Scheherazade

The female teller of The Arabian Nights, holding out the promise of another tale – a tale leading to another – has now been recast (in my mind) as Elizabeth Gaskell. Dickens, I am told by a professor of English, addressed her as such, for her short stories always contained suggestions of further. And told in parts – two or three or more, as many were then, they would have defied Poe's criteria defining a shorter work, for none could have been read 'at a sitting'. Readers would have had to ponder the first part until the next was published, continuing or concluding the tale. A slower digestion of words would have allowed tales with layers, such as hers were, to be more closely examined, and for the social problems she may have raised to be considered, set in a world where Time and Place are becoming different, or to characters who have gained Independence appear so: they are part of a wider world; a world that questions their own; a world that for all its progress of simplification is actually more complex. Or the reader is introduced to the woman's world of making do, including that of her reflections: girlhood recalled, then the first flush of womanhood, before Age with its grey locks knocked at the door, and turned all to memory. Here, a woman's mind is preferred to her person.
Mrs Gaskell's observations seem to me still current: Time and Place are always changing, complicating rather than simplifying; and such advancement, whilst it allows us to connect with the wider world, causes us to neglect our local surroundings. Our horizons broadened we lose much (in my opinion) by failing to narrow them. And yet a woman's world is still not as broad as a man's, nor is her mind consistently preferred to her person.

Picture credit: Scheherazade, Sophie Gengembre Anderson (source: WikiArt).

See Cousin Phillis and Other Stories, Elizabeth Gaskell (Oxford World Classics, 2010, introduction and notes by Heather Glen.) From journal, November 2021.

Telescope

From Coleridge's telescopic introspection to a boy's. A boy's Travels With A Telescope, watching ships, and beginning a voyage of discovery: gender divorced from sex. A boy with dreams of femaleness. The world he wished to inhabit so distant through the glass he felt removed from the human cycle: what part did he have in any of it? He existed, yes, but his mind and body were not One, and therefore as a boy he couldn't be at one with the world. A spiritual Conundum, a spiritual quest. From Wales to stately, intellectual, scholarly Oxford; to Army life and foreign travels. A boy, a man, a woman.
But not a woman, in my opinion, in the true sense of the word. The term is more than a feeling. Woman is a biological experience: it's painful, it's messy, and fluctuates from one extreme to another; a bodily tide of mood and emotion. Woman has a different relationship with her anatomy; chemically, hormonally, there is a difference – a huge country of influence. Boys, men can explore or cross into this terrain, but their lived experience is not Woman, it is Other.

*

I can only judge through the lens of my own lived experience. I do not deny that all mortals have feminine and masculine qualities, nor that one, irrespective of biological gender, will dominate, be the principle ruler, but 'Woman' I translate as Fact; determined biologically, chemically, by Nature. The issue for me is Language, not prejudice. I don't much care what people are; I don't much care for confined spaces – cramped boxes with labels – but I do care when one half of the human race is told they can't hold certain views, nor discuss openly their own idea of 'Woman'. I do care when a people are redefined without any rational debate, just flung hatred. I do care when women are informed their identity, their experience, as seen through their individual lens, is obsolete, and that they must now accept a new language, a new order. Woman, an accommodating gender, is too often dictated to.

Picture credit: Still Life with Telescope, 1927, Max Beckmann (source: WikiArt). 

I refer to Jan Morris' Conundrum and to the initial response it raised within me. Adapted from a journal entry, October 2021.

Groups of Lines

Coleridge #1
His rolling eyes, a sea never becalmed, always in motion; his large, fleshy gaping mouth, a fish struggling for breath; and his hair, a black glossy mass.
Coleridge, wild and strange. A Romantic Poet; a visionary Philosopher. Charismatic and hypnotic. Wordsworth, in comparison, a drier character.

Coleridge #2
Coleridge, a wolf, wrapped in a greatcoat: What Imagination! What Language! What Fast Science! What Eyes! What Milk-white Forehead!
Coleridge, from whom nothing escapes.

Coleridge #3
Coleridge, figuratively running wild and blind in the deserts of Arabia, screaming 'Wordsworth!'
Coleridge, an outburst of emotions.

Coleridge #4
Coleridge, a mind that had much to do; that gave its attention to the visible, the invisible, and the evocative; hovered between images, like a Kingfisher in short flight, thereby permitting its observant eye to see and define everything it was surrounded by.

Coleridge #5
Coleridge, the German scholar, a mass of information; holding forth enthusiastically on any topic. Him, the sun of a young and admiring circle.

Coleridge #6
Coleridge, an alleged kleptomaniac. Jumping from foreign rock to foreign rock, smuggling valuables across borders, in disguise. His large prominent eye fixed upon his own image in glittering waters.

Coleridge #7
Coleridge, the fatal Genius; all things to all men, tho' uncertain about his true direction. Dreamed more than planned; planned more than could be executed. Coleridge, in a restless whirl, or ecstatic state, unable to concentrate. Or absorbed, wholly absorbed, in his inner world of thoughts and feeling.

Coleridge #8
Coleridge, a pure scribbler; a political, poetical reporter, displaying his extensive knowledge and well-grounded foresight, defending Liberty and the Rights of Nature.
Coleridge, a translator, in a five-penny floral dressing-gown decorated with hieroglyphics, alone in his study, losing himself in his work.

Coleridge #9
Coleridge, a drifter and dreamer, always looking to, and searching for, a sublime and beautiful visual existence.

Picture credit: The Dreamer, Caspar David Friedrich (source: WikiArt).

Source material: Coleridge: Early Visions by Richard Holmes.

Written October 2021.

Twilight State: A Definition

The Twilight State, the state between day and night, between child and adult, the state in which there is no clear distinction between the two: it is both. A square of light in a darkening day, a childish mind in an adult frame.

Picture credit: At the Summer House in Twilight, c.1895, Isaac Levitan (source: WikiArt).

Written October 2021.

Essay on Browning

My first official introduction (by Penguin Classics) to Browning, Robert Browning was conducted through a strangling, which I hadn't expected having just read, only seconds before, of his passionate attachment to home – he left his parental home aged thirty-four; and yet here he was the lover of Porphyria strangling her with her yellow hair. Hm Browning, I thought, you have dark depths; what next on this selected poetry tour?
One surprise after another followed: dramatic romances, dramatic lyrics, and the Pied Piper that rid Hamelin of its rats, then spirited its children away. Three riders galloping, galloping; two, their horse spent; so, alas! only one makes it into Ghent. My eyes fly from word to word, my heart pounds.
Then, a pause... a different note. A wistful, contemplative note, as the poet surveys what was once an ancient city; or recalls a day in the city-square, oh to have a house there! if there was 'money enough and to spare', where a trumpet might announce the arrival of a puppet show 'Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife'. Noise and bustle, or the calm of a villa where nature more forcibly strikes you, its darkness pierced by song and lute. Music has crept in, its language and its notes, as have the longer storytelling poems, which I have to, I admit, often read twice through, because sometimes only then does the full story take, my full understanding awaken. My mind, it is true, occasionally drifts on these selected journeyings, somehow loses the ability to at first grasp the words and sees only imagery, but as if through a fog as compared to a clear mist. I reach the end and begin again, Ah! Light, here she comes, line by line, until a sun has edged the clouds away. As the madman saith to the Arab physician: 'It is strange'; strange how the hour of the day influences. But perhaps the hour too made its mark on Browning? I know from my own experience it can be difficult to return to a work unfinished in a different hour: the same thread might not be found, so that which is complete is abandoned or revised, or continued from but disjointedly. The writer loses objectivity, for the work to them reads like two separate pieces: the joins can be perceived. Have they in their tinkering, continuation, or re-write made it worse or better? Perhaps, though, Browning had none of those problems...
This certainly seems to be the case with Childe Roland, which Browning claimed some thirty-odd years later came to him, with no conscious intention, 'as a kind of dream. I had to write it then and there, and I finished it the same day, I believe.'
Is Browning to be believed? Yes! Some ideas just come, entire, with no clue whence they came from, or how, in the aftermath, the artist (the writer, the poet etc.) executed them, for the style, the language might not seem their own: their normal habitable mode. It was all there, existing already in the mind, the imagination, and had to be written, with no reflection until later of what it meant or might suggest; and indeed that might never become clear. Being in that creative flow, however, feeling borne along by it or almost united with it, is a wonderful feeling, whether as an active participant or passive spectator. It is present in all art forms (and nature), and is the closest we have, in an increasingly secular world, to achieving what was once described as religious ecstasy: a soaring of spirit.
Did Browning's spirit soar with Childe Roland? I think so; and though it may not have been as apparent to me as to him, we have to take his word.
Art, the written, the visual is collaborative. Words paint landscapes and portraits; two sources might combine, for example, to paint a man in poetry or prose: the historical giving way to fiction or verse. One artist's work becomes a handbook for the other. It is to this he refers, as Browning does with Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, to create, in different words, in different form, his own. Art, in other words, inspires art. Or comment. Just as Browning found cause to write how a poet might strike a contemporary; just as I have found cause to write on Browning. 

Picture credit: Robert Browning by George Frederick Watts (source: WikiArt)

See Selected Poems by Robert Browning (Penguin Classics, 2004).

Written October 2021.