John Crowley's LJ (RSS Feed)
02-18-2008, 05:07 AM
Over at http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif (http://joculum.livejournal.com/profile)joculum (http://joculum.livejournal.com/)'s place he was talking about Jungian archetypes and how new brain theory and study may give them more substance (i.e. grounding in physiology) than we may have thought, if we care.
I was reminded that in recently re-reading Borges's Other Inquisitions (essays from the 40s and 50s) I came upon his essay on the near-to-last moments in Dante's Purgatorio, when Dante has at last achieved the Earthly Paradise at the top of the seven-story mountain, and Beatrice descends from heaven to speak to him, in the company of some fabulous beasts of allegorical but ambiguous import. She comes not to encourage him to mount up to the next plane, but to criticize him for coming so far when his own heart is so full of sin. She demands that he come clean and confess his errors, and he does so, and weeps I won't repeat Borges's delicate subtlety in pondering this weird scene, except that he makes the case that this scene was an actual dream of Dante's, and that he constructed the entire sequence of three realms just to be able to insert it.
What amazed me reading it (in a volume I've had for many years and haven't looked into for thirty at least; the pages broke from the binding as I turned them) was how the scene exactly matched, in substance and in import, the climactic (to me) but not final (as it is not final in Dante) scene in Endless Things, the last volume of the Ægypt series. In that scene, Pierce and Roo (the last of the triple feminine entity he's been drawn to) reach a place at the top of a mountain in Central America (a peak in Darien, in fact) and sit there and "held hands like the First Boy and Girl", and two strange beasts come out of the forest. And there Pierce, not at Roo's prompting but because of her presence and that place, confesses to her how he had had an imaginary son of twelve or so with whom he'd had an imaginary sexual relationship; he tells all, and weeps. "Tears shed in Eden," the text says.
Readers will be aware that the entire series is about climbing a mountain, and that the top of the mountain is reached twice as the book concludes, this being the first time and the last page of the books the second. Harold Bloom has written that I am writing my own Commedia but started with the Paradiso (Little, Big) and have now completed the Purgatorio. (That leaves an as yet unwritten Inferno.) So it's appropriate that this scene so closely resemble the same scene in the Purgatorio.
The strange thing is that among the very many great books I haven't read is the Purgatorio. I had read the Borges essay on this moment, but retained so little of it that I didn't even recall reading it before. In fact I don't know that I ever did before; all I know is that I possessed the book that contains it, and do remember many of the other essays. And just as strange to me is that the scene in my book is partly autobiographical -- the setting, the mountaintop, the animals, though not the conversation or remorse or any of that. And I knew for years that I would place that moment of Pierce's purgation there in that place I had been in.
How do you like that? Is that transtemporal or mystic or archetypal or what? Maybe not, but it struck me as possibly drawn from the same black pool as Dante's dream, if Borges is right about that: the paradise of Adam and Eve, where the river of forgetfulness runs, yet where we must remember and confess our greatest sins.
(Original Post) (http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/79248.html)
I was reminded that in recently re-reading Borges's Other Inquisitions (essays from the 40s and 50s) I came upon his essay on the near-to-last moments in Dante's Purgatorio, when Dante has at last achieved the Earthly Paradise at the top of the seven-story mountain, and Beatrice descends from heaven to speak to him, in the company of some fabulous beasts of allegorical but ambiguous import. She comes not to encourage him to mount up to the next plane, but to criticize him for coming so far when his own heart is so full of sin. She demands that he come clean and confess his errors, and he does so, and weeps I won't repeat Borges's delicate subtlety in pondering this weird scene, except that he makes the case that this scene was an actual dream of Dante's, and that he constructed the entire sequence of three realms just to be able to insert it.
What amazed me reading it (in a volume I've had for many years and haven't looked into for thirty at least; the pages broke from the binding as I turned them) was how the scene exactly matched, in substance and in import, the climactic (to me) but not final (as it is not final in Dante) scene in Endless Things, the last volume of the Ægypt series. In that scene, Pierce and Roo (the last of the triple feminine entity he's been drawn to) reach a place at the top of a mountain in Central America (a peak in Darien, in fact) and sit there and "held hands like the First Boy and Girl", and two strange beasts come out of the forest. And there Pierce, not at Roo's prompting but because of her presence and that place, confesses to her how he had had an imaginary son of twelve or so with whom he'd had an imaginary sexual relationship; he tells all, and weeps. "Tears shed in Eden," the text says.
Readers will be aware that the entire series is about climbing a mountain, and that the top of the mountain is reached twice as the book concludes, this being the first time and the last page of the books the second. Harold Bloom has written that I am writing my own Commedia but started with the Paradiso (Little, Big) and have now completed the Purgatorio. (That leaves an as yet unwritten Inferno.) So it's appropriate that this scene so closely resemble the same scene in the Purgatorio.
The strange thing is that among the very many great books I haven't read is the Purgatorio. I had read the Borges essay on this moment, but retained so little of it that I didn't even recall reading it before. In fact I don't know that I ever did before; all I know is that I possessed the book that contains it, and do remember many of the other essays. And just as strange to me is that the scene in my book is partly autobiographical -- the setting, the mountaintop, the animals, though not the conversation or remorse or any of that. And I knew for years that I would place that moment of Pierce's purgation there in that place I had been in.
How do you like that? Is that transtemporal or mystic or archetypal or what? Maybe not, but it struck me as possibly drawn from the same black pool as Dante's dream, if Borges is right about that: the paradise of Adam and Eve, where the river of forgetfulness runs, yet where we must remember and confess our greatest sins.
(Original Post) (http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/79248.html)