I don't meet many undead in Cornwall, Patrick. I usually go in the tourist
off season.
I do place him, at one point, in Cornwall; but he was located much of the
time on what was then called Ennor. (I am experimenting with dropping that
name and just saying _island_ to avoid the worst excess of the
literal-minded)
I believe I am right in saying that Domesday but maybe it was some other
document has the Scilly archipelago as a foreign dependency. It's all a
point of view; and a point of view which took into account the dangerous
sea might see it as further than those of us who now get in a diesel ferry
or even a helicopter. Until recently you might not get there; you might
not get back. People still die in those seas.
When I was last there it occurred to me it was taking longer to travel to
the next island than the journey to the mainland would take when it is
airflight only
Coming back to your question and also its undertone, I have no belief at
all that I am aware of in the dead as a meaningful category of entity.
Nothing is known of the man called Elidius who walked on Scilly but he may
or may not have had a variety of beliefs. His interest for me is the
degree to which he may have had several different systems simultaneously.
Often it is much the same now.
It appears that the church in Morvah (west of St Ives) was put under
special measures around 1400 probably for praying both to Jesus and a
female sea deity... Plenty of such shrines survive -- St Warna's on Scilly
seems to have been actively used quite recently (historically) and the one
north of Madron still is if we count new age as religious belief -- _the
goddess_ getting muddled with _the goddess_; but they were disguised as
baptistries... or the believers were more circumspect when speaking to the
inspectorate. The Morvah sacred spring remains a heap of rubble -- or did
a few years back -- 600 years on
BUT I am intensely interested in beliefs about the dead.
I used to subscribe to the idea that the best thing to do is just ignore
belief and believers; and we should all progress to a materialist
rationality; but it caused me problems. One was called John Donne, for
instance. I had a peer who advised me / anyone not to read anyone who
writes about God.
Oh dear.
I have been scribbling away at this for some years and often wondered how
it would be received... But at a time when all over the town of Homs there
are people chanting God is great every time an artillery shell lands, I am
not greatly worried.
I take the piss out of Elidius and have no axe to grind to my best
awareness; but it is a serious attempt at... something or other
Lawrence
On Fri, February 10, 2012 17:04, Patrick McManus wrote:
> Is Elidius one of the undead that you often meet in Cornwall??
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Poetryetc: poetry and poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Douglas Barbour
> Sent: 10 February 2012 16:20
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Elidius on his island
>
>
> It does very well, Lawrence. And I get it, what youre working your way
> into & through.... The series will grow, & should prove very interesting,
> indeed....
>
> Doug
>
>
>
> On 2012-02-10, at 4:33 AM, Lawrence Upton wrote:
>
>
>> Hi Doug
>>
>>
>> This is a really good question. Yours are -- I *was going to say
>> usually are but I don't remember any bad ones -- but this is especially
>> good, going way beyond a notional _why are you writing funny?_
>>
>> And, leaving aside Ms Stein's _why don't you read the way I write?_, I
>> shall endeavour to answer.
>>
>> I thought it best not to say anything about these poems initially.I
>> have said so much in recent times; and I do not yet have a clear idea of
>> what I am doing... Questions may help me learn if people wish to ask
>> them. I think that is preferable to clearing my throat and saying: Now
>> let me tell you next about *this book
>>
>> I am not consciously using a particular form or dialect of speech,
>> though it might well fit somewhere. It doesn't sound unduly odd to me and
>> I associate it, quite possibly wrongly, to the builders' _make
>> good_ when they fill cracks in plaster, render a wall etc.
>>
>> And let us not forget J Luc Picard's _Make it so_
>>
>>
>> I do want him to sound, sometimes anyway, a little stilted or odd for
>> a variety of inchoate and less than inchoate reasons. He lived a long
>> time ago. (What language he spoke is another matter. Depending on where
>> in time we place him it may be that the British Celtic languages had not
>> differentiated themselves from each other *according *to *scholars *of
>> *such *matters -- though there would surely have been as
>> much variation as there is at any time or place, not quite the same
>> thing. I don't want to rely too much on any one position, which saves me
>> mugging up on them all beyond what I pick up by following my amateur
>> scholar's nose, because it'll change and change again as research and
>> speculation follows research and speculation.)
>>
>> I want to be vague about when he lived. I quite him being around when
>> the Romans had recently left. I want him around when the Vikings arrived.
>> And a bit later wouldn't hurt. They all have interesting
>> possibilities although it's his psychology which interests me rather
>> than, pace Ms Renault and others, his realistic story.
>>
>> I am no Mary Renault and do not have the inclination to try. These
>> stories and accounts of Elidius have come down from such a variety of
>> supposed sources, some of them literary enhancement and even invention,
>> that there needs to be a degree of inconsistency if it is to be
> _believable_. e.g.
>
>> Arthur, Tristan
>>
>>
>> (I don't want it to be too believable though. I think I have told here
>> the story of someone thinking I am the son of a Polish-Ukrainian doctor
>> because I once told the story of one such in first person performance;
>> and that wasn't useful. (Nor was the person who thought my simulation in
>> that performance of a man dying was a simulation of me masturbating, and
>> complained.))
>>
>> That line, _make open_ etc wrote itself from my subjectivity. I cannot
>> say that I thought through this or that and chose the words; not
> consciously.
>> It came out of what Csikszentmihalyi calls flow... It is the man
>> himself -- Elidius not the Hungarian American, with a slightly clumsy
>> slightly pompous way of speaking; also, I suppose, a desire to control
>> -- not
>> just opening but making open - when I open you you'll stay open.
>> Elidius'
>> perceptual attitude is that when the door is closed, it's to stay closed
>> an d he attributes the same will-power to the inanimate. His concern is
>> with the dead, or so he thinks, and they are not kept from him even by
>> walls. I know from the many texts I am working on that he is somewhat
>> reconciled to the dead's incursion. It's also his perception that the
>> wind and maybe everything out there is going to wreck his attempt at
>> privacy and security.
>>
>> How's that? Maybe the best I can do. And thank you very much for your
>> energising interest.
>>
>> L
>>
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
> http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> Wednesdays'
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10
> .h
> tml
>
> What dull barbarians are not proud of
> their dullness and barbarism?
>
> Thackeray
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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