Open To Interpretation
Super Freaks
Those girls are all alright with me,
And so are you,
And I wont take you home to mother,
Or around Town wear your colors,
Only in your house
I'll be freaky too.
DolphinWords
Notes: Super Freaks...reference Rick James' song Super Freak...I don't know how many pop songs go on about 'bad' girls......hmmph......anyway...I was studying out some more on Objective Correlative, and located the essay by Washington Allston that T.S. Eliot followed on, and it's a very long tract...I just can't read it all, and only scanned it...did read the intro, which is by the editor, Richard Henry Dana!...Allston's second wife was Dana's sister I gather...Allston touched base with some notables, and was a notable himself as a painter...he did a famous portrait of Samuel Taylor Coleridge...they met and were good friends in Italy...and through Coleridge, Allston befriended the other English romantic poets...and in America he was friends with the notable poets of his time...he had money, and art skills, and like such was able to move in that crowd...and he wrote poems, which are gawdawful!...his 'fault' may have been that he was a paragon in the eyes of his contemporaries, and he himself made being a paragon his life's pursuit...and he seems to have doted on Coleridge, and made an effort to continue the story of Coleridge's Christabel with a strange poem that looks to be out of creepy horror comic book...poem tells the story of a demon that paints, and for paint, grinds up fair damsels in a mortar and pestle, and uses them to paint their likeness on canvas...I think I have that right, and as a horror movie plot...Tales From The Crypt comics I was thinking of!..., not a bad plot...but in a poem..eessh...and Geraldine shows up in it, and a lot of Coleridge's poetic style too...a curio would be to know just how much literary philosophy Allston and Coleridge went over together in their 25 year friendship...by Allston's own description, he was a disciple of Coleridge...and it makes me wonder if Objective Correlatives were actually Coleridge's notion, as was my impression...they just seem something Coleridge would go on about...Coleridge too wrote up a long tract of literary commentary that I can't read...Biographia Literaria...but I scan it too...'DavidDavid, what about the freaky girls!'...oh, well, I was scanning through Allston's tract, and ran into 'bad girls'!...
quote
Look at it then, when the beautiful serpent has cast her slough.
Let us turn to it for a moment, and behold it in league with elegant accomplishments and a subtile intellect: how complete its triumph! If ever the soul may be said to be intoxicated, it is then, when it feels the full power of a beautiful, bad woman. The fabled enchantments of the East are less strange and wonder-working than the marvellous changes which her spell has wrought. For a time every thought seems bound to her will; the eternal eye of the conscience closes before her; the everlasting truths of right and wrong sleep at her bidding; nay, things most gross and abhorred become suddenly invested with a seeming purity: till the whole mind is hers, and the bewildered victim, drunk with her charms, calls evil good. Then, what may follow? Read the annals of crime; it will tell us what follows the broken spell,--broken by the first degrading theft, the first stroke of the dagger, or the first drop of poison. The felon's eye turns upon the beautiful sorceress with loathing and abhorrence: an asp, a toad, is not more hateful! The story of Milwood has many counterparts.
Allston
unquote
...what in the world!...that passage is a bit like the 'evils of marijuana' films and propaganda...Allston can be blunt...he writes a poem about the French Revolution that has it that the Devil used it to acquire two legs and now walks the earth...Allston does really have a knack for horror!...brb...oh!...this is a good googled find!
quote
POE AND WASHINGTON ALLSTON: VISIONARY KIN
GLEN A. OMANS
http://www.eapoe.org/papers/psbbooks/pb19901d.htm
...what I was looking for is if Allston had read Edgar Allen Poe and so acquired the stylistic horror in his poem about the demon painter...Allston may not have known of Poe, but Poe knew of Allston...and both knew of Coleridge...Poe's tract on poetry much like Allston's and Coleridge's...
quote
Poe almost certainly read Coleridge’s essays “On the Principles of Genial Criticism,” published in the Bristol Journal in 1814 to publicize an exhibition of Allston’s paintings and which Allston in turn echoes in his Lectures.(10)
unquote
...now, I suspect both Allston and Poe gathered up the horror in Coleridge's poems, and adapted it to their own works (being Gothic was a trend of the time)...Oman's essay goes on about how all three had an idealized vision of beauty, manifested in beautiful girls, but seems to have missed that they had a vision of beauty in bad girls too!...brb...Allston and Coleridge have Geraldine...and looking quickly to see if Poe has a bad girl, I happen on his Berenice...
quote
The main theme lies in the question that Egaeus asks himself: "How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness?"[3] Poe also uses a character afflicted with monomania for the first time, a device he uses many times again.[2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenice_(short_story)
unquote
...a Poe story I haven't read...I'm familiar only with the most famous ones...but all three of these artists have in common that they have literary/artistic philosophies that they calculate into their artworks...like they have their own religious iconography and myths for their own religions...and this is really common among artists!...and weird...and I have it wrong...while Coleridge's Geraldine is ominous, Allston's Geraldine is a heroine that saves the distressed damsel Ellen...
quote
... ... ...
Enthroned In the midst on an emerald bright,
Fair Geraldine sat without peer;
Her robe was a gleam of the first blush of light,
And her mantle the fleece of a noon-cloud white,
And a beam of the moon was her spear.
In an accent that stole on the still charmed air
Like the first gentle language of Eve,
Thus spake from her chariot the Fairy so fair:
'I come at thy call, but, oh Paint-King, beware.
Beware if again you deceive.'
'Tis true,' said the monster, 'thou queen of my heart,
Thy portrait I oft have essay'd;
Yet ne'er to the canvass could I with my art
The least of thy wonderful beauties impart;
And my failure with scorn you repaid.
'Now I swear by the light of the Comet-King's tail!'
And he tower'd with pride as he spoke,
'If again with these magical colours I fail,
The crater of Etna shall hence be my jail,
And my food shall be sulphur and smoke.
'But if I succeed, then, oh, fair Geraldine!
Thy promise with justice I claim,
And thou, queen of Fairies, shalt ever be mine,
The bride of my bed; and thy portrait divine
Shall fill all the earth with my fame.'
He spake; when, behold, the fair Geraldine's form
On the canvass enchantingly glow'd;
His touches-they flew like the leaves in a storm;
And the pure pearly white and the carnation warm
Contending in harmony flow'd;
And now did the portrait a twin-sister seem
To the figure of Geraldine fair:
With the same
sweet
expression did faithfully teem
Each muscle; each feature; in short not a gleam
Was lost of her beautiful hair.
Twas the Fairy herself! but, alas, her blue eyes
Still a pupil did ruefully lack;
And who shall describe the terrifick surprise
That seiz'd the PAINT-KING when, behold, he descries
Not a speck on his palette of black!
'I am lost!' said the Fiend, and he shook like a leaf;
When, casting his eyes to the ground,
He saw the lost pupils of Ellen with grief
In the jaws of a mouse, and the sly little thief
Whisk away from his sight with a bound.
'I am lost!' said the Fiend, and he fell like a stone;
Then rising the Fairy in ire
With a touch of her finger she loosen'd her zone,
(While the limbs on the wall gave a terrible groan,)
And she swelled to a column of fire.
Her spear now a thunder-bolt flash'd in the air,
And sulphur the vault fill'd around:
She smote the grim monster; and now by the hair
High-lifting, she hurl'd him in speechless despair
Down the depths of the chasm profound.
Then over the picture thrice waving her spear,
'Come forth!' said the good Geraldine;
When, behold, from the canvass descending, appear
Fair Ellen, in person more lovely than e'er,
With grace more than ever divine!
from The Paint King
by Washington Allston
unquote
...sigh...what a sorry lot artists are!...oh...wanted to find this: "The story of Milwood has many counterparts."...brb...
quote
The following year, Lillo wrote his most famous play, The London Merchant, or The History of George Barnwell (1731), which is considered one of the most popular and frequently produced plays of the 18th century.[3] In October 1731 it was presented by royal command in the presence of George II and Queen Caroline.[3] It was in the genre that came to be called melodrama.[4] In The London Merchant, the subject is an apprentice who is seduced by Sarah Millwood, a "lady of pleasure," and then struggles to atone for his indiscretion throughout the remainder of the play, with little success. Lillo shows how "evil breeds evil," and Barnwell's initial dalliance eventually leads him to rob his master and murder his uncle in an attempt to secure the money needed to save Millwood's ostensibly endangered reputation.
http://www.revolvy.com/main/index.php?s=George%20Lillo&item_type=topic
wiki's take on the London Merchant...some salient things, as in noting Sara is the London merchant!
:)
DavidDavid
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment