VV(13) - Dreams Tonight Will Shelter You

[Dave Monroe]

Now the productive thing being accomplished alongside, despite recent 
squabbles here is that we're getting back to V. again ...

--- David Morris <fqmorris at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>Mondaugen sings a lullaby to the feeble Godolphin
>collapsed in Mondaugen's turret bed.  Dreams and childhood are here linked. 
>It is a beautiful song, both despairing and holding on to the possibility 
>of
>magic.

Vampires, banshees, ghouls, skeletons, ogres, trolls, loups-garou 
(werewolves), shadows, harpies, goblins, the Angel (of Death, against whom, 
of course, "Dreams will help you not at all"), and, most uncannily, that (if 
I may coin a word) doppelgangrenous "Bloody wraith who looks like you," 
followed by that "strand wolf scream[ing] again," I can see why "Mondaugen 
lay down trembling on the rug to sleep" (p. 254).  That's pretty damn scary 
lullabye, but it does remind me that most so-called traditional "children's 
stories" are not particularly comforting (ever read Perrault's versions of 
all those fairy tales?) ...

Old Godolphin
>earlier speaking to Vera puts forth an argument for
>moving beyond the indulgences of days gone by:
>
>----------
>(248)  Godolphin laughed at her.  "There's been a
>war, Fraulein.  Vheissu was a luxury, an indulgence.  We can no longer
>afford the likes of Vheissu."

And I'll be back on Vheissu here, but ...

Childhood &
>Dreams are invoked as predecessors to Adulthood and
>responsibility.

Now, I hadn't much picked up on the childhood to adulthood trope throughout 
here, very good, and if I might add to that Biblical quote (1 Corinthians 
13:11) that early Modern European notion of the "Ages of Man," as in ...

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages....

... and so forth.  See William Shakespeare, As You Like It, II.vii.139-166 
for the full sequence.  Or, with illustrations ...

http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/classes/Shakespeare_Illustrated/Mulready.Ages.html

http://cccw.adh.bton.ac.uk/schoolofdesign/MA.COURSE/LNumSAM.html

And cf. ...

http://cccw.adh.bton.ac.uk/schoolofdesign/MA.COURSE/LEX01.html

http://www.libarts.ucok.edu/english/faculty/spencer/collection/ages/

One might go from seven such ages, as above, to four ...

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/abrad5c.html

... right on down, a la the Sphinx's riddle, to a mere three.  I think this 
also comes up in Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale" in The Canterbury Tales, but 
see as well ...

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/T/titian/three_ages.jpg.html

http://www.abcgallery.com/G/giorgione/giorgione14.html

And here's where I get to recommend ...

Burrow, J.A.  The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval
   Writing and Thought.  New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

All of the above not to be confused with Hesiod's "Five Ages of Man" (Gold, 
Silver, Bronze, Heroic, Iron).  See his Works and Days.  But, hey, just 
exercising that ol' facility (in which I can't help but hear that "facile") 
with the keywords, is all ...

>"Humanity" is later linked to Childhood & Dreams in
>a passage where the loss of humanity is seen as the inevitable result of
>"civilization" confronted with the reality of the only thing that is the 
>case:
>  the world:

>(273)  the engineering design for a world he knew
>with numb leeriness nothing could now keep from becoming a reality, a
>world whose full despair he, at the vantage of eighteen years later, 
>couldn't
>even find adequate parables for [...] where finally humanity was
>reduced out of necessity [...] out of a confrontation the young of one's
>contemporaries, God help them, had yet to make,  humanity was reduced to a 
>nervous,
>disquieted, forever inadequate but indissoluble Popular Front against
>[...] the frightening but necessary cry of the strand wolf in the fog.

Interesting article in the Sunday morning NY Times, by the way, on "the 
engineering design for a world" ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/08/science/08DESI.html

Which gives some indication of the stakes in what might be called in that 
Pynchonian context a matter of contingency vs. conspiracy.  Also interested 
in that "Popular Front" on p. 274 ...

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=62410

But do not disregard the "deceptively unpolitical and apparently minor 
enemies" (ibid.) against which it stands, not to mention that "Kingdom of 
Death" (p. 273) just earlier in that very long paragraph.  Will be back ...



_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com