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
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What dull barbarians are not proud of
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