Dover Strait Doubts ; Samuel Palmer.

Bullion Dross

Since Death these days is on everyone’s lips,

we pledge ourselves to His buyers’ market;

a mortal spark will trade a loss, perhaps,

for the spoils of everlasting darkness.

                 

Samuel Palmer: 
The Lonely Tower, 
Etching, 1878-79.

You’ll see that, like Samuel Palmer, I’ve stolen a snippet of John Milton for my own ends . . . indeed, when isolated, it’s a powerful oxymoron. Since my schooldays, aged fourteen, the bullion dross of Paradise Lost has never ceased to exemplify a crisp declamatory end-stopped line, hammered into the mind like a coffin nail.

Palmer’s image of spiritual loneliness – fear of abandonment by a deity – was inspired by Milton’s lines in Il Penseroso :

Or let my lamp at midnight hour,
Be seen in some high lonely tow’r,

Palmer’s comments on the dark night of the soul summoned up by The Lonely Tower may be read in this fragment, tentatively identifying the source of his etching :

Here poetic loneliness has been attempted; not the loneliness of a desert, but a secluded spot in a genial, pastoral country, enriched also by antique relics, such as those so-called ‘Druidic stones’. The constellation of the ‘Bear’ may help to explain that the building is the tower of Il Penseroso. Two shepherds, watching their flocks, speak together of the mysterious light above them.

However, we can never be certain that Palmer was not also conversant with Matthew Arnold’s own long dark night of the soul, Dover Beach (1867), when published a decade earlier. (Dover Beach, of course, was published less than a decade after Origin of Species, 1859.)

The Monuments of Art are easily outdone by Spirits reprobate.                             To my mind, spiritual doubt is graphically symbolised by the ‘druidic stones’ distant on a ‘darkling plain’ bathed in a ‘mysterious light’ whose witnesses are ‘shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.’

Challenged in their lifetime by post-Darwinism’s retreating ‘Sea of Faith’, both Palmer-the-mystic and Arnold-the-doubter in these figurations attempted through their art each an allegorical exegesis of their Victorian generation’s conflicts of doubt as Science warred with Church for supremacy in the race to have the last word on defining the human condition . . . predestined versus evolved by natural selection.

Both worshippers at the altar of Milton (author of Eikonoklastes), they saw the contradictions thrown up by the Spirit of the Age resolved, I believe, by Milton’s own astonishing iconoclasm in characterising the sardonic Arch Fiend as altogether more appealing than the Great Architect. 

After all, to the true artist, the irresolution of a paradox is the power of its mystery. One never solves a mystery or it would no longer remain a mystery. One enters a mystery.

For Milton to challenge his faith by daring to banish Jove’s ‘Architect’ from Paradise – the fallen angel who had ‘built in Heaven high Towers’ – then send him ‘headlong’ to the mines of the Underworld to the dig out ‘ribs of gold’ and, with ‘his industrious crew’, to cast in foundries the ‘massy Ore’, scum the ‘bullion dross’, and thence to ‘build in Hell’ a palace of ‘fretted Gold’, as a tribute to the Great Adversary to outrival the Kingdom of the Creator, was beyond audacious.

For those of us whose creed is no more and no less than belief in the unbearable reality of being, which existentialists call enargeia, the contrarian impulse to ‘make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven’ is a casuistic paradox that, sophistry notwithstanding, endorses that more modest thing, the audacity of Art. 

See also

Miss Emily Dickinson Communes with the Great Dictator Mr John Milton . . . https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/10/miss-emily-dickinson-communes-with.html

That space the Evil One abstracted . . .
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/05/that-space-evil-one-abstracted-and.html

and
Ignoble Retreat at the Edge where Earth and Firmament meet . . . https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2020/02/ignoble-retreat-at-edge-where-earth-and.html

•

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

Ignoble Retreat at the Edge where Earth and Firmament meet . . .

Ubi cœlum terræ se conjungit.

                           A host of angels
                                       vent their dirge obscure
           as of a vanquished 
                                       army of cicadas
           to signify alarm or
                                       their displeasure
           called to retreat, scorned
                                       unavailing stardust.

‘. . . and now in little space the confines met
of Empyrean Heav’n and of this World . . .’
                                                                                     Paradise Lost Book 10
                                                                                              1667 John Milton

A Miotic and Dilative Cosmic Eye

In his paper published in April 1930, Zum kosmologischen Problem der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie, Albert Einstein  speculates briefly on a universe in a process of Expansion (Dilatationsbewegung) and Collapse in an eternal cycle of extinctions and rebirths. His flirtation with Oscillating Universe theory develops from a presumption of ‘spherical  space [spharischen Raum], whose radius is variable over time [and, in consequence, a progressive decrease in expansion follows, which] sets an upper boundary for the radius of the cosmos that cannot be exceeded with the passage of time . . . whereupon the whole process is gone through in the opposite sense (umgekehrtem Sinne) . . .’

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

•

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

O Fruit of that Forbidden Tree whose Mortal Taste Brought All Our Woe . . .

     . . . or did they misunderstand

 and neither heard the rattle 

of a serpentine warning

when Eve thrust the apple 

into Adam’s hand?

The Fall of Man
(1592, detail)
by Cornelis van Haarlem
(1562–1638)  

(Newspaper report, 17 October 2019)         The true way for testing a ripe Cox’s Orange Pippin apple is to shake it. The pips should rattle in the core.

See also: 
Et vocavit Adam nomen uxoris suæ, Eva . . . de ligno autem scientiæ boni et mali ne comedas. 
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/09/et-vocavit-adam-nomen-uxoris-su-heva-de.html
and
That space the Evil One abstracted . . . and attention gained with forked tongue . . .
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/05/that-space-evil-one-abstracted-and.html

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

See also: 

O Fruit of that Forbidden Tree whose Mortal Taste Brought All Our Woe . . .

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/10/o-fruit-of-that-forbidden-tree-whose.html

and

Et vocavit Adam nomen uxoris suæ, Eva . . . de ligno autem scientiæ boni et mali ne comedas. 

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/09/et-vocavit-adam-nomen-uxoris-su-heva-de.html

•

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