So, I read #MMMD in 2019. I recall reading, and saying salt of the earth! Salt of the earth! She captures that so brilliantly! I also recall that if you follow a line in an arabesque, you will end up back at your starting point as the pattern continues endlessly. This means the arabesque does not have a definite beginning, middle or end. That was reading Marguerite Young.
I’m on chapter 22, where Miss Macintosh at the breakfast table reads a torrent of tidbits from the newspaper, interspersed with quickshot questions for Vera about educational factoids. The effect is both voluminous and surreal. And oddly familiar, in an age when we are drowning in information.
But what has she witnessed? Vera riding into miss MacIntosh’s unlocked bedroom on the pony Falada, then striking Miss MacIntosh and in return being very thoroughly beaten up—these incidents seem unlikely and, well, unreal. When Vera wakes up in Miss Macintosh’s bed she is told “You have been very sick and unusually stubborn, but you have recovered” (P 300). Has this all been a fever dream? Or is it another case of the blurring of dream and reality?
All good questions, Peter! So much slippage between dream and reality throughout the novel. I almost don't care whether dream or reality, the language is just so phenomenal on every line!!! How does she do this and sustain it for 1,321 pages. How many lines is that?!
Peter: You are responding exactly as I did when I first read this episode in the book. We are told in the novel’s opening pages that Vera herself acknowledges her “over-active imagination” and so we are prepared to regard her as a typical “unreliable narrator,” and to dismiss her most visionary scenes as mere hallucinations. Miss Young, however, is not going to let us off the hook so easily. She has no interest in writing a book in which a character awakens and says, “Thank God, it was only a dream.” The word she would quarrel with in that sentence is “only.” It is dismissive of the dream experience and the way in which imagination works. Throughout MMMD Miss Young insists that dreams and hallucinations, visions and apparitions have their own reality, their own ontology. Precisely because we are able to activate our powers to generate them, they have stature along with events and happenings in what we refer to as “reality.” Miss Young would always add to a sentence like that (as does Vera in the book), “but what if that ‘reality’ you awaken to is itself a dream, a fiction, something made-up in the cauldron of the imagination?” It is entirely appropriate to consider the “theme” of MMMD as “life is a dream.” The famous novelist Anais Nin said of MMMD: "This is a search for reality through a maze of illusions and fantasy and dreams, ultimately asserting in the words of Calderon: 'Life is a dream.'" Shakespeare said as much at the end of both “Midsummer NIght’s Dream and “The Tempest.” Poets have referred to life as simply the “next room of the dream.” We awaken from dream into dream and from that dream into another.” Once we rid ourselves of the notion that it was “just” a dream, we move into a realm Elizabeth Sewell in her woefully underappreciated book “The Orphic Voice,” calls “post-logical thinking,” Sewell was unfamiliar with MMMD but everything in this book seems to be a commentary on every page of MMMD. Sewell identifies the mythic figure of Orpheus as the source of mythical or “post-logical” thought and traces it through Ovid, Bacon, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson and Rilke.” Had Marguerite Young been available to her, she surely would have included MMMD as a major example of Orphic or post-logical thinking. A shorter version of this argument appears in a line from M. Young’s poem titled “Elegy”: “reality is wild and on the wing.”
I'm not home now so I can't say exactly how far along I am, but I think I'm approaching 300 pages? For me, the experience has been very disjointed because I have other reading obligations and life has been busy, so I read 5-10 pages here and there whenever I can. But reading in this occasional manner has worked pretty well. It feels like a book I can dip into now and then and pick up the mood and the ideas. I am probably forgetting a lot of details I read, but that feels okay -- to me, the experience is more about the sentences and paragraphs rather than the chapters as a whole or the book as a whole. I don't worry about losing the thread of the story -- the "story," such as it is. I just go with the flow, focus on what's in my short section, and not worry about what happened 50 or 100 pages ago. I'm not expecting consistency and (traditional forms of) coherence :)
Very well said, Rebecca. I'm advising just this type of "dipping" to the readers that I recommend the book to at Interabang. The book is one giant swirl of wonderful language. This writing style is so full and yet buoyant. Have you ever read anything/anyone with a similar style?
Warning: this comment may contain spoilers!) Lori and Anthony: I’m glad you extended an invitation to fellow travelers to check in with their thoughts about traveling on a ghost ship. I have from the beginning regarded MMMD as a ghost novel equal or superior to those regarded as superlative explorations of what Mr. Kurtz in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” terms “The horror, the horror.” To my mind there are three levels of ghosts in MMMD: Ordinary, Disturbing, and Cosmic. The first is exemplified by Dr. O’Leary, devoted to bringing babies into the world no matter what, including having to drive a car seriously in need of maintenance, referred to throughout the book as a “ghost buggy”because it lacks everything a car needs in order to move. Akin to the Doctor is the bus driver, wraith-like and, along with several other drivers of conveyances in the novel, a clear displacement of figures in myth and literature who conduct dead souls to their final destination. At this level are other ghostly occurrences such as Catherine Cartwheel’s hallucinations or Hannah’s visions of grandeur, or Mr. Spitzer’s conjuring of the ghost of his dead brother Peron. Ordinary because it’s what readers expect when they open a book noted for its dark leanings. The second level is the Disturbing. Readers who have made it through to chapters 17 through 20 are, if not horrified, at least disturbed by narrator Vera’s encounter with Miss MacIntosh seen clearly and plainly—-as a man, a skeleton, a death’s head, a white skull—seeking to embrace her: “that bald, scarred head floating above me, pillowed on waves of darkness, those blank eyes staring at the void sky, …..that forehead without brows or hairline…was this love or was this death?” Ekphrasis? “The Scream” by Edvard Munch? Similarly disturbing scenes are found throughout the book, notably involving Dr. O’Leary and his sister Sarah, dead at age one but still tormenting her brother in a ghostly tavern somewhere near What Cheer, Iowa. Last to be mentioned here in the second tier but nowhere near the bottom of this barrel is Esther Longtree, eternally pregnant, eternally ravished, mulish and given to burying her imaginary/imaginal babies in the weeds, fields, trees, and by the side of the road where their cries are heard by the strangely intuitive bus driver. Third, last, and most extreme is Cosmic horror. Things seen as they really are and not as you imagine them to be. The year stripped of its leaves, the face without make up, no turbans walking across the floors of a house now badly in need of paint as Dr. Leary’s car is in need of an engine. Sight cleared of all distortions, Truth beheld in its cosmic aspect as the Abyss, the Void. Mr. Spitzer has a momentary glimpse of this third ghost in Chapter 48: “The creation was not the stars. city lights, cities, long-haired water lilies fringed by golden ripples under dying moon, Orion flying as if it were a bird. The creation was this void where the stars went out like city lamps” (p. 627). The one living writer I am aware of who shares this extreme view of the nature of things is Cynthia Ozick. Her short novella The Messiah of Stockholm, is a work of genius, undoubtedly influenced by Marguerite Young. In one of her last interviews, Young mentioned Ozick as a writer she admired. Ozick carries on Miss Young’s task of imagining the unimaginable in her novels The Cannibal Galaxy and the Puttermesser Papers. You will have been well prepared for these demanding books by reading through to the very end of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling where a sign will greet you saying “Be Bak in a Whale.”
Hello, fellow travelers! My background is a 2019 first reading with Prof. Shaviro's Facegroup book. Then I became obsessed and went on to re-read it a couple more times and write 3 volumes exploring the novel. *whew* I took a break to finish reading her other works and plan to do another readalong (my 5th read through) in 2025. I look forward to reading your insights and love the journaling back and forth! The "ghost bus" is a great description along with a "spider web memory" and I found that since Young's intended doctorate was in philosophy that after I familiarized myself with the subject she pretty much went down the list starting with her "water world" by Thales of Miletus - Everything is made of water philosophy. From To All My Darlings Vol 3 - Young uses water in all its forms and water symbolizes various things - purity, clarity, refreshment, mystery and fertility, motion, emotion, intuition and reflection, mutable and sublime, sustaining and destructive, birth and death, placidity and violence, freedom and/or enslavement, inviting, mysterious and daunting, change and turning points, good and bad health. It is used over 1100 times. Fog can symbolize obscurity, indistinction, something that comes before a great revelation, the area between reality and unreality, uncertainty, death, isolation, a transformation to the unreal, illusion vs reality, mystery, confusion, dreams, and depression. Fog is used throughout the novel but it's highest density is from Chapters 9-65. It is used over 400 times. Arctic is used over 50 times and ice many more. Cold can signify misery, death, dying and everything mundane. It is used over 450 times and most densely at the beginning and ending of the novel.
Welcome to the Substack! We are thrilled to have you. Where can we obtain your three volumes? I was unfamiliar with Thales of Miletus and looked up his water theory. One of our favorite quotes from the novel is "watery apparitions dripping with worlds." (p. 21). Now I see this phrase with an enhanced significance.
Because you've read all of Young, I'm curious to know how her poetry or other works influence or are influenced by MMMD?
They are on Amazon but I make them free every time I can. I’ll find the next date and let you know so you can download them easily.
Good question and I’m not sure I can answer well because I read her poetry but didn’t study it if that makes sense. I’m not a huge poetry person to begin with. With her novels you can see repetition and themes that were explored in MMMD. You can also feel the restraint in her other works because of the very different subject matter. Each work is still very different. Her poetry I did not feel that recognition. I would have to re-read it.
Given that the theme for this particular involution of the seashell is all things ghostly, it is worth pointing out that the novel brings richly to mind those writings within cultures known as “books of the dead” whose words are spoken over the beds of dying people to assist them in their latest transformation. For the dying, these spoken words conjure up vivid images, both benign and horrifying, of the world they are leaving, images which, at the time of death, are revealed as illusions to which they must now bid farewell. Considered as a book of the dead, MMMD must be heard as well as read by the dying, and the dying, in this instance, is everyone including those reading these words. If this is macabre, then so be it. It is here that we can legitimately make the claim that MMMD belongs in the tradition of great Gothic literature—from folk tales of jinns, dybbuks and demons to the novels of Shelley, Stoker, Lovecraft, Jackson, King. Scant attention has been paid to the element of horror in MMMD, culminating in pitch black musings on the abyss “swallowing moons, suns, stars, city lights, cities…” confirming what we have come to know about the eating habits of black holes. And where the music of the spheres has changed into the music of gears, the monotonous hum of the machinery of the universe abandoned but still grinding out sounds in the empty void, “death’s ironic scraping,” as Wallace Stevens might phrase it. Ghastly, but this is music too. In Miss Young’s universe, as we are now learning from the string theorists, reality is less a thing than a vibration, that is, music. The great “quantum” novel has been written, and this is it!
As readers and listeners to this ghost and death-haunted book, we become mortal witnesses to the panoply of illusions that fill up the screen of our imaginations, our own individual lives translated into words and images, characters and situations that are enlarged, preposterous, frightening, hysterically funny, and that will, at book’s end, like everything else, dissolve, leaving not a rack behind. Unlike other books you read, there are no “life lessons.” Nothing is resolved. But something has happened. That “something” can be vaguely hinted at by these posts you are presently reading but can only be fully realized by picking up the book (or listening to the audio) and reading (or hearing) “The bus driver was whistling.. .” and then, some time later, at book’s end, having spent considerable hours, perhaps an eternity, inside this ghost ride of a novel (which has taken on the mythic proportions of Jonah’s and Ahab’s respective leviathans) only to encounter this misspelled valediction: “Owt to luntch. Be bak in a whale.” Where you return to where you began. As a contributor to this site, I am very interested in whether or not “something” is happening as you read this book and how it differs (or doesn’t) from other books you consider equally challenging.
I’m gratified to see that these lines from her poetry confirm my suspicion that the subject of Memory is as central to this book as it was to James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (where it is spelled, at book’s end “mememormee”. And that Reality is shot through with universal memory affirming Plato’s notion of “anamnesis” where there is no learning, only remembering.
Moore concludes his review of Young’s poetry by citing this line from the same poem, “Elegy:”
“Reality is wild and on the wing.”
—— for all you lovers of butterflies, pigeons, cranes, ducks, and other light and winged holy beings who ensoul us and richly populate this book.
ELEGY BY M YOUNG: “”Reality with universal memory is haunted, / Throughout the universe is memory”—and/or that poem’s penultimate line: “Reality is wild and on the wing.”
So, I read #MMMD in 2019. I recall reading, and saying salt of the earth! Salt of the earth! She captures that so brilliantly! I also recall that if you follow a line in an arabesque, you will end up back at your starting point as the pattern continues endlessly. This means the arabesque does not have a definite beginning, middle or end. That was reading Marguerite Young.
I love both of these remembrances, Paperpills! And the arabesque imagery is spot on. Kind of like the "waves" in the word abundance!
Thanks for letting me know about this! Hope you're doing well!
I’m on chapter 22, where Miss Macintosh at the breakfast table reads a torrent of tidbits from the newspaper, interspersed with quickshot questions for Vera about educational factoids. The effect is both voluminous and surreal. And oddly familiar, in an age when we are drowning in information.
Ah, Peter, that is a memorable scene. Those rapid-fire questions intended to distract Vera from what she's just witnessed! Thanks!
But what has she witnessed? Vera riding into miss MacIntosh’s unlocked bedroom on the pony Falada, then striking Miss MacIntosh and in return being very thoroughly beaten up—these incidents seem unlikely and, well, unreal. When Vera wakes up in Miss Macintosh’s bed she is told “You have been very sick and unusually stubborn, but you have recovered” (P 300). Has this all been a fever dream? Or is it another case of the blurring of dream and reality?
All good questions, Peter! So much slippage between dream and reality throughout the novel. I almost don't care whether dream or reality, the language is just so phenomenal on every line!!! How does she do this and sustain it for 1,321 pages. How many lines is that?!
Peter: You are responding exactly as I did when I first read this episode in the book. We are told in the novel’s opening pages that Vera herself acknowledges her “over-active imagination” and so we are prepared to regard her as a typical “unreliable narrator,” and to dismiss her most visionary scenes as mere hallucinations. Miss Young, however, is not going to let us off the hook so easily. She has no interest in writing a book in which a character awakens and says, “Thank God, it was only a dream.” The word she would quarrel with in that sentence is “only.” It is dismissive of the dream experience and the way in which imagination works. Throughout MMMD Miss Young insists that dreams and hallucinations, visions and apparitions have their own reality, their own ontology. Precisely because we are able to activate our powers to generate them, they have stature along with events and happenings in what we refer to as “reality.” Miss Young would always add to a sentence like that (as does Vera in the book), “but what if that ‘reality’ you awaken to is itself a dream, a fiction, something made-up in the cauldron of the imagination?” It is entirely appropriate to consider the “theme” of MMMD as “life is a dream.” The famous novelist Anais Nin said of MMMD: "This is a search for reality through a maze of illusions and fantasy and dreams, ultimately asserting in the words of Calderon: 'Life is a dream.'" Shakespeare said as much at the end of both “Midsummer NIght’s Dream and “The Tempest.” Poets have referred to life as simply the “next room of the dream.” We awaken from dream into dream and from that dream into another.” Once we rid ourselves of the notion that it was “just” a dream, we move into a realm Elizabeth Sewell in her woefully underappreciated book “The Orphic Voice,” calls “post-logical thinking,” Sewell was unfamiliar with MMMD but everything in this book seems to be a commentary on every page of MMMD. Sewell identifies the mythic figure of Orpheus as the source of mythical or “post-logical” thought and traces it through Ovid, Bacon, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson and Rilke.” Had Marguerite Young been available to her, she surely would have included MMMD as a major example of Orphic or post-logical thinking. A shorter version of this argument appears in a line from M. Young’s poem titled “Elegy”: “reality is wild and on the wing.”
I'm not home now so I can't say exactly how far along I am, but I think I'm approaching 300 pages? For me, the experience has been very disjointed because I have other reading obligations and life has been busy, so I read 5-10 pages here and there whenever I can. But reading in this occasional manner has worked pretty well. It feels like a book I can dip into now and then and pick up the mood and the ideas. I am probably forgetting a lot of details I read, but that feels okay -- to me, the experience is more about the sentences and paragraphs rather than the chapters as a whole or the book as a whole. I don't worry about losing the thread of the story -- the "story," such as it is. I just go with the flow, focus on what's in my short section, and not worry about what happened 50 or 100 pages ago. I'm not expecting consistency and (traditional forms of) coherence :)
Very well said, Rebecca. I'm advising just this type of "dipping" to the readers that I recommend the book to at Interabang. The book is one giant swirl of wonderful language. This writing style is so full and yet buoyant. Have you ever read anything/anyone with a similar style?
Warning: this comment may contain spoilers!) Lori and Anthony: I’m glad you extended an invitation to fellow travelers to check in with their thoughts about traveling on a ghost ship. I have from the beginning regarded MMMD as a ghost novel equal or superior to those regarded as superlative explorations of what Mr. Kurtz in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” terms “The horror, the horror.” To my mind there are three levels of ghosts in MMMD: Ordinary, Disturbing, and Cosmic. The first is exemplified by Dr. O’Leary, devoted to bringing babies into the world no matter what, including having to drive a car seriously in need of maintenance, referred to throughout the book as a “ghost buggy”because it lacks everything a car needs in order to move. Akin to the Doctor is the bus driver, wraith-like and, along with several other drivers of conveyances in the novel, a clear displacement of figures in myth and literature who conduct dead souls to their final destination. At this level are other ghostly occurrences such as Catherine Cartwheel’s hallucinations or Hannah’s visions of grandeur, or Mr. Spitzer’s conjuring of the ghost of his dead brother Peron. Ordinary because it’s what readers expect when they open a book noted for its dark leanings. The second level is the Disturbing. Readers who have made it through to chapters 17 through 20 are, if not horrified, at least disturbed by narrator Vera’s encounter with Miss MacIntosh seen clearly and plainly—-as a man, a skeleton, a death’s head, a white skull—seeking to embrace her: “that bald, scarred head floating above me, pillowed on waves of darkness, those blank eyes staring at the void sky, …..that forehead without brows or hairline…was this love or was this death?” Ekphrasis? “The Scream” by Edvard Munch? Similarly disturbing scenes are found throughout the book, notably involving Dr. O’Leary and his sister Sarah, dead at age one but still tormenting her brother in a ghostly tavern somewhere near What Cheer, Iowa. Last to be mentioned here in the second tier but nowhere near the bottom of this barrel is Esther Longtree, eternally pregnant, eternally ravished, mulish and given to burying her imaginary/imaginal babies in the weeds, fields, trees, and by the side of the road where their cries are heard by the strangely intuitive bus driver. Third, last, and most extreme is Cosmic horror. Things seen as they really are and not as you imagine them to be. The year stripped of its leaves, the face without make up, no turbans walking across the floors of a house now badly in need of paint as Dr. Leary’s car is in need of an engine. Sight cleared of all distortions, Truth beheld in its cosmic aspect as the Abyss, the Void. Mr. Spitzer has a momentary glimpse of this third ghost in Chapter 48: “The creation was not the stars. city lights, cities, long-haired water lilies fringed by golden ripples under dying moon, Orion flying as if it were a bird. The creation was this void where the stars went out like city lamps” (p. 627). The one living writer I am aware of who shares this extreme view of the nature of things is Cynthia Ozick. Her short novella The Messiah of Stockholm, is a work of genius, undoubtedly influenced by Marguerite Young. In one of her last interviews, Young mentioned Ozick as a writer she admired. Ozick carries on Miss Young’s task of imagining the unimaginable in her novels The Cannibal Galaxy and the Puttermesser Papers. You will have been well prepared for these demanding books by reading through to the very end of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling where a sign will greet you saying “Be Bak in a Whale.”
Hello, fellow travelers! My background is a 2019 first reading with Prof. Shaviro's Facegroup book. Then I became obsessed and went on to re-read it a couple more times and write 3 volumes exploring the novel. *whew* I took a break to finish reading her other works and plan to do another readalong (my 5th read through) in 2025. I look forward to reading your insights and love the journaling back and forth! The "ghost bus" is a great description along with a "spider web memory" and I found that since Young's intended doctorate was in philosophy that after I familiarized myself with the subject she pretty much went down the list starting with her "water world" by Thales of Miletus - Everything is made of water philosophy. From To All My Darlings Vol 3 - Young uses water in all its forms and water symbolizes various things - purity, clarity, refreshment, mystery and fertility, motion, emotion, intuition and reflection, mutable and sublime, sustaining and destructive, birth and death, placidity and violence, freedom and/or enslavement, inviting, mysterious and daunting, change and turning points, good and bad health. It is used over 1100 times. Fog can symbolize obscurity, indistinction, something that comes before a great revelation, the area between reality and unreality, uncertainty, death, isolation, a transformation to the unreal, illusion vs reality, mystery, confusion, dreams, and depression. Fog is used throughout the novel but it's highest density is from Chapters 9-65. It is used over 400 times. Arctic is used over 50 times and ice many more. Cold can signify misery, death, dying and everything mundane. It is used over 450 times and most densely at the beginning and ending of the novel.
Dear To All My Darlings,
Welcome to the Substack! We are thrilled to have you. Where can we obtain your three volumes? I was unfamiliar with Thales of Miletus and looked up his water theory. One of our favorite quotes from the novel is "watery apparitions dripping with worlds." (p. 21). Now I see this phrase with an enhanced significance.
Because you've read all of Young, I'm curious to know how her poetry or other works influence or are influenced by MMMD?
Lori
They are on Amazon but I make them free every time I can. I’ll find the next date and let you know so you can download them easily.
Good question and I’m not sure I can answer well because I read her poetry but didn’t study it if that makes sense. I’m not a huge poetry person to begin with. With her novels you can see repetition and themes that were explored in MMMD. You can also feel the restraint in her other works because of the very different subject matter. Each work is still very different. Her poetry I did not feel that recognition. I would have to re-read it.
I checked the date and I can make them free again the 2nd week of Sept.
Given that the theme for this particular involution of the seashell is all things ghostly, it is worth pointing out that the novel brings richly to mind those writings within cultures known as “books of the dead” whose words are spoken over the beds of dying people to assist them in their latest transformation. For the dying, these spoken words conjure up vivid images, both benign and horrifying, of the world they are leaving, images which, at the time of death, are revealed as illusions to which they must now bid farewell. Considered as a book of the dead, MMMD must be heard as well as read by the dying, and the dying, in this instance, is everyone including those reading these words. If this is macabre, then so be it. It is here that we can legitimately make the claim that MMMD belongs in the tradition of great Gothic literature—from folk tales of jinns, dybbuks and demons to the novels of Shelley, Stoker, Lovecraft, Jackson, King. Scant attention has been paid to the element of horror in MMMD, culminating in pitch black musings on the abyss “swallowing moons, suns, stars, city lights, cities…” confirming what we have come to know about the eating habits of black holes. And where the music of the spheres has changed into the music of gears, the monotonous hum of the machinery of the universe abandoned but still grinding out sounds in the empty void, “death’s ironic scraping,” as Wallace Stevens might phrase it. Ghastly, but this is music too. In Miss Young’s universe, as we are now learning from the string theorists, reality is less a thing than a vibration, that is, music. The great “quantum” novel has been written, and this is it!
As readers and listeners to this ghost and death-haunted book, we become mortal witnesses to the panoply of illusions that fill up the screen of our imaginations, our own individual lives translated into words and images, characters and situations that are enlarged, preposterous, frightening, hysterically funny, and that will, at book’s end, like everything else, dissolve, leaving not a rack behind. Unlike other books you read, there are no “life lessons.” Nothing is resolved. But something has happened. That “something” can be vaguely hinted at by these posts you are presently reading but can only be fully realized by picking up the book (or listening to the audio) and reading (or hearing) “The bus driver was whistling.. .” and then, some time later, at book’s end, having spent considerable hours, perhaps an eternity, inside this ghost ride of a novel (which has taken on the mythic proportions of Jonah’s and Ahab’s respective leviathans) only to encounter this misspelled valediction: “Owt to luntch. Be bak in a whale.” Where you return to where you began. As a contributor to this site, I am very interested in whether or not “something” is happening as you read this book and how it differs (or doesn’t) from other books you consider equally challenging.
As for Miss Young’s poetry, (and relevant to our ghostly theme) Archivist Steven Moore has a wonderful review online. (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/158622/reality-is-wild-and-on-the-wing. ) Of particular interest is her poem titled “Elegy” which contains the lines:
“Reality with with universal memory is haunted
Throughout the universe is memory”
I’m gratified to see that these lines from her poetry confirm my suspicion that the subject of Memory is as central to this book as it was to James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (where it is spelled, at book’s end “mememormee”. And that Reality is shot through with universal memory affirming Plato’s notion of “anamnesis” where there is no learning, only remembering.
Moore concludes his review of Young’s poetry by citing this line from the same poem, “Elegy:”
“Reality is wild and on the wing.”
—— for all you lovers of butterflies, pigeons, cranes, ducks, and other light and winged holy beings who ensoul us and richly populate this book.
ELEGY BY M YOUNG: “”Reality with universal memory is haunted, / Throughout the universe is memory”—and/or that poem’s penultimate line: “Reality is wild and on the wing.”
My three volume series on the MMMD can be found here -
Chapters 1-44 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B2T9PWDQ
Chapters 45-82 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BKX67PSD
Exploring the Masterpiece https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BQCS5HCN
I will make them FREE every three months from now and through 2025 so anyone who would like a Kindle copy of these books can download them for free.
September 12-16, 2024 FREE for five days