Phantastes - Chapter 5

This is yet another fascinating chapter. I won't give it a full treatment for lack of time, but I will point out the aspects that I find particularly interesting.

First is the reference to Pygmalion. This is an explicit reference that directly corresponds to the story so it is inappropriate to not know the mythology being reference. I quote here the synopsis from wikipedia:

According to Ovid, after seeing the Propoetides prostituting themselves (more accurately, they denied the divinity of Venus and she thus ‘reduced’ them to prostitution), he was 'not interested in women',^[4] but his statue was so fair and realistic that he fell in love with it. In the vertex, Venus (Aphrodite)'s festival day came. For the festival, Pygmalion made offerings to Venus and made a wish. "I sincerely wished the ivory sculpture will be changed to a real woman." However, he couldn’t bring himself to express it. When he returned home, Cupid sent by Venus kissed the ivory sculpture on the hand. At that time, it was changed to a beautiful woman. A ring was put on her finger. It was Cupid’s ring which made love achieved. Venus granted his wish.

The parallels are immediate and obvious, so I won't discuss that much more. What I will say is this: I believe the Marble Lady is a very important symbol in Phantastes, so it is worth meditating upon.

One thing that is really cool about the story is how the body of the Marble Lady is entrapped in a "pale coffin" of alabaster. This strongly emphasizes the artistic role of drawing forth a creation from the shapeless stone. I see this as a parallel to how great artists will have envisioned their creation before creating it.

How then do you draw forth the Marble Lady? A kiss does not reach through the tomb of stone. It is the power of song and music that draws forth his vision of perfection. I think this verse in the song powerfully captures and summarizes what I'm saying:

"Thee the sculptors all pursuing,
Have embodied but their own;
Round their visions, form enduring,
Marble vestments thou hast thrown;
But thyself, in silence winding,
Thou hast kept eternally;
Thee they found not, many finding--
I have found thee: wake for me."

The Marble Lady is the embodiment of the creative ideal. To those who are not artists, this creative ideal is perhaps impossible to explain. But to those who are artists, I don't think any more explanation is necessary as I believe we all understand that subconscious voice or urging drawing us forward to some obscure yet understood end.

That she runs off after being freed is perhaps fitting. Creative exercises (whether that be music, painting, poetry, writing, sculpting, drawing, etc) are so often this pursuit of the ideal that it is almost hard for me to think of what it would mean to actually find, capture and encapsulate that ideal. In fact now that I think about it, it reminds me of God a lot. The pursuit of this ideal is like pursuing the presence of God. It fills the space in your soul with something deeper and inexplicable yet tangible. In some ways I almost think the artistic ideal literally is God (the true embodiment of perfection), but in other ways I think the artistic ideal is just a metaphor or pointer towards God, a sign that guides us to him. To quote from Phantastes again,

"I gazed after her in a kind of despair; found, freed, lost! It seemed useless to follow, yet follow I must."

One other point I might emphasize is that (as you will read later) a lot of this story focuses on the protagonist as a singer in particular, not an artist in general. That's why song plays such an important role, and yet I think it is fully within the author's intention that this creative ideal should be considered a general phenomena, because that is indeed what it is. Song is just one expression of the arts, but the spirit that guides them all is the same (1 Corinthians 12 anyone? Many gifts, but the same spirit).

Phantastes - Chapter 4

So much to talk about.

One thing that fascinates me about these descriptions is the whole notion of a world that comes alive at night. It forms such a strong juxtaposition, in his writing, describing how the darkness of sleep flows over men, but this world of fairy lights awakens then. From chapter 3:

Everything sleeps and dreams now: when the night comes, it will be different. At the same time I, being a man and a child of the day, felt some anxiety as to how I should fare among the elves and other children of the night who wake when mortals dream, and find their common life in those wondrous hours that flow noiselessly over the moveless death-like forms of men and women and children, lying strewn and parted beneath the weight of the heavy waves of night, which flow on and beat them down, and hold them drowned and senseless, until the ebbtide comes, and the waves sink away, back into the ocean of the dark.

It makes me think of a bunch of things. One parallel is in dreamlife vs. waking life. Dreams are in some senses parallel to this fairy world, and indeed I believe dreams are an inspiration for his whimsical and non-linear story format.

Another parallel I believe is the spirit world vs. the physical world. Men sleep (and are unable to access the spirit realm), but while men sleep there is an entirely different world of life that is awake and active.

Our hero, Anodos, rencounters the Ash and it is a fascinating encounter. Perhaps the most fascinating part to me is how the author compares the Ash to a vampire. This is fascinating to me for several reasons. One is that vampires are a common trope in my dreams. I think there is a lot of depth to this, but at the very simplest level, I see a vampire as this: a symbol of lust. Vampires by their nature only survive by consuming others. They have nothing of their own and everything they do is to leech and suck life out of others to fill themselves. How ironic that they can create other vampires out of their victims. How often does that happen in real life, that it is through the injuries and destruction that one suffers that new monsters (for lack of a better word) are created.

That said, I think Macdonald's description is completely accurate. He describes an inner gnawing that devours the devourer. That is absolutely what it is. It is an infinite greed.

The other aspect that I see in the Ash (not specific to vampires) is the aspect of the terror that he spreads and the aspect of hatred and anger. I see him as being a figure of anger and hatred, which is partly what drives the lust/greed.

Another aspect of this story that I find interesting is the defenselessness of the narrator. He seems to have nothing that he can do to protect himself from this vague threat. He is dominated by fear and the inability to protect himself. And yet he is threatened.

Then there's the beech tree. Just as before we met a vague and unspecified threat, now we meet a vague and unspecified protector. I hesitate to draw any allegory into this part of the narrative, but I do find it interesting that the soft and protective Beech (wrapping her soft arms around the narrator) is able to ward off the angry and hateful Ash. I also find it interesting how the Beech is presented almost as a love interest, but one that cannot be for reasons outside of their control. Just a man and a Beech tree, from two different worlds, though intertwined by fate for a single day. Once again, I don't see much room for allegory here but the structure is very mournful yet relatable (think: Romeo and Juliet for another example).

I also really loved the song:

"I saw thee ne'er before;
I see thee never more;
But love, and help, and pain, beautiful one,
Have made thee mine, till all my years are done."

This is really meaningful to me because it emphasizes the connection that is formed by love and sacrifice towards the person you love and give you. I discuss this theme in my prior blog post, Love and Power. Ironically my inspiration for that post was a later passage in this exact same book.

In this passage, it is such a stark reinforcement of that theme. The narrator literally cuts off part of the Beech tree's hair ("she shuddered and breathed deep, as one does when an acute pain, steadfastly endured without sign of suffering, is at length relaxed"), and that forms a girdle to protect him from the Ash tree. Her sacrifice literally forms a belt that he wraps around him and takes with him as a force of protection. It is an incredibly stirring image of the spiritual reality, that one's sacrifice for another forms a girdle that both protects that person and binds you together with him or he, that gives you a power to serve them (like I describe in my other post).

At the end, their parting is bittersweet like so many partings are. And yet they have the hope of one day meeting again, when the Beech tree becomes a woman (enters the narrator's world) and they can be together. Not necessarily sexual, because it doesn't have to be sexual to be emotive.

Thus ends a very potent chapter. On to chapter 5!

Phantastes - Chapter 3

This chapter is where stuff starts to get dense, so I'm going to be slowing down right about now.

Starting from the beginning, you see the chapter preface (a quote from Henry Sutton) is setting the tenor for this whole chapter. Namely, since the trees and sea are "but a disguised humanity", he is implying that the forest itself is a parable for human beings. This is a common literary trope (often used in the bible as well, in particular using the sea as a metaphor for humanity but also occasionally trees), though even then the author's particular intended usage is not immediately clear.

There are a variety of trees mentioned by the author: the oak, the elm, the beech, the birch, the ash and the alder. Some of them are given defined characteristics, in particular the ash and the alder.

Also note that the story of Sir Percivale is foreshadowing, so pay attention to it.

The two trees described the most are the Ash and the Alder, but they appear in the story later, so I will discuss them in greater depth then.

Most of the rest of the chapter is consumed with the hijinks of the fairies. Once again, I think there is some room here for interpreting the fairies as symbols for people, but if so I don't know what sort of people they would represent. I find this line of thinking reinforced when I read the description of the city-country split in the fairy population. But if there is a deeper meaning here, it is one that I am not able to grasp.

It's possible that there is no symbolism here at all, and it's just a story told for entertainment's sake (not a bad reason). That was how I read it the last time through, but someone with a deeper literary pedigree than myself might have some other thoughts.

End of chapter 3!

Phantastes - Chapter 2

This chapter is short and simple, which is good because the following chapters are long and complex so I will take this as a good break before diving into the heavy stuff.

Synopsis:

This chapter is a short description of the transformation of Anodos's room from one of the "regular world" into the Fairy Land. Just imagine this chapter as someone (like yourself, the reader) falling asleep and gently entering a dream.

Next chapter the real adventure begins!

Phantastes - Chapter 1

Edit: I almost forgot, the book is available for free on Gutenberg.org because it is out of copyright in the US (i.e. public domain), so it is free and legal to share with anyone and everyone without limitation. The link to the book is right here!

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/325/325-h/325-h.htm

/End edit

Chapter 1 is pretty simple. As far as I can tell, this chapter is just providing the literary setting for the story.

Once you strip out the wonderful descriptions, the story is thus: a first-person narrator awakes the day after his 21st birthday, having received all the possessions of his long-dead father (whose death is not described), and he goes to explore some long-unused secretary (a sort of antique desk). As he pokes around, he discovers a miniature-sized living woman and the "Adventures in Wonderland"-esque aspects of the novel abruptly break in. It took me a while to understand what's going on because the narrator takes the experience with a lot more credulity than I had.

How did this woman get here? How had she survived all these years? How is she so small? All of these questions are completely ignored by the story, setting the tenor of much of the rest of the book. This is not a book of logic, facts or "science" (in the modern sense). It is, in fact, fantasies in the traditional sense (wonders, dreams, etc). So the first thing you (my anonymous reader) should do when reading this book is discard any modern set of rules or rationality regarding story development because the author is not behaving very modern (the book is itself about 152 year olds, so it was much less common to be dominated by the modern paradigm at that time).

With that said, if one stays immersed in the descriptions, almost raw sensationalism, of the book, I think the scene is painted wonderfully and proves its worth in that fashion.

We are also given a name for the narrator; Anodos. The woman remains nameless, but after some discussion she increases her size to full human proportions and they continue talking about things past and present. At the end of the discussion (the payload of this whole chapter, really) the woman promises Anodos that he will travel to Fairy Land the next day.

I think the topic of Fairy Land deserves more discussion, because it is a very common trope of 19th and early 20th century literature (and probably earlier as well, but I'm not a literary scholar so I don't really know), but I will forbear on that discussion for now, so that I have enough things to talk about in later chapters.

On to chapter 2!

A new idea - Bookclub!

I just had this new idea today while walking home. I am going (to try) to start my own personal book club! Everyone is starting a book club these days....... Oprah........ other people.......... and so I figured I would start one too. Now my book club will perhaps work differently, because I've never been in a book club and I don't actually know what a book club is or does. But here was my idea: I will pick a book that I'm going to read through, post it here, and then periodically (perhaps on a chapter by chapter basis) I will post my thoughts and analysis of what I'm reading.

That way I can get my thoughts written down for my own records, and I might also inspire others to read these amazing, amazing books. A lot of what I read is actually re-reading stuff I've already been through, but just enjoyed so much the first time around that I had to read it again.

So! The first book shall be.................................................... Phantastes by George Macdonald! I've already started reading it so I will have to skim the first couple chapters again to post my thoughts, which I will do in the days to come assuming I remember that I'm doing this. I hope I don't forget and have nothing but an intro lying around here for the next year(s)....


Edit: I post this later in the series, but for posterity I should include a link to the FREE E-BOOK for Phantastes right here, just so that nobody has the misconception they have to actually buy the book to follow along. It's available on the internet thanks to the special magic known as the Public Domain (i.e. out of Copyright materials). So here, dear friend and reader, find the e-book at your convenience in a variety of formats:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/325

Selfless love

I'm going to quote below two emails that I wrote to a friend who was just entering a new romantic relationship. I believe that the advice I gave is generally applicable and extendable to nearly any type of relationship or situation.

Email the first:

I just want to leave you with one thought which is to ask yourself what is the greatest and most important (to him) sacrifice he has ever made on your behalf. To me, this is one of the most important metrics of love because sacrifice defines investment. If he hasn't sacrificed, he would not be invested in your life for your sake. Conversely, if he has sacrificed then he will care about you for your sake, and not for what you give him (emotionally or otherwise). I can say, as a guy, that you really have a lot to offer as a person and it would be really easy for guys to (even unconsciously) want to date you because of what you give them, and not because of what they can give you.

Email the second (after a response, not quoted here):

Well, the truth is I didn't really ask that question because I wanted to know the answer, I asked it because I wanted you to know the answer. :) Or more properly, I asked it because I wanted you to ask it of yourself.

Also, I was thinking about the list of small sacrifices that he has made and in my mind most of these do not qualify as a real sacrifice. You see, in nearly everything that you list he could be primarily motivated by a desire to see you because of how you make him feel. You see how in that arithmetic that somebody could be completely selfish and still come to a decision to visit you, because the self-worth outweighs the trouble of driving there? If that's his motivation (hypothetically), then if the costs in the first part ever start to outweigh the personal benefit in the second part, then the relationship will die off per force. Or in the words of George Macdonald,

"I knew now, that it is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, and not the being loved by each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness."

You see, it *has* to be genuine self-less concern for the other that originates one's actions. That way your internal calculus is, "if I do such and such, how much will it bless this other person?", and in that case, you will never allow personal cost or hardship to end your relationship. It's neigh interminable.

Or in my own words, "Love that demands something in return is not love freely given, but merely a business transaction, much like any other purchase or marketplace affair."

As a more concrete example (after all that philosophy), here's what I think of sacrifice. Suppose you need to have ACL surgery, and you're doing rehab. For rehab, you need to do stretches for an hour each morning and a partner would help make it easier. Also suppose that your friend is a night person and doesn't naturally get up early in the morning. Then suppose that for 1, or 2 or 3 or however many months it takes, he shows up every morning at 7 a.m. to help you do stretches to aid in rehab. That would be a sacrifice, because a) it was not naturally easy for him = you know it had a personal cost to him, b) there is minimal reward for him, *unless he values you*, c) he proves consistency by acting not in a single day, but over the course of months. It's possible to "fake" sacrifice and affection over the short term if you expect a long-term payoff. It's nearly impossible to "fake" sacrifice over the long term because most people simply don't have the self-discipline to do that for something they do not truly care about.

Once a person's mental calculus says, "it costs me X to do this, but it benefits my friend as Y, that sounds like a good deal": that is when sacrifice starts to happen, and that's when you know that somebody is starting to walk into love. Or to make this biblical, John 15:13 says "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." I've just been giving specific examples and elucidation of that one, simple verse. It is talking about sacrifice (laying down your life/interests/personhood) in the context of friendship (for your friends). Sacrifice and friendship defines love; sacrifice and friendship declares love; sacrifice and friendship fulfills love.

The Macdonald quote is partially drawn from an earlier post I made, called Love and Power. This post (Selfless love) is something of a complement to that earlier post.

In conclusion, I draw a dichotomy between two different types of love, what I can selfish love and selfless love. The first is where you love somebody because of what they do for you or give you, and the second is where you love somebody because of what you can do for him/her or give to him/her. At the root of the first, selfish love, is lust and the root of the second, selfless love, is "agape": godly, sacrificial love. To be fully accurate, I do believe that true love can be intermingled with that root lust, and the love is genuine in a sense of "real affection". You can go through a lot of situations and it will hold strong on the basis of that affection, but the problem is that the root source of your affection is going to be "what I get" which is the spirit of lust (desire for self). And like Macdonald implies above, when your partner ceases to fulfill that need, ceases to give to you, then the relationship will fail. It won't hold through difficulties.


And a great post I saw from a friend discussing this topic in very similar terms (towards the end):

http://blessedarethefools.blogspot.com/2010/08/loving-abundantly.html