A Leak In The Safe

A Mused (Part Three)

It was interesting to me to realize that the following quote from La Belle Dame sans Merci and the Aesthetics of Romanticism by Barbara Fass, a volume of literary criticism, could just as easily have come from Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind by Graham Hancock, a book classified by my book distributor as "new age" or, even more intriguingly, "controversial knowledge."

In Supernatural Hancock draws a parallel between the folklore of fairy contact with humans, the shamanistic journey through the aether toward cosmic powers and contemporary alien abduction experiences. He fittingly finds the inspiration for the first known artists, the prehistoric cave painters, to come from the quest for knowledge in other dimensions, in much the same way that Fass presents the Romantic poets seeking inspiration in otherworldly muses.

But clearly, as both writers point out, there are problems in the alien sphere of Venusberg. Be they extraterrestrials or exiled gods, the denizens of this immaculate land of perfection, of pure sensation and no contradiction, where the laws of physics have no sway and time has been defeated, seem to need us. They want our stuff, the stuff that makes us human, our meat, our emotions, our sweat and jizz and even our very souls. As both Fass and Hancock note, the supernaturals seem to want us for amatory or breeding purposes, to combine with us in some sort of germinative effort. But somehow this effort cannot bear fruit in the other realm – for all its glories, it is sterile, incapable of generating, or perhaps sustaining, new life. So the fairies switch their babies with ours when the goblin spawn prove misshapen and moonstruck, and the aliens implant earth women when the fetuses in the incubators on the mother ship never turn out quite right.

(For me an analogy for this "other" realm, which may very well be one of the multiple dimensions that physicists now believe surround our own, would be the virtual world. Everything’s under control in video games, which seem "realer" every year, and within time and death exist in a radically different way, and it’s all about pleasure. The women are all beautiful and stacked, and you can be whatever you desire, a sports star, a knight, a super hero, and score, kill, consume and kiss indefinitely if you know the right moves. But you can never really grow, never create anything that isn’t in the game already, and in the end it’s a universe of no tangible consequence, one that an vanish instantly without a trace if, say, your son saves over your save file. There’s an essay in one of the Apocalypse Culture books that postulates that the traditional folkloric entities are trying to manifest themselves within video games and the internet, and I tell you, playing some of these games late at night and "inspired" I’ve felt that that might just be the case.)

Similarly, the Romantic artists seeks to produce poetry by escaping nominal reality and rising above, like a shaman, to fuse with the eternal. But, as pleasant as the higher realms are, he must return to earth to set his vision down. I had a roommate in college who had a mental breakdown senior year. Naturally, he talked a lot of nonsense, but he did have one rap that’s always stayed with me. He desperately wanted to be a writer, but realized that his mental problems were preventing him despite the inspiration he felt. He explained his dilemma this way – the ink you need to create with is in the freezer and you have to go inside to get it, but within the freezer the ink is frozen and useless. It’s not until you’ve gotten yourself back out of the freezer and given the ink a chance to thaw that you can actually write with it. This guy could never quite get himself out of the freezer, and the poetry he wrote that seemed to him to be so profound was just gibberish to everybody else. (The Army, however, was later able to find a place for him pruning trees along the DMZ in Korea, the perfect job for a crazy man if there ever was one.) Fass cites Nerval in her book as the rare writer who was able to make the trip to the fairyland of madness and return to our world with something comprehensible, although the contradiction between the two worlds ultimately proved enough to kill him.

Similarly Yeat’s Tannhauser figure, Oisin, has his harp broken in fairyland and, as Fass says, "in fairyland, the warrior is inactive; and more important, the poet is silenced." The supernatural, then, lacks something, something that makes it reach out to the human world, and in fact, in honor of the season, can’t it be said that God needed Mary in order to produce Jesus as much as Mary needed him?

A Mused (Part Two)

The principle subject of La Belle Dame sans Merci by Barbara Fass is an examination of the titular figure, who must be, like the Femme Fatale, both seductive and dangerous, but, even more, to be unambiguously supernatural and to reside in a supernatural place. As I got into the book I realized how it unexpectedly dovetailed with another book I’ve written about, Graham Hancock’s Supernatural, whose middle section is about the same fairy lore that inspired the Romantic writers Fass treats. Obviously Keats’s poem La Belle Dame sans Merci is a touchstone reference, but so is the Tannhauser legend so beloved of the German Romantics.

With the defeat of paganism at the hands of Christianity, the old gods were driven out and demonized, exiled to another realm, one that reflects the Hellenistic ideals of sybaritism and epicureanism, a place where the strict commandments and judgements of the Judeo/Christian world have no sway. In the Tannhauser myth Venus is the mistress of this dimension, a voluptuary who lives only for sensual pleasure, and who presents such an image of supernatural loveliness that no mere mortal can resist her. (Interestingly, the Barbara Aho net screed I referred to in part one of this essay is haunted by the same scenario which she typically interprets as seduction by Satan).

But there’s a flaw in this sphere – even unrelieved pleasure and beauty can lose their meaning without the bracing contrast of pain and ugliness. Inevitably the smitten hero longs for the contradictory, ended joy of our own world, but the problem is that once he returns to it he finds that neither he nor the world is the same. As we know from the story of Rip Van Winkle, time is experienced differently in Venusberg, and what seems to be an instant there can prove to be decades here. Even though the hero does not feel at home in the unearthly real, once he’s been there he can never feel entirely at home in the earthly realm either.

Thus the knight of Keats’s poem describes his seduction by the belle dame:

Then his own subsequent alienation from the world:

Fass sees the Romantic fascination with the belle dame as reflecting their own contradictory feelings about their artistic vocation, their muse. On one hand, the Romantic nature is drawn to beauty, but it is also drawn to freedom, and poets like Shelley, Keats, and even the later Swinburne felt the pull of the neo-classical idea that literature should be for the moral improvement of mankind, and feared their muse was drawing them into airy, inconsequential realms and away from the crucial political and social conflicts that rocked that age of revolution and democratic awakening.

Although the Romantics were sympathetic to the rising masses, the corresponding decline of royal and aristocratic patronage endangered their livelihood, and the very egalitarianism that they supported seemed to threaten their place in society. As Fass Points out, the imaginative journey to Venusberg was both a pilgrimage to beauty and a flight from an increasingly banal, utilitarian world.

As she says: What artists felt was not so much a longing for the social realm as a rejection by it.