Because I feel like it
May. 9th, 2006 11:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksThe first sonnet in Dylan Thomas's Altarwise by Owl-light sonnet sequence:
Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway house
the gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
and, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
the atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
bit out the mandrake with to-morrow's scream.
Then, penny-eyed, that gentleman of wounds,
old cock from nowheres and the heaven's egg,
with bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,
hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,
scraped at my cradle in a walking word
that night of time under the Christward shelter:
I am the long world's gentleman, he said,
and share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.
I am in hopes that Thomas would not object to my finding the sequence so haunting as to write a book in an attempt to explain it to myself, especially since my medium is fiction rather than critical exegesis. (Honestly, every single critical attempt I've seen made at these has gone into Freudianism: that way lies madness.)
I am also in hopes that, all present appearances to the contrary, the book will not in fact turn out to be some mad combination of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, Angela Carter, and things I've heard on the Internet about Final Fantasy VII.
At least, it had better not be.
I suspect that I read Angela Carter at the wrong sort of impressionable age, frankly, because every single thing I've written since the age of twelve has had to be gone over with a kind of mental de-Cartering device, which does not, in fact, actually work. This project is in some ways a reaction to the nervous habit I had developed of shaking my manuscripts frantically in other people's faces and muttering things about how this was merely a pastiche of Carter run through Phillip K. Dick with capitalization I stole from John Crowley and oh gods why do I never write anything *original*, at which point the other party would blink gently at me and inform me that perhaps this could be worried about when it wasn't three o'clock in the morning.
So this time IT'S ALL DYLAN THOMAS I DIDN'T MAKE UP ANY OF IT HA.
And maybe now I can come up with something I think is creative, in the sheer and certain knowledge that I'm swiping it wholesale, and that the swipe will be annotated right there in the acknowledgements page and I never have to worry about receiving an outraged anonymous phone call from somebody who has figured out that I am not, in fact, Phillip K. Dick and that he did it better the first time round.
Because really I'd never get any sleep if people started doing that.
Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway house
the gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
and, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
the atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
bit out the mandrake with to-morrow's scream.
Then, penny-eyed, that gentleman of wounds,
old cock from nowheres and the heaven's egg,
with bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,
hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,
scraped at my cradle in a walking word
that night of time under the Christward shelter:
I am the long world's gentleman, he said,
and share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.
I am in hopes that Thomas would not object to my finding the sequence so haunting as to write a book in an attempt to explain it to myself, especially since my medium is fiction rather than critical exegesis. (Honestly, every single critical attempt I've seen made at these has gone into Freudianism: that way lies madness.)
I am also in hopes that, all present appearances to the contrary, the book will not in fact turn out to be some mad combination of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, Angela Carter, and things I've heard on the Internet about Final Fantasy VII.
At least, it had better not be.
I suspect that I read Angela Carter at the wrong sort of impressionable age, frankly, because every single thing I've written since the age of twelve has had to be gone over with a kind of mental de-Cartering device, which does not, in fact, actually work. This project is in some ways a reaction to the nervous habit I had developed of shaking my manuscripts frantically in other people's faces and muttering things about how this was merely a pastiche of Carter run through Phillip K. Dick with capitalization I stole from John Crowley and oh gods why do I never write anything *original*, at which point the other party would blink gently at me and inform me that perhaps this could be worried about when it wasn't three o'clock in the morning.
So this time IT'S ALL DYLAN THOMAS I DIDN'T MAKE UP ANY OF IT HA.
And maybe now I can come up with something I think is creative, in the sheer and certain knowledge that I'm swiping it wholesale, and that the swipe will be annotated right there in the acknowledgements page and I never have to worry about receiving an outraged anonymous phone call from somebody who has figured out that I am not, in fact, Phillip K. Dick and that he did it better the first time round.
Because really I'd never get any sleep if people started doing that.
