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From The Quite Heights
Mar. 15th, 2020 11:24 pm1). I have been playing Monument Valley, a beautiful little touchscreen game which is one third puzzle and two thirds wandering through Escher architecture and an evocatively minimal story. You are a small figure making your way through the abandoned structures of the Valley to return something stolen, rotating and changing the structures to progress. If two walkways look as though they touch, then they do.
2). This is not the week of the year I would have chosen to get what is, as all reasonable thought processes assure me, a cold. Mind you, I expect I'd have chosen this week over next week or the week after, things going as they are. One of my flatmates arrives back from Britain tomorrow to fourteen days of self-isolation.
3). I am looking at a documents subfolder which contains, at time of writing, three files of worldbuilding for a story, nine currently-irrelevant save files for the story, the story's actual current draft, and a folder of eleven earlier save files entitled 'Why do I make so many blimmin drafts'. The story is one I am currently twisting about hither and thither hoping that if I make bits of it seem to touch, as in Monument Valley, they will miraculously do so.
4). I am fallen well behind on book reviewing, as a result of having read one thing which I had too much to say about and then two things I didn't have much to say about at all. Here is the first of those, and the others to follow.
De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde.*
This is not quite my first Wilde – we had an audiotape of the children's stories, and then there was Cerebus the Aardvark** – but nearly. I read it aloud. I don't think I planned to, but it's one of those books where the tone of voice hands itself to you word by word. I often find that reading aloud does for humour what salt does for flavour, and the person who wrote in the introduction to my edition of this that "lacking his humour [it] is the least characteristic of his major works" doesn't share a sense of humour with me. I laughed aloud repeatedly, often at sheer ironic understatement.
However, I do see why one might not laugh, given the things he's understating. This is a letter written from prison, one particular passage of which would stand alone as a description of Hell. The letter's whole first section is an excoriation of the man who put Wilde in prison, the addressee, Lord Alfred Douglas; a repeated raking over of the course of what could not in so many words be called their love affair, each time detailing different slights, mistakes, and cruelties. Wilde does blames himself too, but it's the blame of someone who thinks of himself as a partially failed genius and of Douglas as someone whose attempts at personhood have barely begun and may never get far. By going through Douglas' cruelties, Wilde arrives at the point of forgiving him – and then falls back from it, insists to himself that his own soul if nothing else requires it, rises to it again. He was given one sheet of paper at a time, to write, edit, and hand out through the bars, which perhaps accounts for some of the relentless semi-repetition, but it is also a matter of what he can daily manage to feel. At just about the point where I was looking at the page count and thinking 'I cannot bear to read fifty more', he breaks into a joyful discussion of the individualism of Jesus and the virtues which lie beyond suffering and pain: things he has come to believe in deeply, things he is clinging to desperately.
There's a point where he says that he uses nothing of rhetoric, 'rhetoric' being one of a number of words he is not using the way I do, for he never says something in just one way if he can say it in a crescendo of three ways instead – but what he means is that he is trying to find out all the truth he can; a lesser artifice would yield a lesser honesty. His refrain: “The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right.”
I knew from the introduction that upon receiving the letter Douglas tore it up. I also knew that Wilde would not live to make his new understanding of himself into the art he hoped for. I had not known that after Wilde's release he and Douglas met and reconciled. The biography of Wilde whose last chapters I skimmed also states that Wilde was being unfair in saying that Douglas never tried to contact him in prison, that Wilde in fact turned away multiple letters and messages. Which reminds me not to think as badly of Douglas as this letter would have me – not right away, at least. I still find it hard to see outside Wilde's brilliance, especially having given my own voice to his perspective. I have acquired a volume of him, so that I can lean further into this bias before correcting it.
* That being From The Depths, De Aliquanto Alto, and it is after midnight, De Aliquantis Altis, and my Latin is minimal even when it isn't after midnight, Satis Per Se Ex Alto says Google Translate but I disagree, my Latin books are deep in my desk somewhere, altus satis, gratias tibi ago, I'm going to bed. I do regret not learning this language. Perhaps the day will come. I hope the day comes.
**Does any series have an odder trajectory than Cerebus the Aardvark? Swords and sorcery satire comic –> increasingly funny political satire in increasingly well-developed fantasy setting –> theological satire going on sincere messianic fantasy, except for that bit where the climactic events are followed by a crossover with a surreal burning carrot-person from another tonal universe –> leisurely account of parts of the life of Oscar Wilde –> humourless bit with lots of violence that I've mostly forgotten –> deeply-felt misogynistic rant in which the comic gives way to straight-up text –> presumably something else, although I have not read my way far into those wastes, nor know anyone who has lived to return from them.
2). This is not the week of the year I would have chosen to get what is, as all reasonable thought processes assure me, a cold. Mind you, I expect I'd have chosen this week over next week or the week after, things going as they are. One of my flatmates arrives back from Britain tomorrow to fourteen days of self-isolation.
3). I am looking at a documents subfolder which contains, at time of writing, three files of worldbuilding for a story, nine currently-irrelevant save files for the story, the story's actual current draft, and a folder of eleven earlier save files entitled 'Why do I make so many blimmin drafts'. The story is one I am currently twisting about hither and thither hoping that if I make bits of it seem to touch, as in Monument Valley, they will miraculously do so.
4). I am fallen well behind on book reviewing, as a result of having read one thing which I had too much to say about and then two things I didn't have much to say about at all. Here is the first of those, and the others to follow.
De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde.*
This is not quite my first Wilde – we had an audiotape of the children's stories, and then there was Cerebus the Aardvark** – but nearly. I read it aloud. I don't think I planned to, but it's one of those books where the tone of voice hands itself to you word by word. I often find that reading aloud does for humour what salt does for flavour, and the person who wrote in the introduction to my edition of this that "lacking his humour [it] is the least characteristic of his major works" doesn't share a sense of humour with me. I laughed aloud repeatedly, often at sheer ironic understatement.
However, I do see why one might not laugh, given the things he's understating. This is a letter written from prison, one particular passage of which would stand alone as a description of Hell. The letter's whole first section is an excoriation of the man who put Wilde in prison, the addressee, Lord Alfred Douglas; a repeated raking over of the course of what could not in so many words be called their love affair, each time detailing different slights, mistakes, and cruelties. Wilde does blames himself too, but it's the blame of someone who thinks of himself as a partially failed genius and of Douglas as someone whose attempts at personhood have barely begun and may never get far. By going through Douglas' cruelties, Wilde arrives at the point of forgiving him – and then falls back from it, insists to himself that his own soul if nothing else requires it, rises to it again. He was given one sheet of paper at a time, to write, edit, and hand out through the bars, which perhaps accounts for some of the relentless semi-repetition, but it is also a matter of what he can daily manage to feel. At just about the point where I was looking at the page count and thinking 'I cannot bear to read fifty more', he breaks into a joyful discussion of the individualism of Jesus and the virtues which lie beyond suffering and pain: things he has come to believe in deeply, things he is clinging to desperately.
There's a point where he says that he uses nothing of rhetoric, 'rhetoric' being one of a number of words he is not using the way I do, for he never says something in just one way if he can say it in a crescendo of three ways instead – but what he means is that he is trying to find out all the truth he can; a lesser artifice would yield a lesser honesty. His refrain: “The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right.”
I knew from the introduction that upon receiving the letter Douglas tore it up. I also knew that Wilde would not live to make his new understanding of himself into the art he hoped for. I had not known that after Wilde's release he and Douglas met and reconciled. The biography of Wilde whose last chapters I skimmed also states that Wilde was being unfair in saying that Douglas never tried to contact him in prison, that Wilde in fact turned away multiple letters and messages. Which reminds me not to think as badly of Douglas as this letter would have me – not right away, at least. I still find it hard to see outside Wilde's brilliance, especially having given my own voice to his perspective. I have acquired a volume of him, so that I can lean further into this bias before correcting it.
* That being From The Depths, De Aliquanto Alto, and it is after midnight, De Aliquantis Altis, and my Latin is minimal even when it isn't after midnight, Satis Per Se Ex Alto says Google Translate but I disagree, my Latin books are deep in my desk somewhere, altus satis, gratias tibi ago, I'm going to bed. I do regret not learning this language. Perhaps the day will come. I hope the day comes.
**Does any series have an odder trajectory than Cerebus the Aardvark? Swords and sorcery satire comic –> increasingly funny political satire in increasingly well-developed fantasy setting –> theological satire going on sincere messianic fantasy, except for that bit where the climactic events are followed by a crossover with a surreal burning carrot-person from another tonal universe –> leisurely account of parts of the life of Oscar Wilde –> humourless bit with lots of violence that I've mostly forgotten –> deeply-felt misogynistic rant in which the comic gives way to straight-up text –> presumably something else, although I have not read my way far into those wastes, nor know anyone who has lived to return from them.
