Easily Distracted

Monday, March 17, 2025

Interlacing: an aesthetic

Ackroyd spells out his aesthetic thesis in Albion: the origins of the English imagination (2002):

[….] The association with the weaving of tapestry is apposite here, and the poetic technique has become known as that of “interlace.” The “interlace structure” has thus been defined as expressing “the meaning of coincidence,” the recurrence of human behaviour, and the circularity of time5 as the thread of words crosses and recrosses itself in endless weaves and knots.

It is not simply a technique, therefore, but a vision of the world. The great stone crosses of Northumberland and Cumberland, hewn in the early eighth century, are carved with abstract interlace patterns in which bands or threads or vines turn back upon themselves to form woven intersections or knots. They may be symbols of eternity, like the spirals upon even more ancient stone, but they seem also to display a delight in intricacy or ornament for its own sake. Ivory caskets, sword-hilts, brooches and rings are emblazoned with the same labyrinthine device; a large gold buckle, discovered during the excavations at Sutton Hoo and dated to the early seventh century, has an interlacing of snakes and birds’ heads wrought upon it. It was what the Beowulf poet described as “hring-boga ,” ring-coiled. The manuscript illuminations from the seventh and eighth centuries are irradiated by interlace; the initial pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels are peculiarly rich in this art, with one page bearing several thousand “intersections” while in another only two threads or bands are employed to create an entire and effortlessly detailed “carpet-page.” The pattern occurs at a later date. When one Middle English poem, known as The Owl and the Nightingale, is depicted in terms of “chain-stitch”6 the relation to the “carpet-page” of the illuminated gospels is reinforced. If it is indeed a vision of the world, it is one which has no beginning and no end; there is no sequence and no progress, only the endless recapitulation of patterns and the constant interplay of opposing forces. Thus “interlace” has variously described Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Langland’s Piers the Plowman and the penitential lyrics of the thirteenth century. The term has been used to define the novels of Charles Dickens….

https://jayrothermel.substack.com/p/hawksmoor-1985-by-peter-ackroyd?r=1vg2di

Sunday, March 16, 2025

THE PERSON FROM PORLOCK

"The Person from Porlock," Reg mused, half aloud. "Wouldn't it be funny if it turned out that they were deliberately and purposely upsetting the works of other men. Suppose it were their whole object in life–”

Reg’s matter-transfer project is cancelled as unworkable. That night, as he and his wife discuss Coleridge’s “Kublai Khan” misfortune, Reg connects it to the countless human errors that wrecked his work on the Bots-Wellton theory.

Next day Reg lays out this theory to his immediate supervisor. Borge is concerned, but not about practical errors made by Reg's team.

“For six years you've been turning out miracles. I hate like the devil to see you come up with something like this, Reg. Surely you must realize it's all the result of overwork and fatigue. No one is going around interfering with your work. Your mind refuses to admit defeat so it's automatically throwing it off on someone else. I'm no psychologist, but I'll bet that's close to the right answer. I want you to have Walker at the Clinic examine you. I'm willing to bet he recommends a long rest. give you six months with pay if necessary. But I can't let you back in the lab unless you do this. A repetition of yesterday's performance and the whole place would be shot up. You've got to get rid of this Person from Porlock business.”

Reg peels the corporate onion until, higher up the food chain:

Millen leaned forward, his almost ominous seriousness returning. "You've done a good job, Reg. Better than we hoped for a while. It looked for a time as if you weren't going to get it.”

Raymond F. Jones does an outstanding job letting his protagonist balance between collapse and explosion. Reg's petty bourgeois social position as an engineer is well-observed. And the poetry recitations with Mrs. Reg are acutely humanizing.