Uncategorized – Page 10 – Art is My Religion

Posted on 6 Jun 2015 by richardjnovotney

Friday Poe Quote – 05 June 2015

It’s ironical, perhaps, that Poe managed to sell his poem ‘The Bells’, but that it wasn’t published until after his death in 1849. The poem has been disparaged through the years as simplistic, repetitive and as an aggravating example of onomatopoeia–that is, words formed from the sounds they define. However, there have been a lot of convincing arguments made that there’s an awful lot going on in this poem. And considering the state of Poe’s material destitution in the last year of this life, ‘The Bells’ seems a natural rumination for Poe: life starts out in hopeful idealism, only to end in ruin and death. If you read this, make sure to read it aloud.

Hear the sledges with the bells –

Silver bells!

What a world of merriment their melody foretells!

How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,

In the icy air of night!

While the stars that oversprinkle

All the heavens, seem to twinkle

With a crystalline delight;

Keeping time, time, time,

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells

From the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells –

From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Hear the mellow wedding bells –

Golden bells!

What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!

Through the balmy air of night

How they ring out their delight! –

From the molten – golden notes,

And all in tune,

What a liquid ditty floats

To the turtle – dove that listens, while she gloats

On the moon!

Oh, from out the sounding cells,

What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!

How it swells!

How it dwells

On the Future! – how it tells

Of the rapture that impels

To the swinging and the ringing

Of the bells, bells, bells –

Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells –

To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!

III

Hear the loud alarum bells –

Brazen bells!

What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!

In the startled ear of night

How they scream out their affright!

Too much horrified to speak,

They can only shriek, shriek,

Out of tune,

In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,

In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,

Leaping higher, higher, higher,

With a desperate desire,

And a resolute endeavor

Now – now to sit, or never,

By the side of the pale – faced moon.

Oh, the bells, bells, bells!

What a tale their terror tells

Of Despair!

How they clang, and clash and roar!

What a horror they outpour

On the bosom of the palpitating air!

Yet the ear, it fully knows,

By the twanging,

And the clanging,

How the danger ebbs and flows;

Yet the ear distinctly tells,

In the jangling,

And the wrangling,

How the danger sinks and swells,

By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells –

Of the bells –

Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells –

In the clamor and the clanging of the bells!

Hear the tolling of the bells –

Iron bells!

What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!

In the silence of the night,

How we shiver with affright

At the melancholy menace of their tone!

For every sound that floats

From the rust within their throats

Is a groan.

And the people – ah, the people –

They that dwell up in the steeple,

All alone,

And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,

In that muffled monotone,

Feel a glory in so rolling

On the human heart a stone –

They are neither man nor woman –

They are neither brute nor human –

They are Ghouls: –

And their king it is who tolls: –

And he rolls, rolls, rolls,

Rolls

A paean from the bells!

And his merry bosom swells

With the paean of the bells!

And he dances, and he yells;

Keeping time, time, time,

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the paean of the bells: –

Of the bells:

Keeping time, time, time

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the throbbing of the bells –

Of the bells, bells, bells: –

To the sobbing of the bells: –

Keeping time, time, time,

As he knells, knells, knells,

In a happy Runic rhyme,

To the rolling of the bells –

Of the bells, bells, bells –

To the tolling of the bells –

Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells, –

To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

The image comes from the title page an 1912 edition of Poe’s poems called, The Bells and Other Poems, illustrated by Edmund Dulac.

Posted on 4 Jun 2015 by richardjnovotney

Hump Day Shakespearean Quote – 03 June 2015

One of the great soliloquies of Western Art comes from the imagination of Macbeth, contemplating regicide. This speech is a miracle of eloquent verse, vivid imagery, psychological progression and foreshadowing. If Shakespeare had written no other plays, he’d still be remembered today for this bloody masterpiece:

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw.

Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going,

And such an instrument I was to use.

Mine eyes are made the fools o’ th’ other senses,

Or else worth all the rest. I see thee still,

And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,

Which was not so before. There’s no such thing.

It is the bloody business which informs

Thus to mine eyes. Now o’er the one half-world

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates

Pale Hecate’s offerings, and withered murder,

Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf,

Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,

With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design

Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,

Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear

Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,

And take the present horror from the time,

Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives.

Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.

—Macbeth, Act II Scene i

Is the dagger real? It is a hallucination? Is Macbeth mad? What a delicious mix of ambition, fear, temptation and eloquence. Honestly–to hell with what it means: just read it aloud and revel in its lyrical brilliance. Then read the play or watch a movie of it, and there, in context, the many meanings of this ruinous foreshadow will open up for you.

Macbeth knows he plots murder, but hedges when he sees the apparition of a bloody dagger. It causes him pause, until he can–despite the warning of the apparition–steel himself to proceed with his planned murder. For in the end Macbeth cannot discern the meaning of what he sees, and thus its warning is lost on him.

The image is of Patrick Stewart in his great turn as the cursed Macbeth in the 2010 film.

Posted on 31 May 2015 by richardjnovotney

Sunday Sonnet – 31 May 2015

The Spring morning breaks bright and beautiful here in Southern Wisconsin, and so it seems a perfect time to enjoy Shakespeare’s Sonnet 33, which features a complex metaphor about the shining sun–but that sun’s not always what it seems:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all triumphant splendor on my brow;
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.

Despite the poem’s bright opening, this verse is mournful. Apparently the Young Man had rejected the Poet. This sonnet, and the ones following, seem to relate to a specific episode of genuine grief, casting an autobiographical aspect to the Sonnets. These episodes don’t hold the structural majesty of a Hamlet or an Othello, but seem to muddy through a betrayal, hurt feelings, and ambivalent (but beautifully poetic) metaphoric imagery.

Anyhow, what a splendid, lovely image: the rising sun beautifies the mountains and meadows, brightens the streams, only to be blotted out by a cloud, so that the sun must sneak away into sunset. Likewise, the Young Man, a shining beauty, has let something blot his beauty–betraying himself and the Poet.

The image is of William Shakespeare, the recently rediscovered ‘Cobbe Family’ portrait. Scholars suppose this anonymous portrait of the Bard was commissioned later in his life–after Will had achieved fame–yet was painted as a representation of how Will might’ve looked in his younger years, when he was first storming the London stage.

Posted on 24 May 20158 Nov 2016 by richardjnovotney

Sunday Sonnet – 24 May 2015

Shakespeare’s 154 Sonnets are famous and enduring for many reasons: their beauty; their poetic genius of lyricism and form; their originality and refusal to bend to conventions, whether Elizabethan or modern; the fact that some of them express love for a man, and other express love for an arguably unlovable woman. But what also makes these great are their varied metaphors. One of the most unlikely set are Sonnets 123 and 124, which use the world of politics and state to make their case. 124 is full of politics.

124

If my dear love were but the child of state,
It might for Fortune’s bastard be unfather’d’
As subject to Time’s love or to Time’s hate,
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gather’d.
No, it was builded far from accident;
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the blow of thralled discontent,
Whereto the inviting time our fashion calls:
It fears not policy, that heretic,
Which works on leases of short-number’d hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic,
That it nor grows with heat nor drowns with showers.
To this I witness call the fools of time,
Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime.

Few of us today are experts in Elizabethan history and politics. Reading this poem simply for its argument–that love is greater than all human-created conventions or ideals–is evident enough. But scholars and historians have, for centuries, tried to parse out all of the specific political references. In the hands of a lesser poet, such references might cripple the work, forever rendering it anachronistic. But with Shakespeare, these references also work in a general sense. Some examples:

‘were but the child of state’: if you were something created only for profit or power (meaning, but you, dear love, are not)

‘for Fortune’s bastard be unfather’d’: the political world of Europe was littered with bastards of royal birth (meaning, but your love is true born)

‘it suffers not in smiling pomp’; the falseness of Courtly and political life (meaning, but your love shows true)

‘But all alone stands hugely politic’: politics dictate what’s important at the moment (meaning, but your love stands beyond the rage or worry of the moment)

This sonnet is full of many more examples.

So even today, any person woefully ignorant of Elizabethan goings-on can listen to or read Shakespeare’s great sonnets and come away with a sense of wonder, enlightenment and the sonnet’s central message: that love conquers time and anything man can build.

The image is of the prevailing head of state for most of Shakespeare’s life, Queen Elizabeth. The artist is uncertain, but what is certain is that this painting was commissioned by the state as political propaganda after Elizabeth’s defeat of the Armanda.

Posted on 22 May 201522 May 2015 by richardjnovotney

Friday’s Maniacal Poe Quote – 22 May 2015

Though known for horror, mysteries, poetry and criticism, Poe also wrote a series of humorous or satirical short stories. They have not aged well; for the most part, they are awful. Here is an excerpt from one of them, ‘Lionizing’, considered to be less awful than most. The story is about a fantastic nose:

There was myself. I spoke of myself;—of myself, of myself, of myself;—of Nosology, of my pamphlet, and of myself. I turned up my nose, and I spoke of myself.

“Marvellous clever man!” said the Prince.

“Superb!” said his guests:—and next morning her Grace of Bless-my-Soul paid me a visit.

“Will you go to Almack’s, pretty creature?” she said, tapping me under the chin.

“Upon honor,” said I.

“Nose and all?” she asked.

“As I live,” I replied.

“Here then is a card, my life. Shall I say you will be there?”

“Dear Duchess, with all my heart.”

“Pshaw, no!—but with all your nose?”

–from ‘Lionizing’ (1835)

This is one of the best passages from the story, mildly entertaining for its absurd banter. But the repetitive wordplay soon grows tiresome.

Part morality tale, part bad joke with a really long set-up, part satire, this tale and others like were popular in the day. In this particular tale Poe satirizes a couple of other writers of the day; today no one remembers them, and any clever conceits are lost on the modern reader. And so while my posts about Poe usually encourage to go back and read his stuff, today I’m not. Today I’d just like everyone to know that Poe had many interests and many pursuits. Thank goodness his humorous writing wasn’t the only one, or he wouldn’t be remembered today.

The image is from illustrator Harry Clarke, circa 1933. Clarke actually created an illustration for this story in a collection of Poe’s tales. Here you can see a gentleman examining the narrator’s nose.

Posted on 20 May 2015 by richardjnovotney

Hump Day Shakespearean Quote – 20 May 2015

There’s a growing circle of folks in the world who are starting to regard the canon of Shakespeare’s works to be the greatest and most eloquent repository on how humans should live their lives. That is: what makes us human? And what precepts should guide our hearts and minds–and the way we treat others? One great example of this is Portia’s speech to Shylock on the merits of mercy:

Portia

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there.

–from The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene i

Beyond its eloquence and poetic beauty, this speech is fascinating because Shakespeare puts this very learned and moral examination of the qualities of mercy on the lips of a woman.

As we know from many of my past posts, women were regarded as chattel in Elizabethan England. And while Shakespeare’s treatment of women in his plays was an evolving process–from bigoted to enlightened–The Merchant of Venice comes relatively early in Shakespeare’s career. Moreover, Portia’s great speech is delivered when she is disguised as a man. It’s as if no other character in the play would give truck to such revelatory words unless they were spoken from the mouth of…a man.

Read the speech again now: its truths are as valid today as they were over 400 years ago.

The image comes from the 2004 film of The Merchant of Venice, with the great Lynn Collins as the clever–and morally astute–Portia.

Posted on 17 May 201517 May 2015 by richardjnovotney

Sunday Sonnet – 17 May 2015

Today’s installment in the Dark Lady sequence of sonnets is rather an ugly one, and I mean that in more ways than one.

137

Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes,
That they behold, and see not what they see?
They know what beauty is, see where it lies,
Yet what the best is take the worst to be.
If eyes corrupt by over-partial looks
Be anchor’d in the bay where all men ride,
Why of eyes’ falsehood hast thou forged hooks,
Whereto the judgment of my heart is tied?
Why should my heart think that a several plot
Which my heart knows the wide world’s common place?
Or mine eyes seeing this, say this is not,
To put fair truth upon so foul a face?
In things right true my heart and eyes have erred,
And to this false plague are they now transferr’d.

As Shakespeare did with so many of his sonnets–both to the Young Man and the Dark Lady–he turns the Petrarchan Ideal of Romantic Love on its head: he doesn’t flatter his love, rather he tells her (or him in the case of the Young Man), and the entire world, the truth.

The truth in Sonnet 137 is that the Poet regards the Dark Lady as an unfaithful tramp; yet still he loves her. Unfortunately, this misogynistic meme had continued to this very day, over four centuries later, in so much of our Blues and Rock ‘n’ Roll. I can forgive Shakespeare for this, since he a) was largely a product of his time and b) he was the first writer in Western Literature to create thoroughly realistic and empathic female characters–especially in his later plays. And so he grew into a kind of gender enlightenment.

But back to Sonnet 137. The Poet uses some entertaining imagery to describe how Love has blinded him to his lady’s faults:

‘Be anchored in the bay were all men ride’: a scathing condemnation of the Dark Lady’s promiscuity.
‘Which my heart knows the wide world’s common place’: that which my heart loves is available to the whole world for the taking.
The vicious couplet: ‘In things true my heart and eyes have erred, / And to this false plague are they now transferred’: My eyes and heart have been fooled; for they love a lying and diseased woman.

So the next time your lover betrays you (be they male, female, the same gender as you or different), instead of sending them a Sam Smith song, send them this sonnet.

The image is reputed to be of Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway (though we can never really know), whom Shakespeare probably betrayed often. But back in those days, outside the realm of Petrarchan poetry, marriages were more of a practical contract than any kind of romantic or sexual hook-up.

Posted on 15 May 2015 by richardjnovotney

Friday’s Maniacal Poe Quote – 15 May 2015

Poe was known for more than horror, the grotesque or the invention of the modern detective: he also wrote a collection of fanciful musings, mournful stories about mysticism, lost islands, lost races, lovely and frail women who tragically die long before their time. ‘The Island of the Fay’ is one such yarn:

She stood erect in a singularly fragile canoe, and urged it with the mere phantom of an oar. While within the influence of the lingering sunbeams, her attitude seemed indicative of joy—but sorrow deformed it as she passed within the shade. Slowly she glided along, and at length rounded the islet and re-entered the region of light. “The revolution which has just been made by the Fay,” continued I, musingly, “is the cycle of the brief year of her life. She has floated through her winter and through her summer. She is a year nearer unto Death; for I did not fail to see that, as she came into the shade, her shadow fell from her, and was swallowed up in the dark water, making its blackness more black.”

–from ‘The Island of the Fay’ (1841)

Make no mistake; though this Fay is a fairy, an otherworldly creature, she is a woman, and as such is part of one of Poe’s favorite memes: ‘The death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical thing in the world.’

The narrator of this story watches the island from a distance, and watches the Fay circle her boat round and round about the isle, becoming more and more faint and insubstantial, until she mournfully paddles herself toward oblivion and death.

The story, first published in Graham’s in 1841, begins as an essay, but really is another short story. If you read this tale, stick with it; the first couple of pages are dry, incomprehensible mysticism crap. But the prose evolves into some of the most beautifully poetic language Poe ever put to pen.

The image comes from an uncertain origin. It appeared in Graham’s Magazine in 1841, and was intended to accompany Poe’s story. The caption to the engraving read ‘Engraved for Graham’s Magazine from an Original by Martin’, but it seems the painting is actually dated to 1819. So perhaps Poe wrote the tale based on the painting….

Posted on 14 May 201514 May 2015 by richardjnovotney

Hump Day Shakespearean Quote – 13 May 2015

One of the remarkable things about Shakespeare was how sublimely eloquent he could make his villains. And some of his villains weren’t very lovable. Take Macbeth for instance: plotter, mass-murderer, arguably a coward, and certainly overshadowed by the powerful presence of his wife, Lady Macbeth. And yet, when his wife dies, he gives one the greatest soliloquys ever put to pen:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

—Macbeth, Act V, Scene v

Macbeth has just found out Lady Macbeth is dead. And so comes this famous and astonishing speech, so eloquent, that many of its parts have been borrowed, copied and repeated to this very day.

The speech is a striking contemplation about the futility of life. Lady Macbeth? She would’ve died anyway. Such tragedies have marched on for ever. Our time on the stage and our struggles are meaningless! Everything is brief. And all our struggles and passions? They signify nothing.

Breathtaking nihilism.

The images comes from Orson Welles’ 1948 crazed and twisted film version of the Scottish play. It’s worth a view.

Posted on 6 May 2015 by richardjnovotney

Hump Day Shakespearean Quote – 06 May 2015

One of my favorite Shakespearean speeches isn’t very famous.

CONSTANCE

Thou art not holy to belie me so;
I am not mad: this hair I tear is mine;
My name is Constance; I was Geffrey’s wife;
Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost:
I am not mad: I would to heaven I were!
For then, ’tis like I should forget myself:
O, if I could, what grief should I forget!
Preach some philosophy to make me mad,
And thou shalt be canonized, cardinal;
For being not mad but sensible of grief,
My reasonable part produces reason
How I may be deliver’d of these woes,
And teaches me to kill or hang myself:
If I were mad, I should forget my son,
Or madly think a babe of clouts were he:
I am not mad; too well, too well I feel
The different plague of each calamity.

–from King John, Act III Scene iv

King John’s an early play, when the Bard had not fully perfected the soliloquy, and when his ideas and notions on women had not yet fully matured. Shakespeare was writing in a very patriarchal society where women couldn’t own property and certainly couldn’t perform on stage.

Despite all that, Shakespeare breaths a realistic and searing grief into the character of Constance–the heartbreaking despair over the loss of her child.

How did Shakespeare understand all this? His own son, Hamnet, who did at the age of 11, we’re pretty sure was still alive when this play was written. Beyond Shakespeare’s genius with language and craft, he exhibited a deep empathy and emotive power on the page, showing he would imagine the hearts of beings–that is, females–who some Elizabethans believed did not even have souls.

The image comes from a Utah Shakespeare Festival’s production of King John, with Melinda Pfundstein as the beleaguered Constance.