V-2nd - Chapter 8 Space/Time scene climax

[alice wellintown]

There is a wonderful essay, you may find it online, about Milton's
Missing Rhymes. The author's name is McCauley. Milton, famously
replied to his critics with a short but bold statement about his
verse; he explained why his heroic verse (blank verse) need not, must
not, rhyme. But McCauley, perhaps with the help of the computer, and
certainly with the help of several other excellent scholars of Milton,
discovered tons of rhyme in _Paradise Lost_. Well, what is fascinating
about McCauley's essay is how he far he goes to find "rhyme" in PL.
What he discovers, what he calls rhyme, are patterns and tons of
doubles. It is quite clever. You can read the essay at ---->
http://www.luminarium.org/

When P sings them Bartleby Blues in his essay on Sloth I suspect that
he is not merely following a convention--"doth God exact day labor
light denied" or showing off his knowledge of Luddite Romantic Labor
History.

In that Luddite essay he talks of the Gothic tradition and how the
night, when, as Zappa sez, the imaginary diseases haunt the paranoid
mind, but feed it with Moon-stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9FBQ1O5F8k

It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam
claimed as his share of my daily life, that this wretched numbness
held possession of me. It went with me on my sea-shore walks and
rambles into the country, whenever—which was seldom and reluctantly—I
bestirred myself to seek that invigorating charm of Nature, which used
to give me such freshness and activity of thought, the moment that I
stepped across the threshold of the Old Manse. The same torpor, as
regarded the capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me home,
and weighed upon me, in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my
study. Nor did it quit me when, late at night, I sat in the deserted
parlour, lighted only by the glimmering coal-fire and the moon,
striving to picture forth imaginary scenes, which, the next day, might
flow out on the brightening page in many-hued description.   44
  If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might
well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling
so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so
distinctly,—making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a
morning or noontide visibility,—is a medium the most suitable for a
romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is
the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs,
with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a
work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the
book-case; the picture on the wall;—all these details, so completely
seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to
lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing
is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire
dignity thereby. A child’s shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker
carriage; the hobby-horse;—whatever, in a word, has been used or
played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of
strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as
by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has
become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and
fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each
imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here,
without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene
to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form,
beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic
moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had
returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.   45
  The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing
the effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge
throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and
ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This
warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the
moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of
human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them
from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we
behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the
half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a
repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove
farther from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such
an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone,
cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need
never try to write romances.


On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 2:18 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:
> Robin Landseadel sez:
>
>> Just to throw a useless curve ball, note that Debussy's unavoidable
> "Clair de Lune" is the the third movement of Debussy's "Suite
> Bergamasque."
>        Moonlight becomes you, it goes with your hair
>        You certainly know the right thing to wear
>        Moonlight becomes you, I'm thrilled at the sight
>        And I could get so romantic tonight
>
>        You're all dressed up to go dreaming
>        Now don't tell me I'm wrong..
>
> Which lands us smack back on pp. 542-3, the mirroring middle of AtD: "In the
> moonlight, against gravity, the thing poised there..."
>
> And with the transformation of Katje's face one night with Tyrone at the
> Casino HG... and certain lunar/venereal apparitions on a windy island in
> M&D...
>
> Prolly just coincidence.
>
> -Monte
>
>