Greer Gilman's Blog, page 73

Glassy, cool

I've been passing this artist's stall for a few weeks now, glancing at the tiles with their imprints of sea-stars and lizards—oh, pretty—but this evening he put out this wildflower series and I thought of Rackham and was caught.  The Queen Anne's lace is impressed in the wet clay; the glaze is junked glass, the green being Heineken bottles and the cobalt blue SKYY vodka.  I thought of tiling my mantelpiece...

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From a mage's baby house

O my.  Look what the ever-glorious Thrud has brought me!—an altar for my altar.  The books are no bigger than a stamp—say, Antigua, penny, puce— the shells like the Lost Boys' baby teeth, the whole no bigger than a tarot card.  They saw me sighing over these in Florence, and remembered.  Such generosity re-gives me Italy.

I do need to put a speck of glue to that wizard's glass...

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Lightfast

Wishing you joy at the light returning.

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Ideo

The carol service this year was especially glorious.  They had a new organ to celebrate, with a second choir in the loft as well as in the chancel, and no fewer than three pieces newly-composed for the occasion.

I went Sunday at evensong and met my dear B in the gallery.  We both missed the late great Peter Gomes's magnificent reading voice (he had inimitable triphthongs), but the other sempiternals were in place:  "Adeste Fideles"—all five verses, in Latin—and, as the church is a war memorial, "Stille Nacht/Silent Night" sung in German or in English, both together, in commemoration of the Christmas Day Truce of 1914.  There was a lovely new introit, "Lux aurumque."  I noted with pleasure that we had carols this year from Scotland, Cornwall, and Wales:  the Scots cradle song with the refrain Balow, lammy, baloobalow, the Sans Day Carol ("...as blood is it red..."), and "Ar hyd y nos" (our Kapellmeister being Mr. Edward Elwyn Jones).

And walking home this evening in the freezing rain, I stole into the candlelight, by chance as they began my favorite part of the service:  so I stayed just that while.  "The Coventry Carol"—so utterly heartbreaking in the light of this week; the Third Lesson, Matthew 2:1-11; "Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day"; a fabulous fuguing carol, "Christ the Apple Tree" (wassailing the deity!); and glory of glories—all rise—"Personent Hodie," with that wonderful thunderous bit on the organ like God coming downstairs.  (All you cherubim get off My lawn.)  I confess that "perdidit spolia" has taken on new meaning in the last few years....

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Moonwise

The slightest moon drifts down,



Alighting.  O! a bubble, poising to be pricked;



And now a bangle in the thorn;



The old moon now is youngest, cold above pale fires;



Last, night-pinning gold.


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12/12/12

Not quite as cool as 11/11/11, but the last such date for a long while: a coast. Journey well.

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Trouble at parsonage

Out of all the terrific stuff I downloaded on Cyber Monday—a score of ebooks for two and three dollars a pop*—I found myself moved to read Juliet Barker's magisterial The Brontës, newly revised.  It is stone-on-stone sound history, fastidious research—350 pages of notes!  Without emulation, Barker views Mrs. Gaskell’s great Life as a masterpiece and a partial travesty, a fabulous novel about the Brontës.  Her own brief is demythologizing.  There will be no cloudscapes, no thunderbolts, no βροντή.  She will set about unwuthering the heights.

Which suits my mood.  I am weary of biographical fantasizing, of all the Mybuggery that swirls about Shakespeare.

Of course, if you’re going to write about the Brontës from the primary documents, what you’re going to get is the Angrian party, Charlotte and Branwell, whose texts survive.  Gondal has sunken like Atlantis, leaving only a troubling and a phosphorescence on the waters.

Not much Emily here:  but she is fiercely absent, holds her place and power in the atom.  You’d need to be a mystic or a physicist to know her.

Anne, I think, grew up.  She appears rather less frail and timid than her bossy boots sister would allow.

Barker does seem to hold off on Branwell’s unravelling for as long as possible, as if he were a bad tooth that she’s loath to pull.  She probes him expertly:  here another crack, abysmal cavities, but look, still ivory here, still functional.

Of all of them, I think, Charlotte is messiest:  a yearning, striving, touchy, hurt, censorious, impassioned thing; a brilliant and sarcastic, thwarted, arch, self-cancelling, and maddening creature.

L’affaire Heger is always painful to read about:  to watch so great a woman so abase herself, offering up her liver as if to some vegan eagle who declined to peck.

Having set about to marry at 38, not for love, she wrote of her wedding dress, "White I had to buy .... but I stuck convulsively to muslin -- plain book muslin with a tuck or two. Also the white veil ... being simply of tulle with little tucks. If I must make a fool of myself -- it shall be on an economical plan."

For a few months, she was happy.

On learning that her friend had died in pregnancy—from her symptoms, she had hyperemesis gravidarum, like the Duchess of Cambridge—Mrs. Gaskell wrote:  “How I wish I had known! ... it is no use regretting what is past; but I do fancy that if I had come, I could have induced her ...  to do what was so absolutely necessary, for her very life!

An abortion?  How?  Gin and jumping off the kitchen table?  Or did she know where to go, whom to see?  (In Cranford?)  Had she done this for others?

I must say I emerged with new respect and sympathy for poor old Patrick, who came off as—well, geeky.  He may have been a high-necked Tory, but he spent a lifetime fighting for poor relief, for education, for clean water and sewerage.  (Alas, the mucking-out of Haworth came too late for his children’s sake.)

You can see where Charlotte got her nice dry sense of humor.  Having read Mrs. Gaskell’s portrait of him as a tyrant and a madman, he wrote her:

“I do not deny that I am somewhat excentrick.  Had I been numbered amongst the calm, sedate, concentric men of the world, I should not have been as I now am, and I should, in all probability, never have had such children as mine have been.   I have no objection, whatever to your representing me as a little exccentric, since you, and other learned friends will have it so; only don't set me on, in my fury to burning hearthrugs, sawing the backs of chairs, and tearing my wife's silk gown...”

And in their childhood, crucially, he was a low church Prospero, a master of revels for his moorland sprites.  He gave them the Twelves; he brought them all one mask—for all of them in turn—and bade them speak through it.

*****

Hey, and look what I found in my after-Googling—The Brontës of Haworth (Yorkshire Television, 1973), with a “boldly poetic script” by Christopher Fry, of all people, and a very young Michael Kitchen (“resembling ... Mr. Tumnus”) as Branwell.

On to Rebecca West...

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*Thank you, coffeeandink , for that tip!

Now the first of December was covered with snow...

Lovely!

At The Mumpsimus, Matthew Cheney has put up his choices for the Locus 20th & 21st Centuries Poll.  It's an amazingly rich and eclectic list—very Readerconnish--and I am utterly thrilled to be in such dazzling company.  Doubtless as the 21st century goes on, I will slide away into oblivion--but wow!

Of course, all such things are endlessly arguable.  So what would you guys nominate?  What would you scratch off?

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Fire and fleet and Will's Twelfth Neet

The new Jacobean theatre by the Globe will be candlelit.  Gorgeous!

Meanwhile, caption this:



Fry to Rylance:  "Go on, say it:  The glover's son wrote me.  Will made this world.  Or by these hands..."

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How long, O Lady?

I think I have just watched the Church of England commit suicide.

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