Class Notes 3/1

Notes:
Dr. Sexson needed to add something to our discussion of the aesthetic hero and that is James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man...Stephen Hero (aptly named) with a single minded devotion to the aesthetic

Walter Pater, at Oxford, trained Oscar Wilde, a pagan, and Hopkins, a deeply religious writer. But both Wilde and Hopkins were trained at the feet of aesthetic hero....

Hopkins, Jesuit priest wrote poem, Link here: Windhover. Inscape, seeing the bird as in itself as it really is...Transparent Things by Nabokov....the pencil scene.

ice skating...ever seen a proficient ice skater?
last 6 lines: the meaning of the experience dawns on him

the falcon eviscerates a small mammal - brutal, terror, horror

Kevin.......sublime.......Tai

= Pain

Epiphanic part of the poem:

"Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!"

buckle: collapse, knock down, connect, fasten, link.... paradox within one word.....the word is doing two things...

What is the point of this poem?? the act of the bird, the dive bomb, the eviscerating......Hopkins dedicates poem To Christ Our Lord, wants God to do to his soul as the falcon does to its prey....eviscerate it.

( I suppose this fits nicely with the idea that one must go down the ladder before coming back up. Go into the dark place before coming into the light. Dante has to go through Hell to get up to Heaven and his Beatrice. The idea though is that the dark, broken, creepy, scary place changes us. Sometimes you have to reach a breaking point before things start to get better. As Eliot takes us to the dark places of the epiphany, so does Hopkins in a way. Like St. John of the Cross.)


See Lisa Little Legs blog: As Kingfishers Catch Fire.....Lisa says, it's all coming together, Dr. Sexson says when your life comes together, it's also coming apart........buckle....


Google: 'fisher king'

-"The Fisher King, or the Wounded King, figures in Arthurian legend as the
latest in a line charged with keeping the Holy Grail. Confusingly, many
works have two wounded Grail Kings who live in the same castle, a father and son
(or grandfather and grandson). The more seriously wounded father stays in the
castle, sustained by the Grail alone, while the more active son can meet with
guests and go fishing. For clarity, the father will be called the Wounded King,
the son the Fisher King where both appear in the remainder of this article."

This is from Wikipedia......but as I looked around on other sites about the Fisher King in relation to the Holy Grail I found that the story was hard to pin down. See this site for details: http://www.uiweb.uidaho.edu/student_orgs/arthurian_legend/grail/fisher/



-The Fisher King is also a comedy-drama film made in 1991, written by Richard LaGravenese and directed by Terry Gilliam. - Wikipedia


from As Kingfishers Catch Fire
"the just man justices" as in the story from the Bhagavad Gita or Krishna and Arjuna, it is his dharma, his duty to be a warrior.....

To the Light House, 50 eyes

Nature is a Heraclitean fire & of the comfort of resurrection

See Robert's blog
See Kari's blog, "We see into the life of things"
See Nick's blog, Kierkegaard......

Not so much to visit a place, but to revisit the place. To know the place for the first time.

transcendentalism

recollection, ancient Greek term, anamnesis, loss of forgetfulness...
Socrates conversation with Meno

gnosticism.