Baroque Prose of the Day

[Nemonymous]

EDITED (11 Aug 08) to change subject title from 'Purple Patch of the Day'.
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I define 'Purple Patch' as an item of

Purple Prose

Purple_prose

, one that does not stick out like a sore thumb but gains a foothold by enhancing or infecting or enlightening or darkening its surroundings of Prose in a positively Textured way.

We want no lean or hungry prose in this thread (like Hemingway!) but Proustian or Ligottian with a meaningful (or even meaningless!) richness that tentacularly or insidiously or gorgeously or obliquely haunts you or eats away...

My first choice is a random one from an Elizabeth Bowen short story where the word 'conversationally' is basically what the passage is about.

Please provide your own Purple Patches here (even if you don't know exactly what I'm going on about which I don't really, either). :-)
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Thomas proceeded conversationally like the impeccable dentist with an infinitesimally fine instrument, choosing his area, tapping within it nearer and nearer, withdrawing at a suggestion before there had been time for a wince. He specialized in a particular kind of friendship with that eight-limbed, inscrutable, treacherous creature, the happily-married couple; adapting himself closely and lightly to the composite personality. An indifference to, an apparent unconsciousness of, life in some aspects armoured him against embarrassments. As Janet said, he would follow one into one's bedroom without noticing. Yet the too obvious 'tact', she said, was the literal word for his quality. Thomas was all finger-tips.
From 'Foothold' 1929 by Elizabeth Bowen

[Nemonymous]

Sorry, above was edited several times. Hope it makes sense now!

[Nemonymous]

But it was, and not only still here but poetically immortal; and, better still, it had comicalities which his eye had noted – out of the cliff, for instance, out of the vagaries and traceries of the limestone did look a clown’s face, ferns for eyebrows, loony eye-hollows, neb awry, fallen-open mouth where the cave yawned; and the clown did seem to be swallowing terrified gold fish as light-spangles went darting under the rock.
From Chapter Four of ‘A World of Love’ 1954 (a novel by Elizabeth Bowen)

[gveranon]

"I heal patients abandoned by charlatans to sickness or death, restore youth to the aged with marvelous elixirs. And by our Lord I would this gleaming pate might fend off gnats as well as I fend off academic sophistry. Hah! What good is a shining coat-of-mail and buckler? Why gag on stinking panaceas falsely concocted by apothecaries in sculleries? Dizzards! Graziers! Chymists swarming through filthy basements! Vermin begot to brew up foul broth! Dung-prophets! Quack-salvers! None can equal Paracelsus. I am wiser by seventy than all such cod-merchants. Thisselwarps! Whifflers! Daubers! Puffers that coagulate, sublimate and distill -- tending bubbling apparatus toward what? I would sooner tabulate every butterfly in Holland. I am the most puissant and numinous doctor on earth, ruled not by the motionless fabric of constellations but incessant study. There be a more pregnant sense to my doctrine than their wits construe."

-- Evan S. Connell, Alchymic Journals

[Nemonymous]

Thanks, gv. That looks like a much better example of a Purple Patch than any of my choices so far.
Breath-taking.
des

[Nemonymous]

The circumstances of his death were as follows. A fairly mild attack of uraemia had led to his being ordered to rest. But, an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer’s ‘View of Delft’ (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself, Bergotte ate a few potatoes, left the house, and went to the exhibition. At the first few steps he had to climb, he was overcome by an attack of dizziness. He walked past several pictures and was struck by the aridity and pointlessness of such an artificial kind of art, which was greatly inferior to the sunshine of a windswept Venetian palazzo, or of an ordinary house by the sea. At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic’s article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and, finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. “That’s how I ought to have written,” he said. “My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.” Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter. “All the same,” he said to himself, “I shouldn’t like to be the headline news of this exhibition for the evening papers.” He repeated to himself: “Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof, little patch of yellow wall.” Meanwhile he sank down on to a circular settee; whereupon he suddenly ceased to think that his life was in jeopardy and, reverting to his natural optimism, told himself: “It’s nothing, merely a touch of indigestion from those potatoes, which were undercooked.” A fresh attack struck him down; he rolled from the settee to the floor, as visitors and attendants came hurrying to his assistance. He was dead. Dead for ever? Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism offer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death. All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there – those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only – if then! – to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not dead for ever is by no means improbable. They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.

--Marcel Proust

PS: More of a yellow patch of the day!

[gveranon]

"From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that -- a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. There was a wisteria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children's feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust."

-- William Faulkner, first paragraph of Absalom, Absalom!

[G. S. Carnivals]

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon

"From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that -- a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. There was a wisteria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children's feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust." -- William Faulkner, first paragraph of Absalom, Absalom!

This, I believe, is commonly known as the "narrative hook."

[Nemonymous]

Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard
Are sweeter,

said Stephanie. Clever Gillian commented that the word desolate was the centre of the poem, almost allowing one to be taken out of it, like the word forlorn in the Nightingale. They talked about beauty is truth, truth beauty. They talked, as Stephanie had meant them to, about a verbal thing, made of words so sensual and words not sensual at all, like beauuty and truth. She talked about what it could mean, that the urn should “tease us out of thought As doth eternity." It is a funeral urn, said Zelda. That is not enough to say, said Susan, staring at Stephanie.

Things moved in the classroom, amongst eight closed minds, one urn, eight urns, nine urns, half realised, unreal, white figures whose faces and limbs could be sensed but not precisely described, bright white, the dark, the words, moving, in ones, in groups, in clusters, in and out of whatever cells held their separate and communal visual, aural or intellectual memories. Stephanie talked them out of the vocabulary she was supposed to be teaching them and left them with none, darkling. Gillian, who was enjoying the process, reflected that words could be quickly enough snatched back, when the occasion required it. Stephanie reflected that this poem was the poem she most cared for, saying ambivalently that you could not do, and need not attempt, what it required you to do, see the unseen, realise the unreal, speak what was not, and that yet it did it so that unheard melodies seemed infinitely preferable to any one might ever hope to hear. Human beings, she had thought, even as a very small child faced with The Lady of Shalott, might so easily never have hit on the accidental idea of making unreal verbal forms, they might have just lived, and dreamed, and tried to tell the truth. [...] why did he write it, and the answers had been so many and so voluble and so irrelevant to the central problem, that she closed her mind to them, even whilst effortlessly committing them to memory for future use, as Gillian now must and would.

The bell rang. They came out blinking, like owls into the bright daylight. Stephanie, gathering her books, allowed herself to wonder whether the irrelevant flying foam she had seen had come from the Nightingale, or from her own intellect, making Freudian association all too tidily between marble maidens, the Venus and the subconscious knowledge she had of the nature of that foam. It was not very nice foam.

-- A.S. Byatt (The Virgin in the Garden)

[Nemonymous]

Two today;


"Wrzesmian wasn't too popular. The works of this strange man, saturated with rampant fantasy and imbued with strong individualism, gave a most unfavourable impression by inverting accepted aesthetic-literary theories and by mocking established pseudo-truths. His output was eventually acknowledged as the product of a sick imagination, the bizarre work of an eccentric, maybe even a madman. Wrzesmian was an inconvenience for a variety of reasons and he disturbed unnecessarily, stirring peaceful waters. Thus his premature eclipse was received with a secret sigh of relief."
from 'The Area' by Stefan Grabinski

"My pictures are visionary and symbolical, and, from first to last, have seemed to be painted by someone other than myself. [...] I am thus entirely self-taught, or taught by that other within me. I am aware that my pictures lack serious technique(if there is a technique that can be distinguished from inspiration and invention). I should have given up painting them some time ago, were it not that a certain number of people seemed to find something remarkable in them, and have thus identified me with them, and made me feel mildly important."
FROM "RAVISSANTE" BY ROBERT AICKMAN