Arrangement in
Black and Blue
Adapted from cover of
German edition of Cold Mountain
Epigraph to Cold Mountain,
by Charles Frazier --
Men ask the way to Cold Mountain.
Cold Mountain: there's no through trail.
-- Han-shan
For Christopher Fry and the White Goddess: The Edge of Eternity Christian humanist playwright Christopher Fry, author of The Lady's Not for Burning, died at 97 on June 30, 2005. From Log24 on June 30: Robert Graves, author of The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth-- How may the King hold back? Royally then he barters life for love. Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched, Whose coils contain the ocean, Into whose chops with naked sword he springs, Then in black water, tangled by the reeds, Battles three days and nights... From Cold Mountain: "He sat awhile on a rock, and then got up and walked all morning through the dim woods. The track was ill used, so coiled and knotted he could not say what its general tendency was. It aimed nowhere certain but up. The brush and bracken grew thick in the footway, and the ground seemed to be healing over, so that in some near future the way would not even remain as scar. For several miles it mostly wound its way through a forest of immense hemlocks, and the fog lay among them so thick that their green boughs were hidden. Only the black trunks were visible, rising into the low sky like old menhirs stood up by a forgotten race to memorialize the darkest events of their history.... They climbed to a bend and from there they walked on great slabs of rock. It seemed to Inman that they were at the lip of a cliff, for the smell of the thin air spoke of considerable height, though the fog closed off all visual check of loftiness....
Then he looked back down and felt a rush of vertigo as the
lower world was suddenly revealed between his boot toes. He
was indeed at the lip of a cliff, and he took one step back.... The
country around was high, broken. Inman looked about and was
startled to see a great knobby mountain forming up out of the
fog to the west, looming into the sky. The sun broke through a
slot in the clouds, and a great band of Jacob's ladder suddenly
hung in the air like a gauze curtain between Inman and the blue
mountain.... See also the entries of July 3. The crone figure in this section of Cold Mountain is not entirely unrelated to the girl accused of being a witch in Fry's play and to Graves's White Goddess. From Fry's obituary in The Guardian: "Though less of a public theorist than Eliot, Fry still believed passionately in the validity of poetic drama. As he wrote in the magazine Adam: 'In prose, we convey the eccentricity of things, in poetry their concentricity, the sense of relationship between them: a belief that all things express the same identity and are all contained in one discipline of revelation.'" From Fry's obituary in today's New York Times: "His plays radiated an optimistic faith in God and humanity, evoking, in
his words, 'a world in which we are poised on the edge of eternity, a
world which has deeps and shadows of mystery, and God is anything but a
sleeping partner.' He said he wrote his plays in poetry because that
was 'the language in which man expresses his own amazement' at the
complexity both of himself and of a reality which, beneath the surface,
was 'wildly, perilously, inexplicably fantastic.'" |
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Arrangement in Black and Blue Adapted from cover of German edition of Cold Mountain Epigraph to Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier -- Men ask the way to Cold Mountain. Cold Mountain: there's no through trail. -- Han-shan |
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| Intersections 1. Blue Ridge meets Black Mountain, 2. Vertical meets horizontal in music, 3. The timeless meets time in religion. Details: 1. Blue Ridge, Black Mountain "Montreat College is located in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina.... The Black Mountain Campus is... three miles from the main campus in the historic town of Black Mountain." Black Mountain College was "established on the Blue Ridge Assembly grounds outside the town of Black Mountain in North Carolina in the fall of 1933." USA Today, May 15, 2005, on Billy Graham: "MONTREAT, N.C. — ... It's here at his... homestead, where the Blue Ridge meets the Black Mountain range east of Asheville, that Graham gave a rare personal interview." See also the following from June 24:  "No bridge reaches God, except one... God's Bridge: The Cross." -- Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, according to messiahpage.com For some remarks more in the spirit of Black Mountain than of the Blue Ridge, see today's earlier entry on pianist Grete Sultan and composer Tui St. George Tucker. 2. Vertical, Horizontal in Music Richard Neuhaus on George Steiner's "... the facts of the world are not and will never be 'the end of the matter.' Music joins grammar in pointing to the possibility, the reality, of more. He thinks Schopenhauer was on to something when he said music will continue after the world ends.
3. Timeless, Time A Trinity Sunday sermon quotes T. S. Eliot: "... to apprehend See also The Diamond Project. Update of July 8, 2005, 3 AM:
A Bridge for Private Ryan  In memory of actor Harrison Richard Young, 75, who died on Sunday, July 3, 2005
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| Requiem Some links for Grete Sultan, 1906-2005, a pianist who died at 99 on Sunday morning a week ago-- June 26, 2005: Album with sound clips -- The Legacy, Vol. 1 Album with Tantum Ergo -- The Legacy, Vol. 2
Tui St. George Tucker, 1924-2004. Her Requiem apparently premiered at Appalachian State University on April 30, 2005. For other material on theology and Appalachian State University, see that day's Log24 entries and also the April 25 entry, Mathematical Style. For more on music, theology, and Appalachia, see the entries of Sunday, July 25, 2004. |
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Big Dreams "For more than a century, Los Angeles has been synonymous with big dreams. The Australian writer and critic Clive James said it this way. 'Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like… The fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there.'" -- Today's inaugural address by Mayor Villaraigosa See also the previous entry. Update of 2:24 PM July 2: Yesterday afternoon I picked up a copy of George Steiner's Grammars of Creation I had ordered. A check of Amazon.com to see what others had to say about this book yielded the following: "Steiner's account of Hope as something exclusively transcendental and relative to the future is poor and superficial: the person who hopes is not only walking 'towards' Eternal Life, but is already walking 'in' Eternal Life, walking the Kingdom." -- Matías Cordero, Santiago, Chile See also an entry of April 7, 2005, Nine is a Vine. |
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