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The Divnity of Modern Film Through The
Door of... |
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John Milton |
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November 17, 2000 |
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Active Imaginings |
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Claw and Howl like Beasts |
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Pictures of the Soul |
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Flicker in and out of hellish flame |
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The Door so thinly sealed |
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Is but a tree in a Garden |
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The Truth so tightly bound |
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Is but a Serpent's fang |
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That swells the sea of sacrifice |
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-"Memories are Like Tattoos" |
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John Milton's poem, "L'Allegro" is a perfect example of poetic liberty. That is, every person when constructing a memory(remembering) relies upon certain creative conceits or personal methods of concealment, namely of which is our sense of gender. Gender, however, as we find with Milton, is not just our culturally defined role, for even our sense of culture is caught up in the overarching gender which occupies itself with how much the world creates us versus how much we are involved in creating the world; that is, how much our personal structures of developing cognition reflect or are reflected by the broader structures of our place and time in culture. Culture, then, is itself not very specific since culture, by definition, needs be defined by culture even as it has a life unto itself. In fact, the only system of gender ontology that appears true to both the arbitrary nature of culture and the ambiguous nature of culture is that of nature: which within the overarching genderof Muse or Archetypal Feminine becomes what we who might discriminate between culture and nature mayor may not call myth - caught up as we are since beginning of time with what is and what is not true about our nature and role in it: i.e. nature, culture and our nature, our self, our role, our story as told by both light
and flesh. The poetic liberty exhibited by John Milton in "L'Allegro" is not just one man's experience, I would argue, but everyone's - especially if we consider the propriety of myth and person provided by a capitalist democracy, particularly with regards to mainstream film and music. The resonance of such modern architecture is unmistakable; the ability of the author to transmute reality and fantasy into feelings and songs of pure
being. And I would argue that Milton's epic voice is best appreciated as one would appreciate architecture of any variety. That is, if the conceit of both the novel and film are correct and civilization has something to say about its creators when they risk sublimating the purely rational, being artists: |
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And young and old come forth to play |
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On a sunshine holiday |
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Till the livelong daylight fail: |
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Then to the spicy nut-brown ale, |
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With stories told of many a feat, |
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How Faery Mab the junkets eat. |
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(lns 97-102) |
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