radiantfracture (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
radiantfracture) wrote2025-02-23 09:14 am
radiantfracture) wrote2025-02-23 09:14 am
A glimpse of lawn
I need something to look forward to in the mornings, this February. A reason to get up other than the material insistence of the body.
I thought about trying to write a poem a day, but a poem -- a poem that makes me happy, anyway -- is a particular mood. So I thought: what's the easiest possible thing? And that would be some kind of description. A glimpse.
* * * * *
In the thirteenth room, the windows look out on a wide green lawn. It's raining, and the props of some game have been abandoned. It might be croquet, except that the mallets look more complicated and, if possible, more menacing.
In the distance, two ranks of heavy trees converge like green hands encircling the lawn. Beyond is a hazy gray sky, as though the ground drops away suddenly at the edge of the grass. Sometimes a bird crosses the empty space, a tiny black flaw like a fleck of ash, or a golden one like a spark. A conflagration of birds, burning just out of sight.
These grounds are not visible from any other window, and no doorway lets out onto them.
One pane of the window has been broken and repaired with a square of black cardboard. Removing the cardboard reveals the howling void beyond. I do not recommend it.
The room smells of dust and brick, extinguished fires, ozone, the jug of water on the mantel of the empty hearth, and an animal, perhaps a dog.
* * * * * *
You can tell by the style that I have been re-reading Piranesi.
§rf§
I thought about trying to write a poem a day, but a poem -- a poem that makes me happy, anyway -- is a particular mood. So I thought: what's the easiest possible thing? And that would be some kind of description. A glimpse.
* * * * *
In the thirteenth room, the windows look out on a wide green lawn. It's raining, and the props of some game have been abandoned. It might be croquet, except that the mallets look more complicated and, if possible, more menacing.
In the distance, two ranks of heavy trees converge like green hands encircling the lawn. Beyond is a hazy gray sky, as though the ground drops away suddenly at the edge of the grass. Sometimes a bird crosses the empty space, a tiny black flaw like a fleck of ash, or a golden one like a spark. A conflagration of birds, burning just out of sight.
These grounds are not visible from any other window, and no doorway lets out onto them.
One pane of the window has been broken and repaired with a square of black cardboard. Removing the cardboard reveals the howling void beyond. I do not recommend it.
The room smells of dust and brick, extinguished fires, ozone, the jug of water on the mantel of the empty hearth, and an animal, perhaps a dog.
* * * * * *
You can tell by the style that I have been re-reading Piranesi.
§rf§
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I like that.
How is Piranesi treating you on re-read?
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The story makes me feel very clever by giving me more information than the narrator has, but still requiring me to figure some things out.
The setting is absolutely alluring to me. I want to live (I do live?) in the flooded palace.
And I can't remember if last time I appreciated as much what the book might be saying about magic (that it rests in affinity for and attention to the ecosystem, not in Powers, and that it never left -- that is the great learning, maybe?) -- but I liked that this time.
I like the book very much, except for some small qualms about the choices Clarke makes in characterization, which issues are not large enough that I can even really call them quibbles; just qualms.
(Louche gay villains, biracial hero who spends much of his time as a brainwashed noble savage -- commentary, satire, attempt to credit central insight to traditional culture, or flaw? Unsure. Certainly I appreciate louche gay villain representation as much as the next louche gay villain does.)
(ETA) It goes without saying, but should be said, that I am interested in your thoughts on the book!
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OK! So obviously, I noticed that some of the statues came from Narnia – and if I had been thinking about that, I would've thought about how one becomes a statue in Narnia – but tell me more about this!
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Maybe Clarke wondered that too. In Piranesi, it's almost the like world of the House conflates the world of Narnia, the Woods Between the Worlds, and the statues to comment on the necessity of static works of art (the House stays the House even when Mathew Rose Sorensen is shown how to leave it), of interstitial periods between creative works (the marvelously haptic marble halls/hollows filled with water like magic when the human world became disenchanted), and also of liberation from or at least the restfulness of inattention to art in quotidian, even domestic, action (Sorensen's return to this world thanks to Sarah Raphael coming to get him).
Piranesi (2020) is also complex in relation to other post-Narnia works out there, such as Pullman's Dark Materials (1995, 1997, 2000), or Grossman's The Magicians (2009, 2011, 2014). Dark Materials is a meditation on a poetically defiant and existential atheism, amongst other things, while Grossman's Magicians is strongly a meditation on the pull of magic and the struggle with depression, where magic serves to express both relief from depression but also represents causes and effects, such as trauma and dissociation. Grossman is, I think, an atheist but is working with the Narnia books in more of an agnostic, or questioning, mode--he is almost scholastic in his speculative approach to the problem of pain:
"Religion ... the answer may be disappointing, in that it's not something I devote a lot of conscious thought to. I was raised with virtually no religion at all -- my mom's Anglican, my dad's Jewish, and they did send me to a couple of years of Hebrew school, but I never had a bar mitzvah (sp?), and it wasn't something they took seriously at all.
Which is odd because so much of my work is influenced by Lewis, who was deeply religious. (Also Brideshead Revisited is a major influence, which is very much about religion.) I think what I'm trying to say is: I don't know. I did think some about the problem of evil and suffering, and why a god like Ember would allow his people to suffer, but that's as close as I come to actual grappling with these questions" (https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/2ct32c/comment/cjitm71/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button).
I think Clarke may be thinking about Pullman's existential response to Narnia and Grossman's allegory for depression, but is also doing something else. Like maybe thinking through the relationship between magic and faith or between life and art, and what a huge chasm can loom between these states of being and doing, but how that chasm has its own charms. Maybe she's also looking at pain from another angle--not exactly orthodoxy, but more than agnosis--where she can imagine the resting or the waiting between life and art as its own, beautiful place, one which we can't stay in forever, but which has its own weathers and tides, its own labyrinths and revelations, its own pleasures and frustrations, its own birds and waterways, its own life. Of course the etcher Piranesi is the Other's rather cruel but artistically deliberate reference to the etches known as the carceri d'invenzione, which in turn were examples of capriccio, invented architectures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capriccio_(art)), which in turn employ impossible geometries (like tesseracts, 4-D objects, and Mobius strips). And perhaps there is a little of Nietzsche's convalescence in there, where he imagines (although never achieves) wellness after a dead faint:
"O mine animals, answered Zarathustra, talk on thus and let me listen! It refresheth me so to hear your talk: where there is talk, there is the world as a garden unto me.
How charming it is that there are words and tones; are not words and tones rainbows and seeming bridges 'twixt the eternally separated?
To each soul belongeth another world; to each soul is every other soul a back-world.
Among the most alike doth semblance deceive most delightfully: for the smallest gap is most difficult to bridge over.
For me—how could there be an outside-of-me? There is no outside! But this we forget on hearing tones; how delightful it is that we forget!
Have not names and tones been given unto things that man may refresh himself with them? It is a beautiful folly, speaking; therewith danceth man over everything.
How lovely is all speech and all falsehoods of tones! With tones danceth our love on variegated rainbows.—
—"O Zarathustra," said then his animals, "to those who think like us, things all dance themselves: they come and hold out the hand and laugh and flee—and return.
Everything goeth, everything returneth; eternally rolleth the wheel of existence. Everything dieth, everything blossometh forth again; eternally runneth on the year of existence.
Everything breaketh, everything is integrated anew; eternally buildeth itself the same house of existence. All things separate, all things again greet one another; eternally true to itself remaineth the ring of existence.
Every moment beginneth existence, around every 'Here' rolleth the ball 'There.' The middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity" (http://4umi.com/nietzsche/zarathustra/57).
So anyhow, maybe statues, for Clarke, are like the beauty of being in the middle of a story, story everywhere, so dangerous and so lovely, where it's so hard to know the meaning of anything, you don't even know if you're making the story or being made by it, but it is so wild that it's worth it just to be part of the making. Even while she was ill for so long, and trying to write, but finding it hard. Grossman wrote, "It's probably not true to say that writing The Magicians saved my life, but it definitely saved my sanity" (https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/2ct32c/comment/cjiroiw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button).
Apparently Owen Barfield was an influence on Clarke's thinking in addition to Lewis. I don't know a huge amount about Barfield, but I understand that he embraced a fusion of Christian and Gnostic ideas to describe a historical and teleological (or even apocalyptic) process of returning to spirit, or rejoining spirit and matter, or transforming spirit through matter, or transforming matter through spirit--"original participation" and "final participation" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saving_the_Appearances#%C2%A74:_Participation). Barfield advocates, I *think*, for a belief in magic instead of dogma as source for salvation and the reconciliation of transitory and ephemeral art such as Clarke's "impossible objects" with our wish and our feeling that somehow, magic should be, and must be, real, for all of its pitfalls and mysteries; but where we do not believe in magic, he argues for hope in a future where what we imagine will be transfigured into what we do, in concert with the cosmos rather than solely our individual human artworks now (http://owenbarfield.org/BARFIELD/encyclopedia_barfieldiana/Lexicon/Final.html). Which reminds me a little of Lewis's Last Battle, where the Narnia that persists after the end is connected to everything on Earth that was ever beautiful--old houses knocked down in mortal life and overgrown British gardens, as well as paradisaical mountains and talking animals.
Maybe Clarke is writing, then, not just about waiting, when she writes about statues, but also about what happens when the wait is done, even if that is practically impossible to imagine. Clarke says, of her feelings on faith:
"'That was a very deliberate effort on my part, that Piranesi should feel like he perfectly belonged in the world in which he found himself, and that the world was benevolent, and that it really cared for him, and he for it.'
'As to whether I have a faith that is like that, I would say: I wish I did. I remember someone once saying that Christianity was very simple. And I thought, 'Well, it might have a simplicity, but it’s not a simplicity that, I think, is necessarily easily grasped by human beings'" (https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2020/11-december/features/features/susanna-clarke-rescued-by-faith-and-strictly).
Which is to say that I think Clarke has faith in the magic of art as the substance of things hoped for and evidence of things unseen. Faith then is a statue not waiting for anything. Or at least enjoying its day out before the world ends. The books is thoughtfully given its title from the name of Sorensen as prisoner, but somehow, he is free in his impossible world. Heavy essaying here. I am sure other readings are possible and better, and I'd like to read more interviews of Clarke! What do you think of the statues?