Saturday 27 December 2008
Tuesday 16 December 2008
Arnold Böcklin
The Sacred Wood (1882) by Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901) reminds me of the strange ritualistic visions often found in Ithell Colquhoun's writing.
Monday 15 December 2008
Tarjei Vesaas vs Black Metal
Apparently a Tarjei Vesaas poem, Snø og granskog, as performed by somber Norse sadsacks, Darkthrone...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
The prose of Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1927) is some of the most exhilirating and singular I have ever read. Famous for his kinetic, imagist, dystopian satire, We, Zamyatin should also be remembered as a remarkable experimental engineer of language. Anticipating both surrealism and post-modernism, We is filled with an extremely odd descriptive style, as well as a seer-like and alien feel for colour which never fails to surprise. It appears he can be included into that fantastically rarified club of Russian Literary Synaesthesiacs, which also counts Vladimir Nabokov and Andrey Bely as members. Aren't there any non-Russian writers possessed with this talent?
Tarjei Vesaas
I recently survived an avalanche of Tarjei Vesaas novels- four in succession; The Ice Palace, The Birds, Spring Night and The Boat in the Evening. (All of these are published by Peter Owen.) Such an immersion into his unique world has been thrilling to say the least. In fact I would suggest that out of all the obscurer authors I have read he probably deserves a wider readership than most. Vesaas’s style of prose is stark and terse yet eerily beautiful and illuminatingly attuned to nature and beyond, like the ever-changing labyrinth of ice in The Ice Palace. Such is the compression of feeling shaded into his spare writing, these short novels burn effervescently with a quiet intensity.
The Ice Palace is his masterpiece: a perfectly pitched tale of a nascent yet intense friendship between two young girls, Siss and Unn, in the Norwegian wilderness and a poetic flight into the aftermath of a tragic exploration of the mysterious ‘ice palace’ of the title. The inner-lives and secretive, forbidden feelings of the two girls are so brilliantly drawn that their ultimate separation is equally disturbing as it is heartbreaking. Similarly, Vesaas’s descriptions of the spectral but very real ice palace approach the visionary dreams of a mystic.
One of the key themes of The Ice Palace was the sheer mystery and incomprehensibility of the adult world as viewed from a child. A similar motif is to be found in The Birds, a story of Mattis, and adult with learning difficulties and his sister, Hege, who also serves as his carer. The novel deals with the private thoughts and fantasies of Mattis and his difficult engagements with both the natural world and other people. Indeed I would argue that it is the exploration of the nexus of these two common threads that is the defining characteristic of all of Vesaas’s work: how we live with and communicate with each other and how we engage with the natural world around us.
Spring Night again features a brother and sister duo, but in this instance they are both teenagers forced to cope alone when a strange family wresting in the midst of multiple traumas, some overt and others hidden, descend on them for a single night. The action unfolds almost like a play with an assortment of assembled characters all occupying different parts of the house and it is through the eyes of the brother, Olaf, who takes it upon himself to attend to each of them and learn their troubles, that the dramatic events are threaded together. Again the magical realm of the child’s imagination pools into the events like a sticky sap, yet in the end, Olaf and Sissel’s cultivated private universe will be punctured, perhaps forever, as daylight finally breaks.
When reading Vesaas I often think of the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, particularly in his focus on the elemental- fire, water, ice, wood, rock. Furthermore they both share a certain contemplative stillness of vision, an exploration of the transmogrifying properties of light and the people who pass through it. In his work, Tarkovsky notably investigated Aristotle’s dramatic unities, whereby all the action would occur in a single place in a single day. Spring Night is not only another fantastic example of this notion, but it is also an intensely unflinching portrait of a house simmering in the spring heat laden with intrigue and turmoil.
Finally, we have The Boat in the Evening, easily the most hermetic, mysterious and illusive of Vesaas’s books I have read so far. It is essentially a collection of sixteen visions in the form of prose poems. The first eight contain a definite narrative pulse and there is movement, a stirring of memory and of sensation. A drifter is seduced by the mirrored voices of a river and duly takes the plunge; two men meet at dusk to witness a ghostly phantasm fleet across the land; and a girl waits for a lover in the snow who never comes and instead finds solace in his messenger. At times, one is reminded of the Ted Hughes short-story collection, Difficulties of a Bridegroom, in its visionary marriage of the natural and the ethereal.
The second half of the book is far more abstract and difficult to grasp. Here we have ruminations on stone, the human heart, and the silent symphonies of remote places. The mood is gnomic, hermetic and one wonders if Vesaas’s poetic primitivism can be traced to a more pagan understanding of the earth? Certainly there are passages here that would not be out of place in an Ithell Colquhoun book.
Ithell Colquhoun
Hullo! I have decided to inaugurate this site with a brief reflection on the surrealist/occultist writer and artist, Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988).
Distinctively, Ithell Colquhoun’s Goose of Hermogenes reads like a hermetic hybrid of The Wicker Man and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain. Her two previous books, The Crying of the Wind: Ireland and The Living Stones: Cornwall, both intriguing works of ‘travel writing’ provide some indicators of her interests and concerns as a writer and an artist, which she explored to delirious effect with Goose of Hermogenes. Using her travels as a departure point, she places emphasis on the retelling of the folklore and mythology of particularly mystical areas. Her explorations also focus on the shifting relationships between the natural and the more elusive, spectral worlds. Scenes of great natural beauty are evoked and at the same time, the mystical and occult atmosphere is keenly captured. Indeed, at times, one is reminded of the paintings of mystical scenes by the great symbolist artist, Arnold Böcklin.
However, the defining feature to her writings is her deeply felt belief in the occult and the supernatural. Colquhoun speaks of the fantastical like it is ordinary and commonplace, simply part of the fabric of the everyday. From this position she commands a certain authority, as it is apparent from her life that she truly immersed herself into occult literature and practice. Colquhoun’s world is one definitely attuned to the ether, to the arcane realm of spirits and phantasmagoria. Therefore, it can be argued that her interests are not intended to serve as a mere literary device, rather they represent a matter-of-fact acceptance of the co-habitation of our world by the other, and it is this realisation of her scholarly pedigree, as well as her artistic preoccupations, that ultimately makes Goose of Hermogenes all the more extraordinarily and disarmingly strange.
It truly is a fantastic concoction: the combination of obscure medieval occult references with highly lucid automatic writing techniques. Moreover, at times the reader is in the dark as to whether Colquhoun is describing a stream-of-consciousness piece of surrealist abstraction or incanting a nefarious spell of sorts. Again, like in the travel works, there is a certain visionary and dream-like trance quality to her prose that only adds to the overall sensation of disquiet.
A second effect of this alchemical marriage between magick and surrealism is that when the book really takes flight it can be utterly baffling and cryptic, albeit in quite a spectacular way. Again there is a certain appeal in this- I like to think that Colquhoun has concealed many incredible occultist secrets and images into the text which could be revealed through a lifetime of scholarly robe wearing. Alternatively, it’s just wild nonsense. Either way it will linger in the mind like an old dolmen in a field, collecting multiple interpretations like moss.
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