The Queen of the Woods has cut bright boughs of various flowering

[sovay]

From the Preface to David Jones' In Parenthesis (1937):

One other thing. It is not easy in considering a trench-mortar barrage to give praise for the action proper to chemicals—full though it may be of beauty. We feel a rubicon has been passed between striking with a hand weapon as men used to do and loosing poison from the sky as we do ourselves. We doubt the decency of our own inventions, and are certainly in terror of their possibilities. That our culture has accelerated every line of advance into the territory of physical science is well appreciated—but not so well understood are the unforeseen, subsidiary effects of this achievement . . . We who are of the same world of sense with hairy ass and furry wolf and who presume to other and more radiant affinities, are finding it difficult, as yet, to recognise these creatures of chemicals as true extensions of ourselves, that we may feel for them a native affection, which alone can make them magical for us. It would be interesting to know how we shall ennoble our new media as we have already ennobled and made significant our old—candle-light, fire-light, Cups, Wands and Swords, to choose at random.

Comments

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

Wow, interesting way of putting it.

[sovay]

I already have Tarot on the brain these days, so this text especially stuck in my head. Also, David Jones is one of those people where I don't understand why they're not more famous. There is at least a Wikipedia entry in his name and, it seems, a site—but In Parenthesis is the only poem I know ever to filter World War I through Welsh epic and Arthuriana, equal in strangeness and language to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land or James Joyce's Ulysses, and yet it took me almost a year to track down the copy I own. (This was several years ago; I can't remember how I found out about him, but I'm pretty sure I was on an Eliot binge at the time.) I love him.

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

There need to be more people who appreciate both the mythically fantastic and the contemporary without seeing the two as mutually exclusive threads, to be woven together or kept apart but distinct regardless.

[sovay]

I'll see what I can do.

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

God, I'm having trouble with this view. It's gorgeously put, romantic, even exciting to think of these as new manifestations that will be part of ourselves, our art, our literature, our mythology and magic, but then, there's the damage done ... I keep remembering a line from the movie Mindwalk. The physicist says that scientists need training in ethics as well, that sometimes discovery might need to be kept quiet. That's hard to imagine too--that something exists (some knowledge) and we're not able to learn it, follow it through, but I also don't like the notion, "We chop down trees, we plant new seeds," as if it's really that simple. Denying the possibility that everything is connected and maybe one broken link cuts off life for so many more. Yes, the chemicals are extensions of ourselves--we created--them. And war is an extension of ourselves. But a native affection?

Of course, I'm also reading this out of context, and I've never read David Jones that I know of--I'm going to go look to see what I have! Interesting theory; you have me thinking again!

[sovay]

If it helps for context, the author was in the trenches in World War I; In Parenthesis is drawn from his own experiences on the western front between 1915—1916. The poem is well worth reading.