Readings for the 12 Days of Christmas: John Granger

I had a great love first for George MacDonald (as a child and young woman) and then for the Inklings; some of them I have reread, some not. But I have retained an affection for their books and concerns. One of the people involved (via J. K. Rowling) in a resurgence of interest in the Inklings is John Granger. I must have discovered him some time ago while delving about in search of some piece of information about alchemy. And what I found first, I think, was "The Alchemist's Tale," a lucid little explanation of alchemy, The Great Work, and literary alchemy, followed by a discussion of Rowling as in the tradition of literary alchemy--an idea that is pretty clear early on (a wand with a phoenix feather! Albus! Rubeus! etc.) in the books if you have, as I have, read the whole series outloud to a child or wandered through them on your own. But if you are a Rowling fan, Granger goes very deep into the subject and has published books and websites on Rowling and Meyer (I haven't read Meyer, but he classes her as a literary alchemist.) And if you don't know anything about alchemy, the article is a great capsule introduction, both to the original practice and its transformation into story.

Here's an excerpt:


Literary Alchemy

If English Literature from its beginning to Rowling is front-loaded with alchemical devices and images, why is this so? What is the connection between alchemy and literature that makes these images such useful tools for writers?

I think the connection is probably most clear in drama. Eliade even suggested that alchemical work grew out of the initiatory dramas of the Greek Mystery religions.11 Shakespeare doesn’t just make asides to alchemy in his plays; many if not most of them are written on alchemical skeletons and themes. The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labours Lost, and The Merchant of Venice come to mind.12 Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory argued persuasively that Shakespeare built the Globe Theatre on alchemical principles for the proper staging of his alchemical dramas.13 Why?

If you recall your Aristotle on what happens in a proper tragedy, the audience identifies with the hero in his agony and shares in his passion. This identification and shared passion is effectively the same as the experience of the event; the audience experiences katharsis or “purification” in correspondence with the actors. Shakespeare and Jonson, among others, used alchemical imagery and themes because they understood that the work of the theater in human transformation was parallel if not identical to the work of alchemy in that same transformation. The alchemical work was claimed to be greater than an imaginative experience in the theater, but the idea of purification by identification or correspondence with an object and its transformations was the same in both.

Alchemical language and themes are a shorthand. The success of an artist following this tradition is measured by the edification of his audience. By means of traditional methods and symbols, the alchemical artist offers our souls delight and dramatic release through archetypal and purifying experiences.

That may be harder for some of us than the idea of alchemy as a sacred science. If you are like me, you grew up with the idea that reading was entertainment and diversion, and anything but life-changing. This idea, really only in currency for the last seventy or eighty years, is a gross misconception. Anthropologists, historians of religion, and professors of literature will tell you that the rule in traditional cultures, and even in profane cultures such as ours, is that Story, in whatever form, instructs and initiates.

In his The Sacred and The Profane, Eliade argued that entertainments serve a religious function, especially in a profane culture. They remove us from our ego-bound consciousness for an experience or immersion in another world. C. S. Lewis, in his Preface to Paradise Lost, asserted that this is the traditional understanding of the best writers, namely, that their role in culture is “to instruct while delighting.”

Alchemy and literature are a match because they both endeavor (in their undegenerate or orthodox state) to transform the human person.

* * *
Want more? Try here. And if you want more Granger, you can hop to wikipedia and check out the list of external links.

Illustration: "Old burnt door in Jerusalem" by Ekaterina Boym-Medler, graphic designer and photographer, Russian by birth but now living in Israel. Photo courtesy of Ekaterina Boym-Medler and sxc.hu.

Readings for the 12 Days of Christmas: Sébastien Doubinsky

WARNING

This is the reading for the sixth day of Christmas. However, do not expect It’s a Wonderful Life because The Babylonian Trilogy is not located in your literary and movie atlas anywhere near It’s a Wonderful Life.

UNDERWAY

I’m current reading French author Sébastien Doubinsky’s first book in English, The Babylonian Trilogy (P. S. Publishing.) I don’t know whether to say that it has been translated into English or whether Seb has re-formed the book from the original French book. Is it a translation when a multi-lingual author makes his own new book?

CORRECTED BY SEB

Mr. Doubinsky himself informs me that it was written in English! Couldn't that make a writer jealous?

He also has two more books coming out from P. S. Publishing (UK), and both of these were written in English: Absinth (2011) and The Song of Synth (2012).

CONTENTS, The Babylonian Trilogy

Introduction by Michael Moorcock

The Birth of Television According to Buddha
Yellow Bull
The Gardens of Babylon

My comments below are based on The Birth of Television According to Buddha.

BIO-of-SEB

Sébastien Doubinsky was born in Paris in 1963. Having spent a part of his early childhood in America, he is completely bilingual and writes both in English and in French. An established writer in France, Sébastien Doubinsky has published a more than 10 novels, covering different genres, from classical literature to crime fiction. The Babylonian Trilogy is his first novel published in English. He currently lives in Århus, Denmark, with his wife and his two children, where he teaches French literature at the university.

EXCERPT IN WHICH CLOCKWORK FATHER (Matthew Revert) LIKES SEB

http://clockworkfather.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/book-review-the-babylonian-trilogy-by-sebastien-doubinsky/

THE BABYLONIAN TRILOGY is comprised of three lengthy shorts set in the fictional city of Babylon. The chapters within each story are broken down into many individual threads that, as the story progresses, begin to bind. The structure of each story is fascinating and requires time for the reader to orient themselves. Doubinsky doesn’t allow you to linger on one moment too long before plucking you away and dropping you into another. Peppered throughout each story are aphoristic meditations about life that lend a distinct gravitas to the proceedings.

Rather than a story as such, I’d label THE BABYLONIAN TRILOGY a book about themes. The setting of Babylon is used to dissect issues that are so firmly embedded in our world that it’s hard to read it as fantasy. In the first story, an ever present, unending war is occurring far away from Babylon, yet, the tendrils of the war affect everything. From the soldiers themselves, we’re taken into the mind of a bloodthirsty journalist who just wants to exploit the devastation and capture the grandeur of death on camera for the distanced, pacified television audience to consume. We are introduced to a struggling author, with ALL the typical pretenses, who exploits the war in order to find elusive success. The second story concerns a detective on the hunt for a serial killer and smears on a thick topping of noir to invigorate it. The third story concerns the nature of Babylon itself and reinforces the previous two stories as three protagonists try and escape the city.

IN WHICH I QUIBBLE WITH CLOCKWORK FATHER,

and this is rather rude because I have only read one of the three books in the trilogy so far. Not that I didn’t like Clockwork Father’s review: I did. But I had some quibbles. Since he is Antipodean, I shall try to see how far I can go in being upside down from him, just for the fun of it.

Causality is rather bigger in this book than “themes” suggests. Actions (infidelity, say) have costs and lead to results and ensuing actions in many of what Clockwork Father calls threads. And causality suggests p-l-o-t, even if it is plot that doesn’t lead to tidy resolution.

(Side note: I don’t really think this way of handling a book is—while rather odd-looking on the page, perhaps, since some of the chapters are so short and sometimes playful in form—all that many miles off from the way somebody like Dickens weaves many threads into one fabric. It’s just that the world Seb Doubinsky has made makes considerably less sense than the one Dickens creates. That means that the threads can’t be neatly tied together. We can’t arrive at a happy comedy ending for the characters because there is no original happy world to return to—no happy state that preceded events and to which the story can be restored.)

Clockwork Father says that the issues (journalism as sensationalism, the hunt for fame, the inability to clarify the meaning of war, the writer’s temptation to “sell out,” etc.) are so true of our world that it’s “hard to read it as fantasy.” Some of what he says there is easy to argue against: a sequence like man becomes dog, dog flies, dog perches on the Buddha is fairly distant from our world and the chocolate lab I see by the door, pressing her nose against the glass to leave a cloud of nose prints and barking for a walk. But I see what Clockwork Father means, as the thematic concerns are familiar and strongly stated. While the place is “Babylon,” it is no long-gone city-state of Mesopotamia but a kind of version of the West, with some of its soldiers fighting in a foreign land; the concerns resemble the concerns of the contemporary Western world.

This is, nevertheless, a world with its own mythology and creation story that differs in fundamental ways from those that have governed the West. In this version, God kills Lilith, and Lilith’s lover “the Other” kills God. The narrator watches. God’s blood streams upward into the sky, an image rather like the blood of Christ that Marlowe’s hopeless Faust sees streaming in the firmament. But in this world there is not much salvation for anyone. The narrator (who is eternal witness, moving from tale to tale, only his name changing) knows that the ruler of this world is the Other and that the Other is insane. Insane rule means insane events and people who are not, as it is said, “adjusted” to life. The closest thing to a redeemer in a world like this one is the narrator who is all around the reader and characters and who moves through time and space, a narrator who can destroy and save.

The fantastic world view here stems from the idea that an insane spirit holds sway over the world. Essentially there is a kind of dualist religion: first God and the Other are at odds, but God is destroyed. With God absent, the world shifts to a second kind of dualism where the insane Other is balanced by the Narrator, who in himself is dualist and contains opposites.

LET’S GO TO THAT DISTANT WAR

FIRECRACKERS

“Watch out! Somebody screamed, as hell’s fireworks began to fall in a deadly shower, suddenly turning the jungle into a tragic Chinese New Year’s party. The soldiers began to run in very direction, except the right one. The captain fell on the ground, holding his belly Steve bent over to help him, but a violent shock on his back threw him to the ground. The wet earth felt sweet under his cheek Little by little, chaos began to fade, and the world whirled slowly out of sight. Everything was peaceful and turning black. So black he couldn’t even see his hands. So black he couldn’t remember his own name. So black he had forgotten to count.

HOW ABOUT YOU MEET WALDO THE DOG?

DOG

“You’re a dog!” she said, and suddenly Waldo realized it was true. He fell on his four legs and began to chase her out of the apartment, barking, drooling and growling. When she was gone, he curled up on the carpet and got ready for a nap. Right before falling asleep, he wearily looked up and saw that the world was much better when you looked at it from underneath.

WANT MORE WALDO? I DID.

DOG DREAMS

Waldo is dreaming now, sleeping on his favorite carpet. He is in a street, trotting along and sniffing his way through the city. The smells tell him beautiful stories that make him long and ache inside, wonderfully. The sidewalk is full of clues. No more riddles. No more labyrinths. No more fears of getting lost. Waldo is a good dog now, attached to his master—that is, to himself. Waldo smiles in his sleep and grunts with pleasure. He is holding his leash in his mouth.

THAT CURIOUS NARRATOR

THE NARRATOR, AGAIN

You are wondering who I am, perhaps.

Haven’t you understood yet? I am the colors in this text, the mysterious chapters and the thread between the words. I am the sound of the turning of the page, and the silence of your reading. I am with you and within you. I am above and under. I am the song of the trees and the satellites’ radio waves, the laughter of Lilith and the wind on the sea. I am the witness and the actor, the culprit and the innocent. I am the last face you see when you fall asleep, and the first one you meet in the morning. In the paper theatre of your existence, I am the candle which sets everything on fire, and watches you crumple and turn to ashes. But I am also the one who takes you by the hand and leads you out of impossible situations. I am the ink in the pen and the bullet in the chamber, the sigh of relief and the cry of despair. I have no name, but many nicknames, of all of which my favorite is, of course, the narrator.

* * *
Dear Seb,

I think it is entirely unfair to all the English-speaking readers of the world that you have only translated--re-made? re-written?--one of your books into our language. What are you doing in all that spare time when you're not lecturing or attending to family or writing new books or working with students? You're not too busy, are you? You've got those nice dark Danish winters with nothing much to do!

And now you will have to excuse me because I have a book to finish.

XD Marly
*
* * *

Also: Merry Sixth Day of Christmas!

Just a little message from my world, where no snow fell today, nobody quarreled, the tree is lit, and it's a wonderful life.

Readings for the 12 Days of Christmas: Viktor Frankl

How about an old book for today, though new to me--a reading from the only book shelved in the "self-help" area that has ever drawn me. It is also the only book I read this year that made me weep.

Flap copy: Man's Search for Meaning has riveted generations of readers with its description of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 psychiatrist Viktor Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the stories of his many patients, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose.

Born in Vienna in 1905, Viktor E. Frankl earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna. He published more than thirty books on theoretical and clinical psychology and served as a visiting professor and lecturer at Harvard, Stanford, and elsewhere. Frankl died in 1997.

* * *

"Can't you hurry up, you pigs?" Soon we had resumed the previous day's positions in the ditch. The frozen ground cracked under the point of the pickaxes, and sparks flew. The men were silent, their brains numb.

My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn't even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing--which I have learned well by now. Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.

* * *

Another time we were at work in a trench. The dawn was grey around us; grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces. I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious "Yes" in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. "Et lux in tenebris lucet"--and the light shineth in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt she was present, that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.

* * *

There is little to tell and it may sound as if I had invented it; but to me it seems like a poem.

This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. "I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard," she told me. In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously." Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, "This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness." Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. "I often talk to this tree," she said to me. I was startled and didn't know quite how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. "Yes." What did it say to her? She answered, "it said to me, 'I am here--I am here--I am life, eternal life.'"

Readings for the 12 Days of Christmas: Mezzo Cammin

I stayed up till 3:00 working on a promised Anglo-Saxon translation and talking with my daughter, and now must finish cleaning the remains of the flood--in-laws are due tomorrow. So for today's 12 Days of Christmas reading I shall quickly pilfer some poems from that lovely online venue, Mezzo Cammin, edited by Kim Bridgford and featuring formal poems by women.

Enjoy!

Maryann Corbett

Fist

It looks like knucklebones, the way the lines
fist up in fours, each rhyme a hardened stud
under a leather glove. Or meat-fork tines.
You stab with them; the puncture holes ooze blood.

It's built for doing damage. It's compact.
It lays its weapons down in ordered rows,
puts on its ninja costume, silk and black
and disciplined, adopts its kung fu pose,
waits. Is silent.

*************Then it whirls around,
flips on its superpowered X-ray glance,
and THWACK! your nemesis is on the ground.
(And, God, the satisfaction when he lands.)

You feel like watching someone's entrails twist?
Write one of these. A sonnet is a fist.


Jennifer Reeser


from Sonnets from the Dark Lady

1

In the old age black was not counted fair,. . .

The world knows black as universal sin.
No Paris stylist passionately swearing
The chic are rendered chicer, thin more thin,
Persuades the bon vivant into its wearing.
In black, the child is chased away, affection
And understanding, though it clothe demurely;
Compassion, color run from the complexion.
But since life thrives through compromises, surely
Let raven, sable, rook be my disguise.
Make murk my brow, in ashes root my hair,
That while I live, none but my master's eyes
May gain one aureole to find me fair,
And thereby--in fair finding--obfuscate
My mirror's counter and uncountered mate.


Barbara Crooker


Stone Fruit (A Sevenling)

Now they come in, all at once:
peaches, nectarines, plums; thin skins
that can barely hold the fruit, the juice.

But what I'm hungry for is cold soup:
cucumber with dill and yogurt, fiery gazpacho,
velvet avocado, with a curl of shrimp on top.

And at the heart of all flesh, a pit.


Annie Finch

Elegy for Her Mother

For K.V.

When your mother joined October,
took the questions from the earth
with her body, left you shining
with your answers, how did earth
close around her? Was it startled

by a further laugh of grain?
Did a field of hard earth open
over her, till she was grain?

Was she brought to flame again
in the mothers' month, October,
when the dead come closing in?
Was she made to a green flame
by a further laugh of grain?

Did a field of hard earth open
over her, till she was grain?
Was she brought to flame again?