Suppose Suppose the limber, breathless bend of warmth on the wind never gave way to its grace sucked from its breath – life suddenly bound to torpor stillness and sterility. I suppose that the silence meddles your mind, and its meaning when the rush and rustle above vanquishes to the ground – stomped and blown. It forces a sound within, perhaps muted at first, but a growing menace all the same that you wish to ignore – more easy to do, you find, when the clatter of animation abuzz in the air with perpetual bounds and chirps. Suppose, now, you listen.
Month: November 2023 (Page 3 of 3)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fPf1_f5Dex_0xs4WQb4_xWTtL7zsAg-122Ozx2TzRIE/edit?usp=sharing
- From the Novel:
“He made a movement with his hand, and, directly as he did so, it happened as on the previous evening, that a metamorphosis took place in the very abysses of my being. I wake from my topour, as he put it, I came out of death, and was alive again. I was far yet from being my own man; I realized that he exercised on me a degree of mesmeric force which I had never dreamed that one creature could exercise on another…”(Marsh 62)
Marsh, richard. “The Beetle”. 1897.
- Critical Commentary:
“…I consider two oppositions that shape critical discussions of the fin-de-siecle Gothic-horror and terror, and entropy and energy – and I argue that critics’ exploration of the Victorian’s seeming preoccupation with the horrors of entropic decline has obsucred that culture’s persistant anxiety about the terrors of energy”
Jones, Anna. “Conservation of energy, INDIVIDUAL agency, and gothic terror in Richard marsh’s “the beetle”, or, whats scarier than an ancient, evil, shape-shifting bug?”. 2010. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41307851
- Historical Context:
“Ancient history speaks of the mysterious doings, oracular sayings, prophetic forebodings, and apparently miraculous performances of the Egyptian Priests; of the Delphion oracle among the Greeks, and of the Sybils among the Romans…Mesmer’s theory is as follows “Animal magnetism is a fluid universally diffused: it is…mutual influence between the…bodies, the earthm and animated bodies…”(354)
https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.somnolismpsychei00hadd/?sp=5&r=-0.676,0.404,2.352,1.118,0
- Visual:
Welcome Catalog .”The rise and fall of a medical mesmerist”. 2018.
