, however distant, and in some sense we are connected to the young men who suffered and died during this conflict. 

Below you will find the link to the extract from Williams' book:

New poem by John F. Deane

 A while ago I was asked by the Temenos Academy Review to write a review of a collection of poems by the Irish poet John F. Deane, called Achill Island, which I strongly recommend:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Achill-Island-John-F-Deane/dp/1782188991/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2WYKPRIKS377E&dchild=1&keywords=john+f+deane&qid=1615188704&sprefix=john+f+deane%2Caps%2C381&sr=8-2

 It was a wonderful time, because I got to discover this extraordinary poet. He has just released this new poem, which I would like to share on the blog. It finds great resonance with our times, of health crisis, lockdowns, curfews, and restricted freedoms - a time unique in human history, all the more for it being a planetary event. Deane has responded beautifully to the sense of release brought by openness to the natural world, the sense of "emergence" at last. Here it is:

William Blake: In the Beginning (Peter Ackroyd)

Following on from our class discussion today, here are the opening pages to Peter Ackroyd's biography of William Blake, which I mentioned. It answers the question asked today about his social background; modest middle class. His father was a hosier (un bonnetier), and they lived in a London house Ackroyd describes as "solid if not exactly prosperous". I will leave you to savour the writing of this remarkable biographer and novelist; how he can make us relive moments in the past with vivid detail. Note the reference to 'the piping infant' recalling our study of Songs of Innocence and Experience. His account is never purely factual, but imbued with a sense of the times, and the meaning held in the smallest details of life. I also strongly recommend his biography of Charles Dickens.

Click on the link below to access the excerpt:

HS2 Rail link and a 250 year old pear tree

What would Gerard Manley Hopkins feel about this?

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/aug/17/tree-of-the-week-the-beloved-250-year-old-wild-pear-being-cut-down-for-hs2

Hopkins' Binsey Poplars: 'O if we but knew what we do...'

More about trees...Below you can read one of my favourite poems, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is about the brutal felling of a row of poplar trees near the village of Binsey near Oxford.  It was written in 1879, and resonates strongly with us in this time of ecological crisis. 

Hopkins' highly original, even revolutionary, style is in sharp contrast to his retiring life as a Jesuit priest. The striking images and vigorous unconventional rhythms express a love of and feeling for the vitality of nature, and an existential grappling with the questions of life. 

Le Chêne de Flagey (Gustave Courbet)

Following on from yesterday's post on tradition, the symbol and the tree, thank you Cécile for your very interesting comments about the painter Courbet. Here is the painting you mention, Le Chêne de Flagey of 1864 (The Oak at Flagey) that you mentioned. I can't add anything better than your comments below, and the extraordinary painting itself: "Quand je lis ce texte superbe sur le symbolisme de l'arbre, je pense immédiatement au Chêne de Flagey de Gustave Courbet. Un chêne tellement grand qu'il sort du cadre. Sa cime, ses frondaisons, ses racines échappent à l'emprise du cadre qui pourtant le magnifie. Et ce chêne, c'est Courbet lui-même, fort, résistant, déterminé, enraciné dans sa terre du Jura, et s'épanouissant à Paris."

Click below for the painting:

Tradition - The symbol of the Tree

In class we often, necessarily, talk of tradition. The knee-jerk reaction might be rejection of tradition because, throughout history, those embodying forms of tradition have often abused positions of power in its name. But we are talking about something quite different here. It is not dusty and fuddy-duddy, blocking the way for us to the newness and freshness we all long for. Quite the opposite.

There are archetypal patterns, symbols, some of them shared by the whole of humanity. We are born into a world which is Nature itself, our own bodies firstly; and Nature, the rain, storms, cloudy skies, birdsong, sunrise, are among our very first impressions, and accompany us all throughout our lives, in joyful and harder times. They speak to us deeply, on deeper levels than we can really, fully articulate, and the artists naturally turn to this primordial language. So we might define tradition as the universal 'language' which speaks to us because it conforms to or reflects our unchanging inner natures as human beings. 

This language can take the form of story, legend, myth, such as the myths of Creation, the Fall of Man, Divine vengeance, the Flood, the great Quest of the Holy Grail, or the journeys across the seas, tales of exile and return to the kingdom. These narratives underpin many if not most of our great stories and dramas, because they are the eternal blueprint of what our lives actually are, unfolding in time as narrative, and encountering the storms and clear skies of all voyages. We all begin at home, leave, and in some way return. These stages, or phases, might be related to location, or not. Whatever they are, we all experience them as feeling, impression, sensation, intuition.

I don't think any great artists can be disconnected from tradition. They may react against it, as was the case of the Modernists, but that was in the knowledge of what they were reacting against.

Below is an extract from Northrop Frye's The Great Code, a brilliant study of biblical language, image and story, in relation to other traditions. This part concerns the networks of meaning related to the tree. They include of course the cross, as demonic image and image of salvation, Adam, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Hanged Man of the Tarot pack.

What could be more primordial than the tree, symbolically, and literally? It gives shade to man and animal, it is a habitat for millions of creatures, its roots burrow deep into the earth as we need roots, it stands vertically as we stand, 'dressé vers le Ciel', as Rémi Brague describes mankind's unique stance on the Earth in his remarkable study of our place in the Cosmos: https://www.amazon.fr/Sagesse-monde-Histoire-lexp%C3%A9rience-lunivers/dp/2253943223/ref=sr_1_7?__mk_fr_FR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&dchild=1&keywords=remi+brague&qid=1603101585&sr=8-7

and its branches recall our hair, or can be the mirror image of the roots in the Earth but crisscrossing the sky.

Click on the link below to access the Frye document in pdf form:

Kathleen Raine: The Use of the Beautiful

In these challenging times, perhaps the most challenging nationally and globally since the last world war, it is important we turn to the great values of our cultures, and look for unity in all things. For millenia, Beauty has been central to philosophy and artistic creation, and in this essay, from her remarkable collection Defending Ancient Springs, the poetess Kathleen Raine affirms these eternal principles. 

This blog is a space for open enquiry and debate, so when you read the essay, add your comments in the comments section of the site, your thoughts, questions, anything that comes to mind. Do not hesitate. Say something, because these thoughts cannot leave us indifferent!

Click on the link below to download the essay in pdf format. 

For Hypokhâgne 811 - Extract from Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick'

For those absent from class yesterday, here is the extract from Melville's Moby-Dick. For Friday 6th November you need to come to class with questions 1, 2, 3 and 4 prepared in note form for oral presentation. Have a good break!

Click on the link below to download and print out the document:

Two translations (versions) for Hypokhâgne 811

 For those absent from class yesterday, here are the two short texts to translate. You need to prepare the first one, for presentation in class on Friday 13th November. Have a good holiday, keep well!

Click on the link below to access and print out the pdf document: