On Fri, 25 Jul 1997, Peter Larkin wrote:
whether pastoral did start there
> as an urbane Alexandrian charade, so was urban-here rural-there
> directed and had an ironic shuttling between the two built into it
> from the first, or whether it was already more thickly burdened than
> that (pointing to the non-autonomy of the city) ie based on dim
> memories of rural cults and festivals as some believe. That would
> make memory the key issue in pastoral, and also submergence or loss
> of place rather than a groundless evocation of some weightlessly
> remote place (pastoral is not utopia after all).
I'd like to believe the rural-race-memory oral-tradition model -
particularly since
(a) that doesn't assume that "nature" is somewhere else (I have a garbled
quote in my mind, from, I think, one of the Sierra Papers, where the
writer envisages an eco-museum with a stovepipe in it, captioned, "from
the days when there was an away to sling things to"...). Emptying the
binn/skips apart, I'm wary of a poetic which endorses a "here" and
"elsewhere" split...
(b) that "empowers" present day bucolics (perhaps including JK & RC) to
enact new moves on the tradition. My self-recycling wrap is only one of a
number of possibilities, following up John's on-site report. Play that
Pentium reed, Corin! It is the subject-matter, the (infilled) ground we
stamp on.
RC
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