Catherine Eisner: Satan

Monday 21 October 2019

Miss Emily Dickinson Communes with the Great Dictator Mr John Milton . . .

‘Do you ever yearn,’

she was asked,
on a whim,

‘to have been firstborn to
that Master of the Poem?’

‘Daughter of blind Milton?

Why, it’s true,’
she’d shrugged with the coyest of smiles,
‘for then
I would have intimately known

the Fiend’s bade angels

were verily my own.’

Blind Milton dictating Paradise Lost
to his Daughter
by Eugène Delacroix (circa 1826).

Miltonic Homophones Make Mischief.

In emulation of Milton’s daughter, Miss Dickinson transcribed correctly line 344 of Book 1 of Paradise Lost, in countless editions falsely rendered thus:

So numberless were those bad Angels seen
Hovering on wing under the Cope of Hell

for she recognised, unlike most – if not all – Miltonian scholars, that this dictated masterpiece contains many homophones and bad angels for bade angels is surely an example of the grave pitfalls that lie in wait for orality in versification.

Even a fair reading of the transcript by Milton’s daughter would not necessarily have singled out the fault, however acute the blind task-master’s ear. And she . . . ? Well, Milton’s daughter – as Emily suspected – may have allowed the error to stand to colour this stern, forbidding, Epic Voice with her own mischievous girlish descant.

Blind Milton: The meaning’s not mistaken, child?
Meek Daughter: Bade angels, bade as bidden, Father.

Do you doubt Emily’s insights; those of a preeminent bardic practitioner? Consider Milton’s verses some forty lines earlier, a narrative in which Satan arises from the fiery deep to issue rousing orders, bidding his Fallen Angels in a call to arms.

On Hell’s. . .
. . . inflamed sea he stood, and called
His legions, Angel forms, who lay entranced . . .
Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen . . .
. . . Yet to their general’s voice they soon obeyed
Innumerable. [In other words, Bade Angels.]

After all, for every Production Line worker (in this case, over 10,000 lines!) there are bound to be a few moments for a little idle diversion.

Empress of Calvary.
Though, it has to be added, anyone who personifies themselves as ‘Empress of Calvary’ is perhaps in an invidious position when presuming to find a bum note in one of Christendom’s authentic God-given masterpieces. Except, maybe, after all, an Empress of Calvary should command Bad Angels, for they would certainly deserve to be at her impious imperious bidding.

Or is that exactly what Emily meant?


Satan calling up his legions by William Blake (tempera and gold, circa 1800 - 1805)

For Great Dictators: Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Barbara Cartland, Edgar Wallace and Co. . . . see . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2012/09/great-dictators-henry-james-joseph.html

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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Thursday 31 May 2018

That space the Evil One abstracted . . . and attention gained with forked tongue . . .

This morning I was awakened by the ‘tsk-tsk!’ of a stonechat. In Provence or thereabouts they call the bird Le Tarier pâtre (the Shepherd’s Auger because it sounds like persistently abraded rock). When I hear it, I always imagine a spectral sculptor in the hills chipping away at an invisible statue of Demeter, the goddess of grain.

‘Tsk-tsk!’ It’s an imagined space with a qualitative volume.

The substance of shadow.

‘We see least with borrowed eyes,’ my art mistress once said with emphatic earnestness in my last term at school, and I’d vowed then to always question the witness of my own sight, particularly as a favoured elementary visual exercise of hers was the study of ‘counter-shapes’, that is, those structural underpinnings that give substance to a figurative composition, such as the interstices between limbs or objects and their interplay with shadows.

Perception Psychology test card.

This concern for close compositional observation very often finds expression in my fiction. Take this sentence from my narrative, Dispossession, an account of a vulnerable woman’s banishment from her family home and of her feverish scheming to revenge herself of the treacheries of her younger brother (Sister Morphine, Salt, 2008). She confesses:

I felt neglected and vulnerable, held together weakly by will alone,
like a house shored up by its own shadow.

In this case, of course, the shadow – not the house – is the powerful counter-shape that’s representative of the lost domain.

So I continue to brood on the latent power amassed in certain undiscovered counter-shapes and sometimes I’m rewarded when the art of an Old Master, when viewed afresh, unexpectedly yields – with the delayed action of a time bomb – a revelation whose explosive force is the greater for being granted five centuries after the device was primed.

Hidden emblemata revealed.

I need write little more in explanation when the subject of my recent discoveries (this past Monday) is shown to be Albrecht Dürer, hero of the German Renaissance, and when the once hidden emblemata can be seen exposed here on this page in the two drawings I’ve presumed to deconstruct, stumbled upon while riffling through a catalogue of the Dürer oeuvre.

You can see the shadowy interstices here that Dürer identified when he subtly assays the conflict between Piety and Sin – Good and Evil – for in each case the interstice of the ubiquitous Serpent appears, insinuating evil into the devotional duties of knelt prayer and priestly injunction (the First Commandment).

Is there truly a subliminal message in these interspaces of Dürer’s art? A century and a half after these images were made, the tremendous words of John Milton in Paradise Lost told of the Great Adversary whose stratagems as Tempter to suborn mankind resounded as an ordained truth . . . so, in this consideration of the latent potency of counter-shapes in religious art I think it apposite to conjoin those words with Dürer’s prophetic images, for surely they are precursors of ‘that space the Evil One abstracted’ perceived by the blind poet from out of his own darkness.

‘. . . the brute Serpent in whose shape Man I deceived:
that which to me belongs is enmity . . . between Me and Mankind;
I am to bruise his heel. . .’

‘That space the Evil One abstracted stood from his own evil . . .

To me shall be the glory sole among the Infernal Powers . . .’

‘The Potentiality of the Plane’ . . . Postscript (October 3rd 2021)

I’ve just read this by a mystic concerned (like the poet he venerated, Gerard Manley Hopkins) with the mysteries of spiritual ‘indwelling’ and the co-inherence of interrelationships . . .

‘I think in a line [as one who is sequentially conscious] – but there is the potentiality of the plane.’ This perhaps was what great art was – a momentary apprehension of the plane at the point of the line . . . the Praying Hands of Dürer . . . the Ninth Symphony – the sense of vastness in those small things was the vastness of all that had been felt in the present.

Many Dimensions by Charles Williams 1931