Baroque Prose of the Day

Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

To be knav'd out of our graves, to have our sculs made drinking-bowls, and our bones turned into Pipes, to delight and sport our Enemies, are Tragicall abominations escaped in burning Burials.

Urnall interrments and burnt Reliques lye not in fear of worms, or to be an heritage for Serpents; In carnall sepulture, corruptions seem peculiar unto parts, and some speak of snakes out of the spinall marrow. But while we suppose common wormes in graves, 'tis not easie to finde any there; few in Churchyards above a foot deep, fewer or none in Churches, though in fresh decayed bodies. Teeth, bones, and hair, give the most lasting defiance to corruption. In an Hypdropicall body, ten years buried in the Church-yard, we met with a fat concretion, where the nitre of the Earth, and the salt and lixivious liquor of the body, had coagulated in large lumps of fat, into the consistence of the hardest castle-soap; whereof part remaineth with us. After a battle with the Persians, the Roman Corps decayed in a few dayes, while the Persian bodies remained dry and uncorrupted. Bodies in the same ground do not uniformly dissolve, nor bones equally moulder; whereof in the opprobrious disease we expect no long duration. The body of the Marquesse of Dorset seemed sound and healthy and handsomely cereclothed that after seventy-eight years was found uncorrupted.

-- Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia. Urne Buriall; Or, A Discourse Of The Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found In Norfolk (1658)
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

Bleak&Icy said:
To be knav'd out of our graves, to have our sculs made drinking-bowls, and our bones turned into Pipes, to delight and sport our Enemies, are Tragicall abominations escaped in burning Burials.

Urnall interrments and burnt Reliques lye not in fear of worms, or to be an heritage for Serpents; In carnall sepulture, corruptions seem peculiar unto parts, and some speak of snakes out of the spinall marrow. But while we suppose common wormes in graves, 'tis not easie to finde any there; few in Churchyards above a foot deep, fewer or none in Churches, though in fresh decayed bodies. Teeth, bones, and hair, give the most lasting defiance to corruption. In an Hypdropicall body, ten years buried in the Church-yard, we met with a fat concretion, where the nitre of the Earth, and the salt and lixivious liquor of the body, had coagulated in large lumps of fat, into the consistence of the hardest castle-soap; whereof part remaineth with us. After a battle with the Persians, the Roman Corps decayed in a few dayes, while the Persian bodies remained dry and uncorrupted. Bodies in the same ground do not uniformly dissolve, nor bones equally moulder; whereof in the opprobrious disease we expect no long duration. The body of the Marquesse of Dorset seemed sound and healthy and handsomely cereclothed that after seventy-eight years was found uncorrupted.

-- Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia. Urne Buriall; Or, A Discourse Of The Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found In Norfolk (1658)
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"To be knav'd out of our graves..." Astonishing and perfect verb there.

Regarding Sir Thomas Browne, here is a short bit by William H. Gass (from "Fifty Literary Pillars," in the essay collection A Temple of Texts).

Sir Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia: Urn Buriall,
or a Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes
lately found in Norfolk​

The full list, the final roll of honor, would include all the great Elizabethan and Jacobean prose writers: Traherne, Milton, Donne, Hobbes, Taylor, Burton, the translators of the King James Bible, and, of course, Browne, or "Sir Style," as I call him. I would later find them all splendidly discussed in a single chapter of George Saintsbury's A History of English Prose Rhythm, the chapter he called "The Triumph of the Ornate Style." Of course, there are great plain styles. Of course, positivists, puritans, democrats, levelers, Luddites, utilitarians, pragmatists, and pushy progressives have something to say for themselves. There are indeed several musicians after Handel and Bach. And there are other mountains beyond Nanga Parbat. But. But the great outburst of English poetry in Shakespeare, in Jonson, in Marlowe, and so on, was paralleled by an equally great outburst of prose, a prose, moreover, not yet astoop to fictional entertainments, but interested, as Montaigne was, in the drama and the dance of ideas. And they had one great obsession: death, for death came early in those days. First light was often final glimmer. Sir Style is a skeptic; Sir Style is a stroller; Sir Style takes his time; Sir Style broods, no hen more overworked than he; Sir Style makes literary periods as normal folk make water; Sir Style ascends the language as if it were a staircase of nouns; Sir Style would do a whole lot better than this.
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

The vital principal is not the love of Knowledge, but the love of Change. It is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit that is its greatness; that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly around the pinnacles, and frets and fades in labyrinthine knots and shadows along wall and roof, and yet is not satisfied, nor shall be satisfied. The Greek could stay in his triglyph furrow, and be at peace; but the work of the Gothic heart is fretwork still, and it can neither rest in, nor form, its labour, but must pass on, sleeplessly, until its love of change shall be pacified for ever in the change that must come alike on them that wake and them that sleep.


--John Ruskin, "The Nature of Gothic," The Stones of Venice, Volume II
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

John Cowper Powys has the largest working vocabulary of any novelist in the English language; and when it comes to the sheer range of words, drawn from all aspects of life, at his command, he is second only to Shakespeare. I first encountered this curious fact during my second year of university, when I read an essay by George Steiner (a nod to gveranon). To say that Steiner was effusive in his praise of the Welsh novelist would be an understatement. Excited by the promise of discovering a new writer--not merely a writer but a wordsmith, a word-wielder, a baroque maestro!--I began haunting the secondhand bookshops for anything I could find by the Welshman. I have been a devoted reader of his ever since. The following passage of baroque prose (sorry, Nemonymous, but it has a better ring to it than "purple patch"), comes from Powys' colossal Autobiography. The young, aspiring writer has just been offered a teaching position at a girls' school. Hold on tight, Ligottian friends, for this is some thunderous, intoxicating prose, and in no time at all you'll be swaying like drunkards on these rolling waves of words:


I could hardly credit my ears. This was something I had never thought of. Girls' School? Schools of girls! I saw them gleaming like porpoises; shoals and shoals and shoals of them, waiting for their new professor at West Brighton. Were all those invisible lovelinesses, that I had so often told myself stories about, going to incarnate themselves at this crisis in my life, going to call upon me to lead, guide, teach, instruct, inspire, encorcerize them?

I thanked Mr. Grabbitas with the gravest discretion--my pulses beating furiously--and taking a hansom to London Bridge caught the next train to Brighton.
*
​
Schools of girls... shoals of girls... flocks and flurries of girls... what a thing, what an incomprehensible thing for my destiny to evoke! The very word "girl," especially if pronounced, as some of my relatives pronounced it, not to rhyme with "pearl," but to rhyme with "there'll," even as you would say it in a sentence: "there'll be gairls," thrilled me at that time of my life in a manner impossible to describe. It conveyed to my mind a sort of fleeting, floating, fluttering fantasy of femininity, a kind of Platonic essence of sylph-hood, not exactly virginal sylphid-ness, but the sate of being-a-Sylph carried to such a limit of tenuity as almost to cease to have any of the ordinary feminine attributes. This incarnation of airy tantalization was all that the word "girl" evoked for me, however pronounced. It always conveyed the idea to me of an impressionability, under an embrace, so flexible, so yielding, as to bear a resemblance to that ethereal vaporousness of the Homeric shades in Hades, that could not be felt at all as you embraced them! Thus the word "girl" almost ceased for me to have the least connection with the living personalities of real girls. When I saw a real girl I saw a feminine person, almost a feminine man; but these "girls" of my imagination, or rather I ought to say of my desire, could all have stood, thousands of them together, just like those jeered-at angels of scholasticism on the narrow apex of my winnowed, purged, and three-times-over-refined fastidiousness.

For the truth is, what I am so intensely attracted to, what I worshipped in those days to a point of idolatrous aberration, are hardly of the feminine sex at all! It is as if I had been born into this world from another planet--certainly not Venus, Saturn possibly!--where there was a different sex altogether from the masculine and feminine that we know. It is of this sex, of the Saturnian sex, that I must think when in the secret chambers of my mind I utter the syllable "girl." I suppose women are more like these elfin sylphs, these fleeting ephemerals, than most men are; but I am not perfectly sure even about this! The maternal instinct in women, so realistic, so formidable, so wise, so indulgent, is more remote from, and destructive of, the sylph-nature--the nature of these girls who are more girlish than girls--than the spirit of Hercules himself! I think that the inmost flame of my soul, the vital leap of my life-force, must be as fragile and tenuous as it is formidable and fierce; and that it is this brittleness and fineness in this interior flame which makes it flee, as if from cartloads of horned devils, at the faintest approach of any warm maternal lovingness, as if such lovingness would bury it under a thousand bushels, like the scriptural candle.

I cannot believe that a person's sex-emotions exist in some disconnected by-alley of his being without affecting the whole of his nature. My attitude to everything I worship, to the sea, to the mountains, to the earth, to the sun, to the moon, to Homer, to Shakespeare, to Rabelais, to Don Quixote, to lichen growing upon tree-stumps, to moss growing upon stones, to smoke rising from a cottage chimney, must be of this same fine, tenuous intensity; an intensity terribly shy of large, warm human normality, and always flickering round and about the magic candles of the exceptional.

In my most thrillingly happy moments I feel as if my nature were essentially light, volatile, porous, transparent. I seem to float at such times on waves of a quivering ether, an ether vibrant as the hovering heat-waves over an August cornfield. And it is on such an air-tide of quivering vibrations that I seem to be floating, when for a brief moment, in any real woman, I catch some faint trace of my sylphid ideal. It is pure impersonal lust; it is lust without the faintest mixture of anything that from a moralist's point of view could be called "redeeming." And yet I am prepared to justify it without scruple or shame! It is my religion, my beatific vision, my rapturous initiation into the mysteries...


I could go on: the entire Autobiography, all 652 pages of it, is written with this same level of gusto! At the risk of embarrassing myself, I confess that 13 years ago, when I read this book for the first time, I underlined, with a quivering pencil, the above sentence: the nature of these girls who are more girlish than girls...
 
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Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

I once collected John Cowper Powys books avidly (in the seventies). Still got them. I must return to them. Thanks for the reminder, b& i.
I recall going on holiday with my wife and very young cchildren in 1976 to Glastonbury simply because I had just read 'The Glastonbury Romance' by JCP. Glastonbury wasn't so touristy in those days and I don't think I had heard then of any Glastonbury festival.

I've recently written about a Glistenberry Festival in my novella 'Weirdtongue' and mention in it a place called JCP House as a nod towards Powys.

PS: b&i, yes, thanks to gv, I've changed the title of this thread to 'Baroque Prose'.
 
To cast a dissenting vote, I took a look at John Cowper Powys' work some years ago -- prompted by Nemonymous, I feel sure -- and considered his stuff virtually unreadable. While having an extensive vocabulary is a good thing in a writer, having an immense one is not necessarily so. :(
 
Nemonymous said:
Still, you enjoy Clark Ashton Smith and HP Lovecraft...?
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Yes, I do. Not only that, but my favourites from those two authors are their purpler and baroquier stories (The Hound, The Abominations of Yondo, etc.). Pesky people are complicated -- me included. :( Bah!

Do I receive large vocabulary points for baroquier? :confused:
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

Odalisque said:
To cast a dissenting vote, I took a look at John Cowper Powys' work some years ago -- prompted by Nemonymous, I feel sure -- and considered his stuff virtually unreadable. While having an extensive vocabulary is a good thing in a writer, having an immense one is not necessarily so. :(
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I don't recall anybody asking for your vote, Odalisque. This is not an election.

Each time I reread a novel by J. C. Powys I feel that life is worth living... or at the very least I feel that life is worth sublimating through art. As Henry Miller lovingly wrote of the Welshman, "His words, even today, have the power of bewitching me."

As to your opinion regarding his vocabulary: Damn I hate those painters who use so many colours. I wish they would restrict themselves to a limited palette.
 
Two lemon-trees were beside it, and this little house which she seemed at once to inhabit gave her the most strange sensations of dignity and of peace. She saw herself go climbing up the garden from terrace to terrace, calling the goat, and the goat, beautiful in its possessedness, came loping down to meet her, asking to be milked. At this she paused in perplexity, for she had never milked anything and turned cold at the thought of touching the udders of an animal. But in a moment this was over and she carried the milk frothing warm in the pottery jug inside, into the dark interior of the house which would not be dark from within. Here something turned her back and she could not follow herself; she saddened, feeling excluded from some very intimate experience. The house was lonely and in autumn, when the river was brimming, the rushing past of the water must be terrifying; its echo would line with sound the upright walls of the valley. On still spring nights the thud of a falling lemon would be enough to awake one in terror.
From Chapter 6 of ‘The Hotel’ (1927) by Elizabeth Bowen
 
The only J. C. Powys novel I've read is Wolf Solent, and I found it mesmerizing. Powys's word-drunk prose is accompanied by a dry, analytical intelligence; he ain't no fool. And his ecstatic passages about life and nature have a dark, dying-animal awareness to them. This doesn't cancel the ecstasy, but it gives it an earthiness -- sort of like ancient Greek paganism, I think. At the same time, there is a Gothic feel to many of the passages.

I've read several of JCP's nonfiction books. (In middle age, I gravitate more toward nonfiction than fiction.) I'm currently about halfway through In Defence of Sensuality, a book that is not as salacious as it sounds. It contains such a clear exposition of his philosophy, in all its aspects, that I wish I'd read it first, before any of his other nonfiction works. Before reading this book, I didn't fully get his explanations of how one can be happy despite all the reasons for not being happy. Now I understand more fully and viscerally what he's talking about. I highly recommend it to all Ligottians: you too can be a pessimistic enjoyer of life! (Wait -- That doesn't sound very Ligottian, does it?) It's too soon to say what I will ultimately think about this book -- it usually takes me a long time to assimilate something and decide what I think about it -- but my immediate reaction is that this may end up really influencing the way I look at things.

Other excellent nonfiction works by Powys are A Philosophy of Solitude and The Meaning of Culture. I haven't read his Autobiography.

Regarding the issue of baroque prose in general, I wish more people liked it, so that baroque writers would do better in the marketplace. There will never be a shortage of plain, simple prose for sale, but there is a shortage of good baroque prose. Good is the key word there. The writing needs to be artful and intelligent; otherwise it isn't worth reading. Simply substituting uncommon words for common ones doesn't do anything for me. I don't want to get into arguments about taste -- what would be the point? -- but I do get tired of the dismissive attitude so often displayed (not pointing any fingers here!). And my own taste is not for baroque writing exclusively. There are a lot of plain-prose writers that I enjoy. For instance, I don't understand why some people think that Isaac Asimov's plain prose is artless. To me, it looks like he seldom put a word wrong. Some of his plots seem clumsy and silly to me, but I've always been able to read his prose with pleasure.
 
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Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

gveranon said:
The only J. C. Powys novel I've read is Wolf Solent, and I found it mesmerizing. Powys's word-drunk prose is accompanied by a dry, analytical intelligence; he ain't no fool. And his ecstatic passages about life and nature have a dark, dying-animal awareness to them. This doesn't cancel the ecstasy, but it gives it an earthiness -- sort of like ancient Greek paganism, I think. At the same time, there is a Gothic feel to many of the passages.
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That's a wonderful way of putting it, gveranon. But I would suggest that Powys' philosophy of ecstasy goes further back than Homeric or archaic Greek paganism to a kind of primitive animalism, a sympathetic magic--the time when priests were magicians and men were guardians of the earth's fertility. In his writing the sun and sea and the lichen growing on damp bark and the rusty trowel digging the soil are invested with a cosmic energy, an awesome awareness. His men and women have inner lives as rich and deep as the earth.

I've read A Philosophy of Solitude and In Defence of Sensuality and I found them as mesmerizing (to borrow your word) as his fiction. I seem to recall him suggesting that one should live like a lizard in a swamp. This is not as fantastical as it seems. Powys was the ultimate individualist: for him the key to happiness was subjectivity, of pure sensual contemplation. The lizard in the swamp knows how to be still, much like Pascal's man sitting in the room by himself. The lizard is alive, he (or she) is aware, he lives by his senses: the rich earthiness of his dark world thrillingly enters his nostrils; his bright, hooded eyes are alert for the smallest movement... the lizard lacks for nothing and never thwarts his own nature.

Powys maintains that in order to be happy one must retreat from the world into the realm of highly subjective, sensual contemplation. A religion of the inner life, of the world transfigured through one's individual senses. All this might sound remote from the intellectual standpoint which we highly-strung types cherish. But when did thinking ever make you happy? Powys has described a philosophy of happiness highly suited to the loner, to the pessimist, to the outsider.

There are very few writers whose work thrills me. Powys is one of them.

By the way, I sheepishly offer my apologies to the poor Odalisque.:o I snapped at him last night when he posted a negative opinion concerning Powys. Never drink cheap Australian overproof rum while posting on TLO. Not that I'm blaming the booze: I'm a nervous, unsociable, intolerant and drunken fool.
 
The ironic thing is I think John Cowper Powys (judging by his works) would have been very much in tune with the novel Odalisque has just finished writing (after twenty years!).

I was once obsessed with JCP fiction and philosophy. It is now time to get back to it after 30 odd years. I shall first pick off the shelf my copy of 'In Defence of Sensuality' and 'Lucifer' (an epic poem I recall). Thanks, b&i and gv.
 
I’ve just read for the first time an unfinished story by Elizabeth Bowen: ‘The Man and The Boy’, just published in ‘The Bazaar and Other Stories’ (2008) by Elizabeth Bowen (Edinburgh University Press). Discovered handwritten on ten sheets of ruled paper. May date from the late 20’s? One wonders where this universe of reality was heading. The story ends:

“They had the nearest window in the restaurant opened; what air there was came through and fanned Antonia’s arms. She”

The following is a nice baroque passage, I feel from this story:

-------------------

“This town sat on a rock rising out of one of those plains of immense France. A river doubles glinting past the foot of the rock: over the river there is a steep drop. One flank shelves, with grey jumbled roofs, yards, an embanked road for motors zigzagging down between. Down where the road flattens there is a dusty faubourg, across the river, linked to town by a bridge. A boulevard dark with trees runs round the top of the rock, broadening out at the river side into municipal gardens. A cathedral church of flamboyant gothic gives the town interest: it is without charm - that quickness and air of secret pleasure many little French towns have it quite lacks. It has a limestone greyness and with the end of summer grows sluggish and sinister: glare beats on its restless slate-grey trees; wind creeps under the heavily dropping sky; straws blow about the cafes; dust hardens one's lips. Michelin gives three gables to the hotel - so here, yesterday, Theodore, amateur of late gothic, directed Antonia's party across the plain from the more smiling, peach-coloured town of Albi. He collected, he indexed aesthetic experience, though rapture had never flowered in his precise mind.

Benjie saw no reason to change his shirt: how much simpler it was to avoid his mother. He left the hotel and made for the market square, where he stared at objects aggressively. He was twelve, man enough to feel an angry vacuity: he hoped never to cross the English Channel again. Kicking an apple drearily past the stalls till it rolled under an old Renault parked by the kerb, he missed Tom's company. He sidled into a garage yard and stood silently watching two silent mechanics: here his contempt for the French lifted a little. With an obscure feeling of outrage he saw his mother, her pink nightdress slipping off her shoulder, running her hand up Tom's stiff arm, saying: "You won't." The voluptuous delicacy of women, embodied in her, antagonised him: he would rather have had a grim aunt who scrubbed his ears. Wait till I am in the army, Benjie thought.

Two nuns streamed past with a sanctimonious bustle. Avoiding their stuffy skirts, Benjie walked head on into Theodore, coming from the cathedral, eupeptic, bland.”

-------------
Re the word ‘eupeptic’ the editor writes:

“Eupeptic: having good digestion. But I have had to guess. The handwriting being illegible, the word looks like ‘emphatic’ and might be anything at all.”
 
John Cowper Powys is the sort of oceanic writer I, being drier, more 'continental', can only take in lakelike doses. But when I do - dipping into Weymouth Sands or Wolf Solent - I am enthralled and fascinated. I agree with JCP's idea of the 'life illusion', some central belief a person must entertain about himself and the world to be able to live at all. I know mine, and there is never a dull day. JCP describes somewhere (I think it is in that Sensuality book), that nothing is tedious once you use your concentration to really observe and register. He ueses the example (iirc) of a visit to a boring Aunt, where you can derive pleasure simply from watching the colour of the wallpaper, the things she has hoarded through the years et cetera.
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

Bleak&Icy said:
Odalisque said:
To cast a dissenting vote, I took a look at John Cowper Powys' work some years ago -- prompted by Nemonymous, I feel sure -- and considered his stuff virtually unreadable. While having an extensive vocabulary is a good thing in a writer, having an immense one is not necessarily so. :(
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I don't recall anybody asking for your vote, Odalisque. This is not an election.

Each time I reread a novel by J. C. Powys I feel that life is worth living... or at the very least I feel that life is worth sublimating through art. As Henry Miller lovingly wrote of the Welshman, "His words, even today, have the power of bewitching me."

As to your opinion regarding his vocabulary: Damn I hate those painters who use so many colours. I wish they would restrict themselves to a limited palette.
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I didn't say (or wish to imply) that a writer having a huge vocabulary was necessarily a bad thing -- just that it was not necessarily a good thing.

But, in practice, I think that artists actually do use a limited range of colours. In part, this is matter of practicality. In part, I think, too wide a palette exhibited in a single picture would create a mess.

Whether there is a good analogy from this to writing is an open question.

:confused:
 
Re: Purple Patch Of The Day (or Week)

I feel the optimum is to be catholic (know everything) but also eclectic (the ability to choose carefully from that everything).

For the record, incidentally, our co-member here, MG Cardin, has contributed an interesting essay to the 'baroque vs. spare' debate here:
http://shocklinesforum.yuku.com/rep...poverished--Hemingway-et-al-.html#reply-56738
a thread which was sparked off by me quoting gv's quote of Steiner (that gv put on this thread when it was still called 'purple patch of the day'!).
 
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