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a speculative, excessively modest proposal
Jul. 2nd, 2013 02:52 pmThe Prospective Migrations of the Little Joke, or Possible Futures in a World Where History Keeps on Keeping on
“Let’s, he said clapping, put on a play. A ludibrium, a show, a jest in all seriousness, a seriousness in all jest. Not in one place only but across the world, across this Europe at least. Such a play as has never in all the history of the world been seen, a play that will force them all to suspend their disbelief, and not only watch and laugh and weep, but take part as well, and be themselves our actors.” —John Crowley, Endless Things
Except that it wasn’t so, not a bit of it.
“Our revels now are ended”? [Although I think international invisible-guest readers of this journal come mostly to insert advertisements, I ought to start putting familiar allusions in quotation marks for the sake of those who may be less familiar with English literature.] Not by a long shot, or by a short one for that matter.
But seven years and a day seems like an excellent point at which to make a transition, for it is not we who decide to make an end, or rather we can’t make an end even when we think we have made one.
The migration of other souls out of the land of LiveJournal and into the land of Dreamwidth has led me to wonder whether I ought not to do likewise.
Perhaps the goat really is in the garden as my “person from Porlock” suggested as the end to my previous summation of What It All Might Mean. It seems like a resonant symbol with which to make an end, or a turning: has the goat violated the pristine precincts of Eden and will now bring ruin to Paradise with its goatish ways, or has the goat eluded the promised separation from the sheep and made its way into redemptive bliss despite the threat of being kept forever among the preterite?
“’You may be elect’ meant ‘We may decide to use you.’ ‘You are elect’ meant ‘We have decided to use you.’” —John Fowles, The Magus
Except that it wasn’t so, no more so than the birth of real Rosicrucians from what was only a little joke—except that for those for whom the Rosy Cross in the age of the great religious wars was the fulfillment of dreams, the joke made them into members of a mental confraternity that never had physical existence, an actual brother- and sisterhood brought about by a pure fiction. The fiction had real effects.
There are real Magi who are also Tricksters, and I do not refer to novelists.
“Let’s, he said clapping, put on a play. A ludibrium, a show, a jest in all seriousness, a seriousness in all jest. Not in one place only but across the world, across this Europe at least. Such a play as has never in all the history of the world been seen, a play that will force them all to suspend their disbelief, and not only watch and laugh and weep, but take part as well, and be themselves our actors.” —John Crowley, Endless Things
Except that it wasn’t so, not a bit of it.
“Our revels now are ended”? [Although I think international invisible-guest readers of this journal come mostly to insert advertisements, I ought to start putting familiar allusions in quotation marks for the sake of those who may be less familiar with English literature.] Not by a long shot, or by a short one for that matter.
But seven years and a day seems like an excellent point at which to make a transition, for it is not we who decide to make an end, or rather we can’t make an end even when we think we have made one.
The migration of other souls out of the land of LiveJournal and into the land of Dreamwidth has led me to wonder whether I ought not to do likewise.
Perhaps the goat really is in the garden as my “person from Porlock” suggested as the end to my previous summation of What It All Might Mean. It seems like a resonant symbol with which to make an end, or a turning: has the goat violated the pristine precincts of Eden and will now bring ruin to Paradise with its goatish ways, or has the goat eluded the promised separation from the sheep and made its way into redemptive bliss despite the threat of being kept forever among the preterite?
“’You may be elect’ meant ‘We may decide to use you.’ ‘You are elect’ meant ‘We have decided to use you.’” —John Fowles, The Magus
Except that it wasn’t so, no more so than the birth of real Rosicrucians from what was only a little joke—except that for those for whom the Rosy Cross in the age of the great religious wars was the fulfillment of dreams, the joke made them into members of a mental confraternity that never had physical existence, an actual brother- and sisterhood brought about by a pure fiction. The fiction had real effects.
There are real Magi who are also Tricksters, and I do not refer to novelists.
