Archived entries from file /home/galaxybeing/Dropbox/org/wuthering.uk/entry20240104.org
[fn:1] muse: Originally any of the nine sister goddesses in Greek mythology presiding over music, literature, and arts; or a state of deep thought or abstraction, e.g., to enter a muse over a poem; or a source of inspiration, e.g., Jane Austen is my muse.
[fn:2] …e.g., Lady Dedlock’s death at the graveyard of her secret lover in Dickens’ Bleak House.
[fn:3] The word moor appears forty-three times in Jane Eyre. After the second or third use, I was just putty in Charlotte’s hands…
[fn:4] …or modern, well-off tourists.
[fn:5] …more than double the next most popular, the Grand Canyon…
[fn:6] Perhaps give the Smokies a second chance by reading the pre-park fictional work Christy by Catherine Marshall. She captures something that might be called Appalachian Gothic.
[fn:7] Allow me the poetic emphasis device of capitalising nouns.
[fn:8] Quick preliminary, much more later: The term Romanticism followed a twisted path beginning with the Latin romant, or, “in the Roman manner”, thus, not at all our current use of the word as a synonym of lovey-dovey stuff. In general, bundling what I’m trying to get at as Romanticism is fraught to say the least. Academe wants to grip butterflies, but when they open their hands there is only goo. Lots more on this problem as we go…
[fn:9] Yes, ironic that I’m trying to be logical analytical here, no?
[fn:10] …goth described here by Wikipedia as well as anywhere.
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[fn:11] By the way, the Germans capitalise nouns, i.e., built-in poetic emphasis.
[fn:12] Yes, MHGA: Make Halloween Great Again
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[fn:13] Why do some age out of goth? A crude answer may be they just can’t kick the rebel chic can down the beach any longer … there, I said it…
[fn:14] … for example, due to the Victorian shadow over my childhood?
[fn:15] Look here for a quick biography.
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[fn:16] Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
[fn:17] See here for a bio. She is considered by many Britain’s
most prolific poet.
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[fn:18] Go here for a quick biography. HWL was not typically Dark, rather, a popular, “uplifting” poet with a big audience. That’s what makes this selection so unique for me.
[fn:19] Below, we will go over Romanticism poetising’s originator, Novalis. Much to say about poetising, Novalis, and Romanticism…
[fn:20] …more about storytelling below…
[fn:21] modus vivendi: An arrangement or agreement allowing conflicting parties to coexist peacefully, either indefinitely or until a final settlement is reached, or (literally) a way of living.
[fn:22] Fazit: n; in conclusion, in summary, all in all; Germanized Latin for it follows.
[fn:23] See here for a quick biography.
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[fn:24] Where has that network gone? Something tells me getting likes on a YouTube comment isn’t the same…
[fn:25] Doom as unforeseen consequences of previous actions, which in turn, entropically snowball into indebtedness, tragedy, and ruin; typically multi-generational, a punishment that never seems to fit the original crime—if it was a crime at all. One German word for doom is Untergang, which also means downfall.
[fn:26] Queen Victoria in mourning black ca. 1862.
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[fn:27] Is there anything worse than the so-called five stages of grief or the Kübler-Ross model? Grief as an emotional malfunction to be systematically reduced, fixed, corrected? Alas.
[fn:28] Not out yet. Coming…
[fn:29] In the third line, Heft means weight, heaviness; importance, influence; or (archaic) the greater part or bulk of something.
[fn:30] Dickinson freely employed the capitalising of nouns for poetic emphasis.
[fn:31] My shorthand for Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson is based on their earthly abodes—Haworth, West Yorkshire, for the former and Amherst, Massachusetts, for the latter.
[fn:32] Is it not ironic how nearly all lifeforms that attempt to share our modern human environments uninvited are considered invasive, noxious vermin, pests to which we have developed almost hysterical revulsion?
[fn:33] Though cotton was rapidly becoming a global commodity, both cotton and wool fabrics eventually being produced in steam-powered factories as the Industrial Age reached its inflexion point of growth.
[fn:34] In any modern (non-organic Amazon Whole Foods-style) chain supermarket I’m sure less that 1% of the food items come from a truly local source. Nearly everything is shipped in from often far afar.
[fn:35] …e.g., what is a flower garden but a derivative, a mock-up of an original place out in the wilds, albeit with the pretty bits super-amplified idealised, the not-so-pleasant bits left, weeded out?
[fn:36] How often is a Shakespeare character out communing with nature? Never?…
[fn:37] Churches were typically built in the centre of a town or city on the highest ground. I once heard that to this day no building in Vienna may be built taller than the tower of St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
[fn:38] Human population grew 60% between 1800 and 1900, and 275% between 1900 and 2000.
[fn:39] Modern human narratives come at us as thousands upon thousands of fictional novels, films, plays, while aboriginal peoples had myth and legends timeless and unchanging. That alone…
[fn:40] Is our relatively gradual separation from nature not a perfect example of the boiling frog metaphor?
[fn:41] What became of Wordsworth’s To a Highland Girl shepherdess when she and her family were forced into an industrial urban slum? We can only hope she and her kin are in a better place now…
[fn:42] …which we will explore again below…
[fn:43] In those days wild, untouched places were often referred to as wastelands.
[fn:44] What is generally acknowledged as a clear breakthrough was John Snow’s tracing of the London cholera outbreak of 1854 back to certain London neighborhood public wells. This was strong proof of the contagion theory. However, it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur established the field of bacteriology and our modern scientific understanding of microscopic pathogens finally developed.
[fn:45] Couple this modern mechanistic “death as malfunction” with atheist nihilism to arrive at today’s soulless mechanical universe realism dumpster fire.
[fn:46] Probably the biggest proponent of the futuristic, sci-fi trans-human is Ray Kurzweil, who has just published The Singularity is Nearer; When We Merge with AI. You will never read such delusionary, wacko nonsense in your life! As physicist Wolfgang Pauli once criticised a colleague, This is so bad it isn’t even wrong!
[fn:47] For critters, predators are other bigger critters. For humans, predators are—outside of war and homicidal aggression—all but exclusively bacteria and viruses.
[fn:48] Consider this quite tolerable goth version of the classic rock song. Had this been written in Brontëan times, it would have been no cheap, sentimental gimmickry.
[fn:49] Consider the now commonplace heart pacemaker, a device that literally overrides the human heart with artificial electronic pulses. Also, hip and knee replacements are now routine.
[fn:50] Ironically, both of his previous wives had likewise died from smoking-related illnesses.
[fn:51] Anne Brontë’s grave in Scarborough
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[fn:52] Abiah Root (Strong), Amherst Emily’s childhood friend
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[fn:53] …the third volume, Fragmente, of Novalis: Werke, Briefe, Dokumente; Verlag Lambert Schneider; 1957.
[fn:54] Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, first edition appearing in 1798.
[fn:55] Started ca. 1797, finally published in 1800. The German Hymnen (plural of Hymne) means “praising songs” (Lobgesang). Allow me the abbreviation HttN from here on. Try this George MacDonald translation as found in a publication from 1897.
[fn:56] …referred to as the Jena Set by Andrea Wulf in her Magnificent Rebels, The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf; 2022; Vintage Books. More about this flawed account in a section below.
[fn:57] See the Wikipedia explanation of Romanticism or German Romanticism … but with a grain of salt. As I repeat throughout, one of the main objectives of WutheringUK is to wrest Romanticism and especially Dark away from the ivory tower humanities technocrats.
[fn:58] The German Poesie is typically translated as simply poetry; however, poetry as a concept beyond just the literary art, more towards the older poesy perhaps. And of course Novalis and the Jena Set expanded even further…
[fn:59] Again, I will go into how Romanticism is an ivory tower fata morgana in detail soon.
[fn:60] If you must, read this about Novalis, which is as good as any. But as academe is wont to do, it hangs on every word uttered and written by a young man feeling his way along in his twenties. This approach may work with Bohr and Einstein, but not a twenty-something poet…
[fn:61] Lots more on eighteenth-century English Gothic below.
[fn:62] And yet HttN wasn’t entirely new after all. Soon will be discussed similar offerings from the eighteenth century.
[fn:63] Sophie von Kühn
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[fn:64] We’ll dive into Edgar Allan Poe’s very similar idealisations in what is possibly his most popular poem Annabel Lee below.
[fn:65] penetralium: (plural penetralia) the innermost (or most secret) part of a building; an inner sanctum; a sanctum sanctorum.
[fn:66] verisimilar: having the appearance of truth.
[fn:67] Here is the scene from Bright Star.
[fn:68] Here is Dracula’s take on just listening and enjoying…
[fn:69] The Genius of Instinct; Reclaim Mother Nature’s Tools for Enhancing Your Health, Happiness, Family, and Work by Hendrie Weisinger; 2009; Pearson Education, Inc.
[fn:70] Here in woodsy Minnesota we haven’t noticed a shortage of mosquitoes, one of bats’ primary food sources.
[fn:71] …a stay in Belgium to learn French and a short-lived gig in nearby Halifax as a governess.
[fn:72] Sadly enough, there is nothing really otherworldly Dark or Romanticist as I know it about Jane Austen. She was seemingly devoid, non-pursuant of Dostoyevski’s POEH. Although she once did say, “Pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked.” (Letter to her niece Fanny Knight, 23 March 1817.) Otherwise, we know nothing of any dark inclinations she might have had.
[fn:73] From my 1853 copy
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[fn:74] YMMV. Personally, I like a good doom-and-gloom session, and Young really delivers with Night Thoughts. Later we’ll go into Emily Brontë’s take on doom-and-gloom and her more measured Christian perspective.
[fn:75] …that is, in a past age not exposed to the science of modern public relations. See this about Edward Bernays and the birth of modern advertising and public relations. TL;DR: Since Bernays, no “movement” in our modern times can be considered natural and organic, rather, the result of somebody’s financed public relations campaign.
[fn:76] …but the Germans were not idle during this time, either. I should also mention Gottfried August Bürger’s very popular and often translated into English epic poem Lenore from 1774.
[fn:77] Das Land der Dichter und Denker. Intentionally absent was novelists. Although now novelists count as part of die Belletristik, i.e., schöngeistige Literatur or aesthetic literature.
[fn:78] Two terms, novel (English) and roman (French, German, etc. from the adjectival Roman, Roman-like) came to describe any long-form prose story-telling.
[fn:79] Ironically, the Novella, a long short-story format with no chapter breaks, was better tolerated in Germany.
[fn:80] One giveaway is gothic in the title. Perhaps read this overview of Gothic fiction.
[fn:81] Walpole initially claimed Otranto to be a medieval manuscript he had discovered and translated, when all along it had been his own creation.
[fn:82] A model woebegone gothic novel heroine (from El Mundo
ilustrado; 1879).
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[fn:83] See this sorting out.
[fn:84] Once asked why his horror films were so popular, Alfred Hitchcock said the man on the street likes to occasionally dip his toe in the lake of horror.
[fn:85] My former wife, a Jane Austen fan, read Wuthering Heights and advised me to skip it. I always trusted her literary advice and, thus, have never read it.
[fn:86] …although Wordsworth would later mention Barbauld and ASEM as inspirational.
[fn:87] We’ll talk about liminal soon…
[fn:88] The Jena Set’s Friedrich Schlegel first used romantic in contrast to classic to describe what they in Jena were supposedly starting. But it wasn’t until the 1820s when the term Romanticism became widely known and used—evermore randomly…
[fn:89] A quote from M.H. Abrams’ laborious The Mirror and the Lamp would insist … /even an aesthetic philosophy so abstract and seemingly academic as that of Kant can be shown to have modified the work of poets./ Really? I doubt the Brontë sisters read much Kant. But then Abrams never mentions the Brontës…
[fn:90] Peruse on YouTube under The Romantics: Liberty, Nature, Eternity at your peril.
[fn:91] Notably absent is Romanticism = Dark…
[fn:92] From the outset, the Schlegels in Jena made Shakespeare a principal proto-Romanticist, Ludwig Tieck and others of the Jena Set feverishly translating his plays into German. For me this was a clear sign they were on the wrong road. I will at some future date have my fictional character from my novel Emily of Wolkeld tell you why.
[fn:93] So convenient for modern experts that Jena Romanticism came about in a for its time free-wheeling university town, many of the Jena Set also lecturers and professors at the University of Jena. Perhaps a modern version would have been Black Mountain College.
[fn:94] Sample perhaps Isaiah Berlin’s 1965 lectures on Romanticism, published later in book form as The Roots of Romanticism.
[fn:95] …my italics…
[fn:96] Contrast with E.T.A. Hoffmann’s very gothic and sinister The Sandman appeared in 1817 dealing with an all-too-human mechanical automaton.
[fn:97] More about pathetic fallacy soon.
[fn:98] …due to ignorance of Novalis? Alas…
[fn:99] …and again certainly no inkling of what I spoke of above about the modern indoor-outdoor dichotomy.
[fn:100] In 1810 he published Guide to the Lakes, which kicked off Lake District tourism fever in earnest. Rail access began in 1846 and 1847.
[fn:101] The Wordsworths’ Dove Cottage near Grasmere, Cumbria.
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[fn:102] …named in 1843.
[fn:103] Man is a wolf to man.
[fn:104] Some might call Marx’s The Condition of the Working Class in England published in 1845 the beginning of Marxism.
[fn:105] German mediatisation brought on by Napoleonic conquest of the so-called Germanic Holy Roman Empire reduced, secularlised, and consolidated the German states from 300 to 39.
[fn:106] Friedrich’s enigmatic Der Chasseur im Walde, 1814
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[fn:107] Below I will deal with Virginia Woolf’s criticism along those lines.
[fn:108] Oddly enough, the Brontës are completely left out of many key academic analyses of Romanticism. For example, Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp, Beach’s The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, and Berlin’s The Roots of Romanticism make no mention of them! Maybe they had read Virginia Woolf’s comments on /Jane Eyre/ and had given them up for a bad job. See this analysis as well. Big cringe. More soon…
[fn:109] Millais’ The Blind Girl (1854-56)
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[fn:110] Alethea, by Julia Margaret Cameron (1872)
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[fn:111] Nostalgia, from Latin, literally means homesickness and was an acknowledged medical condition in the 1800s.
[fn:112] Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, ca. 1860; the original super model
for the Pre-Raphaelite painters.
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[fn:113] Luke 12:48: /For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more./
[fn:114] Again, the Romantic Era is typically fenced between the years 1800 and 1850.
[fn:115] …e.g., the Brontës were pastor’s daughters in rural West Yorkshire with little exposure to (taint from?) the cultural and literary buzz of the cities.
[fn:116] Today we have the concept of left-brain, right-brain, as often enough nothing else can describe this split-personality confusion. The best ideas about left/right brain are those of Iain McGilchrist. Try these.
[fn:117] This will save you some googling. Note especially the tortured origin of the term romantic.
[fn:118] For what it’s worth, German Romanticism can be broken down into Jena, Heidelberg, then Berlin Romanticism based largely on the principle artists.
[fn:119] Again, Goethe would criticise Romanticism harshly, but attempted to bridge proto-Romanticm Sturm und Drang with his new classicism.
[fn:120] Daguerreotype of Poe 1849
[fn:121] Child Wolfgang and sister Maria Anna
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[fn:122] Academe is also wont to wander around in Freud’s death drive (Todestrieb), another red herring completely antithetical to everything I’m about here with WutheringUK. If anyone doesn’t get feelings and poetisation as my principals saw it, that would be Sigmund Freud.
[fn:123] Woolf in the 1920s
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[fn:124] Pathetic from Middle French pathetique “provoking emotion,” borrowed from Late Latin pathēticus “affecting the emotions,” borrowed from Greek pathētikós “capable of feeling, emotional, receptive, passive, i.e., not pathetic as we today use it to mean sad and contemptible.
[fn:125] Deus sive Natura, the slogan of Baruch Spinoza’s pantheism: the view that god and nature are interchangeable, or that there is no distinction between the creator and the creation.
[fn:126] Perhaps see Bertrand Russell on his meeting with Vladimir Lenin in 1920. A Fabian, “brochure” leftist meets real leftism…
[fn:127] Sometimes the apologists throw in the towel to complete absurdism. Consider Brutalism where ugliness is normalised.
[fn:128] Platonic as opposed to romantic-sexual love was seen in the past as a higher, deeper, quasi-sacred form of love, i.e., the love going on in heaven between the saints and angels brought down to Earth. Today, however, we are made to understand by the Freudians that the human can only ever be a crazed sex monkey, thus, any other view is delusional puerile. Desensitisation then becomes the only answer to “sexual hangups.”
[fn:129] …discussed below…
[fn:130] Emily Brontë as a modern, filled-out “cottagecore emo girl”
per this Slate review. No need to watch, just read the plot for full
cringe.
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[fn:131] I contend libertarianism is simply a new form of liberalism, that is to say, liberalism has gotten so big that leftism no longer can contain it all.
[fn:132] …which according to AncestryDNA is in roughly equal proportions.
[fn:133] Unlike the single-minded satori goal of Zen Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism would seem to float on a legend world of ancient Tibetan myth, hence, it might be an exception to my general rejection of Buddhism.
[fn:134] …and many of those were theology students come to study the Swiss Protestant movement, i.e., Zwingli and the Anabaptists.
[fn:135] Since then I have estranged many friends when I finally admit to not wanting any western Eastern. Just this year a former friend accused me of being fascist when I declined to accept an all-expenses-paid retreat with her guru, so frustrated she had become…
[fn:136] Jokingly I claim to have been verdeutscht, or “germanised,” the prefix ver- usually shading negative, e.g., ver-dorben meaning ruined. But then I found out Luther had coined the term back in the sixteenth century to describe his translation of the Bible from Latin into German.
[fn:137] A conversion of Paul reference.
[fn:138] See this discussion for the general idea of positive feedback.
[fn:139] This is a tolerable scene in the otherwise typically hideous The Favourite depiction of Queen Anne.
[fn:140] According to Wikipedia, Cultural Marxism is a scurrilous far-right conspiracy theory. I merely use it as a catch-all for what indeed would seem to be a broad and thoroughly amoral, nihilist attack on Western culture and values in the classic agitprop Marxist sense. Anti-Western sentiment is not some planned political campaign, rather, a long-in-the-making descent from a Western zenith such as the British Victorian Era. More as we go along…
[fn:141] “White Eurocentric kitchen? Haven’t been there in years…”
[fn:142] Interesting how the whole African-American “roots” thing has all but died away. And Middle Eastern in the form of Islamic fundamentalism also has passed its peak and is seeing heavy push-back in America and Europe.
[fn:143] British writer Anthony Burgess once told of his experience of the British military turning a blind eye to opium use amongst the troops stationed in Southeast Asia due to the overwhelming alienation and dysphoria they suffered there.
[fn:144] A good example would be the critically-acclaimed film Shakespeare Wallah, which deals with the sudden irrelevance of English culture in post-British Raj India.
[fn:145] Perhaps watch An English Woman Who Becomes a Buddhist Monk! to see what happens when the West and East wrestle for dominance. This is seen by many in the West as a great story of women’s rights. As an outsider Diane Perry fights against Tibetan Buddhist tradition and gains concessions for women. But seen from a different angle, this is simply misguided cultural pollution—best of intentions or not…
[fn:146] Romans 3:23: For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.
[fn:147] Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians 13:12.
[fn:148] …a blessing perhaps?
[fn:149] Let me finally mention here that the word wuthering is “Northern” dialect for the wind blowing; from late Middle English whither, wuther “rush, make a rushing sound”, probably of Scandinavian origin; or whithering comes from the Old Norse and means roaring like the wind on a stormy day. This is the sort of wuthering I’m using in my title WutheringUK, i.e., I’m not referencing the book.
[fn:150] Many believe James Joyce’s Ulysses with its stream-of-consciousness and bursty fragments style was a breakthrough. Unfortunately, I say that even though it presumably coattails on the Homer classic The Odyssey, it really goes nowhere except into some nihilist absurdist void, offering us nothing other than a curious writing exercise for hipster literati snob appeal. Some want it to be exposé realism, but even there Joyce is only half-hearted at best…
[fn:151] Gestalt in the sense of form, pattern, configuration. Perhaps as well legends are comprised of atoms of legend stuff, etc. More on “legend receptor sites” later.
[fn:152] Case in point is Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (first print 1774) which supposedly unleashed a wave of suicides of young men who identified all too closely with the story’s male protagonist who commits suicide after losing at love.
[fn:153] …forcefully, poking me in the chest with his finger!
[fn:154] Compare perhaps with the Mircea Eliade “terror of history” concept where, literally, the linear progression of time and history is meaningless when compared to the mythical sacred times of origin. In effect, mundane life is meaningless, thus, its accumulation of “events” are also meaningless, albeit oppressive for those still trapped in their strictly mundane interpretation of life and reality.
[fn:155] An Emily Brontë Gondol poem
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[fn:156] Imagine reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings poems without any knowledge of his Middle Earth or the Lord of the Rings story…
[fn:157] Enjoy this Unthanks Sisters version.
[fn:158] …more about liminal just ahead…
[fn:159] …as per her poem Plead for me
[fn:160] Baroness Annette von Droste-Hülshoff
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[fn:161] Gerhard Wedepohl’s illustration for Der Knabe im Moor
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[fn:162] Sometimes I can’t help but feel America is just a land of lost peasants who have failed at rising above peasant ignorance and can’t figure out where to go other than into more materialism, i.e., the exercise of peasant hoarding…
[fn:163] …reading into Biblical scripture what one subjectively wants to believe, as opposed to exegesis, which purportedly is exactly what the original author meant.
[fn:164] The well-known German liqueur Jägermeister features a stag
with a glowing crucifix between its antlers, which originated from an
apparition seen by Saint Hubertus.
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[fn:165] …or perhaps Emily is experiencing something like what Mary felt at The Annunciation.
[fn:166] Here’s what Wikipedia says: /Transcendentalism emerged from English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the skepticism of David Hume, and the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German idealism./ Nice…
[fn:167] This version would have cringed out the Christian minimalist B-sisters…
[fn:168] Wicked Witch of the West in stealth mode…
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[fn:169] Depiction of Rimbach some six hundred years prior. Note the
red star just below the castle, my digs.
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[fn:170] …but aren’t all fairy tales in suspended animation “until further notice,” e.g., Merlin supposedly biding his time in some pit or inside a hawthorn tree?
[fn:171] Really though, calling her Lake Superior is like calling Einstein a high school graduate.
[fn:172] Wetsuits de rigueur. Even in summer a dunk in her longer than ten minutes can lead to hypothermia … at least on the North Coast. Although the south beaches of Wisconsin and Michigan can be swimmable in the height of summer. However, global climate change may be altering this.
[fn:173] …or if they’re here I haven’t found them.
[fn:174] …e.g., Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Paris, France
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[fn:175] The Great Lakes tourist scene has always been a grittier, more working-class world than other tourist Meccas.
[fn:176] A flip of the James Bond martini quip?
[fn:177] …from his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
[fn:180] DEFINITION NOT FOUND.
[fn:179] Retrenchment towards what, exactly? I’m reminded of Orwell’s 1984.
[fn:178] And of course the joke, Want to make God laugh? Tell Him your plans. Or the German, Der Mensch denkt, der Gott lenkt or, The human thinks, God steers.