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.