The Cat's Dream

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Nurture & Nourishment

Exclusive: AN ORIGINAL STORY BY NOËLLE MACKAY

Romantic fictions and casualties

PART THREE: SILENCE

 Silence by Fuseli, 1799-1801
Oil on canvas, Kunsthaus, Zurich. Image source: WGA

The lightning struck, and receded, the earth quaked and settled again. Resolute, she never spoke again of love and betrayal. She began to believe that the artist had never loved her for her own sake, but more for the sensation of passion, a drama of love, in which she and her sister had been no more to him than sparks of her mother's fire. She knew her mother and he still met, an ageing goddess and her acolyte, and she did not say a word of reproach to either of them.

But the worm had entered the bud. During the next five years, while his fame as an artist and a lover spread, and queens and princes were seduced by him, and still he wore his sweet-sad smile, she started to wither away until her own muse fled - “I sing but little now to what I did once”. She had lived only to give joy to those she loved, and she had no joy left. She had reached the limits of feeling. She lived, but it was the posthumous existence of despair. Every asthma attack was like a drowning, in which to die would be easier than the struggle for breath. She yielded to invalidism as if it was a lover. 

She never lost faith in her mother, she would always be the chief priestess of the Tragic Muse, ensuring nothing distracted the goddess, knowing that the slightest shift of wind might upset the sacred artifice of her art, causing the goddess to misjudge her timing or overreach her power to represent emotion from feeling too much, performing worst when she most ardently wished to do better than ever.[1]

Her breath got shorter and shorter. Even when she knew she was dying, the eldest daughter did not want to cause her mother trouble. There was never any question that the goddess must continue working while her daughter was ill, often travelling far away, giving spiritual sustenance to her worshippers on other islands to pay for medicine, food, clothing and lodgings for her family.  All her life the girl had suffered in her mother's absence which created a vacancy in her heart that nothing else could fill [2] but she and her father, a mere mortal player, not a god, who relied on his wife's earnings to maintain their household, kept the worst news to themselves.

Drawing of Sarah Siddons, artist and date unknown  © Victoria and Albert Museum 

 

At last there came a day when an attendant dared tell the Tragic Muse that her daughter was dying. "Will you believe I must play tonight!" [3] exclaimed the distraught mother. She had always known that she was not immortal, as people wanted her to be, but rather an heroic victim of her own powers of arousing emotion. She broke her contract so she could rush home, but her journey across the sea was delayed by great storms, which neither her dramatic arts nor maternal appeals could appease, and when she arrived, her lovely child, her sweet Sally, was already dead.

Claude-Joseph Vernet, Nocturnal Seastorm 1752
Oil on canvas. Private collection. Image source WGA

[1] Paraphrasing Sarah Siddons' much quoted piece of self-criticism that holds true for all actors, from her letter to Rev. Whalley, 16 July, 1781, published in The Kembles, Percy Fitzgerald, 1871: "Sorry am I to say, that I have often observed I have performed worst when I have most ardently wished to do better than ever"[2] Paraphrasing Letter from Sally Siddons to Miss Bird, 15 September, 1798, quoted by F.M.W. Parsons, The Incomparable Siddons, 1909, p.199.
[3] Paraphrasing Letter from Mrs Siddons to Mrs Fitzhugh, quoted by Parsons, p.204

Extract from a memoir by Sarah Vernon

Few people’s childhood impressions are recalled with as much honesty and poignant detail as Sarah's. She conjures the enormity of the smallest things, and the intensity of the desire to own every emotion, every moment.

With many thanks to Sarah, the first part of COMFORT IN A COTTON FROCK is reblogged from First Night Design

I wish Anne would come. Wednesday Anne. I want to help her today: I want to use the dustpan and brush. She’s broken her arm again so she can’t do any cleaning without me. I love her. How pretty you are, she says. I couldn’t do any of this without your help, she says. How I love her. She’s been around for ages and is even older than Mummy and Daddy. She used to clean for Ellen Terry and Ellen Terry was very famous and from very, very long ago. Charles-Who-Had-His-Head-Chopped-Off was around then. I think. I want to be Ellen Terry.....

The Gathering in a Park

 Watteau: L'Assemblée dans un parc, oil on wood, 1716-17, Musée du Louvre. 

Image source: WGA

Last February, we went to the island of Ruegen on the weekend of a great storm. The Baltic raged for a day and a night, trees were torn out of the cliffs, and firefighters in the state of Mecklenburg Vorpommern.were called out two hundred times. Next morning, the coast looked innocent, as if no violence had been committed, its pale sand beaches, white rock, and calm grey sea as pure as in Friedrich’s view of the chalk cliffs, jagged as canines, guarding the inverted triangle of water beyond.

detail of Caspar David Friedrich's Chalk Cliffs on Ruegen

One day, a few weeks after our trip, I caught up with myself, nine months in, a full term in which....

distemperature

drowning garden

video by Martin Huebscher Photography

...the moon (the governess of floods),
Pale in her anger, washes all the air

...And thorough this distemperature, we see
The seasons alter...

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, Scene 1 

AFTER THE STORM (A Story)

More distemperature: SPRING, SUMMER, DENIAL

contrablog:

 

A fine dose of revenge is in every complaint. Nietzsche

WORLD'S END GARDEN

 ...I am re-begot

Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.

John Donne, A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy's Day, Being The Shortest Day

Part One GARDEN
Part Two PUNISHMENT
Part Three RE-BEGOT
Part Four BOUNDARIES
Part Five SWORD
Part Six BESIEGED
Part Seven BREACHED
Part Eight GARDEN
© Pippa Rathborne 2012

 
Like all histories, this is a product of the imagination, based on real events. Every word is true, but, except for the first person singular and plural, the characters are fictional composites and any resemblance to living persons is unintended and purely coincidental.

I think that whenever one has something unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid.

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

arc stories

Destiny's vanishing point: garden arcade at Hever, Kent, photo by Pippa Rathborne

one of Chesterton's "spiritual puns" photo by Martin Huebscher Photography

human islands

"You must move on". What do they mean? Forget? After three months, even friends get impatient. Grief is now my stigma, my badge of shame. Move On means, I think, Snap Out Of It. "You should be over it by now".When they ask me how I feel, I tell them I am fine. I wonder, have they never been lost....

BOUNDARIES part four of Re-begot...

Tweets from a funeral

Someone boasts he’s taken a photo of me with my tongue hanging out.

“Be histrionic as you like at the funeral” -

display of emotion is socially approved there,

1930s crematorium purpose-built

for bourgeois ritual, convenience-grief.
(but not alone at home, in bed at night,

nor in the street, outside the shops,

nor by the river in the dark,

the places where other animals freely howl)

- No, thanks.....

There are things one does not write
(remark attributed to Napoleon by Stendhal, in The Red and the Black)

Detail of APOLLO REVEALING HIS DIVINITY by Boucher, 1750.  

The apollonion messenger stood us up...

life through DvP's eyes

 

The statue of Fragonard and his muse in Grasse 

(photo by PJR)

Tell us how you feel, Hecuba

We still need catharsis, we are addicted to it, but it isn't morally improving anymore.

Nowadays, sometimes more out of self-gratification than sympathy, we like to vicariously experience other people's extreme emotions and subject them, whether jubilant or suffering, to instant inquisition. Empathy is recognized as a professional tool that could sometimes be mistaken for politeness ("I hope your  journey here was alright?", "I'm sorry about that") and as a fashionable attribute, usually mistaken for compassion.

Traditionally this sort of feelgood factor used to be regulated, produced artificially through dramatic representation, a consensual imaginative act given the morally improving name of catharsis. Only the emotion aroused in the audience was real. How the actor and dramatist achieve their ends, through application of techniques or painful substitution of themselves, does not matter; it is the powerful mystery of their art. 

The intoxicating effects of this emotional communion were acknowledged in ancient Greek civilization by associating theatre with, of all the gods, mood-altering, self-gratifying, subconscious-dwelling Dionysus, not the rational Apollo, overall patron of poetry and the performing arts. The same experience has been undergone by mystics of all religions, reproducing the passion of sacrificial gods and saints. The downside of this was scapegoating and witch-hunting, practices condemned by modern society.

We still need catharsis, we are addicted to it, but it isn't morally improving anymore. Sated with simulated realities, we demand confessions from real living persons. We are angry and suspicious if they deny us with "no comment" or "how the **** do you think I feel?" The description of feeling has become an evasion, more vital to us than the real thing. 

We do not always make a moral distinction between sharing someone else's joy and our own Schadenfreude. We applaud ourselves for feeling empathy, like trainee professionals awarded extra marks for showing it to patients or clients, regardless that compassion as a virtue is not enjoyed, but given to alleviate the suffering of others. We are upset if anyone suggests our interest is motivated by addiction to gossip rather than selfless concern about other people's lives and deaths; a good murder is as alluring as a wedding. 

It's the modern secular game, the coveting of souls for entertainment. The thrill wears off; we need to move on to the next one. Like tragedies in five acts, the limits of compassion for an individual are set for the comfort of the wider community. What's Hecuba to any of us, or us to Hecuba, after three hours?  

"How do you feel?" 

Detail of Antonio Tempesta's print, c.1600, of Hecuba, the inconvenient mourner who took her grief too far for the communal good, lamenting over the corpses of her children.

**********************************

Please don’t ask me: “How do you feel?” In the garden of how I feel nothing....

The falsified self, continued

PRISONER OF FREE WILL

There are worse jobs: shielded by tree bark from harassment, she is free to be beautiful, intellectual and adorable forever. 
But is she happy?

Mortal anguish made exquisite through artistic metamorphosis:  
detail of Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, Marble, 1622 - 25, Galleria Borghese, Rome.

The transformation of Daphne from chaste nymph into laurel tree is portrayed by both Ovid in poetic form and Bernini in sculpture as a sexual experience, even though it is ostensibly sex that she is running away from. Ovid emphasizes the languor of her surrender to a consummation she has prayed for, the death of carnal existence in exchange for spiritual and cerebral life. Revulsed by the lust her beauty stimulates in other people, perpetually in flight from sexual contact - and Ovid in Metamorphoses constantly reminds us how fast she is, one of those athletic women who outrun men in classical mythology - she is an ethereal, wistful being even before she is changed from human to plant form, a dutiful daughter who doesn't want to grow up and bear children of her own, who slips away from flesh-pains as gently as Sleeping Beauty, acquiescent to her new vocation as a symbol of other people's triumphs, conferring prestige without feelings or sensations of her own. There are worse jobs: protected by bark from sexual harassment, she is allowed to be decorative and intellectual forever. 

The significant point about Ovid's Daphne is that she wants to be changed, though she has no say in how or to what. Bernini's Daphne, pursued by Apollo, is traumatized, less of a conflicted personality than a victim of attempted assault, caught in the moment of violent transition....

The falsified self

HECUBA AND THE LANGUAGE OF EMOTION

part two

Disinterested used to mean impartial

HECUBA AND THE LANGUAGE OF EMOTION

part one

Every time a TV arts programme critic describes a film or performance as "visceral", I imagine piles of cocktail sausages, when I'm sure I should be seeing shining entrails. The word doesn't cut the mustard any more. I don't feel my fingers touching vile jelly, like Cornwall does when he plucks out Gloucester's eyes.

HECUBA TRANSFORMED BY GRIEF INTO A DOG

AFTER GOUGING OUT THE EYES OF POLYMESTOR IN REVENGE FOR THE DEATH OF HER YOUNGEST SON

detail of Johann Wilhelm Baur's illustration to Ovid's Metamorphoses,1659 edition

"....Hecuba,

....was driven mad by sorrow

and began barking like a dog...

Such mighty power had grief to wrench her soul"
Dante, Inferno 

When, in the cause of truthful citation, I put the quotation from the thirtieth Canto in Roman numerals, my blog was overrun by lascivious spybots...

World's End gentrification

                 “Mad bitch, mad bitch,

                     we hear that thing you do -

                          laughing that turns to crying -

                        mad bitch, it’s got to stop"....

RE-BEGOT

Please don’t ask me how I feel

because I don’t think you’ll believe me.

What I feel is bigger than me, inside and outside me,

dark matter swallowing and swallowed;
weight of emptiness, a heavy heart,
pulls down rocks and torrents
a storm raging that no-one else sees or hears,
a vacuum filled with shrieking motion.
Her death: event horizon.
My grief: crossing where I’m torn apart
This is not pathetic fallacy;
it is the geography of me....

THE REAVING

Detail of APOLLO REVEALING HIS DIVINITY TO THE SHEPHERDESS ISSE by Boucher, 1750. Original painting at Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tours

  

THE WRONG ENDING,
when the apollonian messenger stood us up
and the unsolicited intervention of a hospice aggravated the suffering of a private death, and the reavers came for the already bereft....

The Yearning Garden: Part Eight of Rebegot

GARDEN

Photo by Martin Huebscher Photography

 every garden is a restoration.....