@@ -1440,13 +1464,13 @@ Above is an etching from a publication of Sir Walter Scott's /[[https://en.wikip
Bride of Lammermore]]/ (1819). Consider the sheer visual density and
heaviness of the scene (click on the image to be taken to a larger
version). /Whence, wherefore/ this heaviness, this portent?
-Predominant is nature dark, inhospitable, threatening. The human-built
-castle is primitive, isolated, and vulnerable, the riders miniscule,
-exposed ... as though every single living cell---plant, animal,
-human---is clinging to life by a thread, and any dim green and blue
-hues of vegetation and sea are wholly irrelevant. The scene evokes
-danger, dysphoria, as if surely something horrific just waiting to
-transpire. But again how, why? Why such darkness and what was (and
+Predominant is a natural dark---inhospitable, threatening. The
+human-built castle is primitive, isolated, and vulnerable, the riders
+miniscule, exposed ... as though every single living cell---plant,
+animal, human---is clinging to life by a thread, and any dim green and
+blue hues of vegetation and sea are wholly irrelevant. The scene
+evokes danger, dysphoria, as if surely something horrific just waiting
+to transpire. But again how, why? Why such darkness and what was (and
still is) the appeal? Hitchcock tautologies aside, modern academe has
offered theories about the socio-political-psychological landscape of
the times, and yet these "experts" only sound supercilious and
@@ -1457,24 +1481,51 @@ arrests, mystifies, the appeal all the stronger for its recessive,
ungraspable spherical symmetry. To be sure, this "coming out" of
gothic in the eighteenth century was overwrought, indulgent with its
fright memes, but undeniably popular and onto something real about the
-inner human experience---at least in the Western world of the day.
+inner human experience---at least to the Western world of those times.
+
+The popularity of the gothic novel continued throughout the nineteenth
+and into the twentieth century primarily in the romance genre---after
+the term romance had been twisted in meaning to mean love.[fn:84] Among
+others, Frances Parkinson Keyes (1885 – 1970) was a popular romance
+author who often wrote from a gothic perspective. /[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonwyck_(film)][Dragonwyck]]/ (1946)
+is a prime example of Hollywood[fn:85] does gothic romance.
+
+**** Received gothic
+
+Novelist Ann Radcliffe (1764 - 1823) could be said to be the first to
+gain respectability for gothic fiction. Upper-middle-class and
+spanning the proto-Romantic late-eighteenth century and the Romantic
+Era, she forged a broad readership in the risen middle class for her
+moral and otherwise high-brow treatment of gothic
+gloom-and-doom. Again, a certain shade of Dark was evolving and
+Radcliffe was a part of it.
+
+The three most popular novels written by the Brontë sisters---/Jane
+Eyre/ by Charlotte, /Wuthering Heights/ by Emily, and /The Tenant of
+Wildfell Hall/ by Anne---would be considered gothic, and therefore, at
+least according to my logic, flawed vis-à-vis Dark. Though by the time
+of their publication and subsequent fame, gothic prose had completely
+shaken off its lightweight and déclassé image. Hence, class and taste
+was no longer the problem, rather, expression. As I'm saying, prose
+attempting Dark cannot help but land hard and miss the subtleties and
+power of poetry.[fn:86]
*** The night, the stars, the moon...
As personal and original as I want Novalis' /Hymns to the Night/ to
-have been, I insist Englishwoman Anna Lætitia Barbauld's /[[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_(Barbauld)/A_Summer_Evening%27s_Meditation][A Summer
-Evening's Meditation]]/ was the same inner outing, already having
-appeared in 1773, praising the night in a similarly cherished, solemn
-way.
+have been, I must present Englishwoman Anna Lætitia Barbauld's /[[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_(Barbauld)/A_Summer_Evening%27s_Meditation][A
+Summer Evening's Meditation]]/ as the same sort of solemn praising of
+the Night, but already having appeared in 1773.
Without more investigation I have no real idea if Barbauld's /ASEM/,
-weighing in at 124 lines, started what I'm calling the /Night School/,
-but as a working theory, yes, she offered a new perspective on Dark
-with an accessibility and maturity not really seen in Graveyard and
-certainly not gothic horror. As a sort of prompt she nods to Young's
+weighing in at one hundred and twenty-four lines, started what I'm
+calling the /Night School/, but as a working theory, yes, she offered
+eighteenth-century Britain a new perspective on Dark with an
+accessibility and maturity not really seen in Graveyard and certainly
+not gothic horror. As a sort of prompt she nods to Young's
/Night-thoughts/ with the quote, /One sun by day, by night ten
thousand shine/, then launches directly into her summer night and its
-canopy of stars...
+canopy of stars
#+begin_verse
Tis past! The sultry tyrant of the south
@@ -1499,8 +1550,9 @@ When Contemplation, from her sunless haunts,
No woe, no doom-and-gloom; instead, a relentless parade of visceral
and natural Dark hyperconductivity. Barbauld hauls us outdoors to
-partake, imbibe, behold. We are not swimming in doom, rather, we are
-touched, moved to reflect in reverence---
+partake, imbibe, behold the Night like never before. We are not
+swimming in doom, rather, we are touched, moved to reflect in
+reverence...
#+begin_verse
...But are they silent all? or is there not
@@ -1542,15 +1594,15 @@ devices---fun as they may be. Most assuredly every protégé of the Dark
Muse must read Barbauld's masterpiece. Hers is an exposition of
natural darkness, placing it far above the reproach of gothic horror
detractors. Though /ASEM/ was as far as I can tell a singleton, a
-unicorn whose influence seemed to lay dormant for decades.[fn:84] One
+unicorn whose influence seemed to lay dormant for decades.[fn:87] One
Barbauld biographer mentioned a trend of that time of ladies studying
-astronomy. But obviously Barbauld is waxing Dark, not embellishing
+astronomy. But obviously Barbauld is waxing Dark, not just idealising
celestial bodies. Perusing her other poems, yes, she often dwells on
nature, sometimes in a dusky way, but addressing Dark as she did with
/ASEM/ doesn't come forth again, nor from others during her
times. Today she is known as an influential social commentator,
-moralist, and educator, not as proto-Romanticism. And so I must jump
-ahead some /fifty/ years and bring in Brontëan poetry as a
+moralist, and educator, but not as proto-Romanticism. And so I must
+jump ahead some /fifty/ years and bring in Brontëan poetry as a
continuation of this Night School thread. Haworth Emily's /[[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Poems_of_Emily_Bront%C3%AB/Stars][Stars]]/ is
just one her many examples of Night School from someone who probably
had never read nor heard of Barbauld's /ASEM/. Exactly like Barbauld,
@@ -1568,8 +1620,8 @@ And scorch with fire the tranquil cheek,
Where your cool radiance fell?
#+end_verse
-The night sky's depth and expanse over the trammels of life during
-sunlight, indeed. And so the last two stanzas
+The untrammelled night sky's depth and expanse over the trammels of
+life during sunlight, indeed. And so the last two stanzas
#+begin_verse
Oh, stars, and dreams, and gentle night;
@@ -1607,11 +1659,11 @@ The darling of my heart to me.
Simpler, more measured was Anne's poetry than her sister's. And she
includes the grave by eulogising either of her older sisters Maria or
-Elizabeth, or her mother, but again, sans drama.
+Elizabeth, or her mother, but again, sans drama. This calmer, more
+introspective Dark matured in the nineteenth century.
-This calmer, more introspective Dark dominated the eighteenth
-century. And let us not forget the many poems devoted to the
-moon. Here is Anne Brontë's /Fluctuations/
+But let us not forget the many poems devoted to the moon. Here is Anne
+Brontë's /Fluctuations/
#+begin_verse
What though the Sun had left my sky;
@@ -1661,13 +1713,13 @@ Restore my fainting heart!
#+end_verse
Here we may imagine the youngest Brontë bowed if not weighed down by
-her earthly afflictions, cares, deprivations, but then in this lean,
-hungry, susceptible state caught in an emotional whirling, carried,
-borne up by the natural nighttime procession of sun to moon and
-stars. She speaks of her tearful gaze, her fainting heart, her
+her earthly afflictions, cares, deprivations; but then in this lean,
+hungry, susceptible state she is caught in an emotional whirling,
+carried, borne up by the natural nighttime procession of sun to moon
+and stars. She speaks of her tearful gaze, her fainting heart, her
spirits, her emotional exposure. She is a vulnerable ward of nature,
but tenaciously pursuant of its subtleties. Indeed, back then it was
-always subtleties, delicate qualities found in nature by the
+always subtleties, delicate qualities found in Nature by the
vulnerable if not pathetic human, an exacting counting of seemingly
modest blessings which then gained sublime ascendency.
@@ -1678,8 +1730,8 @@ thought-behind-thoughts mental state took a starker, more fatalist view of
God. Anne humble, Emily defiant perhaps; *nevertheless, the Dark Muse
absolutely owned by these Brontës!*
-William Wordsworth was nearly always about Nature, as well as
-all his foundational Romanticist ideals. In his /A Night Thought/
+William Wordsworth was nearly always about Nature, as were his
+foundational Romanticist ideals. In his /A Night Thought/
(published 1837) he clearly intersects with Night School
#+begin_verse
@@ -1766,44 +1818,45 @@ occurred in daylight. Like Edgar Allan Poe's /The Raven/, which we
will discuss below, there is a melancholy over loss.
With Night School first there is Nature dark, then human reflection
-upon that natural Dark; indeed, just the deepest possible descriptions
-of the world in darkness bringing forth some of humanity's finest
-insights.
+upon that natural Dark; indeed, just the deepest possible recitations
+of the world in darkness bring forth the finest, keenest insights.
** Romanticism
If a group of people enter a restaurant together the maître d' will
-assume they are together and require a table together. This is a good
-analogy to what has happened to my Dark principals. I have a lot to
-say about what has come to be known as /Romanticism/ since it is the
-catch-all created during and solidified after the main time frame of
-my Dark principals to make them some coterie they certainly were not.
+probably assume they are together and want a single table. This is a
+good analogy to what has happened to my Dark principals over the years
+since. I have a lot to say about what has come to be known as
+/Romanticism/,[fn:88] as it is the catch-all created for to try and make by
+Dark principals some exclusive coterie they certainly were not.
By now the reader knows I want my principals to have come by their
sublime poetry "as naturally as leaves came to a tree," as the film
/Bright Star/'s Keats said. To be sure, I insist my visionaries were
-just that, timeless trance visionary, who might have time, geography,
-and ethnicity in common, but cannot be made out a product thereof. I
-cannot have them reduced to puppets dangling on strings connected,
-owing to proto-this or precursor-that on the factory assembly line of
-time.[fn:85] Yes, of course they were of their times, and yet
-outliers, outsiders, unicorns, not for lumping together or lining up
-on a labelled shelf. And as said above, their actual lives give little
-insight into their gifts. Still, we have this most /unnatural/ box,
-this clammy container created by both contemporaries during the day,
-then subsequent generations of academe to hold, control, own, to
-/jail/ my greats, this /Romanticism/. But labelling is convenient, at
-times even necessary. And yet I must continue to argue what a disaster
-has become of herding the ghosts of my heroes onto some latter-day
-scholar's stage, a Fata Morgana that really never existed as all the
-pendants want it to have. Again, gripping butterflies squashes
-them.[fn:86] Right. We shall use the term carefully...
+just that, timeless and visionary, who, yes, might have time,
+geography, and ethnicity in common, but cannot be made out to have
+been a product thereof. I cannot have them reduced to puppets dangling
+on strings connected, owing to proto-this or precursor-that on the
+factory assembly line of time.[fn:89] Yes, of course they were of
+their times, and yet outliers, outsiders, unicorns, not for lumping
+together or lining up on a labelled shelf. And as I also insist, their
+actual lives give little solid insight into their gifts. Still, we
+have this most /unnatural/ box, this clammy container created by both
+contemporaries during the day, then subsequent generations of academe
+to hold, control, own, to /jail/ my greats, this thing called
+/Romanticism/. Again, gripping butterflies squashes them.
+
+One hot mess is the [[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0144q90/episodes/guide][BBC's series on Romanticism]][fn:90] hosted by
+English historian Peter Ackroyd. And then severe, left-brained
+Bertrand Russell in his /The History of Western Philosophy/ mangles
+away at Romanticism in a consummate pedantic way. These are Exhibit A1
+and A2 of people who don't get it but will sound important
+erudite.
*** Feelings, emotions, innocence, nature ... anything else?
-Academe typically begins any a priori deductive or empirical inductive
-proof session of Abstract Topological Romanticism with this set of
-axiomatic equations.[fn:87]
+So many proof sessions of Abstract Topological Romanticism begin with
+this set of axiomatic equations.[fn:91]
\begin{align*}
\large{\text{Romanticism}} &= \large{\text{feelings}} \\
@@ -1812,36 +1865,28 @@ axiomatic equations.[fn:87]
\large{\text{Romanticism}} &= \large{\text{nature}}
\end{align*}
-Academe wants Romanticism a spirited anti-rationalist (unrational,
-disrational, irrational?), predominantly vernal youthful /revolt/
-against the soulless straitjacket, the failed humanism of
-Enlightenment logic, as well as against stodgy, urban-centric
-classicism---basically anything coming before. Like hallucinating AI
-chatbots, scholars spin, and tangle bundles of cords and wires,
-connecting up Descartes, Rousseau, the American and French
-Revolutions, Defoe, Spinoza, Shakespeare,[fn:88] ... Buddha, Jesus,
-Merlin, the pope, et cetera, et cetera, to form a massive grid of
+Academe wants Romanticism to have been a spirited anti-rationalist
+(unrational, disrational, irrational?), predominantly vernal youthful
+/revolt/ against the soulless straitjacket, the supposedly failed
+humanism of Enlightenment logic, as well as against stodgy,
+urban-centric classicism---basically anything coming before. Like
+hallucinating AI chatbots, scholars spin and tangle bundles of cords
+and wires, connecting up Descartes, Rousseau, the American and French
+Revolutions, Defoe, Spinoza, Bacon, Hobbs, Shakespeare,[fn:92]
+... Buddha, Jesus, Merlin, the pope, etc., to form massive grids of
vertices and edges spreading out over the near and distant past, the
-denser, the more far-fetched the better. But of course all of this
-microscopic literary DNA matching is happening long after the fact in
-a modern realism setting, separate, aloof---clueless. What was an
-intuitive, gut-level, all but spontaneous reaction to the
-deterministic dogma rising from, say, Newton and before, Francis
-Bacon, has become a tossed salad of imagined influences and
-intentionalities.
-
-And then always their usual suspects
-roundup---anachronistically-tagged proto-hippie, back-to-nature,
-right-brain iconoclast types doing anti-Establishment.[fn:89] And so
-Novalis' /poetising/, where the mundane is flipped mysterious sacred
-and the sacred flipped ordinary profane, becomes a formulaic lab
-procedure conducted by contrarian irrationalists, rather than
-visionaries spinning gold out of trances. The upshot is, an artistic
-paper airplane floating around on feelings and emotions was folded and
-set sailing. Isaiah Berlin described Romanticism as
+denser, the more far-fetched the better. And yet this microscopic
+literary DNA matching is mostly happening long after the fact in a
+modern realism setting, separate, aloof---clueless. My visionaries
+spinning gold out of trances becomes formulaic lab procedures
+conducted by contrarian irrationalists, anachronistically-tagged
+proto-hippie, back-to-nature, right-brain iconoclast types doing
+anti-Establishment.[fn:93]
+
+The famous Oxford scholar Isaiah Berlin[fn:94] described Romanticism as
+ a new and restless spirit, seeking /violently/ to burst through old
- and cramping forms,[fn:90]
+ and cramping forms,[fn:95]
+ a /nervous/ preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of
consciousness,
+ a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual
@@ -1852,20 +1897,19 @@ set sailing. Isaiah Berlin described Romanticism as
+ a search after means of expressing an /unappeasable yearning for
unattainable goals/.
-Especially the last point makes my heroes sound like children who want
-everything in the candy shop.[fn:91] More discerning, an
-intentionality is implied which my principals most certainly did not
-bring---leading us once more to the disjunction between latter-day
-professional analysts and the original grave-mute creators. But then
-the question Berlin raised at the beginning of his /The Roots of
-Romanticism/, namely, whether this was really a movement at all---or
-just a collective condition, a state of mind that is always "in the
-air," to emerge and then fade like virtual quantum particles blinking
-in and out of existence.
-
-But again my question: Where is Dark in any academe Romanticism? And
-no, I don't mean campy pop gothic. The feelings and emotions Haworth
-Emily describe in /Fall leaves fall/
+Especially the last point makes my heroes sound like children who
+wanted everything in the candy shop. Again, an intentionality is
+implied that my principals most certainly did not bring---leading us
+once more to the disjunction between latter-day professional analysts
+and the original grave-mute creators. But then the question Berlin
+raised at the beginning of his first lecture, namely, whether this was
+really a movement at all---or just a collective condition, a state of
+mind that is always "in the air," to emerge and then fade like virtual
+quantum particles blinking in and out of existence.
+
+But again my question: Where is Dark in any academe's Romanticism?
+And no, I don't mean campy pop gothic. The feelings and emotions
+Haworth Emily describe in /Fall leaves fall/
#+begin_verse
...I shall smile when wreaths of snow
@@ -1876,27 +1920,28 @@ Ushers in a drearier day.
do not appear in any known academic treatment of Romanticism, forcing
me through this manifesto to start over from scratch. Again, /Emily is
-not just flipping!/ When I read these lines, yes, they are words
-processed by my brain's logical language model, but then they go to
-feelings. This is a quasi-[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron][mirror neuron]] "yes, I feel this way too"
+not just flipping!/ When I read her /Fall leaves fall/, yes, they are
+words processed by my brain's logical language model, but then they go
+to feelings. This is a quasi-[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron][mirror neuron]] "yes, I feel this way too"
moment that gives me pause and transports me once again to the gates
of the Dark Muse. /Fall leaves fall/ is terminal---I imbibe, feel, and
-go forth, i.e., I /behold/ all this sublime ideation of darkness and
-allow it to carry me---and that's it! Haworth Emily infects me with
+go forth. I /behold/ all this sublime ideation of darkness and allow
+it to carry me---and that's it! Haworth Emily infects me with
contagion, and I too smile and sing along with her.
-We all follow logically-set plans in our lives, locigally-derived
-"goals." But we are always emotional, constantly assessing how we
-/feel/ about this or that, things in general. This is what I might
-call the /logic train/ and the /emotion braid/. Then when I read /Fall
-leaves fall/ my braid of emotions stretching back to my birth (or even
-further) swells and lifts me beyond my mundane, deterministic logic
-train. And it is exactly this mirroring and swelling that academe
-doesn't get, never catches onto. Wreathes of snow and night's decay
-overshadow my clear, well-lit logic track.[fn:92] But a new sight
-emerges, informed by my emotional faculties. And so when dealing with
-academe's cutting around on Romanticism I must, as Amherst Emily said,
-/beware of the surgeon with his knife, lest he find the culprit life/.
+Surely we all follow logically-set plans in our lives,
+logically-derived "goals." But we are simultaneously emotional,
+constantly assessing how we /feel/ about this or that, things in
+general. This is what I might call the /logic train/ and the /emotion
+braid/. Then when I read /Fall leaves fall/ my braid of emotions
+stretching back to my birth (or even further) swells and lifts me
+beyond my mundane, deterministic logic train. /And it is exactly this
+mirroring and swelling that academe doesn't get, never catches
+onto/. Visions of snowy wreathes and night's decay break away from my
+clear, well-lit logic track. *But then a new sight emerges, informed
+by my emotional faculties*.[fn:96] And so when dealing with academe's
+cutting around on Romanticism I must, as Amherst Emily said, /beware
+of the surgeon with his knife, lest he find the culprit life/.
*** Nature reduced to sentimentality and innocence
@@ -1905,23 +1950,23 @@ hallmark of Romanticism. Nature, nature, nature they repeat---but with
only the most patronising view of what it meant to my
principals. Nature what? Nature awareness, appreciation, adulation,
respect, idealisation, idolisation, rapture, fervour, worship? Nature
-as a metaphor supply closet, a source of inspiration, a cruel
-mistress, a loving mother. All of this gets batted around endlessly,
-again, making my principals seem soppy, dreamy, sentimental, their
-lines see-through by modernist grownups. They don't understand Nature
-as I described it above, i.e., a non-place; instead, constant
-everything everywhere cycles of birth, growth, deterioration, and
-Death.
+as the metaphor supply closet, a source of inspiration, a cruel
+mistress, a loving mother.[fn:97] All of this gets batted around
+endlessly, again, making my principals seem soppy, dreamy,
+sentimental, their lines see-through by us modernist grownups. And so
+academe cannot understand Nature as I described it above, i.e., a
+non-place; instead, constant everything everywhere cycles of birth,
+growth, deterioration, and Death.
Academe's favourite Romanticism nature boy is of course William
-Wordsworth, whom so many call Romanticism's godfather[fn:93]---but
-then routinely pan as sappy sentimental. Beholden to the modern age,
-its urban nihilist public, not to mention peer reviewers, academe
-would use as touchstones modern realist writers such as Jack London
-and Ernest Hemingway and their supposedly more objective and
-unvarnished, /truer/ understanding of nature. What Wordsworth said
-about wandering like a cloud then going nuts over daffodils is curious
-but affected, mushy and maudlin to them
+Wordsworth, whom so many call Romanticism's godfather[fn:98]---but
+then routinely pan as way-out sappy sentimental. Beholden to the
+modern age, its urban nihilist public, not to mention peer reviewers,
+modern scholars cannot help but use as touchstones modern realist
+writers such as Jack London and Ernest Hemingway and their supposedly
+more objective and unvarnished, /truer/ understanding of nature. And
+so whatever Wordsworth said about wandering like a cloud then going
+nuts over daffodils is seen as affected, mushy, and maudlin
#+begin_verse
I wandered lonely as a cloud
@@ -1955,9 +2000,8 @@ And dances with the daffodils.
Eye rolls, smirks, and tsk-tsking in today's English department
classrooms. The richer his waxing, the further he sinks into
-patronisation and condemnation by modern realists. Missed entirely is
-his subtle and sublime. Here from /Lines Written a Few Miles above
-Tintern Abbey/
+patronisation and condemnation. Missed entirely is his subtle and
+sublime. Here from /Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey/
#+begin_verse
...Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
@@ -1978,14 +2022,25 @@ We see into the life of things.
This of course is genial and goes to the heart and soul of what I want
to bring forth here at WutheringUK, even though he hasn't included
Dark. With words he causes vibrations to my emotion braid. But again,
-all this goes way over heads and contrary to agendae today.[fn:94]
-And so Wordsworth is just a dusty old statue glimpsed during a quick
-run-through the classic wing of a museum, more interesting, better
-things in the modern wing for sure.
+all this goes contrary to modern realism today. One scholar mentioned
+in the Wikipedia article on this poem says,
+
+#+begin_quote
+[Wordsworth manages] to see into the life of things only by narrowing
+and skewing his field of vision and by excluding certain conflictual
+sights and meanings.
+#+end_quote
-Worse, Wordsworth made nature the only possible house for human purity
-and innocence. How droll. In /To a Highland Girl/ he transforms a
-peasant shepherdess he saw on a trip to Scotland into a goddess
+Obviously, Wordsworth was a toxic male apologist for the
+capitalist industrialist patriarchy, ignoring that so very many women
+and minorities were being oppresses exactly as he saw those sights and
+penned those lines... And so Wordsworth is just a dusty old statue
+glimpsed during a quick run-through the classic wing of a museum, more
+interesting, better things in the modern wing for sure.
+
+Worse, Wordsworth wanted nature the only possible house for human
+purity and innocence. In /To a Highland Girl/ he transforms a peasant
+shepherdess he saw on a trip to Scotland into a demi-angel
#+begin_verse
...With earnest feeling I shall pray
@@ -1996,24 +2051,23 @@ Benignity and home-bred sense
Ripening in perfect innocence.
#+end_verse
-I guess you had to have been there. Again, as William lit up my
-emotion bundle I was.
-
-And so nature is never more than a /theme/, a /leitmotif/---bereft of
-any clue as to what Nature capitalised meant.[fn:95] Nature conducive
-to feelings and innocence, as so much of Romanticist poetry is someone
-describing what they /feel/ and /yearn/ while in /nature/. Especially
-with the Romanticist bond between feelings and nature do we see
-academe as scoffers and put-down artists.
-
+I guess you had to have been there...
+And so nature for modern realist academe is never more than a /theme/,
+a /leitmotif/---bereft of any clue as to what Nature capitalised
+meant.[fn:99] Nature conducive to feelings and innocence, inviting
+re-sensitisation, indeed, as so much of Romanticist poetry is someone
+describing what they /feel/ and /yearn/ while in what they call
+/Nature/. No, modern realists cannot this abide.
+If one rejects metaphysics in all forms, then Nature has no magic. So
+ironic how /[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)][naturalism]]/ means nature sans any metaphysics, completely
+materialist mechanistic from the micro to the macro. Though the term
+has the root /natural/, i.e., the feel of instinctive, genuine,
+candid, sincere, e.g., the smile of a dear friend... Woe. Alas.
-If one rejects metaphysics in all forms, then Nature is without
-magic.[fn:96]
-
-Often, Nature is simply reverently noted in verse, as does Anne Brontë
-in her /Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day/
+This Nature nativism was so often simply reverently noted in verse, as
+does Anne Brontë in her /Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day/
#+begin_verse
My soul is awakened, my spirit is soaring
@@ -2032,10 +2086,10 @@ I wish I could see how its proud waves are dashing,
And hear the wild roar of their thunder to-day!
#+end_verse
-I will posit that my principals were instinctively unknowingly,
+I will posit that my principals were instinctively, unknowingly,
belatedly stamping a new European nature worship out of the moors and
forest floors---necessarily independent of whatever had been the
-vernacular paganisms before Roman occupation. Orthogonal as well to
+vernacular paganisms before Roman occupation ... orthogonal as well to
Elizabethan pastoral lyric, German /Shepherd Poetry/ of the
post-Thirty Years War seventeenth century, or even the Greek Arcadian
/Bucolic/ tradition.
@@ -2053,7 +2107,7 @@ having entered such a world.
#+end_quote
Below I will dive into the three poems which I believe describe her
-credo cosmology best. And, again, her Nature is completely different
+credo cosmology best. And again, her Nature is completely different
from any modern ideas thereof.
*** Sensitivity
@@ -2061,29 +2115,33 @@ from any modern ideas thereof.
Academe wants my principals to have been more in tune with their
senses, more impulsive, less emotionally structured, even sensual. But
once more their approach comes off as patronising, like child
-psychologists trying to describe children at play. The doctors know
+psychologists trying to describe children at play. These doctors know
"unruly" won't do, so they euphemize cleverly. To be sure, they just
-don't get what it is to be instinctual. And as ivory tower residents
-embedded securely in society, they cannot fathom being an /outsider/,
-neither physically nor social-psychologically. Tragic how one sort of
-gifted, analytical intellectual, is largely unable to fathom another
-sort of gifted---artistic lyrical spiritual.
+don't get what it is to be instinctual and creative about it. And as
+ivory tower residents embedded securely in society, they cannot fathom
+being an /outsider/, neither physically nor
+social-psychologically. Tragic how one sort of gifted---the analytical
+intellectual---is so unable to fathom another sort of
+gifted---artistic lyrical spiritual.
In general, academe lacks first-hand experience of what outsiders, the
disadvantaged have of the real world. This dearth of experience is not
made up by imagining the dehumanising and ultimately /desensitising/
waves coming at, say, the Brontës, the rumour of human exploitation,
-the colonialism and capitalist industrialism. Though academe is master
-of paradigms and movements, making the backdrop of Enlightenment's
-cold, relentless dynamism and reductionist determinism hardly
-oppressive, especially some two hundred years in the past. In short
+the colonialism, as well as capitalist industrialism Wordsworth was
+supposed to have known of sitting above Tintern Abbey. More so academe
+is master of historical paradigms and movements, making the backdrop
+of Enlightenment's cold, relentless dynamism and reductionist
+determinism hardly visceral oppressive, especially some two hundred
+years in the past. And so I say
#+begin_quote
It takes a poet to know a poet, and it takes a special,
time-travelling poet to know these special Romantic Era poets.
#+end_quote
-Am I, your guide, a poet? Here's something I wrote
+But then am I, your guide, a poet? Dare I correct established,
+mainstream Romantic Era experts? Here's something I wrote
#+begin_verse
And from bygone generations I have surely more than blood.
@@ -2121,12 +2179,13 @@ To God and the bless'd everlasting.
I think this might have got me an honourable mention back in the day.
-And yet there's was no political polemic intended; rather, by trying
-to re-humanise, /re-sensitise/, à la Novalis' poetising, theirs was a
-more Zen approach, a /Euro-Zen/ perhaps. And so I re-collect Feeling,
-Nature, and Euro Zen re-sensitisation. But then Romanticism is not
-formulaic prescriptive. It is not a political or religious movement,
-not a lifestyle ... what then?[fn:97]
+My poets of yore. And yet no political polemic was ever intended;
+rather, by trying to re-humanise, /re-sensitise/, à la Novalis'
+poetising, theirs was a more Zen approach, a /Euro-Zen/ perhaps. And
+so I write lines to re-collect Feeling, Nature, and Euro Zen
+re-sensitisation. But if my principals meant nothing political or
+religious, no lifestyle, what did they want? What did they
+mean?[fn:100]
*** Zen: East and West
@@ -2143,14 +2202,14 @@ the wild west as an aesthete itinerant.
I recall getting a book on Zen Buddhism at that time wherein I found
the concept of /Unsui/, which is Japanese and means /cloud,
-water/. The term refers to a novice monk
+water/. The term also refers to a novice monk
#+begin_quote
In Japan, one receives unsui ordination at the beginning of formal
ordained practice, and this is often perceived as 'novice ordination.'
#+end_quote
-My dense, written-for-adults book further described unsui
+This dense, written-for-adults book further described unsui
metaphorically, saying water may change states if impeded: as steam it
escapes heat; as water it goes around impediments or, if dammed,
simply waits patiently; if frozen, likewise, waits---for nothing can
@@ -2164,120 +2223,251 @@ or existential meaninglessness, as in, What does it take to get you to
respond, kid? Caine momentarily stepped out of the nihilism and broke
the spell.
-Contrast this with something Emily Brontë said in a diary
-
-#+begin_quote
-All creation is equally mad. Nature is an inexplicable problem; it
-exists on a principle of destruction. Every being must be the tireless
-instrument of death to others, or itself must cease to live. Yet
-nonetheless we celebrate the day of our birth, and we praise God for
-having entered such a world.
-#+end_quote
-
-Yes, both Eastern philosophies and my Brontëan English Zen do not
-confront the real world with socio-political doctrine or
-manifestos. But then where does Buddhism take us? Where does Brontëan
-Zen take us?
-
-Buddhism wants enlightenment---which supposedly raises us to some sort
-of extra-human demi-angel. Once enlightened, we no longer have worldly
-cares. But how many actually reach this state which we might guess is
-some permanent version of Dostoyevski's presence of eternal harmony?
-This is why I cannot take any sort of Eastern religion based on
-enlightenment seriously, since such a very limited number of people
-ever arrive at this self-actualization.
+Contrast this with Emily Brontë's koan-like description of Nature as
+both cruel but our home. Thus, both Eastern philosophies and my
+Brontëan English Zen would not confront the real world with
+socio-political doctrine or manifestos. But then where does Buddhism
+take us? Where does Brontëan Zen take us?
+
+Buddhism wants enlightenment---which supposedly raises us to an
+extra-human state. And once enlightened, we no longer have worldly
+cares. But then how many actually reach this state---which might be
+presumed as some permanent version of Dostoyevski's presence of
+eternal harmony? This is why I cannot take any sort of Eastern
+religion with the stated goal of enlightenment seriously, if for no
+other reason than so very few people ever arrive at this
+self-actualization. Also, where is Dark in the East?
But then what of West Zen? Emily Brontë's /All creation is equally
mad.../ presents a deep paradox and falls into fatalism, rather than
offering a path to anything higher. How could poetised
-feelings---Longfellow's piteous ruing of snowflakes, Poe's overnights
-at the sepulchre by the sea, Novalis' shout-outs to the night---sit
-atop all the violent dynamism, all the smashing, banging, clanging of
-theirs or our times? How was so-called Romanticism even to be
-considered the aesthetics of, the contemporary cultural offerings to
-such great upheaval, coercion, destruction as came upon the
-nineteenth-century West? The initial answer is no, it could not
-be. There could be no artistic, aesthetic compliment to colonialism,
-Newtonian science, and industrialism. And therein lies so much of the
-irony and paradox. How could The British Empire rising to the height
-of its power and reach make William "Dances With Daffodils" Wordsworth
-its poet laureate?[fn:98] No, what the Romantic Era poets and artists
-created was, as we might categorise (sic) it, a very /underground/
-aesthetic, an anti-movement that blanched and faded in the light of
-day. The /radical philosophers/, as the proto-Marxist activists were called
-by some, were about power and wealth, i.e., the haves versus the
-have-nots. Marxist dialectics then said when the gradient is too great
-necessarily the revolution will begin. Grim was the new industrial
-urban, the largely subsistence peasants now wage slaves living in
-existential terror of squalor, hunger, and exploitation. /Homo homini
-lupus/[fn:99] had once again raised its terrible head in a new and
-awful way.
-
-Here we might suggest classicism as a better choice for Western
-civilization. Classicism would seem to better compliment imperialism,
-as in "See the wonderful omelette? Now forget all the eggs we broke to
-make it." Glory, majesty, splendor, regality, grandeur to justify,
-substantiate whatever terrible happenings on the frontiers enabled
-it. Or perhaps the classicist envelope around religion, elevating the
-huge paradox of meek, pious, pacifist Christianity as a
-stop-at-nothing empire's real humanistic intention. As phenomena go,
-Romanticism was not to be had, full stop.
-
-The Brontë sisters languished (or blossomed?) in obscurity most of
-their lives,[fn:100] but as they gained popular recognition in the
-latter half of the eighteenth century, they and other Victorian
-Neo-Romanticisms kept on portraying a softer, kinder England from the
-capitalist industrialist, imperialist militarist reality. Consider the
-Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (founded in 1848). Below is a later
-painting of John Everett Millais, /An Idyll of 1745/
+feelings---Longfellow's piteous ruing of snowflakes, Novalis'
+shout-outs to the night---sit atop all the violent dog-eat-dog, all
+the smashing, banging, clanging of the real world? How was so-called
+Romanticism even to be considered the aesthetics of, the contemporary
+cultural offerings to such great upheaval, coercion, destruction as
+was the nineteenth-century West? The initial answer is no, it could
+not be official aesthetics. There could be no artistic, aesthetic
+compliment to colonialism, Newtonian science, industrialism. And
+therein lies so much of the irony and paradox. What sense did the
+naming of William "Dances With Daffodils" Wordsworth as the poet
+laureate of the British Empire make?[fn:101] No, what the Romantic Era
+poets and artists created was, as we might categorise (sic) it, a very
+/underground/ aesthetic, an anti-movement that blanched and faded in
+the presence of political struggles. The /radical philosophers/, as
+the proto-Marxist activists were called by some, were about power and
+wealth, i.e., the haves versus the have-nots. Marxist dialectics then
+insisted that when the gradient is too great necessarily the
+revolution will begin. Grim was the new industrial urban world with
+the once blithely subsistence peasants become wage slaves and living
+in the existential terror of squalor, hunger, and exploitation. /Homo
+homini lupus/ [fn:102] had once again raised its terrible head in a new
+and awful way. But my principals seemed mute. Or were they?
+
+Many opposed what Romanticism seemed to be saying. Goethe and Schiller
+promoted as an alternative their /Weimar Classicism/ (more later). To
+most, classicism was the best compliment to the modern world,
+invariably to imperialism. As in "See the wonderful omelette? Now,
+forget all the eggs we broke to make it." Glory, majesty, splendor,
+regality, grandeur to justify, substantiate whatever terrible
+happenings on the frontiers enabled it. Even more poignant was the
+classicist envelope around religion, elevating the huge paradox of
+meek, pious, pacifist Christianity as a seemingly stop-at-nothing
+empire's real humanistic intentions. All in all, Romanticism could not
+be applied anywhere except, maybe, on a walk in Wordworth's Lake
+District.
+
+*** Nostalgia and going home
+
+Novalis promoted a nostalgia for the Medieval Era---confusing his
+contemporaries. Likewise, Walpole was all in for medieval in his more
+melodramatic way. And later, critiques of, e.g., /Jane Eyre/ chided
+its nostalgic, rustic appeal for English moorlands.[fn:103] All
+Brontëan writing has the thread of rootedness to the land, which
+should be timeless, but then was often seen as all too twee
+nostalgic. What then is going on with nostalgia?
+
+The Brontë sisters languished in obscurity most of their
+lives,[fn:104] but as they gained popular recognition in the latter
+half of the eighteenth century, Victorian Neo-Romantics kept up with
+portraying a softer, kinder Britain from the capitalist industrialist,
+imperialist militarist reality. Miss Jane Eyre, suspected of fairy
+ancestry, incessantly asked, Who and what am I? Which was answered,
+You are a charge of the land. To be sure, my delicate bundle of
+English Zen, Dark, Nature, and Christianity was tied by the Brontë
+sisters. But could it last could it hold up against the avalanche of
+realism and modernism brought on by the acceleration of industrialism
+in the late-Victorian Age? Or, from a different angle, How did
+Romanticism die?
+
+Consider the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (founded in 1848). Below is a
+later painting of John Everett Millais, his /An Idyll of 1745/
#+begin_export html
.jpg)
-Before YouTube and hysterical helicopter parents...
+Before internet social media and hysterical helicopter parents...
#+end_export
-Millais is dealing in profane or vulgar nostalgia,[fn:101] an
-associativity we today cannot totally follow without flawed
-speculation. Of course Britain in 1745 was powerful after favourable
-political events (e.g., Treaty of Utrecht) and Robert Walpole's era as
-the first prime minister. It might be said that a new era of decadence
-had arrived, and yet 1745 was the year of the main Jacobite rebellion;
-hence, the patriotic theme. But this was not dominant domineering
-Britain yet, rather, a Britain still fighting and scrapping for its
-position in the world, mainly against the French, as well as still
-suffering the collective PTSD of the bloody seventeenth-century
-British civil wars less than a hundred years earlier. And yet Millais
-painting this in 1884 would hearkened back, however vulgarly, to, yes,
-an /idyllic/ time---at least as he thought provided by the seemingly
-eternal English countryside, Britain's first and foremost national
-treasure. Three innocent, tabula rasa peasant girls are enraptured by
-an enlisted man playing a flute while a fatherly high-born officer
-looks on admiringly. Clearly, this pastoral bliss is a version of
+Millais is dealing in what I call /profane/ or /vulgar/
+nostalgia,[fn:105] his associations, however, we probably cannot fully
+understand today. Of course his Britain of 1745 was powerful after
+favourable political events (e.g., Treaty of Utrecht) and Robert
+Walpole's era as the first prime minister. And yet 1745 was the year
+of the main Jacobite rebellion; hence, the patriotic theme? Though
+this was not yet domineering Britain; rather, a Britain still fighting
+and scrapping for its position in the world, mainly against the
+French, as well as still suffering the collective PTSD of Jacobitism
+and the bloody seventeenth-century British civil wars less than a
+hundred years earlier. Still, Millais painting this in 1884 would
+hearkened back, however vulgarly, to, yes, an /idyllic/ time---at
+least as he thought provided by the seemingly eternal English
+countryside, Britain's first and foremost national treasure. Three
+innocent, tabula rasa peasant girls are enraptured by an enlisted man
+playing a flute, while a fatherly high-born officer looks on
+admiringly. Clearly, this pastoral and class bliss was a version of
Britain longed for by the nostalgia-heavy, Romanticism-influenced
Pre-Raphaelites. Great rueing and regretting permeated Victorian
-parlour society, spurring them to revive the earlier Romantic Era and
-to see in nature vitality and salvation. See beside as well Millais'
-/The Blind Girl/.[fn:102] This was the England they wanted, and not the
-bloody savagery of colonialism imperialism, nor the horrific suffering
-of the urban industrial wastelands Charles Dickens came to chronicle.
+parlour society vis-à-vis the real world, spurring them to revive the
+earlier Romantic Era and to see in nature true vitality and
+salvation. See beside as well Millais' /The Blind Girl/.[fn:106] This
+was the down-home England they wanted, and not the harsh realities of
+colonialism and imperialism, and certainly not the horrific suffering
+of the urban industrial wastelands Charles Dickens came to chronicle
+over and over throughout this time.
+
+English Zen and English nostalgia against the unrelenting brutality of
+the world. Again, Romanticism's right bookend was supposedly 1850. But
+did it die, retire, was it replaced? No, no, and no---in part, I would
+say, exactly because it was never anything as intentional and
+wrappable boxable as the watchers and minders wanted it to
+be. Romanticism was like an ongoing silent-bid auction always
+interrupted just before the sale. Was Tennyson a Romanticist? What
+about Yeats' /The Stolen Child/ from 1889
+
+#+begin_verse
+Come away, O human child!
+To the waters and the wild
+With a faery, hand in hand,
+For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
+#+end_verse
+
+I should also mention James Macpherson's /The Poems of Ossian/, like
+Walpole's /Otranto/, was the supposed field collections of the
+legendary Celtic bard Oisín, although most scholars believe Macpherson
+largely composed the poems himself, drawing in part on traditional
+Gaelic poetry he had collected. As Wikipedia says
+
+#+begin_quote
+Though the stories "are of endless battles and unhappy loves", the
+enemies and causes of strife are given little explanation and
+context. Characters are given to killing loved ones by mistake, and
+dying of grief, or of joy. There is very little information given on
+the religion, culture or society of the characters, and buildings are
+hardly mentioned. The landscape "is more real than the people who
+inhabit it. Drowned in eternal mist, illuminated by a decrepit sun or
+by ephemeral meteors, it is a world of greyness."
+#+end_quote
+
+Yes, Dark, but clearly more of the predominant Medieval Age nostalgia
+of the eighteenth century, especially since the authenticity is highly
+suspect, i.e., wishful and aggrandising penning on MacPherson's part.
+
+Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies. Julia Margaret Cameron, half
+of her life spent after 1850, conjured an ultra-nostalgia in her
+ground-breaking photography with her soft-focus and historical
+themes.[fn:107] Nostalgia, originally a medical condition,[fn:108]
+morphed into the social-psychological phenomenon of idolising the
+past, vulgar nostalgia selectively reviving, reanimating hoped-for
+aspects of the past. Nostalgia's motivation? Again, eighteenth-century
+gothic doom paralleled the beginning of the Industrial Revolution's
+inflexion point, as well as the reverberations of colonialism, e.g.,
+slavery. Doom, where sins' ever compounding interest overwhelm any
+profits, gains. Here is how J.R.R. Tolkien responded when his fantasy
+writings were called escapist
+
+#+begin_quote
+Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is
+imprisioned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?
+#+end_quote
+
+He went on to say the prisoner's natural urge is to escape and run
+home. Where is this home? Granted, the intersection of nostalgia and
+Dark is minimal, but mist dims light, softens lines, and all nostalgia
+involves the obscurants mist and shadow. Nostalgia is mainly for the
+thrumming the emotion braid and less for the calibration of the logic
+train. But yes, home---perhaps the home Jane Eyre described with the
+Rivers family on the Northern moorlands? Neo-Victorian Luddite
+closet-Monarchist Tolkien was the next stepping stone after George
+MacDonald---who was a stepping stone after?... And yes, it was all
+ultimately about home. Ursula Le Guin said an adult is not a dead
+child, rather a child that survived. But can that child in us take a
+faery hand-in-hand? Faery from our past. Elizabeth Siddal,
+(1829 - 1862)[fn:109] model, artist, poetess, her /Gone/
-No
-more that Christianity before it could.
+#+begin_verse
+To touch the glove upon her tender hand,
+To watch the jewel sparkle in her ring,
+Lifted my heart into a sudden song
+As when the wild birds sing.
-Romanticism portrayed as a furtherance of Enlightenment freedom of
-expression is also farcical. See how eighteenth-century gothic doom
-paralleled the beginning of the Industrial Revolution's inflexion
-point, as well as the reverberations of colonialism, e.g.,
-slavery. Doom, where sins' ever compounded interest smashed any
-profits, gains. Dynasties subject to Old Testament's crashing woe.
+To touch her shadow on the sunny grass,
+To break her pathway through the darkened wood,
+Filled all my life with trembling and tears
+And silence where I stood.
+I watch the shadows gather round my heart,
+I live to know that she is gone
+Gone gone for ever, like the tender dove
+That left the Ark alone.
+#+end_verse
+and then her /Lord May I Come?/
+
+#+begin_verse
+Life and night are falling from me,
+Death and day are opening on me,
+Wherever my footsteps come and go,
+Life is a stony way of woe.
+Lord, have I long to go?
+
+Hallow hearts are ever near me,
+Soulless eyes have ceased to cheer me:
+Lord may I come to thee?
+
+Life and youth and summer weather
+To my heart no joy can gather.
+Lord, lift me from life’s stony way!
+Loved eyes long closed in death watch for me:
+Holy death is waiting for me
+
+Lord, may I come to-day?
+
+My outward life feels sad and still
+Like lilies in a frozen rill;
+I am gazing upwards to the sun,
+Lord, Lord, remembering my lost one.
+O Lord, remember me!
+
+How is it in the unknown land?
+Do the dead wander hand in hand?
+God, give me trust in thee.
+
+Do we clasp dead hands and quiver
+With an endless joy for ever?
+Do tall white angels gaze and wend
+Along the banks where lilies bend?
+Lord, we know not how this may be:
+Good Lord we put our faith in thee
+
+O God, remember me.
+#+end_verse
-*** Desensitisation, re-sensitisation
+Nostalgia as a home of yore for which we the living witness.
- perception hang-ups, much less emotion
-brake-checking. There was no pause to reflect on
+*** Desensitisation, re-sensitisation, and the totality of Emily Brontë
+
+With an ever-faster-spinning planet there is antagonism with
#+begin_quote
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof,
@@ -2291,34 +2481,40 @@ the sons of man to be exercised therewith. \\
---Ecclesiastes 1:13
#+end_quote
-Humanity born of Spirit forever feeling wind in our faces and circling
-around wisdom ... almost as if there is a sanctity in what may emerge
-from consciousness beyond behaviorist stimulus-response,
-action-reaction, the Day's to-dos: order, change, progress.
-
-Perhaps my Romantic Era principals sensed the hyper-individualistic
-reptilian mindset from the middle-class capitalist
-industrialists[fn:103] as a egregious desensitisation regime spreading
-throughout society, and threw a re-sensitisation at it.
-
-
-
-Marxism dispenses with aesthetics, while my principals could not do
-without an aesthetical foundation---and then only adorned said
-foundation with poetisings. And of course there was no "call to action."
-
+...humanity born of Spirit forever feeling wind in our faces and
+circling around wisdom ... almost as if we may find a sanctity in what
+may emerge from such consciousness above and beyond behaviorist
+stimulus-response, action-reaction, beside the modern gauge of the
+personal logic train, besides the day's to-dos---orderings, changes,
+updates, progress.
-There is something instinctual in my eschewing of Eastern as a Dark Muser. Why
-do I cleave to Emily Brontë's English Zen and revolt against all the
-westernised Buddhism?[fn:104]
+Perhaps my Romantic Era principals sensed the hyper-individualistic,
+the utilitarian, the reptilian mindset coming from the middle-class
+capitalist industrialists as an egregious desensitisation regime
+spreading throughout society, and so they threw re-sensitisation at
+it.
-
-No, my principle principals
+The typical middle-class industrialist coming up during the
+Enlightenment was a pragmatic utilitarian who, after absorbing the
+message of Adam Smith's /The Wealth of Nations/ (1776), had jettisoned
+the baggage of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige][noblesse oblige]],[fn:110] the New Testament beatitudes,
+and any lingering other-century nostalgia and sentimentality to forge
+ahead as the consummate self-reliant individualist laser-focused on
+financial wealth. These men projected a stripped-down emotional
+psychological persona, indeed, a new desensitisation
+regime. Capitalism, Marxism, both dispensed with aesthetics, while my
+principals rushed to shore up an aesthetical foundation---and then
+only adorned said foundation with poetisings. And therein was no "call
+to action."
+
+There is something instinctual in my eschewing of Eastern as a Dark
+Muser. Why do I cleave to Emily Brontë's English Zen and revolt
+against all the westernised Buddhism?[fn:111]
Here I will simply and plainly state that I believe Emily Jane Brontë
was the very centre, the utter culmination of the whole Romanticism
thing---ironically _the most outside_ of any Romanticism boxing or
-packaging by academe. She combined in her /poetry/[fn:105]
+packaging by academe. She combined in her /poetry/[fn:112]
+ *Pagan Nature*,
+ *Dark*, and
@@ -2435,14 +2631,14 @@ And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.
#+end_quote
-*** Virginia Woolf's unfortunate critique of /Jane Eyre/
+*** Virginia Woolf counteroffensive against /Jane Eyre/
Every era seems to latch onto some set of hyper-idealisms, our present
times the herculean task of idealising any sort of non-heterosexual,
transgender proclivities to the level of enlightenment, the bearers'
paths through life that of martyrs, geniuses, prophets, and saints. A
double hero for both gender-bending and modern realism literature is
-Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941).[fn:106] In the photo to the right I ask,
+Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941).[fn:113] In the photo to the right I ask,
do we see a long-suffering, compassionate person, or is this a cold,
haughty, insufferable urbanite exuding modern emotional detachment and
unavailability? In any event, she was a late-Victorian,
@@ -2524,7 +2720,7 @@ impediments. But then the centrepiece of Woolf madness, namely, the
accusation that Charlotte and Emily are always "invoking the help of
nature." Aaaagh! Virginia, dear, /that's a feature not a bug!/
-Woolf is critical of Brontëan use of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy][pathetic fallacy]],[fn:107] a
+Woolf is critical of Brontëan use of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy][pathetic fallacy]],[fn:114] a
staple of Romantic Era writing. But of course writers of Woolf's era
were through with the link between Nature and man. They were onto more
realistic depictions of life. And yet all I see from them and their
@@ -2573,7 +2769,7 @@ I sadly watched that solemn sky.
The narrator's emotions float upon, are embedded in Nature. A real
human being has exactly this sort of experience: Life and Nature are
interwoven. Simply put, the Brontës were beholden unto Nature and
-God. They beseeched Nature and God,[fn:108] and thus came back with
+God. They beseeched Nature and God,[fn:115] and thus came back with
blessings in the form of lines such as these. And so I cannot allow
Woolf, nor any other city-bound modernist clone-bunnies, to cancel my
ladies' artistic licenses. Modern realists like Woolf are
@@ -2582,10 +2778,10 @@ miraculousness---however sublime or terrible---of Nature and our
fantastic membership thereof. Ironic how urban realists are nearly all
"reformists" out to radical socialists, always wanting to improve
mankind's lot, many following deterministic Marxist dialectic
-scripts.[fn:109] And yet they cannot see how /no one knows what to do
+scripts.[fn:116] And yet they cannot see how /no one knows what to do
with the Industrial Era!/, nor how the human is supposed to ever
thrive in these alien, hostile, sterile urban hell zones---however
-decorated this or that corner may be with classical tinsel.[fn:110]
+decorated this or that corner may be with classical tinsel.[fn:117]
** A Romantic Movement
@@ -2604,12 +2800,12 @@ incessantly pigeon-holing it as gothic fright---or just missing it
entirely. Again, one of the main tasks of WutheringUK is to get Dark
out of its academe and popular media prisons. Foremost is how academe
Romanticism seems more the labeling work of these clueless busy-bodies
-than any intentional movement from the actual creators.[fn:111] Which
+than any intentional movement from the actual creators.[fn:118] Which
begs the question posed by the highly-respected twentieth-century
humanities professor Isaiah Berlin in his lecture series on
Romanticism whether those times were not something timeless, a
permanent state of mind wholly outside of anyone's historical fence
-work.[fn:112] Nevertheless, there is no avoiding the sweeping
+work.[fn:119] Nevertheless, there is no avoiding the sweeping
intellectualisations, the mountains of churn from Romanticism's
academic investigators. And as I say, /none/ of them get Dark; and in
general, the more they think they know, the less they actually
@@ -2644,7 +2840,7 @@ Yes, many contemporaries of the actual artistic producers helped talk
Romanticism into existence---the Jena Set, Coleridge, Germaine de
Staël, Emerson et al.---but again, I believe the actual principals
were far-sighted, inward-gazing, quasi-timeless unicorns not following
-guidelines or living up to anybody's expectations.[fn:113] ... and most
+guidelines or living up to anybody's expectations.[fn:120] ... and most
certainly they did not "write to spec" or pastiche, as was fairly
obviously the case with gothic horror novelists. /And so I say sifting
through all the academic chaff gets us nowhere versus simply reading
@@ -2654,7 +2850,7 @@ imagining commonalities, generalities, throwing a formulaic hyperspace
over the lone wolf creators. Caveat emptor. If the purpose of a poem,
as Keats said, is to embolden the soul to accept mystery, then such
analytical death marches must be seen as antithetical. Analysing
-mystery is a fool's errand.[fn:114] For me at least, the principals
+mystery is a fool's errand. For me at least, the principals
/re-sensitised/, while their describers have only managed to
/de-sensitise/ with their mystery-deaf approach.
@@ -2664,7 +2860,7 @@ Edgar Allan Poe. With them we see their creations take us into the
ephemeral mists of Romanticism's subtleties and sublimities, while
their intellectualizations and pontifications thereof sound windy, if
not shrill out to ridiculous. No wonder the concept of left-brain,
-right-brain arose,[fn:115] as nothing else can describe this
+right-brain arose,[fn:121] as nothing else can describe this
split-personality confusion. But the urban salons necessarily
trafficked in rational, left-brain talk and copy. And this is for me
the /crisis of Romanticism/, i.e., the huge divide between the
@@ -2684,7 +2880,7 @@ in less than a day, with imitations instantly springing up like
mushrooms after rain. But in the closing years of the eighteenth
century there just seemed to be something in the air, which came to be
called Romanticism, apparently first by Jena Set founder Friedrich
-Schlegel[fn:116] ... after Coleridge and Wordsworth's collaboration
+Schlegel[fn:122] ... after Coleridge and Wordsworth's collaboration
/Lyrical Ballads/ (first edition) appeared in 1798 and Novalis' /HttN/
in 1800. But again, my principle principal, Emily Brontë, who wrote
decades later, arguably knew very little to absolutely nothing about
@@ -2694,7 +2890,7 @@ supposedly encountered translations of Ludwig Tieck's short
stories. Otherwise, there had not been much cross-fertilisation,
rather, the Romanticism Muse was, yes, just something in the air.
-/Early German Romanticism/[fn:117] began when Novalis' /HttN/ burst
+/Early German Romanticism/[fn:123] began when Novalis' /HttN/ burst
upon the scene in the very first year of the nineteenth century. Clear
to me, however, is that /HttN/ was a one-off that came out of the
blue, thus, certainly not intentional, positioned for, or tailored to
@@ -2721,7 +2917,7 @@ Dark entirely.
*** Poe and Dark Romanticism
And then /[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Romanticism][Dark Romanticism]]/ (DR) ... another academe box. At its
-centre was supposedly [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe][Edgar Allan Poe]].[fn:118] Alas but the Wikipedia
+centre was supposedly [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe][Edgar Allan Poe]].[fn:124] Alas but the Wikipedia
description of DR trots out all the negative stereotypes of Dark. As
one biographer noted, Poe struggled all his short adult life to make a
living as a writer and poet. One supposed quote of his said
@@ -2824,7 +3020,7 @@ Leanore into the lines. Allow me, please.
And so here I want to make a very important point about my principals,
to be sure, *that they were only vessels*, those particular mortals
the Muses chose to be their emissaries. This angle is well developed
-in the Hollywood film /[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_(film)][Amadeus]]/ where Mozart[fn:119] was depicted as an
+in the Hollywood film /[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeus_(film)][Amadeus]]/ where Mozart[fn:125] was depicted as an
immature, outta-control brat and yet the conduit of heavenly music. As
alluded above, Novalis was likely just such a boy-wonder Amadeus sort,
Poe no doubt lashing out mercurial, Emily Brontë austere anorexic,
@@ -2988,7 +3184,7 @@ If there is a better American example of the Dark Muse, I don't know
it. Here Poe is sustainable contemplative melancholic, rather than
hurling his fright bombs as in his prose. Did Poe know of Novalis and
his supposed hundred nights of graveside vigilance for deceased Sophie
-von Kühn?[fn:120] Perhaps but totally irrelevant. Again, I suss out
+von Kühn? Perhaps but totally irrelevant. Again, I suss out
that both Poe and Emily Brontë got the Dark Muse and gave it with
their poetry, but not in their prose, falling back into gothic. And so
I fall back to poetry and fragmented bursts as the only vehicle of
@@ -3022,7 +3218,7 @@ unfolding in the three-season, thirty episode AppleTV+ series
/Dickinson/. Apparently, the real Amherst Emily said something
affectionate in a letter to a female friend---which opened the door
for screenwriter Alena Smith to flip typical nineteenth-century
-platonic[fn:121] to sexual and reinvent the shy, gentle, reclusive, homebody,
+platonic[fn:126] to sexual and reinvent the shy, gentle, reclusive, homebody,
proto-nerd-girl Emily Elizabeth as a brassy, bratty, boorish, snarky,
completely desensitised and masculinised, outta-control, hyper-sexual
protest-lesbian champion against the patriarchy. And so this period
@@ -3043,7 +3239,7 @@ the time." Really? Quite a dirty, distorting window. It is nothing of
the sort, rather, an entire reinvention based on radical, male-hating,
misanthropic, twenty-first-century agitprop feminism, full stop. If
conspiracy theories about "cultural Marxism" were ever to be taken
-serious, this would be Exhibit A.[fn:122] This is nothing less than a
+serious, this would be Exhibit A.[fn:127] This is nothing less than a
frontal assault on an icon of Western culture, and I don't like it.
#+begin_export html
@@ -3053,7 +3249,7 @@ frontal assault on an icon of Western culture, and I don't like it.
More innocuous perhaps because it is a single film lasting only two
hours, thus, not able to get up to as much evil and inanity as
-/Dickinson/, is the 2022 Hollywood /Emily/,[fn:123] depicting Emily
+/Dickinson/, is the 2022 Hollywood /Emily/,[fn:128] depicting Emily
Brontë, the woman I consider the greatest, deepest English-language
poet, as a clumsy, oafish maladroit, stumbling around in a completely
anachronistic period fantasy chaos. Enough said.
@@ -3115,7 +3311,7 @@ believe anything good about the past, and the Right will not brook
anything bad about some golden era in their imaginations. The Left,
however, is arguably everything Noam Chomsky had to say about French
nihilism, and the Right an amalgamation of conservative and, newly,
-libertarianism.[fn:124]
+libertarianism.[fn:129]
@@ -3148,12 +3344,12 @@ see this other world of shadow and magic whenever I look out at my
moonlit /Inland Sea/ over the treetops of dark spruce and gnarled,
bare aspen.
-/Inland Sea/,[fn:125] thus, North Coast instead of North
+/Inland Sea/,[fn:130] thus, North Coast instead of North
Shore. Indeed, she is so much more sea-like than any lake. To my
thinking, a lake is something much smaller and much friendlier. Our
Inland Sea is big and often violent like any sea or ocean of
saltwater. She's no simple lake for beer-and-brats picnickers,
-windsurfers, speedboat and jet ski riffraff.[fn:126] To be sure, she
+windsurfers, speedboat and jet ski riffraff.[fn:131] To be sure, she
has a mighty présence, often dark and moody if not threatening.
Here is nothing really spectacular in the modern sense of the American
@@ -3164,7 +3360,7 @@ moodiness prevails. And as I insist, only subtle can lead to
sublime. But again, the people here a decidedly not Dark Musers, which
creates an almost perfect laboratory to test whether Dark is nature or
nurture. I'm saying if there are no gothic buildings, e.g., no Père
-Lachaise Cemetery,[fn:127] no community of mutually re-enforced
+Lachaise Cemetery,[fn:132] no community of mutually re-enforced
nighttime proclivities, then any Dark I'm getting must come from the
actual place itself, i.e., one hundred percent nature over
nurture. Which bolsters my argument that the Dark Muse ultimately
@@ -3285,7 +3481,7 @@ and I feel, I respond. I find Rossetti on the same fatalist wavelength
as Emily Brontë. She is describing an interaction with God not
dissimilar to Haworth Emily's /"I'll come when thou art saddest/
where, again, life is bitterly entropic, i.e., effort is nowhere near
-linearly rewarded, plans hardly realised.[fn:128]
+linearly rewarded, plans hardly realised.[fn:133]
But then organised Christianity is dogma---with results, rewards for
our compliance and obedience thin on the ground other than avoidance
@@ -3417,26 +3613,26 @@ today.
conflicting parties to coexist peacefully, either indefinitely or
until a final settlement is reached, /or/ (literally) a way of living.
-[fn:24] Doom as unforeseen consequences of previous actions, which in
+[fn:24] See [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson][here]] for a quick biography. \\
+[[file:images/EmilyDickinson.png]]
+\\
+\\
+
+[fn:25] Doom as unforeseen consequences of previous actions, which in
turn, entropically snowball into indebtedness, tragedy, and ruin;
typically multi-generational, a punishment that never seems to fit the
original crime---if it was a crime at all. One German word for doom is
/Untergang/, which also means /downfall/.
-[fn:25] Queen Victoria in mourning black ca. 1862. \\
+[fn:26] Queen Victoria in mourning black ca. 1862. \\
[[file:images/QueenVictoriaInMourningBlack.jpg]] \\
\\
-[fn:26] Is there anything worse than the so-called /[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_stages_of_grief][five stages of
+[fn:27] Is there anything worse than the so-called /[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_stages_of_grief][five stages of
grief]]/ or the Kübler-Ross model? Grief as an emotional malfunction
to be systematically reduced, fixed, corrected? Alas.
-[fn:27] Lots more about my novel as we go.
-
-[fn:28] See [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson][here]] for a quick biography. \\
-[[file:images/EmilyDickinson.png]]
-\\
-\\
+[fn:28] Lots more about my novel as we go.
[fn:29] In the third line, /Heft/ means weight, heaviness; importance,
influence; /or/ (archaic) the greater part or bulk of something.
@@ -3550,47 +3746,49 @@ Self/ by Andrea Wulf; 2022; Vintage Books. More about this flawed
account in a section below.
[fn:56] See the Wikipedia explanation of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism][Romanticism]] or [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Romanticism][German
-Romanticism]] ... but with a grain of salt. As I repeat throughout, the
-main purpose of WutheringUK is to wrest Romanticism and especially
-Dark away from the ivory tower humanities technocrats.
+Romanticism]] ... but with a grain of salt. As I repeat throughout, one
+of the main objectives of WutheringUK is to wrest Romanticism and
+especially Dark away from the ivory tower humanities technocrats.
[fn:57] The German /Poesie/ is typically translated as simply
/poetry/; however, poetry as a concept beyond just the literary art,
more towards the older /poesy/ perhaps. And of course Novalis and the
Jena Set expanded even further...
-[fn:58] I will go into how Romanticism is a fata morgana in detail
-soon.
+[fn:58] Again, I will go into how Romanticism is an ivory tower fata
+morgana in detail soon.
[fn:59] If you must, read [[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/novalis/][this about Novalis]], which is as good as
any. But as academe is wont to do, it hangs on every word uttered and
written by a young man feeling his way along in his twenties. This
-approach may work with Einstein, but not a twenty-something poet...
+approach may work with Bohr and Einstein, but not a twenty-something
+poet...
[fn:60] Lots more on eighteenth-century English Gothic below.
[fn:61] But /HttN/ wasn't entirely new after all. Soon will be
discussed similar offerings from the previous eighteenth century.
-[fn:62] We'll dive into Edgar Allan Poe's very similar idealisations
+[fn:62] Sophie von Kühn \\
+[[file:images/Sophie_von_Kühn.jpg]] \\
+\\
+
+[fn:63] We'll dive into Edgar Allan Poe's very similar idealisations
in his possibly most popular poem /Annabel Lee/ soon.
-[fn:63] Yes, give Wulf's /Magnificent Rebels/ a shot. But you'll
+[fn:64] Yes, give Wulf's /Magnificent Rebels/ a shot. But you'll
quickly realise she is more like a gossip columnist going on about
celebrities than someone who understands what they were actually
-doing. For all intents and purposes, she might as well be describing
-Andy Warhol's /Factory/, a place where social buzz was more important
-than the actual art.
-
-[fn:64] Again, /LB/ is bereft of Dark, although Nature is spot-on
-romanticised.
+about. For all intents and purposes, she might as well have been
+describing Andy Warhol's /Factory/, a place where society buzz was
+more important than the actual art supposedly produced.
[fn:65] *penetralium*: (plural /penetralia/) the innermost (or most
secret) part of a building; an inner sanctum; a sanctum sanctorum.
[fn:66] *verisimilar*: having the appearance of truth.
-[fn:67] [[https://youtu.be/bASfrZYnkvI?si=JKGP2LiHgOj-h9oL][Here]] is the scene from the bio-pic /Bright Star/.
+[fn:67] [[https://youtu.be/bASfrZYnkvI?si=JKGP2LiHgOj-h9oL][Here]] is the scene from /Bright Star/.
[fn:68] /The Genius of Instinct; Reclaim Mother Nature's Tools for
Enhancing Your Health, Happiness, Family, and Work/ by Hendrie
@@ -3599,12 +3797,10 @@ Weisinger; 2009; Pearson Education, Inc.
[fn:69] Here in woodsy Minnesota we haven't noticed a shortage of
mosquitoes, one of bats' primary food sources.
-[fn:70] A stay in Belgium to learn French and a short-lived gig in
+[fn:70] ...a stay in Belgium to learn French and a short-lived gig in
nearby Halifax as a governess.
-[fn:71] We consume upwards of one hundred times the resources and
-energy per capita as did one of our European ancestors from
-1800 ... and so the bigger the dance floor, the crazier the dancing.
+[fn:71] ...and the bigger the dance floor, the crazier the dancing.
[fn:72] There is nothing really otherworldly Dark or Romanticist as I
know it about Jane Austen, sadly. She was seemingly devoid,
@@ -3618,7 +3814,7 @@ non-pursuant of Dostoyevski's POEH. Although she once did say,
[fn:74] YMMV. Personally, I like a good doom-and-gloom session, and
Young really delivers with /Night Thoughts/. Later we'll go into Emily
-Brontë's take on doom-and-gloom, her more measured Christian
+Brontë's take on doom-and-gloom and her more measured Christian
perspective.
[fn:75] ...that is, in a past age not exposed to the science of modern
@@ -3627,131 +3823,145 @@ modern advertising and public relations. TL;DR: Since Bernays, no
"movement" in our modern times can be considered natural and organic,
rather, the result of somebody's financed public relations campaign.
-[fn:76] /Das Land der Dichter und Denker/. Intentionally absent was
+[fn:76] ...but the Germans were not idle during this time, either. I
+should also mention Gottfried August Bürger's very popular and often
+translated into English epic poem /[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenore_(ballad)][Lenore]]/ from 1774.
+
+[fn:77] /Das Land der Dichter und Denker/. Intentionally absent was
novelists. Although now novelists count as part of /die Belletristik/,
i.e., /schöngeistige Literatur/ or aesthetic literature.
-[fn:77] Two terms, /novel/ (English) and /roman/ (French, German,
+[fn:78] Two terms, /novel/ (English) and /roman/ (French, German,
etc. from the adjectival /Roman/, /Roman-like/) came to describe any
long-form prose story-telling.
-[fn:78] Ironically, the /Novella/, a long short-story format with no
+[fn:79] Ironically, the /Novella/, a long short-story format with no
chapter breaks, was better tolerated in Germany.
-[fn:79] One giveaway is /gothic/ in the title. Perhaps read [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction][this
+[fn:80] One giveaway is /gothic/ in the title. Perhaps read [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction][this
overview]] of Gothic fiction.
-[fn:80] Walpole initially claimed /Otranto/ to be a medieval
+[fn:81] Walpole initially claimed /Otranto/ to be a medieval
manuscript he had discovered and translated, when all along it had
been his own creation.
-[fn:81] ...although this is ironic since the actual label Gothic had
+[fn:82] ...although this is ironic since the actual label Gothic had
been used pejoratively in the Renaissance alluding to the destructive
barbarian Goths, i.e., Gothic architecture was crude and barbaric.
-[fn:82] A model woebegone gothic novel heroine (from /El Mundo
+[fn:83] A model woebegone gothic novel heroine (from /El Mundo
ilustrado/; 1879). \\
[[file:images/VictorianWomanOnBeach_side.png]] \\
\\
-[fn:83] Once asked why his horror films were so popular, Alfred
+[fn:84] See [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_(prose_fiction)][this]] sorting out.
+
+[fn:85] Once asked why his horror films were so popular, Alfred
Hitchcock said the man on the street likes to occasionally dip his toe
in the lake of horror.
-[fn:84] ...although Wordsworth would later mention Barbauld and
+[fn:86] My former wife, a Jane Austen fan, read /Wuthering Heights/
+and advised me to skip it. I always trusted her literary advice and,
+thus, have never read it.
+
+[fn:87] ...although Wordsworth would later mention Barbauld and
/ASEM/ as inspirational.
-[fn:85] A quote from M.H. Abrams' laborious /The Mirror and the Lamp/
+[fn:88] The Jena Set's Friedrich Schlegel first used /romantic/ in
+contrast to /classic/ to describe what they were doing in Jena, but it
+wasn't until the 1820s when the term Romanticism became widely known
+and used---evermore poorly...
+
+[fn:89] A quote from M.H. Abrams' laborious /The Mirror and the Lamp/
would insist \\
/Even an aesthetic philosophy so abstract and seemingly academic as
that of Kant can be shown to have modified the work of poets./ \\
Really? I doubt the Brontë sisters read much Kant. But then Abrams
never mentions the Brontës...
-[fn:86] The Jena Set's Friedrich Schlegel first used /romantic/ in
-contrast to /classic/ to describe what they were doing in Jena, but it
-wasn't until the 1820s until the term Romanticism became widely known
-and used---evermore poorly...
+[fn:90] Peruse on YouTube under /The Romantics: [[https://youtu.be/oLwRXlSgiSQ?si=y4a1MQek8Ac0pkyJ][Liberty]], [[https://youtu.be/liVQ21KZfOI?si=GpsPOUfS_l6w6r8_][Nature]],
+[[https://youtu.be/R6mefXs5h9o?si=c-cJk0fKTneunPZH][Eternity]]/.
-[fn:87] Notably absent is *Romanticism = Dark*...
+[fn:91] Notably absent is *Romanticism = Dark*...
-[fn:88] From the outset, the Schlegels in Jena made Shakespeare a
+[fn:92] From the outset, the Schlegels in Jena made Shakespeare a
principal proto-Romanticist, Ludwig Tieck and others of the Jena Set
feverishly translating his plays into German. For me this was a clear
sign they were on the wrong road. I will eventually have my fictional
character from my novel /Emily of Wolkeld/ tell you why.
-[fn:89] So convenient that Jena Romanticism came about in a for its
+[fn:93] So convenient that Jena Romanticism came about in a for its
time conspicuously free-wheeling university town, many of the Jena Set
-lecturers and professors at the University of Jena. Perhaps a modern
-version would have been [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mountain_College][Black Mountain College]].
-
-[fn:90] ...my italics...
+also lecturers and professors at the University of Jena. Perhaps a
+modern version would have been [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mountain_College][Black Mountain College]].
-[fn:91] What would the esteemed Oxford professor say after following
-an aboriginal witchdoctor around for a few days? Something very
-similar, I dare say.
+[fn:94] Sample perhaps [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIffazJIrLo&list=PLhP9EhPApKE_9uxkmfSIt2JJK6oKbXmd-&pp=iAQB][Isaiah Berlin's 1965 lectures on Romanticism]],
+published later as /The Roots of Romanticism/.
-[fn:92] A bit of my folk psychology: All twisted (sic), screwed-up
-people have this in common: They've attempted to wall off some strand
-or cut out a section of their emotion braid.
+[fn:95] ...my italics...
-[fn:93] ...due to ignorance of Novalis? Alas...
+[fn:96] A bit of my folk psychology: All twisted (sic), screwed-up
+people have one thing in common: They have attempted to wall off some
+strand or cut out a section of their emotion braid. They lack
+emotional vision.
-[fn:94] A scholar mentioned in the Wikipedia articles says,
-/[Wordsworth manages] to see into the life of things only 'by
-narrowing and skewing his field of vision' and by excluding 'certain
-conflictual sights and meanings'/. Obviously Wordsworth was a male
-apologist for the capitalist industrialist patriarchy, ignoring that so
-very many women and minorities were being oppresses exactly as he saw
-those sights and penned those lines...
+[fn:97] More about /pathetic fallacy/ soon.
-[fn:95] ...and certainly no inkling of what I spoke of above about the
-modern indoor-outdoor dichotomy being irrelevant.
+[fn:98] ...due to ignorance of Novalis? Alas...
-[fn:96] So ironic how /[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)][naturalism]]/ means nature sans any metaphysics,
-completely materialist mechanistic from the micro to the macro. Though
-the term has the feel of instinctive, genuine, candid, sincere, e.g.,
-the smile of a dear friend... Woe. Alas.
+[fn:99] ...and certainly no inkling of what I spoke of above about the
+modern indoor-outdoor dichotomy.
-[fn:97] A vacation destination, perhaps, as Wordsworth and Coleridge
-popularised the Lake District as the world's first lit/eco-tourism
+[fn:100] One fallout was, due to the Wordsworths and Coleridge, the
+Lake District becoming the world's first eco-literature tourism
destination.
-[fn:98] ...named in 1843.
+[fn:101] ...named in 1843.
-[fn:99] /[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_homini_lupus][Man is a wolf to man]]/.
+[fn:102] /[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_homini_lupus][Man is a wolf to man]]/.
-[fn:100] ...and they were routinely left out of academic analysis of
-Romanticism, e.g., Abrams' /The Mirror and the Lamp/, Beach's /The
-Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry/, and Berlin's
-/The Roots of Romanticism/ make no mention of them! Maybe they had
-read [[https://classicalu.com/wp-content/uploads/Bronte-upload-4.pdf][Virginia Woolf's comments on /Jane Eyre/]] and gave them up for a
-bad job. See [[https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/apr/19/virginia-woolf-in-bronte-country-jane-eyre][this analysis]] as well. Big cringe...
+[fn:103] Below I will deal with Virginia Woolf's criticism along those
+lines.
-[fn:101] ...as opposed to /sacred/ nostalgia, i.e., a heartfelt hearkening,
-yearning for the profound eternal and epic, which should not be
-dependent on context or seen as escapism to the past.
+[fn:104] Oddly enough, the Brontës have been left out of many key
+academic analyses of Romanticism. For example, Abrams' /The Mirror and
+the Lamp/, Beach's /The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century
+English Poetry/, and Berlin's /The Roots of Romanticism/ make no
+mention of them! Maybe they had read [[https://classicalu.com/wp-content/uploads/Bronte-upload-4.pdf][Virginia Woolf's comments on
+/Jane Eyre/]] and had given them up for a bad job. See [[https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/apr/19/virginia-woolf-in-bronte-country-jane-eyre][this analysis]] as
+well. Big cringe...
-[fn:102] Millais' /The Blind Girl (1854-56)/ \\
+[fn:105] ...as opposed to /sacred/ nostalgia, i.e., a hearkening,
+yearning for the profoundly eternal and epic such as mythos and
+legend. In general, nostalgia should not be seen as merely escapism to
+the past.
+
+[fn:106] Millais' /The Blind Girl (1854-56)/ \\
[[file:images/MillaisTheBlindGirl1854-56.jpg]] \\
\\
-[fn:103] The typical middle-class industrialist coming up during the
-Enlightenment was a pragmatic utilitarian who, after absorbing the
-message of Adam Smith's /The Wealth of Nations/ (1776), had jettisoned
-the baggage of noblesse oblige, the New Testament beatitudes, and any
-lingering other-century nostalgia and sentimentality to forge ahead as
-the consummate self-reliant individualist laser-focused on financial
-wealth. These men projected a stripped-down emotional psychological
-persona, indeed, a new desensitisation regime.
+[fn:107] Alethea, by Julia Margaret Cameron (1872) \\
+[[file:images/Alethea,_by_Julia_Margaret_Cameron.jpg]] \\
+\\
+
+[fn:108] *Nostalgia*, from Latin, literally means [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homesickness][/homesickness]]/ and was
+an acknowledged medical condition in the 1800s.
+
+[fn:109] Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, ca. 1860; the original super model
+for the Pre-Raphaelite painters. \\
+[[file:images/Siddal-photo.jpg]] \\
+\\
+
+[fn:110] Luke 12:48: /For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall
+be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they
+will ask the more./
-[fn:104] I say "westernised Eastern" because we in the West cannot
+[fn:111] I say "westernised Eastern" because we in the West cannot
possibly know what real Eastern is, not being genetically or
culturally truly Eastern. We only think we can rationalise the
irrational number Eastern.
-[fn:105] Again, let's forget her book /Wuthering Heights/, which for me
+[fn:112] Again, let's forget her book /Wuthering Heights/, which for me
is just gothic novel handle-cranking, however artistically potent. As
before, I suspect an inevitable inability for prose to do what poetry
does. Likewise, Poe lost much altitude when he would switch from
@@ -3759,27 +3969,27 @@ poetry to prose. That is to say, Brontë and Poe said deep and lasting
things in their verse, but simply added pulp to the gothic novel shelf
with their prose.
-[fn:106] \\
+[fn:113] \\
[[file:images/VWoolf.jpg]] \
\\
-[fn:107] *Pathetic* from Middle French /pathetique/ "provoking emotion,"
+[fn:114] *Pathetic* from Middle French /pathetique/ "provoking emotion,"
borrowed from Late Latin /pathēticus/ "affecting the emotions," borrowed
from Greek /pathētikós/ "capable of feeling, emotional, receptive,
passive, i.e., not pathetic as we today use it to mean sad and
contemptible.
-[fn:108] /Deus sive Natura/, the slogan of Baruch Spinoza's pantheism:
+[fn:115] /Deus sive Natura/, the slogan of Baruch Spinoza's pantheism:
the view that god and nature are interchangeable, or that there is no
distinction between the creator and the creation.
-[fn:109] Perhaps see [[https://youtu.be/6TK9c-caEcw?si=VfMnEZFDX9QXrIPX][Bertrand Russell on his meeting with Vladimir
+[fn:116] Perhaps see [[https://youtu.be/6TK9c-caEcw?si=VfMnEZFDX9QXrIPX][Bertrand Russell on his meeting with Vladimir
Lenin in 1920]].
-[fn:110] Sometimes the apologists throw in the towel to complete
+[fn:117] Sometimes the apologists throw in the towel to complete
absurdism. Consider [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture][Brutalism]] where ugliness is normalised.
-[fn:111] ...e.g., we would never have known Emily Brontë's poetry had
+[fn:118] ...e.g., we would never have known Emily Brontë's poetry had
not sister Charlotte pilfered her manuscripts from their hiding place
and published them without her sister's permission. Similarly, the
reclusive Emily Dickinson only half-heartedly ever sought
@@ -3788,44 +3998,31 @@ her death /over a thousand/ were discovered in her room and
subsequently published. In general, how many Barbaulds, Brontës,
Dickinsons, Poes didn't make the recognition cut?
-[fn:112] Academe typically fences the Romantic Era in between 1800
+[fn:119] Academe typically fences the Romantic Era in between 1800
and 1850.
-[fn:113] ...e.g., the Brontës were pastor's daughters in rural West
+[fn:120] ...e.g., the Brontës were pastor's daughters in rural West
Yorkshire with little exposure to (taint from?) the cultural and
literary buzz of the cities.
-[fn:114] One hot mess is the [[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0144q90/episodes/guide][BBC's series on Romanticism]]. (Catch it on
-YouTube under /The Romantics: [[https://youtu.be/oLwRXlSgiSQ?si=y4a1MQek8Ac0pkyJ][Liberty]], [[https://youtu.be/liVQ21KZfOI?si=GpsPOUfS_l6w6r8_][Nature]], [[https://youtu.be/R6mefXs5h9o?si=c-cJk0fKTneunPZH][Eternity]])/. And then
-Bertrand Russell in his severe, left-brained /The History of Western
-Philosophy/ mangles away at Romanticism in his consummate pedantic
-way. These are Exhibit A1/A2 of people who don't get it but must sound
-important erudite. More palatable perhaps is [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIffazJIrLo&list=PLhP9EhPApKE_9uxkmfSIt2JJK6oKbXmd-&pp=iAQB][Isaiah Berlin's 1965
-lectures on Romanticism]] which starts with his admission that it just
-might have all been in the air---and still is.
-
-[fn:115] The best ideas about left/right brain are those of Iain
+[fn:121] The best ideas about left/right brain are those of Iain
McGilchrist. Try [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK7XG3t2nFg&list=PLqBHk3itxyPDKFnwj8-SmlwHra64cCrky&pp=iAQB][these]].
-[fn:116] [[https://engines.egr.uh.edu/english-romanticism/what-romanticism][This]] will save you some googling. Note again the tortured
+[fn:122] [[https://engines.egr.uh.edu/english-romanticism/what-romanticism][This]] will save you some googling. Note again the tortured
origin of the term /romantic/.
-[fn:117] For what it's worth, German Romanticism can be broken down
+[fn:123] For what it's worth, German Romanticism can be broken down
into Jena, Heidelberg, then Berlin Romanticism based largely on the
principle artists.
-[fn:118] Daguerreotype of Poe 1849 \\
+[fn:124] Daguerreotype of Poe 1849 \\
[[file:images/Edgar_Allan_Poe,_circa_1849,_restored,_squared_off.jpg]]
-[fn:119] Child Wolfgang and sister Maria Anna \\
+[fn:125] Child Wolfgang and sister Maria Anna \\
[[file:images/Wolfgang_amadeus_mozart_1756_j_hi.jpg]] \\
\\
-[fn:120] Sophie von Kühn \\
-[[file:images/Sophie_von_Kühn.jpg]] \\
-\\
-
-[fn:121] Platonic as opposed to romantic-sexual love was seen in the
+[fn:126] Platonic as opposed to romantic-sexual love was seen in the
past as a higher, deeper, quasi-sacred form of love, i.e., the love
going on in heaven between the saints and angels brought down to
Earth. Today, however, we are made to understand by the modernist
@@ -3833,41 +4030,41 @@ Freudians that the human is only a crazed sex monkey, and any other
view is delusional puerile. Thus, desensitisation is the answer to
"sexual hangups."
-[fn:122] Not only is Emily Dickinson trashed, they trash other big
+[fn:127] Not only is Emily Dickinson trashed, they trash other big
names of the American Romantic Era. Try [[https://youtu.be/3tO8ol9j34s?si=DQifICJs3tJgpi9O][this]], then
[[https://youtu.be/LmneLDB6hAI?si=sSef_hvjshiTbV1b][this]]. Crrringe... And just when you thought it couldn't get worse,
[[https://youtu.be/pFp05alGLow?si=tTk-5CPhmpdkeQ3R][this music video]] by the actress portraying Emily Dickinson is
attached to the series as its supposed theme song. Alas...
-[fn:123] Emily Brontë as a modern, filled-out "cottagecore emo girl"
+[fn:128] Emily Brontë as a modern, filled-out "cottagecore emo girl"
per [[https://slate.com/culture/2023/02/emily-bronte-movie-true-story-wuthering-heights.html][this]] Slate review. No need to watch, just read [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_(2022_film)#Plot][the plot]] for full
cringe. \\
[[file:images/Emily2022.jpg]] \\
\\
-[fn:124] I contend libertarianism is simply a new form of liberalism,
+[fn:129] I contend libertarianism is simply a new form of liberalism,
i.e., liberalism has gotten so big that leftism no longer is big
enough to contain it all.
-[fn:125] Really though, calling it /Lake/ Superior is
+[fn:130] Really though, calling it /Lake/ Superior is
like calling Einstein a high school graduate.
-[fn:126] Wetsuits de rigueur. Even in summer a dunk in her longer than
+[fn:131] Wetsuits de rigueur. Even in summer a dunk in her longer than
ten minutes can lead to hypothermia ... at least on the North
Coast. Though the south beaches of Wisconsin and Michigan can be
swimmable in the height of summer.
-[fn:127] Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Paris, France \\
+[fn:132] Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Paris, France \\
[[file:images/Pere_Lachaise_Chemin_Errazu.jpg]] \\
\\
-[fn:128] And of course the joke, Want to make God laugh? Tell Him your
+[fn:133] And of course the joke, Want to make God laugh? Tell Him your
plans. Or the German, /Der Mensch denkt, der Gott lenkt/ or, The human
thinks, God steers.
-[fn:131]
+[fn:136] ...lots more below...
-[fn:130] If academe doesn't get my Haworth Emily, Hollywood is even
+[fn:135] If academe doesn't get my Haworth Emily, Hollywood is even
more of a clueless ignoramus.
-[fn:129] ...lots more below...
+[fn:134]
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diff --git a/index.html b/index.html
index 21f9cea..917274b 100644
--- a/index.html
+++ b/index.html
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
-
+
January, 2024
-
The Great Inland Sea: most conductive of the Dark Muse
(Note: I began writing this in the Winter of 2024 and it is now High Summer; hence, my external references might shift as we go…) @@ -97,7 +97,7 @@
Transfixed by an abandoned graveyard: octonimoes@DeviantArt
I provide here a quote from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre An
Autobiography. Main protagonist Jane describes the house, called
simply Moor House, and environs of her adoptive family, the Rivers, on
-the edge of the wild, presumably Yorkshire moors,3
+the edge of the wild, presumably Yorkshire moors,3
The word moor appears forty-three times in Jane Eyre. After
the second or third use, I was just putty in Charlotte’s hands…
@@ -184,7 +184,7 @@
-… the consecration of its loneliness indeed.4
+… the consecration of its loneliness indeed.4
Here is what I might call an English Zen. More about EZ later.
I often read
this passage just to muse upon the wistful, moody, delicately
@@ -211,9 +211,9 @@ Bronëan natural Dark
Bronëan natural Dark
Case in point: Consider the Great Smoky Mountains National Park high on the Appalachian Mountains border of Tennessee and North @@ -246,7 +246,7 @@
Continuing, I am at a loss to explain my dark penchant to those who
do not, cannot, will not get it. Dark as I mean it is strictly a
-take-it-or-leave-it proposition; one gets Dark6
+take-it-or-leave-it proposition; one gets Dark6
Allow me the poetic emphasis device of capitalising nouns.
or one does
not. Dark as I mean it was best presented by certain principle poets
-of the early nineteenth-century Romantic Era,7
+of the early nineteenth-century Romantic Era,7
Quick preliminary, much more later: The term Romanticism
followed a twisted path beginning with the Latin romant, or, “in the
Roman manner”, thus, not at all our current use of the word as a
@@ -291,7 +291,7 @@
I can only say my Dark Muse often comes on as a feeling behind
feeling, subtle, profound, yet fleeting, not hanging around for
-pedantics’ tedious descriptions.8
+pedantics’ tedious descriptions.8
One very important principal, the German poet Novalis (penname
for Baron Friedrich von Hardenberg), often used his unique fragment
style to describe his Dark Muse. And so he abandoned even lyrical
@@ -307,18 +307,18 @@ My Dark penchant
My Dark penchant
Of course I have an affinity with and feel a kinship to the modern
-goth subculture.9
+goth subculture.9
…goth described here as well as anywhere.
Again, campy, over-the-top gothic can be interesting, fun, but I’d
rather not lose sight of the source, however obscure and rare it may
-be.11
+be.11
Yes, MHGA: Make Halloween Great Again
And yet it is one of the elephants I must shift
a few inches from the centre of the room. In very short, I believe
-modern goths surely sense Dark,10
+modern goths surely sense Dark,10
BTW, the Germans capitalise nouns, i.e., built-in poetic
emphasis.
but for whatever reasons so
@@ -360,7 +360,7 @@ Adding an extra wagon to the goth train
@@ -398,7 +398,7 @@ Adding an extra wagon to the goth train
triste and Stygian can be so very subtle and sublime. I’m after
something I will not outgrow, rather, continue as my raison d’être
sustaining me to my grave. And so I say there must be no “aging out of
-the scene” as I fear often happens with modern goth.12
+the scene” as I fear often happens with modern goth.12
Why do people age out of goth? A crude answer may be they just
can’t kick the rebel chic can down the beach any longer … there, I
said it…
@@ -411,9 +411,9 @@ Adding an extra wagon to the goth train
Female Strigoi by HalloweenJack1960@DeviantArt
Another ox gored is my rejection of modern dumbed-down American street English, which has permeated modern society virtually @@ -425,7 +425,7 @@
For me life seems empty, insipid, weak, every moment rudderless,
misspent, crushingly mundane without a strong and constant current of
the Dark Muse. It is as if life cannot be properly understood without
the dark perspective. And then I wonder, is this nature or nurture?
That is to say, are we innately so, or is this something
-acculturated?15
+acculturated?15
…due perhaps to one of my Victorian Era-heavy schoolmarms?
I feel it is the former. One simply feels
the tug of Dark—regardless of any sort of prepping or grooming. But
let’s do another quick litmus test. I present here a short, simple
poem from my main darkness benefactress, the poetess who stands at the
centre of everything I mean to say about dark, namely, Emily Jane
-Brontë16
+Brontë16
Oddly enough, I’ve never read her Wuthering Heights and do
not intend to. (More about why later.) Basically, it would be like
watching Marian Anderson sing a bawdy sailor’s song. However, her
@@ -509,14 +509,14 @@ Dark like me?
responses, if not outright hostility. The openly hostile see my dark
druthers as morose, morbid, as wallowing in self-pity, seeking
attention, dwelling on the negative—and then the quick DSM–5
-look-up.17
+look-up.17
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
I beg to differ…
Here is something a bit lighter but the same basic idea from
-Christina Rossetti 18
+Christina Rossetti 18
See here for a bio. She is considered by many Britain’s
most prolific poet.
@@ -550,7 +550,7 @@ Dark like me?
-And another poem,19
+And another poem,19
Yes, poems, as the Dark Muse seems to find its best, most
concentrated expression through poetry. Much more on why mainly poetry
delivers the ineffable of darkness later.
@@ -584,14 +584,14 @@ Dark like me?
-Here I see Longfellow20
+Here I see Longfellow20
Go here for a quick biography. HWL was not typically Dark,
rather, a popular, “uplifting” poet with a big audience. That’s what
makes this selection so unique for me.
looking to the natural world and
poetising, to be sure, darkly. The idea of poetising, the
poetisation of nature and life was central to the Romantic
-Movement.21
+Movement.21
Below we will go over Romanticism poetising’s originator,
Novalis.
It parallels the long-standing belief that we humans
@@ -599,7 +599,7 @@ Dark like me?
agents, triggers of mental affliction and depression—despair, grief,
misery—are transformed into more equanimous states of sadness and
melancholy, hopefully bringing us to a higher emotional
-maturity.22
+maturity.22
Events in life, especially hardships, are supposed to
increase our emotional depth and maturity, not become excuses for
anti-social behaviour and emotional immaturity as we so often see
@@ -620,7 +620,7 @@ Dark like me?
emotional crises into a stasis remission melancholy. Today, we wage a
full-scale war against melancholia psycho-analyses and prescription
psycho-pharma drugs. And so too often we are failures at finding a
-modus vivendi23
+modus vivendi23
modus vivendi: An arrangement or agreement allowing
conflicting parties to coexist peacefully, either indefinitely or
until a final settlement is reached, or (literally) a way of living.
@@ -628,31 +628,58 @@ Dark like me?
as our ancestors once did.
-Surely the human suffers poorly. Again, all we may ever do is disperse
-the initially searing, inescapable pain to a dull, hopefully diluted
-ache in the ever-growing backdrop of time. Though again I would say
-this was better conducted in the past than today. How, why? Because
-they did not attempt to contain, disguise, systematise, or process
-greif; rather, greif was faced directly, pain was shared, empathy a
-way of communal life. And so emotional space was allotted, support was
-shared, organic, and natural. Strikingly different from today was
-their acceptance of doom24
+
+After great pain, a formal feeling comes —
+As Emily Elizabeth Dickinson24
+See here for a quick biography.
-Consider Queen Victoria25
+Consider Queen Victoria26
Queen Victoria in mourning black ca. 1862.
+
Suffering
+
+
+
+
+
+The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs —
+The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
+And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
+
+The Feet, mechanical, go round —
+A Wooden way
+Of Ground, or Air, or Ought —
+Regardless grown,
+A Quartz contentment, like a stone —
+
+This is the Hour of Lead —
+Remembered, if outlived,
+As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow —
+First — Chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —
+
+
+
+
+ of mid-1800s Amherst,
+Massachusetts, relates, the human must suffer in a severe if not grand
+way. Again, all we may ever do is disperse the initially searing,
+inescapable pain to a dull, hopefully diluted ache in the ever-growing
+backdrop of time. Though again I would say this was better conducted
+in the past than today. How, why? Because they did not attempt to
+contain, disguise, systematise, or process greif; rather, greif was
+faced directly, pain was shared, empathy a way of communal life. And
+so emotional space was allotted, support was shared, organic, and
+natural. Strikingly different from today was their acceptance of
+doom25
Doom as unforeseen consequences of previous actions, which in
turn, entropically snowball into indebtedness, tragedy, and ruin;
typically multi-generational, a punishment that never seems to fit the
original crime—if it was a crime at all. One German word for doom is
Untergang, which also means downfall.
- and fate, two concepts antithetical
-to our dynamic, positivist, self-determining,
-fix/paper-over-everything-quickly modern ways.
+ and fate, two concepts antithetical to our dynamic,
+positivist, self-determining, fix/paper-over-everything-quickly modern
+ways.
@@ -664,7 +691,7 @@ Suffering
chivvied mourners along with their grief and sadness. Contrast this
with today’s all-too-prevalent disassociation, the confused emotional
shutdown, the disorganised quasi-denial and suppression we moderns too
-often show towards death26
+often show towards death27
Is there anything worse than the so-called five stages of
grief or the Kübler-Ross model? Grief as an emotional malfunction
to be systematically reduced, fixed, corrected? Alas.
@@ -681,9 +708,9 @@ Suffering
But still, why Dark? Dark speaks to me. But again, how, why? Lack of a clear and simple answer forces me into a regrettably wordier one? @@ -699,7 +726,7 @@
The fresh-cut rose elicits a simple response, but the faded rose another—deeper, but for me never “depressing”. Here is something -from my novel Emily of Wolkeld 27 +from my novel Emily of Wolkeld 28 Lots more about my novel as we go.
@@ -727,14 +754,8 @@
-Let’s see another example of get-it-or-don’t, this time a poem from
-Emily Elizabeth Dickinson28
-See here for a quick biography.
Let that sink in for a while… The last line includes Death
-capitalised.30
+capitalised.30
Dickinson freely employed the capitalising of nouns for poetic
emphasis.
Again, I must emphasise these nineteenth-century
@@ -778,9 +799,9 @@
-
-
-
- of mid-1800s Amherst, Massachusetts,
-her There’s a certain slant of light29
+Let’s see another example of get-it-or-don’t, this time another poem
+from Emily Dickinson, her There’s a certain slant of light29
In the third line, Heft means weight, heaviness; importance,
influence; or (archaic) the greater part or bulk of something.
@@ -766,7 +787,7 @@ But why Dark?
But why Dark?
The main points being:
@@ -800,7 +821,7 @@
This, in turn, has brought us to see nature more as a place separate
and outside, cut off, away from our artificial, high-tech, controlled
-and regulated modern indoor spaces32
+and regulated modern indoor spaces32
Is it not ironic how nearly all lifeforms that attempt to
share our human environments uninvited are considered invasive,
noxious vermin, pests to which we have developed almost hysterical
@@ -861,7 +882,7 @@
Along with this growing separation came mentalities, narratives
-increasingly based indoors and extra-natural.36
+increasingly based indoors and extra-natural.36
How often is a Shakespeare character out communing with
nature? Never?…
Being indoors
meant we no longer were in direct contact with the nature spirits all
around; instead, praying to an extra-natural, off-world monotheistic
-God in architectural showcase churches.37
+God in architectural showcase churches.37
Churches were typically built in the centre of a town or city
on the highest ground. I once heard that to this day no building in
Vienna may be built taller than the tower of St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
Western architecture
seemed to reach a fantastical aesthetic crescendo in the Victorian
-nineteenth century38
+nineteenth century38
…with dark, dense, dramatic Neo-Gothic as a leading
style. Indeed, seemingly all nineteenth century styles were
“revivalist-nostalgic” (Greek, Gothic, Italianate, Elizabethan, Queen
@@ -957,19 +978,19 @@
Yes, she is outdoors “facing the elements,” as we say. She even refers
-to the wilds as “wastes” and as “drear.”43
+to the wilds as “wastes” and as “drear.”43
In those days wild, untouched places were often referred to as
wastelands.
And yet she is
@@ -1116,7 +1137,7 @@
Though for the meantime death remains an undeniable certainty. Death
comes as it always has—from old age, fatal accident, or deadly
-physical aggression or predation.46
+physical aggression or predation.46
For critters, predators are other bigger critters. For humans,
predators are—outside of war and homicidal aggression—all
but exclusively bacteria and viruses.
@@ -1177,7 +1198,7 @@
Allow me to relate a modern story about our new attitude towards
death. My father, who has since passed away, lost his third wife to
-lung cancer caused inevitably by decades of her smoking.49
+lung cancer caused inevitably by decades of her smoking.49
Ironically, both of his previous wives had likewise died from
smoking-related illnesses.
But
@@ -1237,7 +1258,7 @@
-A sickly Anne Brontë50
+A sickly Anne Brontë50
Anne Brontë’s grave in Scarborough Nature and Death in the nineteenth century
wool rather than factory-made retail clothing. The early-nineteenth
century Brontëan West Yorkshire would have seen the majority of the
villagers in homespun, all but a few garments not hand-tailored
-bespoke.33
+bespoke.33
However cotton was rapidly becoming a global commodity, both
cotton and wool fabrics eventually being produced in steam-powered
factories as the Industrial Age reached its inflexion point of growth.
@@ -872,7 +893,7 @@ Nature and Death in the nineteenth century
would have come from farther away. Today, however, this supply pyramid
is completely flipped, as nearly everything comes from far (far!) away
(e.g. China), while only a few personal items would be from a local or
-even regional source.34
+even regional source.34
In any modern (non-organic Amazon Whole Foods-style)
supermarket I’m sure less that 1% of the food items come from a truly
local source. Nearly everything is shipped in from often far afar.
@@ -897,7 +918,7 @@ Nature and Death in the nineteenth century
environments in ever-expanding urban centres became increasingly
physically removed, walled off from the wild natural world, becoming
evermore self-contained, all-encompassing, self-referencing, thus,
-recursively derivative.35
+recursively derivative.35
…e.g., what is a flower garden but a derivative, a mock-up
of an original place out in the wilds, albeit with the pretty bits
super-amplified idealised, the not-so-pleasant bits left, weeded out?
@@ -906,19 +927,19 @@ Nature and Death in the nineteenth century
Nature and Death in the nineteenth century
conditions better for us and us alone. We mainly see our dominion
over, abstraction away, separation from nature as fate, as
destiny. After all, our population doubling in less than fifty years
-to eight billion39
+to eight billion39
Human population grew 60% between 1800 and 1900, and 260%
between 1900 and 2000.
says something to our intention and ability to
dominate. And we seem to have adapted our collective human psyche, our
-narratives to this separation.40
+narratives to this separation.40
Modern human narratives come at us as thousands upon thousands
of fictional novels, films, plays, while aboriginal peoples had myth
and legends timeless and unchanging. That alone…
But is this sustainable? All
doomsday spinnings aside, many of us today have grown concerned over
the question of sustainability, concerned about our long arc of
-estrangement from nature.41
+estrangement from nature.41
Is our relatively gradual separation from nature not a perfect
example of the boiling frog metaphor?
Let me suggest a completely different
@@ -1016,7 +1037,7 @@ Nature and Death in the nineteenth century
deep within a massive concentration of extra-natural, human-exclusive
space and activity. Poverty in the pre-industrial rural landscape was
all but idyllic compared the grueling, grinding poverty of the
-industrial cityscapes.42
+industrial cityscapes.42
What became of Wordsworth’s To a Highland Girl shepherdess
when she and her family were forced into an industrial urban slum? We
can only hope she and her kin are in a better place now…
@@ -1081,7 +1102,7 @@ Nature and Death in the nineteenth century
Nature and Death in the nineteenth century
aid just a plane ride away? Haworth Emily lived in a time when
nothing was modern, i.e., her West Yorkshire moorlands were
semi-wilderness, and early eighteenth-century medicine didn’t even
-know about germs.44
+know about germs.44
What is generally acknowledged as a clear breakthrough was
John Snow’s tracing of the London cholera outbreak of 1854 back to
certain London neighborhood publich wells. This was strong proof of
@@ -1133,7 +1154,7 @@ Nature and Death in the nineteenth century
With nature as countless cycles of birth, growth, deterioration, and
death going on all around, the last two components, deterioration and
death, must be understood beyond our mechanistic reductionist modern
-take of just physical malfunction.45
+take of just physical malfunction.45
Couple this mechanistic “death as malfunction” with atheist
nihilism to arrive at today’s soulless mechanical universe realism
dumpster fire.
@@ -1155,7 +1176,7 @@ Nature and Death in the nineteenth century
Nature and Death in the nineteenth century
This is surely the old-fashioned take on death and its finalistic,
absolute inevitability so resounding as to constantly shake and echo
through life. Death as life’s backstop, container, timer, combinator,
-reaper.47
+reaper.47
Consider this quite tolerable goth version of the classic rock
song. Had this been written in Brontëan times, it would have been no
cheap, sentimental gimmick.
@@ -1199,7 +1220,7 @@ Nature and Death in the nineteenth century
overall the doominess of doom by redefining life as just so much
carbon-based machine circuitry, a mechanism that, in turn, is to be
better and better repaired, maintained, improved against entropic
-wear-and-tear.48
+wear-and-tear.48
Consider the now commonplace heart pacemaker, a device that
literally overrides the human heart with artificial electronic
pulses. Also, hip and knee replacements are now routine.
@@ -1209,7 +1230,7 @@ Nature and Death in the nineteenth century
Nature and Death in the nineteenth century
@@ -1260,13 +1281,13 @@ Nature and Death in the nineteenth century
my death. Indeed. My father did not trust his wife’s death.
Allow me to insert a passage from a letter Emily Dickinson wrote to
her friend Abiah Root in 1846 when she sixteen years of age. She describes a
-visit to Boston and the first true American cemetery, Mount Auburn.51
+visit to Boston and the first true American cemetery, Mount Auburn.51
Abiah Root (Strong), Amherst Emily’s childhood friend
@@ -1290,9 +1311,9 @@ Teenage Dickinson’s cemetery visit
The world must be romanticised. In this way we will find again its @@ -1309,19 +1330,19 @@
Death births German Romanticism: Novalis
-This is an oft-cited quote from52
+This is an oft-cited quote from52
…the third volume, Fragmente, of Novalis: Werke, Briefe,
Dokumente; Verlag Lambert Schneider; 1957.
the German nobleman George
Philipp Friedrich Freiherr (Baron) von Hardenberg (1772—1801), pen
name Novalis, who is considered to be the original muse of the
German Romantic Movement … paralleling similar ideals and sentiments
-in Britain,53
+in Britain,53
Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, first edition
appearing in 1798.
which quickly spread throughout the
English-speaking diaspora and the West in general. Specifically, his
-prose-poem cycle Hymns to the Night 54
+prose-poem cycle Hymns to the Night 54
Started ca. 1797, finally published in 1800. The German
Hymnen (plural of Hymne) means “praising songs”
(Lobgesang). Allow me the abbreviation HttN from here on. Try
@@ -1329,7 +1350,7 @@ Death births German Romanticism: Novalis
George MacDonald translation as found in a publication from 1897.
electrified people
around him, initially a gathering of German salon intellectuals in
-Jena, Thuringia, Germany.55
+Jena, Thuringia, Germany.55
…referred to as the Jena Set by Andrea Wulf in her
Magnificent Rebels, The First Romantics and the Invention of the
Self by Andrea Wulf; 2022; Vintage Books. More about this flawed
@@ -1338,47 +1359,48 @@ Death births German Romanticism: Novalis
Novalis, whom they adopted as a sort of naïf mascot, building on
HttN and Novalis’ poetising, another term he used for the
romanticising of life. Indeed, what came to be known as Jena
-Romanticism56
+Romanticism56
See the Wikipedia explanation of Romanticism or German
-Romanticism … but with a grain of salt. As I repeat throughout, the
-main purpose of WutheringUK is to wrest Romanticism and especially
-Dark away from the ivory tower humanities technocrats.
+Romanticism … but with a grain of salt. As I repeat throughout, one
+of the main objectives of WutheringUK is to wrest Romanticism and
+especially Dark away from the ivory tower humanities technocrats.
spread to eager circles and fertile grounds
throughout the West. They raised Novalis’ idealisations of
-Poesie 57
+Poesie 57
The German Poesie is typically translated as simply
poetry; however, poetry as a concept beyond just the literary art,
more towards the older poesy perhaps. And of course Novalis and the
Jena Set expanded even further…
as an all-embracing paradigm to counter the cold,
-dehumanising, thus desensitising implications of Enlightenment Age
+dehumanising, thus desensitising implications of Enlightenment Age
rationalism and determinism, as well as the stultifying formalisms of
-Classicism. Novalis sounded the charge to re-sensitise life. Lots
-more on this later…
+Classicism. Novalis sounded the charge to re-sensitise the human
+being. Lots more on this later…
Alas, but here is where I become quite the iconoclast, primarily by -insisting academe has Romanticism wrong! 58 -I will go into how Romanticism is a fata morgana in detail -soon. +insisting academe has Romanticism wrong! 58 +Again, I will go into how Romanticism is an ivory tower fata +morgana in detail soon. Even Novalis’ supporters, his Jena contemporaries, yes, even Novalis himself seemed to lose the thread and march about spouting dessicated -intellectualisations.59 +intellectualisations.59 If you must, read this about Novalis, which is as good as any. But as academe is wont to do, it hangs on every word uttered and written by a young man feeling his way along in his twenties. This -approach may work with Einstein, but not a twenty-something poet… +approach may work with Bohr and Einstein, but not a twenty-something +poet… I posit that Novalis with his foundational HttN took off like a sleepwalker towards the Dark -Muse. Thus, Romanticism, as subsequently cooked up by “experts” during -and after, became a bloated, overanalysed, theory-bound, +Muse. However, Romanticism, as subsequently cooked up by “experts” +during and after, became a bloated, overanalysed, theory-bound, cart-before-the-horse disaster. Or I will simply say German Romanticism began true but veered off into the ditch—all while Wordsworthian English Romanticism never really emphasised Dark to any great extent, except for Coleridge’s gothic borrowings from the -eighteenth century.60 +eighteenth century.60 Lots more on eighteenth-century English Gothic below.
@@ -1388,12 +1410,12 @@@@ -1426,14 +1448,18 @@
It my opinion HttN is one of the densest, purest, most direct
-attesting to the Dark Muse ever.61
+attesting to the Dark Muse ever.61
But HttN wasn’t entirely new after all. Soon will be
discussed similar offerings from the previous eighteenth century.
As the legend tells, his
inspiration came from being grief-stricken at the death of his
-fifteen-year-old fiancée Sophie von Kühn, to whose grave he made a
-pilgrimage for one hundred nights. The Jena Set writer Ludwig Tieck
-described the teenage Sophie
+fifteen-year-old fiancée Sophie von Kühn,62
+Sophie von Kühn
+
+
+ to whose grave he
+made a pilgrimage for one hundred nights. The Jena Set writer Ludwig
+Tieck described the teenage Sophie
@@ -1450,30 +1476,31 @@Death births German Romanticism: Novalis
-Indeed, Sophie was a shining paragon of the highest sensitisation -while on earth.62 +Indeed, Sophie was a shining paragon of what I might call apex human +sensitisation while on earth.63 We’ll dive into Edgar Allan Poe’s very similar idealisations in his possibly most popular poem Annabel Lee soon. - And it was her death that threw Novalis into -despair so deep that he fell into his trance, his visionary -state. HttN was most certainly not just the gymnastics of flipping -the sacred to profane and profane to sacred as Novalis himself -described romanticising poetising. He journeyed into Night and came -back with some of the most compelling Dark ever. But then yawned open -this great abyss between producers and describer-promoters…63 + And it was her death that threw +Novalis into despair so deep that he then fell into his trance-like, +visionary state. HttN was most certainly not just the gymnastics of +flipping the sacred to profane and profane to sacred as Novalis +himself described romanticising poetising. He journeyed into Night and +came back with some of the most compelling Dark ever. But then yawned +open this great abyss between producers and +describer-promoters…64 Yes, give Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels a shot. But you’ll quickly realise she is more like a gossip columnist going on about celebrities than someone who understands what they were actually -doing. For all intents and purposes, she might as well be describing -Andy Warhol’s Factory, a place where social buzz was more important -than the actual art. +about. For all intents and purposes, she might as well have been +describing Andy Warhol’s Factory, a place where society buzz was +more important than the actual art supposedly produced.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is generally accepted as the leading intellectualiser of British Romanticism during its inception roughly @@ -1498,14 +1525,15 @@
Indeed, such wordy intellectualisations are the usual fodder seized -upon by academics whipping up copy. Again, Coleridge and +upon by latter-day academes whipping up copy. Yes, Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads is considered the cornerstone of -English Romanticism.64 -Again, LB is bereft of Dark, although Nature is spot-on -romanticised. - Now, let us contrast this with what -English poet John Keats said years later in a 1817 letter to his -brothers George and Thomas +English Romanticism with its extensive poetising of Nature. And yet +these men do not seem to know the Dark Muse. +
+ ++Now, let us consider what English poet John Keats said years +later in a 1817 letter to his brothers George and Thomas
@@ -1523,24 +1551,26 @@John Keats’ sense of Beauty
-Hard and fast ideas, logically circumscribed, battling it out for -supremacy, while feelings and impressions and what-ifs lost in the -ruckus … intellectualisations, great and lengthy, especially of the -“Penetralium65 +Keats repudiates hard and fast ideas, neatly, logically circumscribed, +battling it out for supremacy. Intellectualisations, great and +lengthy, especially of the “Penetralium65 penetralium: (plural penetralia) the innermost (or most secret) part of a building; an inner sanctum; a sanctum sanctorum. - of mystery,” just verisimilar66 + of mystery,” are just +so much verisimilar66 verisimilar: having the appearance of truth. - -ramblings. Indeed, to not immediately intellectualise, but to hold -oneself in a counter-intuitive state of unresolved—just to see where -it might lead. Keats’ Negative Capability is about cognitive -dissonance as a great and necessary burden the poet must carry, a -process key to deeper understanding beyond neat and tidy piles of -logical-seeming words to impress other don’t-get-it people. Then with -his simple ode to Beauty the poet obviates, obliterates the sterility -of academic intellectualisms. Here is the famed beginning of his -“poetic romance” Endymion + ramblings to him. Indeed, to not +immediately intellectualise, but to hold oneself in that maddeningly +counter-intuitive state of unresolved—just to see where it might +lead—is Keats’ great insight. Feelings and impressions and what-ifs +must be gently, carefully raised up out of the mental ruckus. To be +sure, Negative Capability is about cognitive dissonance as a great +and necessary burden the poet must carry, a mental control technique +key towards deeper insights and understanding. And so the poet must +fly beyond the neat and tidy piles of logical-seeming words. Keats +went on to to obviate the sterility of academic intellectualisms with +his simple ode to Beauty. Here is the famed beginning of his “poetic +romance” Endymion
@@ -1574,20 +1604,29 @@John Keats’ sense of Beauty
Take that Coleridge, you brachial babbling braincase! Again, read, -sigh, imbibe—repeat. Let this sink in, dear reader. +sigh, reflect—repeat. Let this sink in, dear reader.
In the 2009 film Bright Star, a touching verisimilar bio-drama about Keats, there is a scene where, speaking to his love interest Fanny -Brawne, he says A poet is not at all poetical. In fact, he the most -unpoetical thing in existence. He has no identity. He is continually -filling some other body—the sun, the moon. He then says, Poetic -craft is a carcass, a sham. If poetry does not come as naturally as -leaves to a tree then it had better not come at all. And then Fanny -says, I still don’t know how to work out a poem. To which Keats -says67 -Here is the scene from the bio-pic Bright Star. +Brawne, he says +
+ +++ ++A poet is not at all poetical. In fact, he the most unpoetical thing +in existence. He has no identity. He is continually filling some other +body—the sun, the moon… Poetic craft is a carcass, a +sham. If poetry does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree then +it had better not come at all. +
++And then Fanny says, I still don’t know how to work out a poem. To +which Keats says67 +Here is the scene from Bright Star.
@@ -1602,27 +1641,27 @@John Keats’ sense of Beauty
-And thus, I would posit he, like I, did not see Romanticism as -something needs bundling and explaining and stuck with labels and -herded into categories. The point of hearing birdsong is not to think -about male birds warding off other males while trying to appeal to -females, but to luxuriate in the wonderful chorus of nature. Time and -time again I listen to or read a description of Romanticism and come -away feeling the scholar, the author understood nothing, rather, is -simply stringing disparate bits and bobs together towards some -verisimilitude of a penetralia they don’t really get or +And thus, I would posit he, like I two centuries later, did not see +Romanticism as something needs bundling and explaining and stuck with +labels and herded into categories. The point of hearing birdsong is +not to think about male birds warding off other males while trying to +appeal to females, but to luxuriate in the wonderful chorus of +nature. Time and time again I listen to or read a description of +Romanticism and come away feeling the scholar, the author understood +nothing, rather, is simply stringing disparate bits and bobs together +towards some verisimilitude of a penetralia they don’t really get or understand. And so I say the intellectual prison in which academe has stuck Romanticism should be opened up, the guards soundly switched and run off, the prisoners let back out into the wide fields and deep -woods. +woods. And so I’ll soon be thrashing the guards more thoroughly below…
-In his book The Genius of Instinct 68
+In his book The Genius of Instinct 68
The Genius of Instinct; Reclaim Mother Nature’s Tools for
Enhancing Your Health, Happiness, Family, and Work by Hendrie
Weisinger; 2009; Pearson Education, Inc.
@@ -1634,24 +1673,23 @@ Thriving versus surviving; top dog versus underdog
human buildings, preferring them over natural homes such as rock
outcrops, hollow trees, or caves. And in so doing, they enjoy
advantages such as better body temperature regulation, lower infant
-mortality, less threat of predation. This may be true, but wait,
+mortality, less threat of predation. This may be true, but wait,
haven’t these bats jumped outside of the original constraints where
they once were completely integrated with nature? These advantaged
-bats are now in a state of trans-bat-ism. But is that a good thing?
-In the meantime the bats profit. But for nature as a whole? In effect,
-the bats have short-circuited their doom, their fate. Again, what are
-the real long-term consequences?
+bats are now in a state of trans-bat-ism. But is this good for nature as a
+whole? In effect, the bats have short-circuited their doom, their
+fate. Again, what are the real long-term consequences?
Perhaps bats doing better is not too much of an imbalance vis-a-vis
-the rest of their competitors and surrounding environment.69
+the rest of their competitors and surrounding environment.69
Here in woodsy Minnesota we haven’t noticed a shortage of
mosquitoes, one of bats’ primary food sources.
And
yet what happens when a species keeps thriving more and more,
increasing its success statistics, stepping over, beyond any of the
-natural restrictions that real integration and harmony with nature
+natural restrictions that total integration and harmony with nature
would have required? Aren’t we humans Exhibit A of just such an
out-of-control species? And so I ask, how can all this so-called
thriving be good, end well? How can a dominant species like
@@ -1672,9 +1710,10 @@ Thriving versus surviving; top dog versus underdog
-To my mind, Emily Brontë was just this sort of hard-pressed little bat -out in the wilds—colony-less, huddled in a hollow tree, barely eking -out a marginal life. Here is her Plead for me +I bring all this up because, to my mind, Emily Brontë was just this +sort of hard-pressed little bat out in the wilds—colony-less, +huddled in a hollow tree, barely eking out a marginal life. Here is +her Plead for me
@@ -1706,25 +1745,25 @@Thriving versus surviving; top dog versus underdog
-I consider this her ode to skipping the trans-human thrive scene of -her day and striking out into some Beyond to commune with her God of -Visions. Again, I must believe she was a little bat fluttering across -the semi-wilderness moorland, as true an existential underdog, an -equal of all the other underdog wild critters, as was still possible -back then. +I consider this her ode to skipping the unnatural trans-human thrive +scene of her day and striking out into some Beyond to commune with her +God of Visions. Again, I must believe she was a little bat fluttering +across the semi-wilderness moorland, as true an existential +underdog, a quasi-equal of all the other underdog wild critters, as +was still possible back then.
-Compare this with today’s outdoor adventurer who clad in his technical -gear from REI, Patagonia, North Face, drives to government set-aside -wilds such as the Smokies mentioned above in a four-wheel-drive Jeep -Cherokee, consumes protein bars and electrolyte drinks, listens to -music with earbuds, takes smart phone pictures and GoPro videos. Any -mishaps? Call for immediate helicopter rescue on the iPhone satellite -connection… At some point we’re just amateur Earth astronauts, no? -When nature is truly in balance, all participants are underdogs to -some degree. But we modern humans have demanded and gained total -dominance over nature. +Compare this with today’s outdoor adventurer who, clad in his +technical gear from REI, Patagonia, North Face, drives to government +set-aside wilds such as the Smokies mentioned above in a +four-wheel-drive Jeep Cherokee, consumes protein bars and electrolyte +drinks, listens to appropriate New Age music with earbuds, takes smart +phone pictures and GoPro videos. Any mishaps? Call for immediate +helicopter rescue on the iPhone satellite connection… At some point +we’re just amateur Earth astronauts, no? When nature is truly in +balance, all participants are underdogs to some degree. But we modern +humans have demanded and gained al but total dominance over nature.
@@ -1732,8 +1771,8 @@
And yet one might insist her existence in the early nineteen century -was not really so very wild and rugged. Was she still not observing -nature from civilization’s relative place of safety, thereby rendering -her observations just as tainted, just as removed and relative as ours -today? I say no. Clearly our modern place of safety is so much greater -than hers, as we of the twenty-first century float above cruel Nature -on unprecedented levels of high-tech materialism.71 -We consume upwards of one hundred times the resources and -energy per capita as did one of our European ancestors from -1800 … and so the bigger the dance floor, the crazier the dancing. - I contend -hers was a unique vantage point, neither too exposed nor removed from -elemental nature. +was not really so very wild and rugged—compared to a remote +wilderness in Canada, the Rockies, or the Amazon Basin. Was she still +not observing nature from civilization’s relative place of safety, +thereby rendering her observations just as tainted, just as removed +and relative as ours today? I say no. Clearly our modern place of +safety is so much greater than hers, as we of the twenty-first century +float above cruel Nature on unprecedented levels of high technology +materialism. Consider how we consume upwards of one hundred times +the resources and energy per capita as did one of our European +ancestors from 1800.71 +…and the bigger the dance floor, the crazier the dancing. + I contend hers was a unique vantage point, +neither too exposed nor removed from elemental nature.
Still, I’m often confronted with modern scoffers who believe Romantic
Era poets only knew nature from picnics held at country estates where
dandies and their pampered ladies were attended by servants, as seen,
-for example, in Hollywood film versions of Jane Austen’s Emma72
+for example, in Hollywood film versions of Jane Austen’s Emma72
There is nothing really otherworldly Dark or Romanticist as I
know it about Jane Austen, sadly. She was seemingly devoid,
non-pursuant of Dostoyevski’s POEH. Although she once did say,
@@ -1774,58 +1814,58 @@
Again, for us moderns nature is a place, a location away from and
-diametrically opposite our modern interior spaces. Nature today is
-seen as this vast other place, the Great Outdoors. Therefore, the
-farther afield from modern civilization we can go, the truer and more
-authentic nature supposedly becomes. And so we create a nature
-continuum whereby a trackless wilderness as far from civilization as
-possible is the truest nature, while hardly nature at all would be a
-weedy ditch behind a triple-paned windowed, vinyl-siding-clad,
-forced-air-HVAC suburban house. Nature can only be very wild, thus,
-very far away from the safety of our space-colony civilization. But
-let me again be blunt: We do not get more nature simply because we
-have gone like explorer astronauts way farther out from our sterile,
-artificial exclusively human home base. Nature is not something close
-or remote.
+diametrically opposite our modern space-station-like interior
+spaces. Nature picks up somewhere outdoors, where it eventually
+becomes the Great Outdoors. Basically, the farther afield from
+modern civilization we can go, the truer and more authentic nature
+supposedly becomes. And so we create a nature continuum whereby a
+trackless wilderness as far from civilization as possible is the
+truest nature, while hardly nature at all would be a weedy ditch
+behind a triple-paned windowed, vinyl-siding-clad, forced-air-HVAC
+suburban house. Nature can only be very wild, thus, very far away from
+the safety of our space-colony civilization. But let me again be
+blunt: We do not get more nature simply because we have gone like
+explorer astronauts way farther out from our sterile, artificial
+exclusively human home base. Nature is not something close or
+remote.
It is precisely because we have spoiled so much of our proximate
places that we elevate far-afield wilderness to a practically
quasi-off-planet status. Writers like Ernest Hemingway and Jack London
-exploit fright memes of Nature as a distant, exotic, hostile place
-… again, virtually identical to science fiction stories of strange,
-hostile, dangerous, alien planets conquered by brave, intrepid
-astronauts. To be sure, many sci-fi depictions of alien worlds are
-interchangeable with the Klondike Yukon that London described.
+exploit fright memes in describing distant, exotic, hostile places
+like the Yukon and Africa … again, virtually identical to science
+fiction stories of strange, hostile, dangerous, alien planets
+conquered by brave, intrepid astronauts.
-No, my poets of the so-called Romantic Era were not pampered dandies
-with their fine ladies strolling for a few bored minutes on manicured
-estate grounds. Nor were they “white privilege” beneficiaries of the
-“Age of Exploration” colonialism. My poets were mainly short-lived
-little bats in their crevasses and corners, as pressed as any bats
-have ever been.
+And so I insist my poets of the so-called Romantic Era were not
+pampered dandies with their fine ladies strolling for a few bored
+minutes on manicured estate grounds. Nor were they “white privilege”
+beneficiaries of the “Age of Exploration” colonialism. My poets were
+mainly short-lived little bats in their crevasses and corners, as
+hard-pressed as any bats have ever been.
Thriving versus surviving; top dog versus underdog
As alluded above, the world was seeing Dark decades before Novalis and -German Romanticism, specifically eighteenth-century Britain and its -gothic movement, first, the doom-and-gloom Graveyard School of -poetry. After Graveyard, just past mid-century came the gothic novel -with arguably a more formulaic doom-and-gloom. But then came what -might be called the Night School, which became the basis of my dark -corner of Romanticism. +German Romanticism, specifically eighteenth-century Britain and what +might be called its gothic movement staring off with the +doom-and-gloom Graveyard School of poetry. After Graveyard, just +past mid-century, came the gothic novel with an obviously formulaic +doom-and-gloom. But then came what might be called the Night School, +which became the basis of my dark corner of Romanticism.
It was only a few decades into the eighteenth century when there emerged in Britain a style of poetry which has since been named the @@ -1834,7 +1874,7 @@
+Though Graveyard had a more contemplative, measured side. For example, +Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751). To be +sure, eulogising the dead is a much older and well established genre, +typically emphasising the qualities of the deceased over the dark, +eternal abyss his grave might represent. If we are not meant to +survive Young’s pounding, Gray’s elegy of a lost friend is Dark and +fatalist and yet reverent and faithful
@@ -1921,43 +1964,45 @@The Graveyard School
-Here, whatever negatives—morose out to sinister doom—may be -swirling about, God in his heavenly domain has our backs. Gray doesn’t -try to beat us down as much as did the hardcore Graveyard -Schoolers. And yet with Graveyard, Britain had arrived at a public -exhibition of Dark. +With Gray whatever woefulness, doom may be swirling about, God in his +heavenly domain still has our backs. Gray doesn’t try to beat us down +as much as did the hardcore Graveyard Schoolers.
-Where did all this come from? Was Dark simply in the air? As I will -always insist about the Dark Muse in general, Graveyard arrived -unexpected, a natural, organic upwelling—however inelegant its -expression. Which begs the question, What rises to cultural and -intellectual prominence in an age?75 +Whence this proto-Dark? Was it simply in the air? As I insist about +the Dark Muse in general, Graveyard arrived unexpectedly, a natural, +organic upwelling—however heavy and oppressive its expression. Which +begs the question, What rises to cultural and intellectual prominence +in an age?75 …that is, in a past age not exposed to the science of modern public relations. See this about Edward Bernays and the birth of modern advertising and public relations. TL;DR: Since Bernays, no “movement” in our modern times can be considered natural and organic, rather, the result of somebody’s financed public relations campaign. - To be sure, many of that era -condemned gothic and Graveyard as subculture. But eventually came a -refinement, which I might call the Night School. Though intervening -was the gothic novel, which we will now investigate. + To be sure, many of that era condemned gothic and +Graveyard as unworthy subculture. But eventually came a refinement, +which I might call the Night School. Though intervening was the +gothic novel, which we will now investigate.76 +…but the Germans were not idle during this time, either. I +should also mention Gottfried August Bürger’s very popular and often +translated into English epic poem Lenore from 1774. +
Prose versus poetry. In the past poetry was seen by members of polite
society as the higher, the acceptable form of literature. For example,
Germany has long been referred to as the land of poets and
-thinkers.76
+thinkers.77
Das Land der Dichter und Denker. Intentionally absent was
novelists. Although now novelists count as part of die Belletristik,
i.e., schöngeistige Literatur or aesthetic literature.
- Prose in the form of the novel,77
+ Prose in the form of the novel,78
Two terms, novel (English) and roman (French, German,
etc. from the adjectival Roman, Roman-like) came to describe any
long-form prose story-telling.
@@ -1978,7 +2023,7 @@
Modern academe considers the novel The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic
Story, appearing in its first edition in 1764, to be the official
-start of British gothic literature.79
+start of British gothic literature.80
One giveaway is gothic in the title. Perhaps read this
overview of Gothic fiction.
Written by the excentric,
@@ -1995,18 +2040,18 @@
-The popularity of the gothic novel continued throughout the nineteenth
-and into the twentieth century primarily in the romance genre—after
-the term romance had been twisted in meaning to mean love. Among
-others, Frances Parkinson Keyes (1885 – 1970) was a popular romance
-author who often wrote from a gothic perspective. Dragonwyck (1946)
-is a prime example of Hollywood83
-Once asked why his horror films were so popular, Alfred
-Hitchcock said the man on the street likes to occasionally dip his toe
-in the lake of horror.
- does gothic romance.
-The arrival of the gothic novel
writing, as a regrettable parallel to poetry, consumed mainly by
easily excited arriviste vulgarian middle-class women. But then as the
middle class grew in power and numbers, the novel came to the fore,
-especially in the eighteenth century.78
+especially in the eighteenth century.79
Ironically, the Novella, a long short-story format with no
chapter breaks, was better tolerated in Germany.
@@ -1987,7 +2032,7 @@ The arrival of the gothic novel
The arrival of the gothic novel
is a melodrama set in sixteenth-century Naples offering slumming
readers a big dose of darkness, doom, and woe. Walpole’s penchant for
medievalism rode the long-simmering nostalgic idealisation of the
-Medieval Age80
+Medieval Age81
Walpole initially claimed Otranto to be a medieval
manuscript he had discovered and translated, when all along it had
been his own creation.
, while the adjective gothic referred to medieval
-Gothic architecture.81
+Gothic architecture.82
…although this is ironic since the actual label Gothic had
been used pejoratively in the Renaissance alluding to the destructive
barbarian Goths, i.e., Gothic architecture was crude and barbaric.
Gothic “horror” was an instant hit, and
other writers and influencers quickly joined in creating a full-on
-gothic literature movement.82
+gothic literature movement.83
A model woebegone gothic novel heroine (from El Mundo
ilustrado; 1879).
@@ -2014,19 +2059,6 @@ The arrival of the gothic novel
Wolf's Crag from Walter Scott's gothic The Bride of Lammermore
@@ -2035,13 +2067,13 @@ The arrival of the gothic novel
Bride of Lammermore (1819). Consider the sheer visual density and
heaviness of the scene (click on the image to be taken to a larger
version). Whence, wherefore this heaviness, this portent?
-Predominant is nature dark, inhospitable, threatening. The human-built
-castle is primitive, isolated, and vulnerable, the riders miniscule,
-exposed … as though every single living cell—plant, animal,
-human—is clinging to life by a thread, and any dim green and blue
-hues of vegetation and sea are wholly irrelevant. The scene evokes
-danger, dysphoria, as if surely something horrific just waiting to
-transpire. But again how, why? Why such darkness and what was (and
+Predominant is a natural dark—inhospitable, threatening. The
+human-built castle is primitive, isolated, and vulnerable, the riders
+miniscule, exposed … as though every single living cell—plant,
+animal, human—is clinging to life by a thread, and any dim green and
+blue hues of vegetation and sea are wholly irrelevant. The scene
+evokes danger, dysphoria, as if surely something horrific just waiting
+to transpire. But again how, why? Why such darkness and what was (and
still is) the appeal? Hitchcock tautologies aside, modern academe has
offered theories about the socio-political-psychological landscape of
the times, and yet these “experts” only sound supercilious and
@@ -2052,30 +2084,75 @@ The arrival of the gothic novel
ungraspable spherical symmetry. To be sure, this “coming out” of
gothic in the eighteenth century was overwrought, indulgent with its
fright memes, but undeniably popular and onto something real about the
-inner human experience—at least in the Western world of the day.
+inner human experience—at least to the Western world of those times.
+
+The popularity of the gothic novel continued throughout the nineteenth +and into the twentieth century primarily in the romance genre—after +the term romance had been twisted in meaning to mean love.84 +See this sorting out. + Among +others, Frances Parkinson Keyes (1885 – 1970) was a popular romance +author who often wrote from a gothic perspective. Dragonwyck (1946) +is a prime example of Hollywood85 +Once asked why his horror films were so popular, Alfred +Hitchcock said the man on the street likes to occasionally dip his toe +in the lake of horror. + does gothic romance.
+Novelist Ann Radcliffe (1764 - 1823) could be said to be the first to +gain respectability for gothic fiction. Upper-middle-class and +spanning the proto-Romantic late-eighteenth century and the Romantic +Era, she forged a broad readership in the risen middle class for her +moral and otherwise high-brow treatment of gothic +gloom-and-doom. Again, a certain shade of Dark was evolving and +Radcliffe was a part of it. +
+ ++The three most popular novels written by the Brontë sisters---Jane +Eyre by Charlotte, Wuthering Heights by Emily, and The Tenant of +Wildfell Hall by Anne—would be considered gothic, and therefore, at +least according to my logic, flawed vis-à-vis Dark. Though by the time +of their publication and subsequent fame, gothic prose had completely +shaken off its lightweight and déclassé image. Hence, class and taste +was no longer the problem, rather, expression. As I’m saying, prose +attempting Dark cannot help but land hard and miss the subtleties and +power of poetry.86 +My former wife, a Jane Austen fan, read Wuthering Heights +and advised me to skip it. I always trusted her literary advice and, +thus, have never read it. + +
+As personal and original as I want Novalis’ Hymns to the Night to -have been, I insist Englishwoman Anna Lætitia Barbauld’s A Summer -Evening’s Meditation was the same inner outing, already having -appeared in 1773, praising the night in a similarly cherished, solemn -way. +have been, I must present Englishwoman Anna Lætitia Barbauld’s A +Summer Evening’s Meditation as the same sort of solemn praising of +the Night, but already having appeared in 1773.
Without more investigation I have no real idea if Barbauld’s ASEM, -weighing in at 124 lines, started what I’m calling the Night School, -but as a working theory, yes, she offered a new perspective on Dark -with an accessibility and maturity not really seen in Graveyard and -certainly not gothic horror. As a sort of prompt she nods to Young’s +weighing in at one hundred and twenty-four lines, started what I’m +calling the Night School, but as a working theory, yes, she offered +eighteenth-century Britain a new perspective on Dark with an +accessibility and maturity not really seen in Graveyard and certainly +not gothic horror. As a sort of prompt she nods to Young’s Night-thoughts with the quote, One sun by day, by night ten thousand shine, then launches directly into her summer night and its -canopy of stars… +canopy of stars
@@ -2104,8 +2181,9 @@The night, the stars, the moon…
No woe, no doom-and-gloom; instead, a relentless parade of visceral and natural Dark hyperconductivity. Barbauld hauls us outdoors to -partake, imbibe, behold. We are not swimming in doom, rather, we are -touched, moved to reflect in reverence— +partake, imbibe, behold the Night like never before. We are not +swimming in doom, rather, we are touched, moved to reflect in +reverence…
@@ -2155,18 +2233,18 @@The night, the stars, the moon…
Muse must read Barbauld’s masterpiece. Hers is an exposition of natural darkness, placing it far above the reproach of gothic horror detractors. Though ASEM was as far as I can tell a singleton, a -unicorn whose influence seemed to lay dormant for decades.84 +unicorn whose influence seemed to lay dormant for decades.87 …although Wordsworth would later mention Barbauld and ASEM as inspirational. One Barbauld biographer mentioned a trend of that time of ladies studying -astronomy. But obviously Barbauld is waxing Dark, not embellishing +astronomy. But obviously Barbauld is waxing Dark, not just idealising celestial bodies. Perusing her other poems, yes, she often dwells on nature, sometimes in a dusky way, but addressing Dark as she did with ASEM doesn’t come forth again, nor from others during her times. Today she is known as an influential social commentator, -moralist, and educator, not as proto-Romanticism. And so I must jump -ahead some fifty years and bring in Brontëan poetry as a +moralist, and educator, but not as proto-Romanticism. And so I must +jump ahead some fifty years and bring in Brontëan poetry as a continuation of this Night School thread. Haworth Emily’s Stars is just one her many examples of Night School from someone who probably had never read nor heard of Barbauld’s ASEM. Exactly like Barbauld, @@ -2188,8 +2266,8 @@The night, the stars, the moon…
-The night sky’s depth and expanse over the trammels of life during -sunlight, indeed. And so the last two stanzas +The untrammelled night sky’s depth and expanse over the trammels of +life during sunlight, indeed. And so the last two stanzas
@@ -2235,13 +2313,13 @@The night, the stars, the moon…
Simpler, more measured was Anne’s poetry than her sister’s. And she includes the grave by eulogising either of her older sisters Maria or -Elizabeth, or her mother, but again, sans drama. +Elizabeth, or her mother, but again, sans drama. This calmer, more +introspective Dark matured in the nineteenth century.
-This calmer, more introspective Dark dominated the eighteenth -century. And let us not forget the many poems devoted to the -moon. Here is Anne Brontë’s Fluctuations +But let us not forget the many poems devoted to the moon. Here is Anne +Brontë’s Fluctuations
@@ -2295,13 +2373,13 @@The night, the stars, the moon…
Here we may imagine the youngest Brontë bowed if not weighed down by -her earthly afflictions, cares, deprivations, but then in this lean, -hungry, susceptible state caught in an emotional whirling, carried, -borne up by the natural nighttime procession of sun to moon and -stars. She speaks of her tearful gaze, her fainting heart, her +her earthly afflictions, cares, deprivations; but then in this lean, +hungry, susceptible state she is caught in an emotional whirling, +carried, borne up by the natural nighttime procession of sun to moon +and stars. She speaks of her tearful gaze, her fainting heart, her spirits, her emotional exposure. She is a vulnerable ward of nature, but tenaciously pursuant of its subtleties. Indeed, back then it was -always subtleties, delicate qualities found in nature by the +always subtleties, delicate qualities found in Nature by the vulnerable if not pathetic human, an exacting counting of seemingly modest blessings which then gained sublime ascendency.
@@ -2316,8 +2394,8 @@The night, the stars, the moon…
-William Wordsworth was nearly always about Nature, as well as -all his foundational Romanticist ideals. In his A Night Thought +William Wordsworth was nearly always about Nature, as were his +foundational Romanticist ideals. In his A Night Thought (published 1837) he clearly intersects with Night School
@@ -2418,66 +2496,72 @@The night, the stars, the moon…
With Night School first there is Nature dark, then human reflection -upon that natural Dark; indeed, just the deepest possible descriptions -of the world in darkness bringing forth some of humanity’s finest -insights. +upon that natural Dark; indeed, just the deepest possible recitations +of the world in darkness bring forth the finest, keenest insights.
If a group of people enter a restaurant together the maître d’ will -assume they are together and require a table together. This is a good -analogy to what has happened to my Dark principals. I have a lot to -say about what has come to be known as Romanticism since it is the -catch-all created during and solidified after the main time frame of -my Dark principals to make them some coterie they certainly were not. +probably assume they are together and want a single table. This is a +good analogy to what has happened to my Dark principals over the years +since. I have a lot to say about what has come to be known as +Romanticism,88 +The Jena Set’s Friedrich Schlegel first used romantic in +contrast to classic to describe what they were doing in Jena, but it +wasn’t until the 1820s when the term Romanticism became widely known +and used—evermore poorly… + as it is the catch-all created for to try and make by +Dark principals some exclusive coterie they certainly were not.
By now the reader knows I want my principals to have come by their
sublime poetry “as naturally as leaves came to a tree,” as the film
Bright Star’s Keats said. To be sure, I insist my visionaries were
-just that, timeless trance visionary, who might have time, geography,
-and ethnicity in common, but cannot be made out a product thereof. I
-cannot have them reduced to puppets dangling on strings connected,
-owing to proto-this or precursor-that on the factory assembly line of
-time.85
+just that, timeless and visionary, who, yes, might have time,
+geography, and ethnicity in common, but cannot be made out to have
+been a product thereof. I cannot have them reduced to puppets dangling
+on strings connected, owing to proto-this or precursor-that on the
+factory assembly line of time.89
A quote from M.H. Abrams’ laborious The Mirror and the Lamp
would insist
Even an aesthetic philosophy so abstract and seemingly academic as
that of Kant can be shown to have modified the work of poets.
Really? I doubt the Brontë sisters read much Kant. But then Abrams
never mentions the Brontës…
- Yes, of course they were of their times, and yet
-outliers, outsiders, unicorns, not for lumping together or lining up
-on a labelled shelf. And as said above, their actual lives give little
-insight into their gifts. Still, we have this most unnatural box,
-this clammy container created by both contemporaries during the day,
-then subsequent generations of academe to hold, control, own, to
-jail my greats, this Romanticism. But labelling is convenient, at
-times even necessary. And yet I must continue to argue what a disaster
-has become of herding the ghosts of my heroes onto some latter-day
-scholar’s stage, a Fata Morgana that really never existed as all the
-pendants want it to have. Again, gripping butterflies squashes
-them.86
-The Jena Set’s Friedrich Schlegel first used romantic in
-contrast to classic to describe what they were doing in Jena, but it
-wasn’t until the 1820s until the term Romanticism became widely known
-and used—evermore poorly…
- Right. We shall use the term carefully…
+ Yes, of course they were of
+their times, and yet outliers, outsiders, unicorns, not for lumping
+together or lining up on a labelled shelf. And as I also insist, their
+actual lives give little solid insight into their gifts. Still, we
+have this most unnatural box, this clammy container created by both
+contemporaries during the day, then subsequent generations of academe
+to hold, control, own, to jail my greats, this thing called
+Romanticism. Again, gripping butterflies squashes them.
+
+One hot mess is the BBC’s series on Romanticism90 +Peruse on YouTube under The Romantics: Liberty, Nature, +Eternity. + hosted by +English historian Peter Ackroyd. And then severe, left-brained +Bertrand Russell in his The History of Western Philosophy mangles +away at Romanticism in a consummate pedantic way. These are Exhibit A1 +and A2 of people who don’t get it but will sound important +erudite.
-Academe typically begins any a priori deductive or empirical inductive -proof session of Abstract Topological Romanticism with this set of -axiomatic equations.87 +So many proof sessions of Abstract Topological Romanticism begin with +this set of axiomatic equations.91 Notably absent is Romanticism = Dark…
@@ -2490,51 +2574,46 @@-Academe wants Romanticism a spirited anti-rationalist (unrational, -disrational, irrational?), predominantly vernal youthful revolt -against the soulless straitjacket, the failed humanism of -Enlightenment logic, as well as against stodgy, urban-centric -classicism—basically anything coming before. Like hallucinating AI -chatbots, scholars spin, and tangle bundles of cords and wires, -connecting up Descartes, Rousseau, the American and French -Revolutions, Defoe, Spinoza, Shakespeare,88 +Academe wants Romanticism to have been a spirited anti-rationalist +(unrational, disrational, irrational?), predominantly vernal youthful +revolt against the soulless straitjacket, the supposedly failed +humanism of Enlightenment logic, as well as against stodgy, +urban-centric classicism—basically anything coming before. Like +hallucinating AI chatbots, scholars spin and tangle bundles of cords +and wires, connecting up Descartes, Rousseau, the American and French +Revolutions, Defoe, Spinoza, Bacon, Hobbs, Shakespeare,92 From the outset, the Schlegels in Jena made Shakespeare a principal proto-Romanticist, Ludwig Tieck and others of the Jena Set feverishly translating his plays into German. For me this was a clear sign they were on the wrong road. I will eventually have my fictional character from my novel Emily of Wolkeld tell you why. - … Buddha, Jesus, -Merlin, the pope, et cetera, et cetera, to form a massive grid of + +… Buddha, Jesus, Merlin, the pope, etc., to form massive grids of vertices and edges spreading out over the near and distant past, the -denser, the more far-fetched the better. But of course all of this -microscopic literary DNA matching is happening long after the fact in -a modern realism setting, separate, aloof—clueless. What was an -intuitive, gut-level, all but spontaneous reaction to the -deterministic dogma rising from, say, Newton and before, Francis -Bacon, has become a tossed salad of imagined influences and -intentionalities. +denser, the more far-fetched the better. And yet this microscopic +literary DNA matching is mostly happening long after the fact in a +modern realism setting, separate, aloof—clueless. My visionaries +spinning gold out of trances becomes formulaic lab procedures +conducted by contrarian irrationalists, anachronistically-tagged +proto-hippie, back-to-nature, right-brain iconoclast types doing +anti-Establishment.93 +So convenient that Jena Romanticism came about in a for its +time conspicuously free-wheeling university town, many of the Jena Set +also lecturers and professors at the University of Jena. Perhaps a +modern version would have been Black Mountain College. +
-And then always their usual suspects -roundup—anachronistically-tagged proto-hippie, back-to-nature, -right-brain iconoclast types doing anti-Establishment.89 -So convenient that Jena Romanticism came about in a for its -time conspicuously free-wheeling university town, many of the Jena Set -lecturers and professors at the University of Jena. Perhaps a modern -version would have been Black Mountain College. - And so -Novalis’ poetising, where the mundane is flipped mysterious sacred -and the sacred flipped ordinary profane, becomes a formulaic lab -procedure conducted by contrarian irrationalists, rather than -visionaries spinning gold out of trances. The upshot is, an artistic -paper airplane floating around on feelings and emotions was folded and -set sailing. Isaiah Berlin described Romanticism as +The famous Oxford scholar Isaiah Berlin94 +Sample perhaps Isaiah Berlin’s 1965 lectures on Romanticism, +published later as The Roots of Romanticism. + described Romanticism as
-Especially the last point makes my heroes sound like children who want -everything in the candy shop.91 -What would the esteemed Oxford professor say after following -an aboriginal witchdoctor around for a few days? Something very -similar, I dare say. - More discerning, an -intentionality is implied which my principals most certainly did not -bring—leading us once more to the disjunction between latter-day -professional analysts and the original grave-mute creators. But then -the question Berlin raised at the beginning of his The Roots of -Romanticism, namely, whether this was really a movement at all—or -just a collective condition, a state of mind that is always “in the -air,” to emerge and then fade like virtual quantum particles blinking -in and out of existence. +Especially the last point makes my heroes sound like children who +wanted everything in the candy shop. Again, an intentionality is +implied that my principals most certainly did not bring—leading us +once more to the disjunction between latter-day professional analysts +and the original grave-mute creators. But then the question Berlin +raised at the beginning of his first lecture, namely, whether this was +really a movement at all—or just a collective condition, a state of +mind that is always “in the air,” to emerge and then fade like virtual +quantum particles blinking in and out of existence.
-But again my question: Where is Dark in any academe Romanticism? And -no, I don’t mean campy pop gothic. The feelings and emotions Haworth -Emily describe in Fall leaves fall +But again my question: Where is Dark in any academe’s Romanticism? +And no, I don’t mean campy pop gothic. The feelings and emotions +Haworth Emily describe in Fall leaves fall
@@ -2583,66 +2657,70 @@Feelings, emotions, innocence, nature … anything else
do not appear in any known academic treatment of Romanticism, forcing me through this manifesto to start over from scratch. Again, Emily is -not just flipping! When I read these lines, yes, they are words -processed by my brain’s logical language model, but then they go to -feelings. This is a quasi-mirror neuron “yes, I feel this way too” +not just flipping! When I read her Fall leaves fall, yes, they are +words processed by my brain’s logical language model, but then they go +to feelings. This is a quasi-mirror neuron “yes, I feel this way too” moment that gives me pause and transports me once again to the gates of the Dark Muse. Fall leaves fall is terminal—I imbibe, feel, and -go forth, i.e., I behold all this sublime ideation of darkness and -allow it to carry me—and that’s it! Haworth Emily infects me with +go forth. I behold all this sublime ideation of darkness and allow +it to carry me—and that’s it! Haworth Emily infects me with contagion, and I too smile and sing along with her.
-We all follow logically-set plans in our lives, locigally-derived -“goals.” But we are always emotional, constantly assessing how we -feel about this or that, things in general. This is what I might -call the logic train and the emotion braid. Then when I read Fall -leaves fall my braid of emotions stretching back to my birth (or even -further) swells and lifts me beyond my mundane, deterministic logic -train. And it is exactly this mirroring and swelling that academe -doesn’t get, never catches onto. Wreathes of snow and night’s decay -overshadow my clear, well-lit logic track.92 +Surely we all follow logically-set plans in our lives, +logically-derived “goals.” But we are simultaneously emotional, +constantly assessing how we feel about this or that, things in +general. This is what I might call the logic train and the emotion +braid. Then when I read Fall leaves fall my braid of emotions +stretching back to my birth (or even further) swells and lifts me +beyond my mundane, deterministic logic train. And it is exactly this +mirroring and swelling that academe doesn’t get, never catches +onto. Visions of snowy wreathes and night’s decay break away from my +clear, well-lit logic track. But then a new sight emerges, informed +by my emotional faculties.96 A bit of my folk psychology: All twisted (sic), screwed-up -people have this in common: They’ve attempted to wall off some strand -or cut out a section of their emotion braid. - But a new sight -emerges, informed by my emotional faculties. And so when dealing with -academe’s cutting around on Romanticism I must, as Amherst Emily said, -beware of the surgeon with his knife, lest he find the culprit life. +people have one thing in common: They have attempted to wall off some +strand or cut out a section of their emotion braid. They lack +emotional vision. + And so when dealing with academe’s +cutting around on Romanticism I must, as Amherst Emily said, beware +of the surgeon with his knife, lest he find the culprit life.
The indoorsmen of academe never fail to raise nature up as a hallmark of Romanticism. Nature, nature, nature they repeat—but with only the most patronising view of what it meant to my principals. Nature what? Nature awareness, appreciation, adulation, respect, idealisation, idolisation, rapture, fervour, worship? Nature -as a metaphor supply closet, a source of inspiration, a cruel -mistress, a loving mother. All of this gets batted around endlessly, -again, making my principals seem soppy, dreamy, sentimental, their -lines see-through by modernist grownups. They don’t understand Nature -as I described it above, i.e., a non-place; instead, constant -everything everywhere cycles of birth, growth, deterioration, and -Death. +as the metaphor supply closet, a source of inspiration, a cruel +mistress, a loving mother.97 +More about pathetic fallacy soon. + All of this gets batted around +endlessly, again, making my principals seem soppy, dreamy, +sentimental, their lines see-through by us modernist grownups. And so +academe cannot understand Nature as I described it above, i.e., a +non-place; instead, constant everything everywhere cycles of birth, +growth, deterioration, and Death.
Academe’s favourite Romanticism nature boy is of course William -Wordsworth, whom so many call Romanticism’s godfather93 +Wordsworth, whom so many call Romanticism’s godfather98 …due to ignorance of Novalis? Alas… —but -then routinely pan as sappy sentimental. Beholden to the modern age, -its urban nihilist public, not to mention peer reviewers, academe -would use as touchstones modern realist writers such as Jack London -and Ernest Hemingway and their supposedly more objective and -unvarnished, truer understanding of nature. What Wordsworth said -about wandering like a cloud then going nuts over daffodils is curious -but affected, mushy and maudlin to them +then routinely pan as way-out sappy sentimental. Beholden to the +modern age, its urban nihilist public, not to mention peer reviewers, +modern scholars cannot help but use as touchstones modern realist +writers such as Jack London and Ernest Hemingway and their supposedly +more objective and unvarnished, truer understanding of nature. And +so whatever Wordsworth said about wandering like a cloud then going +nuts over daffodils is seen as affected, mushy, and maudlin
@@ -2680,9 +2758,8 @@Nature reduced to sentimentality and innocence
Eye rolls, smirks, and tsk-tsking in today’s English department classrooms. The richer his waxing, the further he sinks into -patronisation and condemnation by modern realists. Missed entirely is -his subtle and sublime. Here from Lines Written a Few Miles above -Tintern Abbey +patronisation and condemnation. Missed entirely is his subtle and +sublime. Here from Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
@@ -2707,24 +2784,31 @@Nature reduced to sentimentality and innocence
This of course is genial and goes to the heart and soul of what I want to bring forth here at WutheringUK, even though he hasn’t included Dark. With words he causes vibrations to my emotion braid. But again, -all this goes way over heads and contrary to agendae today.94 -A scholar mentioned in the Wikipedia articles says, -[Wordsworth manages] to see into the life of things only ’by -narrowing and skewing his field of vision’ and by excluding ’certain -conflictual sights and meanings’. Obviously Wordsworth was a male -apologist for the capitalist industrialist patriarchy, ignoring that so -very many women and minorities were being oppresses exactly as he saw -those sights and penned those lines… - -And so Wordsworth is just a dusty old statue glimpsed during a quick -run-through the classic wing of a museum, more interesting, better -things in the modern wing for sure. +all this goes contrary to modern realism today. One scholar mentioned +in the Wikipedia article on this poem says, ++ +-Worse, Wordsworth made nature the only possible house for human purity -and innocence. How droll. In To a Highland Girl he transforms a -peasant shepherdess he saw on a trip to Scotland into a goddess +[Wordsworth manages] to see into the life of things only by narrowing +and skewing his field of vision and by excluding certain conflictual +sights and meanings. +
++Obviously, Wordsworth was a toxic male apologist for the +capitalist industrialist patriarchy, ignoring that so very many women +and minorities were being oppresses exactly as he saw those sights and +penned those lines… And so Wordsworth is just a dusty old statue +glimpsed during a quick run-through the classic wing of a museum, more +interesting, better things in the modern wing for sure. +
+ ++Worse, Wordsworth wanted nature the only possible house for human +purity and innocence. In To a Highland Girl he transforms a peasant +shepherdess he saw on a trip to Scotland into a demi-angel
@@ -2739,38 +2823,32 @@Nature reduced to sentimentality and innocence
-I guess you had to have been there. Again, as William lit up my -emotion bundle I was. +I guess you had to have been there…
-And so nature is never more than a theme, a leitmotif—bereft of -any clue as to what Nature capitalised meant.95 +And so nature for modern realist academe is never more than a theme, +a leitmotif—bereft of any clue as to what Nature capitalised +meant.99 …and certainly no inkling of what I spoke of above about the -modern indoor-outdoor dichotomy being irrelevant. - Nature conducive -to feelings and innocence, as so much of Romanticist poetry is someone -describing what they feel and yearn while in nature. Especially -with the Romanticist bond between feelings and nature do we see -academe as scoffers and put-down artists. +modern indoor-outdoor dichotomy. + Nature conducive to feelings and innocence, inviting +re-sensitisation, indeed, as so much of Romanticist poetry is someone +describing what they feel and yearn while in what they call +Nature. No, modern realists cannot this abide.
- - --If one rejects metaphysics in all forms, then Nature is without -magic.96 -So ironic how naturalism means nature sans any metaphysics, -completely materialist mechanistic from the micro to the macro. Though -the term has the feel of instinctive, genuine, candid, sincere, e.g., -the smile of a dear friend… Woe. Alas. - +If one rejects metaphysics in all forms, then Nature has no magic. So +ironic how naturalism means nature sans any metaphysics, completely +materialist mechanistic from the micro to the macro. Though the term +has the root natural, i.e., the feel of instinctive, genuine, +candid, sincere, e.g., the smile of a dear friend… Woe. Alas.
-Often, Nature is simply reverently noted in verse, as does Anne Brontë -in her Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day +This Nature nativism was so often simply reverently noted in verse, as +does Anne Brontë in her Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day
@@ -2793,10 +2871,10 @@Nature reduced to sentimentality and innocence
-I will posit that my principals were instinctively unknowingly, +I will posit that my principals were instinctively, unknowingly, belatedly stamping a new European nature worship out of the moors and forest floors—necessarily independent of whatever had been the -vernacular paganisms before Roman occupation. Orthogonal as well to +vernacular paganisms before Roman occupation … orthogonal as well to Elizabethan pastoral lyric, German Shepherd Poetry of the post-Thirty Years War seventeenth century, or even the Greek Arcadian Bucolic tradition. @@ -2820,25 +2898,26 @@
Nature reduced to sentimentality and innocence
Below I will dive into the three poems which I believe describe her -credo cosmology best. And, again, her Nature is completely different +credo cosmology best. And again, her Nature is completely different from any modern ideas thereof.
Academe wants my principals to have been more in tune with their senses, more impulsive, less emotionally structured, even sensual. But once more their approach comes off as patronising, like child -psychologists trying to describe children at play. The doctors know +psychologists trying to describe children at play. These doctors know “unruly” won’t do, so they euphemize cleverly. To be sure, they just -don’t get what it is to be instinctual. And as ivory tower residents -embedded securely in society, they cannot fathom being an outsider, -neither physically nor social-psychologically. Tragic how one sort of -gifted, analytical intellectual, is largely unable to fathom another -sort of gifted—artistic lyrical spiritual. +don’t get what it is to be instinctual and creative about it. And as +ivory tower residents embedded securely in society, they cannot fathom +being an outsider, neither physically nor +social-psychologically. Tragic how one sort of gifted—the analytical +intellectual—is so unable to fathom another sort of +gifted—artistic lyrical spiritual.
@@ -2846,10 +2925,12 @@
@@ -2860,7 +2941,8 @@Sensitivity
-Am I, your guide, a poet? Here’s something I wrote +But then am I, your guide, a poet? Dare I correct established, +mainstream Romantic Era experts? Here’s something I wrote
@@ -2904,22 +2986,23 @@Sensitivity
-And yet there’s was no political polemic intended; rather, by trying -to re-humanise, re-sensitise, à la Novalis’ poetising, theirs was a -more Zen approach, a Euro-Zen perhaps. And so I re-collect Feeling, -Nature, and Euro Zen re-sensitisation. But then Romanticism is not -formulaic prescriptive. It is not a political or religious movement, -not a lifestyle … what then?97 -A vacation destination, perhaps, as Wordsworth and Coleridge -popularised the Lake District as the world’s first lit/eco-tourism +My poets of yore. And yet no political polemic was ever intended; +rather, by trying to re-humanise, re-sensitise, à la Novalis’ +poetising, theirs was a more Zen approach, a Euro-Zen perhaps. And +so I write lines to re-collect Feeling, Nature, and Euro Zen +re-sensitisation. But if my principals meant nothing political or +religious, no lifestyle, what did they want? What did they +mean?100 +One fallout was, due to the Wordsworths and Coleridge, the +Lake District becoming the world’s first eco-literature tourism destination. - +
As a teen growing up in the early 1970s, I, like everyone around me, fell in love with the magical, mysterious TV series Kung Fu @@ -2936,7 +3019,7 @@
I recall getting a book on Zen Buddhism at that time wherein I found the concept of Unsui, which is Japanese and means cloud, -water. The term refers to a novice monk +water. The term also refers to a novice monk
@@ -2947,7 +3030,7 @@Zen: East and West
-My dense, written-for-adults book further described unsui +This dense, written-for-adults book further described unsui metaphorically, saying water may change states if impeded: as steam it escapes heat; as water it goes around impediments or, if dammed, simply waits patiently; if frozen, likewise, waits—for nothing can @@ -2965,156 +3048,329 @@
-Contrast this with something Emily Brontë said in a diary -
- --- --All creation is equally mad. Nature is an inexplicable problem; it -exists on a principle of destruction. Every being must be the tireless -instrument of death to others, or itself must cease to live. Yet -nonetheless we celebrate the day of our birth, and we praise God for -having entered such a world. -
-
-Yes, both Eastern philosophies and my Brontëan English Zen do not -confront the real world with socio-political doctrine or -manifestos. But then where does Buddhism take us? Where does Brontëan -Zen take us? +Contrast this with Emily Brontë’s koan-like description of Nature as +both cruel but our home. Thus, both Eastern philosophies and my +Brontëan English Zen would not confront the real world with +socio-political doctrine or manifestos. But then where does Buddhism +take us? Where does Brontëan Zen take us?
-Buddhism wants enlightenment—which supposedly raises us to some sort -of extra-human demi-angel. Once enlightened, we no longer have worldly -cares. But how many actually reach this state which we might guess is -some permanent version of Dostoyevski’s presence of eternal harmony? -This is why I cannot take any sort of Eastern religion based on -enlightenment seriously, since such a very limited number of people -ever arrive at this self-actualization. +Buddhism wants enlightenment—which supposedly raises us to an +extra-human state. And once enlightened, we no longer have worldly +cares. But then how many actually reach this state—which might be +presumed as some permanent version of Dostoyevski’s presence of +eternal harmony? This is why I cannot take any sort of Eastern +religion with the stated goal of enlightenment seriously, if for no +other reason than so very few people ever arrive at this +self-actualization. Also, where is Dark in the East?
But then what of West Zen? Emily Brontë’s All creation is equally mad… presents a deep paradox and falls into fatalism, rather than offering a path to anything higher. How could poetised -feelings—Longfellow’s piteous ruing of snowflakes, Poe’s overnights -at the sepulchre by the sea, Novalis’ shout-outs to the night—sit -atop all the violent dynamism, all the smashing, banging, clanging of -theirs or our times? How was so-called Romanticism even to be -considered the aesthetics of, the contemporary cultural offerings to -such great upheaval, coercion, destruction as came upon the -nineteenth-century West? The initial answer is no, it could not -be. There could be no artistic, aesthetic compliment to colonialism, -Newtonian science, and industrialism. And therein lies so much of the -irony and paradox. How could The British Empire rising to the height -of its power and reach make William “Dances With Daffodils” Wordsworth -its poet laureate?98 +feelings—Longfellow’s piteous ruing of snowflakes, Novalis’ +shout-outs to the night—sit atop all the violent dog-eat-dog, all +the smashing, banging, clanging of the real world? How was so-called +Romanticism even to be considered the aesthetics of, the contemporary +cultural offerings to such great upheaval, coercion, destruction as +was the nineteenth-century West? The initial answer is no, it could +not be official aesthetics. There could be no artistic, aesthetic +compliment to colonialism, Newtonian science, industrialism. And +therein lies so much of the irony and paradox. What sense did the +naming of William “Dances With Daffodils” Wordsworth as the poet +laureate of the British Empire make?101 …named in 1843. - No, what the Romantic Era poets and artists -created was, as we might categorise (sic) it, a very underground -aesthetic, an anti-movement that blanched and faded in the light of -day. The radical philosophers, as the proto-Marxist activists were called -by some, were about power and wealth, i.e., the haves versus the -have-nots. Marxist dialectics then said when the gradient is too great -necessarily the revolution will begin. Grim was the new industrial -urban, the largely subsistence peasants now wage slaves living in -existential terror of squalor, hunger, and exploitation. Homo homini -lupus99 + No, what the Romantic Era +poets and artists created was, as we might categorise (sic) it, a very +underground aesthetic, an anti-movement that blanched and faded in +the presence of political struggles. The radical philosophers, as +the proto-Marxist activists were called by some, were about power and +wealth, i.e., the haves versus the have-nots. Marxist dialectics then +insisted that when the gradient is too great necessarily the +revolution will begin. Grim was the new industrial urban world with +the once blithely subsistence peasants become wage slaves and living +in the existential terror of squalor, hunger, and exploitation. Homo +homini lupus 102 Man is a wolf to man. - had once again raised its terrible head in a new and -awful way. + had once again raised its terrible head in a new +and awful way. But my principals seemed mute. Or were they?
-Here we might suggest classicism as a better choice for Western -civilization. Classicism would seem to better compliment imperialism, -as in “See the wonderful omelette? Now forget all the eggs we broke to -make it.” Glory, majesty, splendor, regality, grandeur to justify, -substantiate whatever terrible happenings on the frontiers enabled -it. Or perhaps the classicist envelope around religion, elevating the -huge paradox of meek, pious, pacifist Christianity as a -stop-at-nothing empire’s real humanistic intention. As phenomena go, -Romanticism was not to be had, full stop. +Many opposed what Romanticism seemed to be saying. Goethe and Schiller +promoted as an alternative their Weimar Classicism (more later). To +most, classicism was the best compliment to the modern world, +invariably to imperialism. As in “See the wonderful omelette? Now, +forget all the eggs we broke to make it.” Glory, majesty, splendor, +regality, grandeur to justify, substantiate whatever terrible +happenings on the frontiers enabled it. Even more poignant was the +classicist envelope around religion, elevating the huge paradox of +meek, pious, pacifist Christianity as a seemingly stop-at-nothing +empire’s real humanistic intentions. All in all, Romanticism could not +be applied anywhere except, maybe, on a walk in Wordworth’s Lake +District.
- --The Brontë sisters languished (or blossomed?) in obscurity most of -their lives,100 -…and they were routinely left out of academic analysis of -Romanticism, e.g., Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp, Beach’s The -Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, and Berlin’s -The Roots of Romanticism make no mention of them! Maybe they had -read Virginia Woolf’s comments on Jane Eyre and gave them up for a -bad job. See this analysis as well. Big cringe… - but as they gained popular recognition in the -latter half of the eighteenth century, they and other Victorian -Neo-Romanticisms kept on portraying a softer, kinder England from the -capitalist industrialist, imperialist militarist reality. Consider the -Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (founded in 1848). Below is a later -painting of John Everett Millais, An Idyll of 1745 +
+Novalis promoted a nostalgia for the Medieval Era—confusing his +contemporaries. Likewise, Walpole was all in for medieval in his more +melodramatic way. And later, critiques of, e.g., Jane Eyre chided +its nostalgic, rustic appeal for English moorlands.103 +Below I will deal with Virginia Woolf’s criticism along those +lines. + All +Brontëan writing has the thread of rootedness to the land, which +should be timeless, but then was often seen as all too twee +nostalgic. What then is going on with nostalgia? +
+ ++The Brontë sisters languished in obscurity most of their +lives,104 +Oddly enough, the Brontës have been left out of many key +academic analyses of Romanticism. For example, Abrams’ The Mirror and +the Lamp, Beach’s The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century +English Poetry, and Berlin’s The Roots of Romanticism make no +mention of them! Maybe they had read Virginia Woolf’s comments on +Jane Eyre and had given them up for a bad job. See this analysis as +well. Big cringe… + but as they gained popular recognition in the latter +half of the eighteenth century, Victorian Neo-Romantics kept up with +portraying a softer, kinder Britain from the capitalist industrialist, +imperialist militarist reality. Miss Jane Eyre, suspected of fairy +ancestry, incessantly asked, Who and what am I? Which was answered, +You are a charge of the land. To be sure, my delicate bundle of +English Zen, Dark, Nature, and Christianity was tied by the Brontë +sisters. But could it last could it hold up against the avalanche of +realism and modernism brought on by the acceleration of industrialism +in the late-Victorian Age? Or, from a different angle, How did +Romanticism die? +
+ ++Consider the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (founded in 1848). Below is a +later painting of John Everett Millais, his An Idyll of 1745
-Before YouTube and hysterical helicopter parents...
-
--Millais is dealing in profane or vulgar nostalgia,101 -…as opposed to sacred nostalgia, i.e., a heartfelt hearkening, -yearning for the profound eternal and epic, which should not be -dependent on context or seen as escapism to the past. - an -associativity we today cannot totally follow without flawed -speculation. Of course Britain in 1745 was powerful after favourable -political events (e.g., Treaty of Utrecht) and Robert Walpole’s era as -the first prime minister. It might be said that a new era of decadence -had arrived, and yet 1745 was the year of the main Jacobite rebellion; -hence, the patriotic theme. But this was not dominant domineering -Britain yet, rather, a Britain still fighting and scrapping for its -position in the world, mainly against the French, as well as still -suffering the collective PTSD of the bloody seventeenth-century -British civil wars less than a hundred years earlier. And yet Millais -painting this in 1884 would hearkened back, however vulgarly, to, yes, -an idyllic time—at least as he thought provided by the seemingly -eternal English countryside, Britain’s first and foremost national -treasure. Three innocent, tabula rasa peasant girls are enraptured by -an enlisted man playing a flute while a fatherly high-born officer -looks on admiringly. Clearly, this pastoral bliss is a version of +Before internet social media and hysterical helicopter parents... + +
+Millais is dealing in what I call profane or vulgar
+nostalgia,105
+…as opposed to sacred nostalgia, i.e., a hearkening,
+yearning for the profoundly eternal and epic such as mythos and
+legend. In general, nostalgia should not be seen as merely escapism to
+the past.
+ his associations, however, we probably cannot fully
+understand today. Of course his Britain of 1745 was powerful after
+favourable political events (e.g., Treaty of Utrecht) and Robert
+Walpole’s era as the first prime minister. And yet 1745 was the year
+of the main Jacobite rebellion; hence, the patriotic theme? Though
+this was not yet domineering Britain; rather, a Britain still fighting
+and scrapping for its position in the world, mainly against the
+French, as well as still suffering the collective PTSD of Jacobitism
+and the bloody seventeenth-century British civil wars less than a
+hundred years earlier. Still, Millais painting this in 1884 would
+hearkened back, however vulgarly, to, yes, an idyllic time—at
+least as he thought provided by the seemingly eternal English
+countryside, Britain’s first and foremost national treasure. Three
+innocent, tabula rasa peasant girls are enraptured by an enlisted man
+playing a flute, while a fatherly high-born officer looks on
+admiringly. Clearly, this pastoral and class bliss was a version of
Britain longed for by the nostalgia-heavy, Romanticism-influenced
Pre-Raphaelites. Great rueing and regretting permeated Victorian
-parlour society, spurring them to revive the earlier Romantic Era and
-to see in nature vitality and salvation. See beside as well Millais’
-The Blind Girl.102
+parlour society vis-à-vis the real world, spurring them to revive the
+earlier Romantic Era and to see in nature true vitality and
+salvation. See beside as well Millais’ The Blind Girl.106
Millais’ The Blind Girl (1854-56)
- This was the England they wanted, and not the
-bloody savagery of colonialism imperialism, nor the horrific suffering
-of the urban industrial wastelands Charles Dickens came to chronicle.
+ This
+was the down-home England they wanted, and not the harsh realities of
+colonialism and imperialism, and certainly not the horrific suffering
+of the urban industrial wastelands Charles Dickens came to chronicle
+over and over throughout this time.
-No -more that Christianity before it could. +English Zen and English nostalgia against the unrelenting brutality of +the world. Again, Romanticism’s right bookend was supposedly 1850. But +did it die, retire, was it replaced? No, no, and no—in part, I would +say, exactly because it was never anything as intentional and +wrappable boxable as the watchers and minders wanted it to +be. Romanticism was like an ongoing silent-bid auction always +interrupted just before the sale. Was Tennyson a Romanticist? What +about Yeats’ The Stolen Child from 1889 +
+ +++Come away, O human child!
+
+To the waters and the wild
+With a faery, hand in hand,
+For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
-Romanticism portrayed as a furtherance of Enlightenment freedom of -expression is also farcical. See how eighteenth-century gothic doom -paralleled the beginning of the Industrial Revolution’s inflexion -point, as well as the reverberations of colonialism, e.g., -slavery. Doom, where sins’ ever compounded interest smashed any -profits, gains. Dynasties subject to Old Testament’s crashing woe. +I should also mention James Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian, like +Walpole’s Otranto, was the supposed field collections of the +legendary Celtic bard Oisín, although most scholars believe Macpherson +largely composed the poems himself, drawing in part on traditional +Gaelic poetry he had collected. As Wikipedia says +
+ +++ ++Though the stories “are of endless battles and unhappy loves”, the +enemies and causes of strife are given little explanation and +context. Characters are given to killing loved ones by mistake, and +dying of grief, or of joy. There is very little information given on +the religion, culture or society of the characters, and buildings are +hardly mentioned. The landscape “is more real than the people who +inhabit it. Drowned in eternal mist, illuminated by a decrepit sun or +by ephemeral meteors, it is a world of greyness.” +
+
+Yes, Dark, but clearly more of the predominant Medieval Age nostalgia +of the eighteenth century, especially since the authenticity is highly +suspect, i.e., wishful and aggrandising penning on MacPherson’s part. +
+ +
+Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies. Julia Margaret Cameron, half
+of her life spent after 1850, conjured an ultra-nostalgia in her
+ground-breaking photography with her soft-focus and historical
+themes.107
+Alethea, by Julia Margaret Cameron (1872)
+
+
+ Nostalgia, originally a medical condition,108
+Nostalgia, from Latin, literally means /homesickness/ and was
+an acknowledged medical condition in the 1800s.
+
+morphed into the social-psychological phenomenon of idolising the
+past, vulgar nostalgia selectively reviving, reanimating hoped-for
+aspects of the past. Nostalgia’s motivation? Again, eighteenth-century
+gothic doom paralleled the beginning of the Industrial Revolution’s
+inflexion point, as well as the reverberations of colonialism, e.g.,
+slavery. Doom, where sins’ ever compounding interest overwhelm any
+profits, gains. Here is how J.R.R. Tolkien responded when his fantasy
+writings were called escapist
+
++ ++Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is +imprisioned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? +
+
+He went on to say the prisoner’s natural urge is to escape and run
+home. Where is this home? Granted, the intersection of nostalgia and
+Dark is minimal, but mist dims light, softens lines, and all nostalgia
+involves the obscurants mist and shadow. Nostalgia is mainly for the
+thrumming the emotion braid and less for the calibration of the logic
+train. But yes, home—perhaps the home Jane Eyre described with the
+Rivers family on the Northern moorlands? Neo-Victorian Luddite
+closet-Monarchist Tolkien was the next stepping stone after George
+MacDonald—who was a stepping stone after?… And yes, it was all
+ultimately about home. Ursula Le Guin said an adult is not a dead
+child, rather a child that survived. But can that child in us take a
+faery hand-in-hand? Faery from our past. Elizabeth Siddal,
+(1829 - 1862)109
+Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, ca. 1860; the original super model
+for the Pre-Raphaelite painters.
+
+
+ model, artist, poetess, her Gone
+
++To touch the glove upon her tender hand,
+
+To watch the jewel sparkle in her ring,
+Lifted my heart into a sudden song
+As when the wild birds sing.
+
+To touch her shadow on the sunny grass,
+To break her pathway through the darkened wood,
+Filled all my life with trembling and tears
+And silence where I stood.
+
+I watch the shadows gather round my heart,
+I live to know that she is gone
+
+Gone gone for ever, like the tender dove
+That left the Ark alone.
+
+and then her Lord May I Come? +
+ +++Life and night are falling from me,
+
+Death and day are opening on me,
+Wherever my footsteps come and go,
+Life is a stony way of woe.
+Lord, have I long to go?
+
+Hallow hearts are ever near me,
+Soulless eyes have ceased to cheer me:
+Lord may I come to thee?
+
+Life and youth and summer weather
+To my heart no joy can gather.
+Lord, lift me from life’s stony way!
+Loved eyes long closed in death watch for me:
+Holy death is waiting for me
+
+Lord, may I come to-day?
+
+My outward life feels sad and still
+Like lilies in a frozen rill;
+I am gazing upwards to the sun,
+Lord, Lord, remembering my lost one.
+O Lord, remember me!
+
+How is it in the unknown land?
+Do the dead wander hand in hand?
+God, give me trust in thee.
+
+Do we clasp dead hands and quiver
+With an endless joy for ever?
+Do tall white angels gaze and wend
+Along the banks where lilies bend?
+Lord, we know not how this may be:
+Good Lord we put our faith in thee
+
+O God, remember me.
+
+Nostalgia as a home of yore for which we the living witness.
- perception hang-ups, much less emotion -brake-checking. There was no pause to reflect on +With an ever-faster-spinning planet there is antagonism with
@@ -3134,41 +3390,45 @@Desensitisation, re-sensitisation
-Humanity born of Spirit forever feeling wind in our faces and circling -around wisdom … almost as if there is a sanctity in what may emerge -from consciousness beyond behaviorist stimulus-response, -action-reaction, the Day’s to-dos: order, change, progress. -
- --Perhaps my Romantic Era principals sensed the hyper-individualistic -reptilian mindset from the middle-class capitalist -industrialists103 -The typical middle-class industrialist coming up during the -Enlightenment was a pragmatic utilitarian who, after absorbing the -message of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), had jettisoned -the baggage of noblesse oblige, the New Testament beatitudes, and any -lingering other-century nostalgia and sentimentality to forge ahead as -the consummate self-reliant individualist laser-focused on financial -wealth. These men projected a stripped-down emotional psychological -persona, indeed, a new desensitisation regime. - as a egregious desensitisation regime spreading -throughout society, and threw a re-sensitisation at it. +…humanity born of Spirit forever feeling wind in our faces and +circling around wisdom … almost as if we may find a sanctity in what +may emerge from such consciousness above and beyond behaviorist +stimulus-response, action-reaction, beside the modern gauge of the +personal logic train, besides the day’s to-dos—orderings, changes, +updates, progress.
- --Marxism dispenses with aesthetics, while my principals could not do -without an aesthetical foundation—and then only adorned said -foundation with poetisings. And of course there was no “call to action.” +Perhaps my Romantic Era principals sensed the hyper-individualistic, +the utilitarian, the reptilian mindset coming from the middle-class +capitalist industrialists as an egregious desensitisation regime +spreading throughout society, and so they threw re-sensitisation at +it.
--There is something instinctual in my eschewing of Eastern as a Dark Muser. Why -do I cleave to Emily Brontë’s English Zen and revolt against all the -westernised Buddhism?104 +The typical middle-class industrialist coming up during the +Enlightenment was a pragmatic utilitarian who, after absorbing the +message of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), had jettisoned +the baggage of noblesse oblige,110 +Luke 12:48: For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall +be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they +will ask the more. + the New Testament beatitudes, +and any lingering other-century nostalgia and sentimentality to forge +ahead as the consummate self-reliant individualist laser-focused on +financial wealth. These men projected a stripped-down emotional +psychological persona, indeed, a new desensitisation +regime. Capitalism, Marxism, both dispensed with aesthetics, while my +principals rushed to shore up an aesthetical foundation—and then +only adorned said foundation with poetisings. And therein was no “call +to action.” +
+ +
+There is something instinctual in my eschewing of Eastern as a Dark
+Muser. Why do I cleave to Emily Brontë’s English Zen and revolt
+against all the westernised Buddhism?111
I say “westernised Eastern” because we in the West cannot
possibly know what real Eastern is, not being genetically or
culturally truly Eastern. We only think we can rationalise the
@@ -3176,16 +3436,11 @@ Desensitisation, re-sensitisation
-No, my principle principals -
-
Here I will simply and plainly state that I believe Emily Jane Brontë
was the very centre, the utter culmination of the whole Romanticism
thing—ironically the most outside of any Romanticism boxing or
-packaging by academe. She combined in her poetry105
+packaging by academe. She combined in her poetry112
Again, let’s forget her book Wuthering Heights, which for me
is just gothic novel handle-cranking, however artistically potent. As
before, I suspect an inevitable inability for prose to do what poetry
@@ -3338,16 +3593,16 @@ Desensitisation, re-sensitisation
Every era seems to latch onto some set of hyper-idealisms, our present
times the herculean task of idealising any sort of non-heterosexual,
transgender proclivities to the level of enlightenment, the bearers’
paths through life that of martyrs, geniuses, prophets, and saints. A
double hero for both gender-bending and modern realism literature is
-Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941).106
+Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941).113
\
@@ -3447,7 +3702,7 @@ Virginia Woolf’s unfortunate critique of Jane Eyre<
-Woolf is critical of Brontëan use of pathetic fallacy,107
+Woolf is critical of Brontëan use of pathetic fallacy,114
Pathetic from Middle French pathetique “provoking emotion,”
borrowed from Late Latin pathēticus “affecting the emotions,” borrowed
from Greek pathētikós "capable of feeling, emotional, receptive,
@@ -3510,7 +3765,7 @@ Virginia Woolf’s unfortunate critique of Jane Eyre<
The narrator’s emotions float upon, are embedded in Nature. A real
human being has exactly this sort of experience: Life and Nature are
interwoven. Simply put, the Brontës were beholden unto Nature and
-God. They beseeched Nature and God,108
+God. They beseeched Nature and God,115
Deus sive Natura, the slogan of Baruch Spinoza’s pantheism:
the view that god and nature are interchangeable, or that there is no
distinction between the creator and the creation.
@@ -3523,13 +3778,13 @@
Virginia Woolf’s unfortunate critique of Jane Eyre<
fantastic membership thereof. Ironic how urban realists are nearly all
“reformists” out to radical socialists, always wanting to improve
mankind’s lot, many following deterministic Marxist dialectic
-scripts.109
+scripts.116
Perhaps see Bertrand Russell on his meeting with Vladimir
Lenin in 1920.
And yet they cannot see how no one knows what to do
with the Industrial Era!, nor how the human is supposed to ever
thrive in these alien, hostile, sterile urban hell zones—however
-decorated this or that corner may be with classical tinsel.110
+decorated this or that corner may be with classical tinsel.117
Sometimes the apologists throw in the towel to complete
absurdism. Consider Brutalism where ugliness is normalised.
@@ -3537,9 +3792,9 @@
Virginia Woolf’s unfortunate critique of Jane Eyre<
And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books @@ -3558,7 +3813,7 @@
A Romantic Movement
entirely. Again, one of the main tasks of WutheringUK is to get Dark out of its academe and popular media prisons. Foremost is how academe Romanticism seems more the labeling work of these clueless busy-bodies -than any intentional movement from the actual creators.111 +than any intentional movement from the actual creators.118 …e.g., we would never have known Emily Brontë’s poetry had not sister Charlotte pilfered her manuscripts from their hiding place and published them without her sister’s permission. Similarly, the @@ -3572,7 +3827,7 @@A Romantic Movement
humanities professor Isaiah Berlin in his lecture series on Romanticism whether those times were not something timeless, a permanent state of mind wholly outside of anyone’s historical fence -work.112 +work.119 Academe typically fences the Romantic Era in between 1800 and 1850. Nevertheless, there is no avoiding the sweeping @@ -3618,7 +3873,7 @@A Romantic Movement
Romanticism into existence—the Jena Set, Coleridge, Germaine de Staël, Emerson et al.—but again, I believe the actual principals were far-sighted, inward-gazing, quasi-timeless unicorns not following -guidelines or living up to anybody’s expectations.113 +guidelines or living up to anybody’s expectations.120 …e.g., the Brontës were pastor’s daughters in rural West Yorkshire with little exposure to (taint from?) the cultural and literary buzz of the cities. @@ -3632,16 +3887,7 @@A Romantic Movement
over the lone wolf creators. Caveat emptor. If the purpose of a poem, as Keats said, is to embolden the soul to accept mystery, then such analytical death marches must be seen as antithetical. Analysing -mystery is a fool’s errand.114 -One hot mess is the BBC’s series on Romanticism. (Catch it on -YouTube under The Romantics: Liberty, Nature, Eternity). And then -Bertrand Russell in his severe, left-brained The History of Western -Philosophy mangles away at Romanticism in his consummate pedantic -way. These are Exhibit A1/A2 of people who don’t get it but must sound -important erudite. More palatable perhaps is Isaiah Berlin’s 1965 -lectures on Romanticism which starts with his admission that it just -might have all been in the air—and still is. - For me at least, the principals +mystery is a fool’s errand. For me at least, the principals re-sensitised, while their describers have only managed to de-sensitise with their mystery-deaf approach. @@ -3653,7 +3899,7 @@A Romantic Movement
ephemeral mists of Romanticism’s subtleties and sublimities, while their intellectualizations and pontifications thereof sound windy, if not shrill out to ridiculous. No wonder the concept of left-brain, -right-brain arose,115 +right-brain arose,121 The best ideas about left/right brain are those of Iain McGilchrist. Try these. as nothing else can describe this @@ -3670,16 +3916,16 @@A Romantic Movement
sham, a carcass.
Today a hit song or a brain-dead TikTok video can go globally “viral”
in less than a day, with imitations instantly springing up like
mushrooms after rain. But in the closing years of the eighteenth
century there just seemed to be something in the air, which came to be
called Romanticism, apparently first by Jena Set founder Friedrich
-Schlegel116
+Schlegel122
This will save you some googling. Note again the tortured
origin of the term romantic.
… after Coleridge and Wordsworth’s collaboration
@@ -3694,7 +3940,7 @@ English and German Romanticism
-Early German Romanticism117
+Early German Romanticism123
For what it’s worth, German Romanticism can be broken down
into Jena, Heidelberg, then Berlin Romanticism based largely on the
principle artists.
@@ -3724,12 +3970,12 @@ English and German Romanticism
And then Dark Romanticism (DR) … another academe box. At its
-centre was supposedly Edgar Allan Poe.118
+centre was supposedly Edgar Allan Poe.124
Daguerreotype of Poe 1849
Alas but the Wikipedia
@@ -3861,7 +4107,7 @@ Poe and Dark Romanticism
And so here I want to make a very important point about my principals,
to be sure, that they were only vessels, those particular mortals
the Muses chose to be their emissaries. This angle is well developed
-in the Hollywood film Amadeus where Mozart119
+in the Hollywood film Amadeus where Mozart125
Child Wolfgang and sister Maria Anna
@@ -4049,11 +4295,7 @@ Poe and Dark Romanticism
it. Here Poe is sustainable contemplative melancholic, rather than
hurling his fright bombs as in his prose. Did Poe know of Novalis and
his supposed hundred nights of graveside vigilance for deceased Sophie
-von Kühn?120
-Sophie von Kühn
-
-
- Perhaps but totally irrelevant. Again, I suss out
+von Kühn? Perhaps but totally irrelevant. Again, I suss out
that both Poe and Emily Brontë got the Dark Muse and gave it with
their poetry, but not in their prose, falling back into gothic. And so
I fall back to poetry and fragmented bursts as the only vehicle of
@@ -4062,9 +4304,9 @@ Poe and Dark Romanticism
What if we all went around completely misrepresenting each other, telling outlandishly false things about whomever whenever? Enmity, @@ -4096,7 +4338,7 @@
More innocuous perhaps because it is a single film lasting only two
hours, thus, not able to get up to as much evil and inanity as
-Dickinson, is the 2022 Hollywood Emily,123
+Dickinson, is the 2022 Hollywood Emily,128
Emily Brontë as a modern, filled-out “cottagecore emo girl”
per this Slate review. No need to watch, just read the plot for full
cringe.
@@ -4225,7 +4467,7 @@ All travesties aside…
anything bad about some golden era in their imaginations. The Left,
however, is arguably everything Noam Chomsky had to say about French
nihilism, and the Right an amalgamation of conservative and, newly,
-libertarianism.124
+libertarianism.129
I contend libertarianism is simply a new form of liberalism,
i.e., liberalism has gotten so big that leftism no longer is big
enough to contain it all.
@@ -4233,9 +4475,9 @@ All travesties aside…
One of my earliest brushes with Dostoevski’s presence of eternal harmony came on a Halloween night back when I was a little boy in a @@ -4267,7 +4509,7 @@
-Inland Sea,125
+Inland Sea,130
Really though, calling it Lake Superior is
like calling Einstein a high school graduate.
thus, North Coast instead of North
@@ -4275,7 +4517,7 @@ Grand Marais, my sepulchre by the sea?
thinking, a lake is something much smaller and much friendlier. Our
Inland Sea is big and often violent like any sea or ocean of
saltwater. She’s no simple lake for beer-and-brats picnickers,
-windsurfers, speedboat and jet ski riffraff.126
+windsurfers, speedboat and jet ski riffraff.131
Wetsuits de rigueur. Even in summer a dunk in her longer than
ten minutes can lead to hypothermia … at least on the North
Coast. Though the south beaches of Wisconsin and Michigan can be
@@ -4293,7 +4535,7 @@ Grand Marais, my sepulchre by the sea?
sublime. But again, the people here a decidedly not Dark Musers, which
creates an almost perfect laboratory to test whether Dark is nature or
nurture. I’m saying if there are no gothic buildings, e.g., no Père
-Lachaise Cemetery,127
+Lachaise Cemetery,132
Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Paris, France
@@ -4380,9 +4622,9 @@ Grand Marais, my sepulchre by the sea?
(1975 - 1978) and visited Amsterdam for Christmas 19
A few things have led me back to belief in God. Besides the Brontës and the other poets of the Glorious Nineteenth showing me how wondrous @@ -4442,7 +4684,7 @@
(This is written in the Summer of 2024.)
@@ -4491,17 +4733,17 @@