Dame Edith Sitwell

[Nemonymous]

Seems Ligottian to me:

Clowns' Houses

BENEATH the flat and paper sky
The sun, a demon's eye,
Glowed through the air, that mask of glass;
All wand'ring sounds that pass

Seemed out of tune, as if the light
Were fiddle-strings pulled tight.
The market-square with spire and bell
Clanged out the hour in Hell;

The busy chatter of the heat
Shrilled like a parakeet;
And shuddering at the noonday light
The dust lay dead and white

As powder on a mummy's face,
Or fawned with simian grace
Round booths with many a hard bright toy
And wooden brittle joy:

The cap and bells of Time the Clown
That, jangling, whistled down
Young cherubs hidden in the guise
Of every bird that flies;

And star-bright masks for youth to wear,
Lest any dream that fare
--Bright pilgrim--past our ken, should see
Hints of Reality.

Upon the sharp-set grass, shrill-green,
Tall trees like rattles lean,
And jangle sharp and dissily;
But when night falls they sign

Till Pierrot moon steals slyly in,
His face more white than sin,
Black-masked, and with cool touch lays bare
Each cherry, plum, and pear.

Then underneath the veiled eyes
Of houses, darkness lies--
Tall houses; like a hopeless prayer
They cleave the sly dumb air.

Blind are those houses, paper-thin
Old shadows hid therein,
With sly and crazy movements creep
Like marionettes, and weep.

Tall windows show Infinity;
And, hard reality,
The candles weep and pry and dance
Like lives mocked at by Chance.

The rooms are vast as Sleep within;
When once I ventured in,
Chill Silence, like a surging sea,
Slowly enveloped me.

Dame Edith Sitwell (1887-1964)

[G. S. Carnivals]

des, this poem is an astounding addition to TLO's content. It resonates on many different levels and suggests the Ligottian motifs which we know and love. It belongs here. Thank you, kind sir!

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

[Nemonymous]

Thanks, GSC.
Quite a find finding this poem, I hope. Written 1918.

I always recall Edith Sitwell - dressed in black and beads - appearing on
chat shows of fifties/early sixties black & white BBC TV. An eccentric figure that haunts me...
She also provided the poems for Sir Willam Walton's truly amazing FAÇADE.
des

[gveranon]

I’d never read any Dame Edith Sitwell before; this makes me want to read more. The similarity with Ligotti is uncanny. Not only all those Ligottian motifs packed together into one poem, but the animating vision behind the poem: that things are not quite what they seem, or rather that things as they seem are already pretty awful but portend a further dreadful revelation.

Facetiously, I wonder if Dame Edith Sitwell didn’t really die but is 120 years old and writing under the name “Thomas Ligotti.” Or – another possibility – I can’t help but notice that the initials for Dame Edith Sitwell are des. Hmm...

More seriously, this puts me in mind of Borges’s “Kafka and His Precursors.” (Sorry for the pretentiousness, but this is highly relevant to the Sitwell-Ligotti resemblance, I think.) Here is a quotation from the Borges essay (just substitute Sitwell-Ligotti for Browning-Kafka):

“The poem 'Fears and Scruples' by Browning foretells Kafka’s work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics’ vocabulary, the word ‘precursor’is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”

So saith Borges.

[Nemonymous]

From this site re Bierce and Borges:
http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/b...de/bierce.html :
"I usually give a full biographical lecture on Bierce because he was such a character and such a successful muckraker. Students are always fascinated by his disappearance--no skeleton was ever found. (Several expeditions were mounted and, since he was over 6 feet tall and had a full head of pure white hair, the rumors of his every move were rampant: but there has never been confirmation of his death.) Brigid Brophy insists he did not die but merely came back again when the world was more ready for his wild, stylistic experiments. According to Brophy, he now writes under the nom de plume of "Jorge Luis Borges." (Actually, since Borges died recently, I suppose that must mean Bierce finally did, too.)"
===============

Above relevant to gveranon's precursor-cursor symbiosis point on Ligotti/Sitwell and Browning/Kafka (Borges) ??

gveranon: I can’t help but notice that the initials for Dame Edith Sitwell are des. Hmm...

Blimey!!
des

[Nemonymous]

Following the incredibilties above, on this page:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Walton-Fa%C3%A7ade-Poems-Edith-Sitwell/dp/B000025RVY
you can hear five of the Sitwell poems being performed from Walton's FAÇADE
des

[gveranon]

I’m not sure about the relations between Bierce and Borges, because I haven’t read any of Bierce’s fiction; I’ve only pawed through The Devil’s Dictionary (which is great).

Brigid Brophy’s notion is appropriately Borgesian, since Borges liked to play with the philosophically idealist idea that all authors are ultimately one. (I hope I’m not perpetrating a crude travesty of his position here, since I’m just relying on my memory and don’t have access to any of his books right now. He always managed to be nuanced, sly, and ironical in his presentations of this theme -- so “all authors are ultimately one” is probably not a good way to phrase it.) I did find this quote on the internet:

“All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.”
-- "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"

What I like about the quote from “Kafka and His Precursors” is that it views the Browning-Kafka (or for our purposes, Sitwell-Ligotti) symbiosis from the standpoint of the reader rather than from the standpoint of the later author. (After all, we don’t know if Thomas Ligotti has ever read Sitwell or if he would feel that the comparison is apt.) But anyone who has read and appreciated Ligotti is bound to read the Sitwell poem in a Ligottian way – and probably see more in it (or at least see it somewhat differently) than someone who hasn’t read Ligotti. In other words, the resemblance between the two authors is partly in our heads; the reader who has read both is inevitably part of the idealist mind-meld, in a way that changes it.

“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together....goo goo ga joob.”

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by gveranon

What I like about the quote from “Kafka and His Precursors” is that it views the Browning-Kafka (or for our purposes, Sitwell-Ligotti) symbiosis from the standpoint of the reader rather than from the standpoint of the later author.

Indeed, I look back at my first post on this thread and I see that I suggested Sitwell's 1918 poem was Ligottian. Time-logically, I should have called Ligotti's work Sitwellian (except of course, that is possibly the only Ligottian poem she ever wrote!).

Quote

“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together....goo goo ga joob.”

Very apt. The whole of the 'I Am The Walrus' poem (from which the above line is taken):
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/beatles..._10026521.html
is most definitely Sitwellian in a very typical way, i.e. most if not all of Sitwell's poems are, to my mind, Walrusian.

[Nemonymous]

Serendipity has forced me to bump this thread today.
Sorry.
des