The question is: which is disenchanted, the world itself or the consciousness we have of it?
But human nature is so constituted, that it holds nothing to be precious and admirable but what is uncommon and of rare occurrence. The rising and setting of the sun, than which there is nothing in the world more beautiful, nothing more fit to excite our wonder, we pass by without any admiration, because they are daily presented to our eyes; while an eclipse of the sun fills the whole world with astonishment, because it happens rarely.
– Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hibernica
“… he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold. His own father said that no man who has not gone to war on horseback can ever truly understand the horse and he said that he supposed he wished that this were not so but that it was so.
– Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal. He said that if a person understood the soul of the horse then he would understand all horses that ever were.”
Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe… Importantly, eucatastrophic grace is not a denial of the sorrows and sufferings of the world. Eucatastrophic grace is, rather, commitment to hope, loyalty to hope, fidelity to hope… It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories”Comments closed
Shortly after the October Revolution in 1917, Avraamov proposed to the Commissar of Public Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, a project to burn all pianos in Russia. Avraamov perceived pianos as the ultimate symbols of the despised 12-tone, octave-based “well-tempered” scale, which he believed had adversely affected human hearing for several hundred years. Arguing in favor of the new 48-tone, microtonal, ultrachromatic scale named the “Welttonsystem,” Avraamov intended to pursue the possibility of combining the well-tempered scale with the natural one based on series of overtones.
https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2017/07/revolutionary-arseny-avraamov
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The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
– Dylan Thomas
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Comments closedI also believe that the best metaphors are infinitely flexible. Like a good metaphor will last you your whole life, and longer. Rivers and oceans and the sun and moon, palm trees and pomegranates—I genuinely believe those images won’t ever stop feeling fresh.
