Hellebore #7: The Ritual Issue

 

Hellebore #7: The Ritual Issue by Maria J. Pérez Cuervo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is only the second issue of Hellebore I've read, having read issue 1 previously. Now I think I'm going to have to go back and collect the intervening five issues! Because while I really liked the first issue, this one really knocked my socks off! As with any great anthology, the sum is greater than the parts. But that won't stop me from looking at this issue piece by piece.

Francis Young's article "The Making of a Folklore Bible" traces the sometimes surprising historiography of how Folklore, Myths, and Legends of Britain not only came to be, but came to be beloved by so many. A series of anecdotes about the place the book holds in many contemporary folklorists lives and work.

In "Killing the May Queen," Catherine Spooner disabuses us of the notion that the white dress worn by the May Queen and even the notion of the May Queen are of ancient origin. In fact, the association of the dress and the supposed sacrifice is of quite recent origin. Spooner outlines the historical ambiguity of sartorial choice and ritual in a clear, concise manner accessible to scholar and stan alike.

Lest you weary of May Queens, Victoria Pearson unveils a wide variety of folk traditions from throughout the British isles in her article "The Ritual Isles". A nice grab-bag of celebrations from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Northern Ireland.

In "Ancient Antlers, Clashing Swords" Clare Button expounds on the Morris dance and analyzes not only its history, but ways in which it has been and can further be updated to meet societal needs.

The beautifully illustrated (by Richard Wells) article "May Day on Summerisle" is an examination of the hodge-podge of traditions mashed up in The Wicker Man written by Hellebore editor Maria J. Pérez Cuervo. It's a good reminder, along with the other essays in this issue, that cinema does not equal reality, though much can be gleaned from that medium, if one is careful.

In "Possessed, Magical, and Dangerous to Handle," Hannah Armstrong expounds on the feminizing influence that Jane Ellen Harrison had on ritual and its interpretation. It's a fascinating mini-biography that shows how the talented Harrison has affected modern ritual, possibly as much as Frazer. This has gotten me wanting to know much more about Harrison and her history.

Aleco Julius provides an excellent primer on labyrinths, their history in the British Isles and in Europe, and dances associated with these mystical structures in "The Path of the Labyrinth". There is so much more about labyrinths that one can study, but this gives a great basis from which one can spiral inward in their study of these ritual devices.

Angeline Morrison pens a poignant and provocative essay in "Ghost Hunting in the Ruins of Empire," in which she engages in intentional subterfuge of British society's quieting of the black voice. As I've read and reread, I've found that this is possibly the most important of the pieces in this volume. Notions of Fisher's "Weird" and rituals of misrule lead to many salient points regarding historical whitewashing and a sort of inverted colonialism that leads to the denial of black history (especially pre-colonial black history) of the British Isles. The structure of this essay, with it's "slippery" transitions between philosophical and historiographical arguments reminds me of Michel Foucault's writing, truth be told. This is an essay worth reading and re-reading, the kind of genre-breaking, media-spanning (and I mean, here, the academic notion of media as various ways of analyzing data, not the popular media) heuristic kit-bashing that spawns fresh, new thought. It's a bit of a jarring transition, going from the previous articles to this final trickster of an essay. But I can't think of a better way of planting the largest gem in the ritual crown of this issue of Hellebore.

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The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt

 

The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt by Lotte H. Eisner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't know where or when my fascination with silent movies began. Definitely not as a child. I couldn't stand the things back then. I think it might have been after I discovered The Dark Side of the Rainbow and realized that the same technique of watching one piece of visual media while listening to another piece of aural media could easily be applied to silent movies. Suddenly, these often-campy, over-acted films could become something sublime or something sinister, with the right music. Eisner's book was grist for that mill in enough volume to last me the rest of my life. Though I was very familiar with a few of these films and had already tried the trick of using two tabs of Youtube in a web-browser - one (the film) set on mute and the other (the music) with volume UP - I found several other good combinations and a couple of great ones. I will continue exploring this way.

If you'd like to give it a try, look up The Student of Prague (1913) or Waxworks on Youtube. Mute that tab. Now open another tab, go to Youtube, then play something like Ligeti's "Lontano" or Penderecki's "Symphony No. 1" (or, for real ambience, play it on vinyl!) with the volume UP. Or, perhaps you'd like to go another route and listen to some more . . . modern music? I have a few suggestions linked here.

I suggest watching without subtitles turned on, if you can. just enjoy the visual and auditory experience. It's a stark contrast from watching the movie alone, even when, or especially when, someone has attached an old-timey organ soundtrack to the movie. It's your experience - make it yours!

Incidentally, because of this book, I understand why sub-titles are called sub-titles. Only took 52 years to be enlightened. "Titles" was the term originally used in silent movies for the words that flashed up on the screen, in the absence of spoken dialogue. "Subtitles" appear, as the name implies beneath the titles. These are, as you know, most often translations from the original language into another.

52 years.

You can teach an old dog new tricks.

Speaking of new tricks, the early years of cinema were a sort of wild west, when it came to creative innovation, especially when constraints brought on by conflict interfered with the procurement of some materials. Interestingly, the lack of materials in the last years of World War I led to playwrights and cinematic directors using light and shadow, rather than elaborate sets, as they used to use, to give depth to the settings and to indicate the passage of time. A happy accident for early German movies.

The recollections of Carl Boese on how the special effects were done for Der Golem (1920) were absolutely fascinating. These practical effects were very dangerous, so volunteers were asked to try them out. The first stunt-men, perhaps. Knowing this has given me an excuse to watch the movie again. Of course, I will also have to reread Gustav Meyrinks novel, which has little to do with the movie, but hey, a good excuse is okay. After all, the book and the movie were both highly influential on one of my own creative works.

And, speaking of old dogs . . .

Eisner has a fixation on the melancholy and gloom inherit in the German soul, as he sees it. I tend to agree to some extent, but when I see this was first published in 1952, I wonder if some of the hyperbole isn't post-holocaust apologetics or manifestations of guilt. There's a bit too much of "Germans are brooding, dark-minded people as a whole" for me. It's overstated and I wonder why?

It is reasonable to argue that the German cinema is a development of German Romanticism, and that modern technique merely lends visible form to Romantic fancies.

These generalizations of German people as a brooding bunch keep coming up again and again. I don't fully disagree, but frankly (and I don't mean "in the manner of the French"), it got a little, well, old.

But if you can ignore the repeated caricature of an entire nation as, well, goths, there is much to be enjoyed about this work. I would also recommend (whether you read the book or not) following the Pagan Hollywood instagram or twitter account. Sometimes NSFW, you'll want to maneuver carefully, but if you want to catch the glamor of early cinema (and much more) in still photos, that's a great place to start. There's also a great interview with Pagan Hollywood's founder, Charles Lieurance over on Youtube, while you're at it.

I must note that the early text on Doctor Caligari instructed "see frontispiece". I turned to the front of the book, and noted the ragged edges where that key marker had been torn out of the book.

Was that a sign that I should not have entered the realm of the torn page?

Maybe I should have heeded it.

But I'm glad I didn't.



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Carl Otto Czeschka Illustrations 1895-1900

 

Carl Otto Czeschka Illustrations 1895-1900 by Thomas Negovan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Perhaps it has something to do with having spent half my childhood in Europe (Germany, Italy, England), or maybe it's just a matter of taste; regardless of the impetus, I am a hardened europhile (if there isn't such a word, I just made it. You're welcome, Shakespeare lovers). And while Americans are exposed to European art, cinema, literature, etc. now more than ever, I tend to dive into some of the more obscure, recondite works that my co-patriots (can I use that term in this context? Again, you're welcome) might miss either because of lack of interest or lack of exposure. This is particularly true in my taste in books and literature. For example, I've met few Americans who know the works of Géza Csáth, Marcel Schwob, Paul Willems, or Hanns Heinz Ewers. More are aware of the works of Kafka, obviously, or even Gustav Meyrink, but there is a treasure trove of great literature that is only recently being brought to the attention of American audiences.

In terms of visual arts, however, we Americans are more well-versed in the breadth and depth of the European tradition due, I think, largely, to the timing of the Renaissance, when the United States simply did not exist as a nation. Most of our modern western art springs from techniques developed in the Renaissance. Sure, there are many, many exceptions (Fauvism, Japonisme, etc), but by and large western art is rooted in European precedent.

Still, we Americans have much to learn. On the whole, I am amazed at the cultural illiteracy of the masses here. Yes, I'm an over-educated snob, yes, I'm a cultural elitist. So shoot me (that most American thing to do, N'est-ce pas?). I was born in Europe. Half of my childhood was spent there. I am a Europhile and I am frankly appalled at how Americo-centric my "home" nation is.

Now that my ranting is over, let's proceed on learning a tiny bit more about European art. For this purpose, I am giving my strongest recommendation to "read" ("see?", "meditate upon?") Century Guild's absolutely fantastic presentation of Carl Otto Czescha Illustrations 1895-1900.

Normally, I would take a moment here to introduce the person whose artwork is under consideration, Carl Otto Czescha. But I don't want to spoil that aspect of the book for you. Thomas Negovan has collected and collated a great deal of information that is otherwise scattered across physical and virtual archives so thinly as to be ghostlike. Czeschka's life alone makes for an interesting biography. It's an inspiring story, to say the least.

Not only is the research well done it is well-presented. The narrative of Czescha's life and career is written in a font somewhere between gothic and art nouveau. I have no idea what the font is, but it is beautiful and appropriate to the atmosphere and work. I have the hardcover copy of the book (limited to 650 copies - get yours), rather than the deluxe slipcase edition (limited to 150 copies - #lust), which has a different front cover. But I presume the inside pages are identical because, let's face it, who wants to lay out the same book twice?

The artwork is, as one might expect, absolutely stunning. Should you require visuals, I'll point you to the Century Guild Salon episode where Negovan and Kat Handler explore the book in depth, answering listener questions (yes, a few by me - I can't help myself) along the way. Note that these are Czeschka's early works, in a different "voice" than his later, more geometrical works, but obviously drawn by the same deft hand. Many of the works are collected from the Allegorien published by the Wiener Werkstatte around the turn of the 20th century and some are from children's books, if I remember correctly. You'll note several "ex libris" book plates, as well, and I have to say that as a booklover, I am tickled pink (that sounds so painful) by the fact that so many of these are from this artistic sub-sub-sub-genre. I love ephemera, and here you get snapshots of such ephemera in abundance.

The art itself is dreamlike or, in some instances nightmarish. For those of us with both a strong romantic and morbid streak, it's a perfect place to land. Czeschka's sinuous figures ooze into the eyes and brain with such ease! Subject matter includes oh-so-many faeries, mermaids, fruit and flowers in abundance, angels, and even a few appearances by Death. The mythopoeic energy here is strong, echoing loudly even though these illustrations are only a little over a century old.

In publishing Carl Otto Czeschka Illustrations 1895-1900, Century Guild has yet again provided a window into which we can peek to see a seminal artistic vision from an artist whose work resonates both backward in time to the pre-Raphaelites and, hence, to medieval art, and forward in time to the 1960s and '70s, the influence of which continues even today.

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The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A crushingly poignant work. Now, I "get it", whereas when I read this as a teenager, I didn't. As a child, I was so bent on loving the anti-heroes that I missed the tragedy, the squandered possibilities, not within Gatsby, but within everyone else. As I read it, Gatsby isn't really the hero or the anti-hero at all. He is a hub around which the real stories churn. He is a soft, vulnerable, naive, ambitious machine. And while everything and everyone revolves around him, he is, in the end, abandoned, though not forgotten, by all but a few. But the real question remains, just who have they abandoned? And in remembering him, are Jordan, Tom, Daisy, Wolfsheim and others creating a man that was never really there? Gatsby is like a raw onion at the dinner table. The center of attention both because of his ability to flavor any dish and because of his stink. But to focus on the raw onion in the middle of the table is to miss the delectable dishes that compose the rest of the meal.

Fitzgerald knows how to pull at the heartstrings. I thought back to friends and girlfriends of long ago, situations, not the same, but similar to those of many of the characters that I've seen either in my own life or in the lives of those close to me. This book has a way of causing you to delve down behind the bookshelves of your mind and pull out those long-mangled scraps of paper, some of which you have been looking for for a long time, some of which you'd rather just forget.

The writing herein is beautiful. I'll leave with one admittedly (and indulgently) long quote, which speaks to the beauty of the work, as well as the feeling that Fitzgerald gives the reader of continuously being placed on the edge of an emotional precipice overlooking a drop to the ocean, hundreds of feet below. It's exhilarating, thrilling really, and quite, quite dangerous.

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily
joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to
shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of
ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and
hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and
chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of
men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives
out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey
men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud
which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift
endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.
J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and
gigantic--their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on
waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an
hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was
because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan's mistress.

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The Dream Weavers: Tales of Fantasy by the Pre-Raphaelites

The Dream Weavers: Tales of Fantasy by the Pre-Raphaelites by John Howard Weeks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Confession: I never did finish this book when it was assigned reading for my senior seminar on Victorian Arts and Culture. I read enough, at that time, to complete the assigned critique of one story that we enjoyed. Thankfully, this came four stories into the anthology, freeing up study time for other projects in a very busy semester.

To say that Victorian art and literature has had an influence on my own fiction is a gross understatement. I've been accused of, and guilty of, the same flamboyant prose that was popular a couple of centuries ago. I've worked hard lately to be free of those tentacles, or at least to have them resting a little more loosely over my throat.

But a series of nostalgic hankerings has been pulling at me lately, and I thought "it's about time I finish that book". After all, the Pre-Raphaelite artists are not only the subject of one of my novels, they produced some of my favorite visual art of all time.

Unfortunately, what pleases the eye visually does not necessarily make for good prose. Oftentimes, the artists-cum-writers are too free in adding embellishments to their words that ought to have been reserved only for their paintings. Some of them were decent poets, but stretching a poem out into a long narrative, rather than watering the words down, as one would expect, only allows more room for treacle to be poured into the ensuing gaps. Many of the stories in this volume are practically drowning in treacle and baroque language, which makes for a sickly-sweet jolt that should be enjoyed only in small servings.

That's not to say that every story is a failure. Far from it. I found aspects of several of these stories rather refreshing and intriguing.

For example, Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Dead Love," in which the Lady Yolande de Craon falls in love with and, through that love, subsequently revives the body of the knight Jacques d'Aspremont (who had previously killed her husband in battle), shows an interesting ambiguity between what is good and what is evil, what is romantic and what is perverse. This is a much more nuanced take on morality than I would have expected from a story of its age.

In Swinburne's "The Portrait," the painter, Peter, after hatching a plot with a wicked woman (you will find this trope throughout) to kill her husband by means of a painting that would kill a man should he look upon it, is described as "a man that rejoiced in all manner of shameful dealing, and was also unclean of his life, as is the fashion of men that paint and men that make songs and verses; for this Peter also made many amorous poems, and played upon stringed instruments marvellously [sic] well. And the lives of such men as are painters, or such as are poets, are most often evil and foolish; therefore it may be well conceived of this Peter that he was a very lewd man."

I'm not sure if this is an attempt by Swinburne at self-effacing humor or if it was meant as a kind of marketing ploy for the shock value of its self-admitted wickedness. One wonders if he and his contemporaries, Huysmans and Verlaine were not all customers of the same marketing agency.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "The Orchard Pit" was the story that, as an undergraduate, I chose to examine in detail. I won't bore you with the amateurish rantings and ravings of a college senior who actually thought he knew what he was talking about. Suffice it to say that this remains one of my favorite stories in this volume, a hallucinogenic prose poem that beats a trance-inducing mental cadence in the reader's mind.

Sprinkled throughout these stories are what I will call "Odes to the Cult of Weakness," passages that seek to heroicize the androgynous as being simultaneously better than their peers and, yet, harboring a critical vulnerability that is, in a strange way, lauded. This is evinced in the description of Charo dell' Erma in Rossetti's story "Hand and Soul":

The extreme longing after a visible embodiment of his thoughts strengthened as his years increased, more even than his sinews or the blood of his life; until he would feel faint in sunsets and at the sight of stately persons.

Thankfully, not all of the characters in this volume are infected with that same ultra-sensitivity (it grows tedious very quickly). And, in fact, I wonder if editor John Weeks intentionally followed up Rossetti's shriveling little daisy with Edward Burne-Jones' tale "The Druid and the Maiden". This is a solid story of love, betrayal, patriotism, double crosses, and ghosts in the shadow of the Roman Empire's invasion of Brittany. It is much less florid than the stories that precede it and a welcome, prosaic relief from the extreme poetic acrobatics that permeate the collection.

Burne-Jones continues to display a spark of modernity in his tale "The Cousins". This story is downright Dickinsonian (thank you, Doris, for providing me with the right word!), yet it is punctuated, in the middle, by a long scream straight from Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable that the narrator refers to as "a missing year".

Finally, I quite enjoyed William Falford's "A Night in a Cathedral," not because the hackneyed story about being locked away, alone, for a night in a cathedral had anything to recommend it (it didn't), but because it summoned from the dead caverns of my mind a series of images from childhood: those of Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat being harangued by cartoon, ghosts and skeletons. I needed the laughs, if nothing else, to counter the grave seriousness with which this author, and several others in the volume, took himself.

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