Off My Feet

A trip to the doctor's office this past Thursday has confirmed I have aggravated some latent infirmity in my left knee, a fracture or tear. The daily, growing strain placed on my left leg's muscles is causing a slight limp in my walk now. As a result, my doctor sent me to have several X-Rays taken of the region of my left knee to identify the precise problem. Next Thursday I return to have the results revealed to me, and a medical solution to the problem offered by my doctor. I hope this won't affect my ability to work.

Otherwise I have been steadily reading Tom Harpur's new book Water Into Wine: An Empowering Vision of the Gospels. My left leg is probably grateful that I am not a strict believer of any Christian orthodox, evangelical or fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, because I have not been up on my feet in distress.

The Insatiate Countess

I'm staying awake over-night with a pot of coffee, and by reading Four Jacobean Sex Tragedies. My fiancée is flying in 6 to 7 hours down to Trinidad for 2 weeks in order to finalise the wedding plans. I'm driving her to the airport in 4 hours.

Yesterday, early in the morning, I finally took my car into a garage to have the oil changed and the drums and shoes of the brakes replaced, so I slept for only 4 hours last night. Some modern Joe mixed with some Renaissance titillation ought to have some dramatic effect on my half-awake, half-asleep brain. I have a choice: William Barkstead and Lewis Machin's The Insatiate Countess, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, Thomas Middleton's The Maiden's Tragedy and John Fletcher's The Tragedy of Valentinian in this Oxford Volume of English Drama.

A fresh change from Wace's Roman de Brut out of a copy of Arthurian Chronicles, translated by Eugene Mason, that I borrowed from the Library. I considered reading Layamon's Brut afterwards but decided otherwise.

The Investment of a Lifetime

As the time draws nigh to the day set for the wedding in July, I am beginning to feel the gravitational pull of this significant occasion - as a groom - against my conscious sense of Life. Things are awry: The work week is fleeting, finances are waning, weekends are transitory, and, to top it off, the guest list is growing. Next week, my fiancée is flying out early on Wednesday morning to Trinidad to secure the final arrangements for our wedding, bring over centre-pieces, and work out any other outstanding things. She is the mastermind of this wedding: I am forever indebted to her industrious labours.

Over the past week, too, I kept busy reading a number of horror novels: Brian Keene's Ghoul, Richard Laymon's Among The Missing, and Graham Masterton's break-out novel The Manitou. The two veteran horror-meisters, Laymon and Masterton's novels were filled with the classic terrifying Spirit of the Weird, while the only disappointment was the dull and unpoetic descriptive writing of rookie Keene. I even tried reading his Bram-Stoker-Award-winning novel The Conqueror Worms but I kept remembering the sceptical words of T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare's Hamlet: "Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know." I just can't help but insist that the quality of Keene's stilted writing falls short of his own imaginative ambition--it's especially sad that the back-cover's description of the novel was more exciting than the actual words on the pages themselves. Reading is an imaginative investment. The words of a novel ought to be more profitable than the paper they are printed on, otherwise they're not worth the paper they were printed on.

Inheritors of Visionary Literature

"...horror has to do with the numinous, the uncovering of the terrible truth that is there under the everyday. That is only another articulation of uncovering the transcendent truth under the everyday."

China Miéville

All literature is visionary. It is this human experience of the visionary in literature that encompasses all: writers, characters and readers alike, who participate unwittingly in this literary production of unconsciously held beliefs and assumptions. The picture of this unconscious or visionary world is not to be confused with the economic model of a human assembly or production line. It is a world of imagination that produces an extra-visionary sequence of phases that can widen and/or narrow as the perspective of each individual becomes involved in the process. Howard Philip Lovecraft offers this picture of the reader's involvement in the imaginative production of "weird" literature in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature:

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to tappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience.

Here: the world envisioned by Lovecraft is a negative or contrasting image of writers, characters and readers. He is appealing to the positive or receptive reader who "sees" or experiences the actual message or prophecy envisioned which underlies his words. The visionary experience widens for those who understand the spiritual meaning behind his written words. Such a type of reader is not only an inheritor of his message, but also an active participant in the cosmos of visionary literature:

But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our innermost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species.

The visionary experience of literature is the truest liberty: it excludes only those who are unwilling to open their eyes and see.

The 300 Club

Yesterday, I paid a visit to the public library again. I borrowed Peter Straub's Koko, Michael Slade's Headhunter and the 2-disc DVD BBC production of Gormenghast based on Mervyn Peake's trilogy of Gormenghast novels--Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone. Before plunging deep into contemplation about any of these paintings of imaginative horrors, however, I went with my fiancée to watch, or rather, soak my eyes in the Titus Andronicus-like, comic book / cinematic gore of 300 last night. The movie was nothing short of Spartan in its cruel and intractable power to hold its viewers in the deep grip of fear and pity, while staving off any expectation of purely mindless spectacle.

"And if my vision range beyond..."

O my soul, keep the rest unknown!
It is too like a sound of moan
When the charnel-eyed
Pale Horse has nighed:
Yea, none shall gather what I hide!

Why load men's minds with more to bear
That bear already ails to spare?
From now alway
Till my last day
What I discern I will not say.

Let time roll backward if it will;
(Magians who drive the midnight quill
With brain aglow
Can see it so,)
What I have learnt no man shall know.

And if my vision range beyond
The blinkered sight of souls in bond,
- By truth made free -
I'll let all be,
And show to no man what I see.

Thomas Hardy, "He Resolves To Say No More"

Yesterday I quickly borrowed a set of Everyman editions of Selected Poems from Thomas Hardy, as well as Gerard Manley Hopkins, from the Brampton Public Library at the Civic Centre before heading off to work. As much as I enjoyed reading out-loud the intertwined sprung rhythm and sacred religious zeal of Hopkins, I rather preferred meditating on Thomas Hardy's elegiac poetry. I can't help but identify personally - as predicted by a friend - with Thomas Hardy's sense of arduous struggle reflected in his words, composition and poesis against the stubborn and proud-worn intractability of things broken, of things falling apart, of dysfunctional mutability, of crumbling words, and downward spirituality in the "real modern world." He picks up his small, down-trodden words with such proud, hard-lived, unreal truth--that wrestling angel of experience--and builds them up to a new-found glory.