Waxing Gibbous
Dec. 12th, 2024 03:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smokingbootThe moon is huge and bright as a lemon tonight surrounded by black mackerel clouds. I went outside to watch it, felt the frost crunch under my bare feet. Never had that experience before.
Reading quotes from Hilary Mantel's book Giving Up The Ghost :
"I am seven, and I am in the yard playing near the house, near the back door. Something makes me look up: some shift of the light. My eyes are drawn to a spot beyond the yard, beyond its gate, in the long garden. It is, let us say, some fifty yards away, among coarse grass, weeds and bracken. I can't see anything, not exactly see: except the faintest movement, a ripple, a disturbance of the air. I can sense a spiral, a lazy buzzing swirl, like flies, but it is not flies. There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But its motion, its insolent shift, makes my stomach heave. I can sense at the periphery, the limit of all my senses - the dimensions of the creature. It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, and fifteen inches. The air stirs around it invisibly. I am cold and rinsed by nausea. I cannot move. I am shaking; pinned to the moment, I cannot wrench my gaze away. I am looking at a space occupied by nothing. It has no edges, mass, dimension, or shape except the formless; it moves. I beg it, stay away, stay away. Within the space of a thought, it is inside me and has set up a sick resonance within bones and in all the cavities of my body. [...]
"I was never the same afterward," Mantel continues, "I was always doomy after that: and what was it anyway? Something intangible had come for me."
She spoke of this experience in an interview for the Independent:
"I couldn't say I saw it," she says slowly. "I'm talking about something at the very border of sensory experience. I could walk to where it was, could say how high it was and describe the speed at which it moved. But how I got the information, through which sense, I don't know." What Mantel does know is that she felt she had witnessed something she wasn't meant to. "The experience was absolutely destroying, as if my body was falling apart at a cellular level, which expressed itself in intense nausea. The way I rationalised it was that it was the devil. As a Catholic, that was the theology I had at my command."
I read this and think yes Catholicism, yes childhood illness and trauma, but also yes Daemon and Duende. Lorca took the latter term from being a dwarf-like figure of folklore ('the master of the house') and turned it into a definition of artistic power. To have duende means to have art of a specifically difficult to define type, so much so that I must resort to Wiki, and Christopher Maurer's interpretation.
'To a higher degree than the muse or the angel, the duende seizes not only the performer but also the audience, creating conditions where art can be understood spontaneously with little, if any, conscious effort. It is, in Lorca's words, "a sort of corkscrew that can get art into the sensibility of an audience... the very dearest thing that life can offer the intellectual." The critic Brook Zern has written, of a performance of someone with duende, "it dilates the mind's eye, so that the intensity becomes almost unendurable... There is a quality of first-timeness, of reality so heightened and exaggerated that it becomes unreal..."'
If little Hilary Mantel had met a Spaniard, for sure they might have said 'that was the devil.' But a wise Spaniard might have said, 'what you saw was a shape of your own duende, of course it is part of you and will never leave you. But it is not evil. Or good. It is.'
But then, if little Hilary had heard these words and relaxed into it, would she ever have written a thing?
Reading quotes from Hilary Mantel's book Giving Up The Ghost :
"I am seven, and I am in the yard playing near the house, near the back door. Something makes me look up: some shift of the light. My eyes are drawn to a spot beyond the yard, beyond its gate, in the long garden. It is, let us say, some fifty yards away, among coarse grass, weeds and bracken. I can't see anything, not exactly see: except the faintest movement, a ripple, a disturbance of the air. I can sense a spiral, a lazy buzzing swirl, like flies, but it is not flies. There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But its motion, its insolent shift, makes my stomach heave. I can sense at the periphery, the limit of all my senses - the dimensions of the creature. It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, and fifteen inches. The air stirs around it invisibly. I am cold and rinsed by nausea. I cannot move. I am shaking; pinned to the moment, I cannot wrench my gaze away. I am looking at a space occupied by nothing. It has no edges, mass, dimension, or shape except the formless; it moves. I beg it, stay away, stay away. Within the space of a thought, it is inside me and has set up a sick resonance within bones and in all the cavities of my body. [...]
"I was never the same afterward," Mantel continues, "I was always doomy after that: and what was it anyway? Something intangible had come for me."
She spoke of this experience in an interview for the Independent:
"I couldn't say I saw it," she says slowly. "I'm talking about something at the very border of sensory experience. I could walk to where it was, could say how high it was and describe the speed at which it moved. But how I got the information, through which sense, I don't know." What Mantel does know is that she felt she had witnessed something she wasn't meant to. "The experience was absolutely destroying, as if my body was falling apart at a cellular level, which expressed itself in intense nausea. The way I rationalised it was that it was the devil. As a Catholic, that was the theology I had at my command."
I read this and think yes Catholicism, yes childhood illness and trauma, but also yes Daemon and Duende. Lorca took the latter term from being a dwarf-like figure of folklore ('the master of the house') and turned it into a definition of artistic power. To have duende means to have art of a specifically difficult to define type, so much so that I must resort to Wiki, and Christopher Maurer's interpretation.
'To a higher degree than the muse or the angel, the duende seizes not only the performer but also the audience, creating conditions where art can be understood spontaneously with little, if any, conscious effort. It is, in Lorca's words, "a sort of corkscrew that can get art into the sensibility of an audience... the very dearest thing that life can offer the intellectual." The critic Brook Zern has written, of a performance of someone with duende, "it dilates the mind's eye, so that the intensity becomes almost unendurable... There is a quality of first-timeness, of reality so heightened and exaggerated that it becomes unreal..."'
If little Hilary Mantel had met a Spaniard, for sure they might have said 'that was the devil.' But a wise Spaniard might have said, 'what you saw was a shape of your own duende, of course it is part of you and will never leave you. But it is not evil. Or good. It is.'
But then, if little Hilary had heard these words and relaxed into it, would she ever have written a thing?
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no subject
Date: 2024-12-12 05:23 am (UTC)Beautiful!
I keep thinking I should read this. More lately because you are mentioning it lol.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-14 12:30 pm (UTC)Re Giving Up The Ghost, for me it must now wait due to the need to read the entire Wolf Hall trilogy end-to-end. Obsession is merciless.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-12 12:36 pm (UTC)I've never read anything by Mantel except the Wolf Hall trilogy.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-13 10:20 am (UTC)I would hold off getting Giving Up The Ghost though, just for a bit. I know you don't celebrate this time of year particularly, but my seventh sense tells me some randomness may be turning up at your house soonish, depending on the post.
Apropos of nothing at all, can you DM me your new snail mail address? :-)
no subject
Date: 2024-12-13 06:31 pm (UTC)Yes, I can. Check FB.