Showing posts with label Witchcraft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Witchcraft. Show all posts
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Thursday, March 6, 2014
Grief's Visage?
Weird brother to go with the weird sisters in Macbeth this week?
Or, Grief's Visage?
Hollow-eyed and empty-mouthed?
Can you hear the wailing?
Herald:
stoneware; sea-foam glazing.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Macduck . . . On The Blasted Heath
Self-portrait #51.
Banquo: The earth hath bubbles as the water has,
And these are of them. Whither are they vanished?
Macbeth: Into the air, and what seemed corporal melted
As breath into the wind. Would they have stayed.
(Act I, scene iii, 79-82)
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Monday, July 9, 2012
Introducing Fern Capel
I'll quote a lengthy paragraph from the first chapter of Jan Siegel's Prospero's Children. I am tempted to quote something about the elemental mermaid from the rather gripping, rather fantastic prologue, but the novel really gets going with the introduction of our main character: so sensible, so grounded Fernanda Capel.
That was the beginning, she decided long afterward. The meeting at the gallery, the sense of menace, the picture. The incident seemed trivial enough at the time but it left her feeling vaguely perturbed, as if the outlying penumbra of some far-flung shadow had brushed the borderline of her bright safe world, or she had caught a few isolated notes of an eerie music which would soon come booming from every corner of the universe, obliterating all other sound. The events of that extraordinary and terrifying summer became perhaps easier to assimilate because she was in some sort prepared: from the moment of that initial encounter an unfamiliar atmosphere began to seep into her life, unsettling her, unbalancing her cultivated equilibrium, making her vulnerable, unsure, receptive to change. She was sixteen years old, well-behaved, intelligent, motivated, a product of the Eighties in which she lived, viewing the world with a practical realism engendered by the early death of her mother and the responsibilities which had devolved on her as a result of it. Her father's easygoing manner had acquired its undercurrent of anxiety from that time, left alone with a small daughter and smaller son, but it was Fern who had gradually taken charge of the household, trading au pair for housekeeper, seeing the bills were paid, bossing her surviving parent, attempting to boss her younger brother. She had coasted through puberty and adolescence without rebellion or trauma, avoiding hard drugs, excessive alcohol, and underage sex. Her future was carefully planned, with no room for surprises. University; a suitable career; at some point, a prudent marriage. She thought of herself as grown-up but behind the sedate facade she was still a child, shutting out the unknown with illusions of security and control. That summer the illusions would be dissipated and the unknown would invade her existence, transforming the self-possessed girl into someone desperate, frightened, uncertain, alone--the raw material of an adult.
--Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children, A Del Rey Book, Random House: New York, 2001. Pages 16-17.
Now some will say that there's far too much telling and not enough showing in the above paragraph, and I can see the point of such an observation. I can also see the point of laying out the larger trajectory of Fern's summer, her transformation, in one such paragraph and then devoting three hundred pages to the How of that summer, that transformation. Desperation, fright, uncertainty, isolation: those are crucial ingredients of the stew of life, the factors without which we may never mature.
Fern Capel's career spans three books: Prospero's Children, The Dragon Charmer, and The Witch Queen. I recall reading somewhere that Jan Siegel was interested in taking the child-hero of the classics of the fantasy field--the Narnia books, The Dark is Rising books, and so forth--from that special, fantastic, and haunted childhood into adulthood. For as we all know, stories never really end, not even when the books are unwritten . . . .
That was the beginning, she decided long afterward. The meeting at the gallery, the sense of menace, the picture. The incident seemed trivial enough at the time but it left her feeling vaguely perturbed, as if the outlying penumbra of some far-flung shadow had brushed the borderline of her bright safe world, or she had caught a few isolated notes of an eerie music which would soon come booming from every corner of the universe, obliterating all other sound. The events of that extraordinary and terrifying summer became perhaps easier to assimilate because she was in some sort prepared: from the moment of that initial encounter an unfamiliar atmosphere began to seep into her life, unsettling her, unbalancing her cultivated equilibrium, making her vulnerable, unsure, receptive to change. She was sixteen years old, well-behaved, intelligent, motivated, a product of the Eighties in which she lived, viewing the world with a practical realism engendered by the early death of her mother and the responsibilities which had devolved on her as a result of it. Her father's easygoing manner had acquired its undercurrent of anxiety from that time, left alone with a small daughter and smaller son, but it was Fern who had gradually taken charge of the household, trading au pair for housekeeper, seeing the bills were paid, bossing her surviving parent, attempting to boss her younger brother. She had coasted through puberty and adolescence without rebellion or trauma, avoiding hard drugs, excessive alcohol, and underage sex. Her future was carefully planned, with no room for surprises. University; a suitable career; at some point, a prudent marriage. She thought of herself as grown-up but behind the sedate facade she was still a child, shutting out the unknown with illusions of security and control. That summer the illusions would be dissipated and the unknown would invade her existence, transforming the self-possessed girl into someone desperate, frightened, uncertain, alone--the raw material of an adult.
--Jan Siegel, Prospero's Children, A Del Rey Book, Random House: New York, 2001. Pages 16-17.
Now some will say that there's far too much telling and not enough showing in the above paragraph, and I can see the point of such an observation. I can also see the point of laying out the larger trajectory of Fern's summer, her transformation, in one such paragraph and then devoting three hundred pages to the How of that summer, that transformation. Desperation, fright, uncertainty, isolation: those are crucial ingredients of the stew of life, the factors without which we may never mature.
Fern Capel's career spans three books: Prospero's Children, The Dragon Charmer, and The Witch Queen. I recall reading somewhere that Jan Siegel was interested in taking the child-hero of the classics of the fantasy field--the Narnia books, The Dark is Rising books, and so forth--from that special, fantastic, and haunted childhood into adulthood. For as we all know, stories never really end, not even when the books are unwritten . . . .
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn?
I love my alma mater, warts and all. And, to keep with that metaphor, she'll bewitch you if you give her half a chance. Half-Circe, half-Sibyl of Cumae?
Whenever I approach that gate, I hear Virgilian echoes; I just do.
(Homeric resonances too: Holy moly, Hermes!)
Let's hear it, especially, for Latin Summer Workshop '88!
"O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem." --Virgil, The Aeneid, from Book I.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Dusk
I call this one The Watcher.
Sculpture mix; nutmeg and brown glazing.
Tonight felt right for pulling him out and taking a few potshots.
Dusky, dusky mood.
My mother would have been 76 today.
From my earliest days, she fostered my devotion to stories and magic.
Real magic: the sort you can find in the webbing of a frog's foot, in the whiskers of a ginger cat, in the earth around a tomato plant's roots, and in the sand, rock, and salt of the seashore. Driftwood, windfall, found coin. I am the son of a witch, as she always claimed, for which I am so grateful.
I wish you'd found the time and space to learn the piano, Mom. When I realize that I've been putting something -- some possible joy, however arduous or demanding -- off for too too long, I think of that wish of yours.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
