The dome of the spirit
The palace of the heart
Her sovereign realm is
Locked in the darkness
of the madness of loneliness,
casting the eternal spells
of sadness on the queen
unwanted, unseen, unheard,
betrayed by false courtesans,
courtiers, father, mother, all,
till the light of love casts over
the weeping queen’s head softly
with a gentle touch of the sun
in all sweetness evermore.
A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The biblical cyclicity of history proclaims that what is happening now happened before because there’s no new thing under the sun. As I agree with the cyclical history theory, I prefer stories that confirm the continuity of human nature, which results in this felicitous book I came across on the Kindle store. The precedent epidemic scares and the response to them in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, a classic 1722 account of the Black Death that devastated England from 1664 to 1665, do not read no less different than ours. Defoe’s recounting of the plague successfully resurrects the spirit of the epoch as his narrator guides the reader to the places and scenes of the seismic event in the capacity of a charitable and knowledgeable guardian of posterity, making them surprisingly familiar with ours.
It is a literary eye-witness account of what happened during the resurgence of the bubonic plague that had ravaged Europe hundreds of years earlier in the semblance of a nonfiction narrative. Even though Defoe was only five years old when the plague swept England, his fictional narrator feels very real and the account telltale as though it had been written it in the spirit of Veni Vidi Vici. So much so that the story seems more veritable than the counterpart of Samuel Pepys, whose narrative feels comparatively prosaic without the personal charm of the narrator. The reader will also learn that the 17th-century modus operandi of dealing with a pandemic is not that far from the current 21st-century preventive measures of social distancing, personal hygienic disciplines, and other relevant systematic societal restrictions.
Defoe holds up a mirror to his posterity that shows what it was like during the epidemic scare and what the people from days of yore did to sail through such calamity as a wise and warm advisor to our current global pandemic situations. In fact, while I was reading the book, I was surprised by how similar the cautious measures decreed by the authority were then to our own now. In my opinion, this book replaces Boccaccio’s The Decameron as a must-read during the pandemic, because of its power of reality drawn on empirical oral accounts so close to the lives of the ordinary folk that we can relate to our own time.
Where the earth meets the sky on the mountain,
An old mountain spirit opens and closes the doors
Of Day and Night every day at the proper hours
And works the wonders of nature in the divine design.
The vault of heaven, the dome of Sky God’s palace
She frescoes with celestial ephemerals every night
With new moons hung and old moons cut into stars
Sprinkled across the nightly firmament golden bright.
The garden of the earth, the parterre of Earth Goddess
She waters with rains spun out of soft summer clouds
Woven by early morning’s gossamer cobwebs and dews
Flake after flake, like those of fluffy white cotton balls.
The wise mountain spirit, the wonderful divine artist
Adorns the heaven’s frescoes every night with cheer;
The wise mountain spirit, the wondrous fairy gardener
Cherishes nature’s garden every day with delight.
P.S. This poem is based upon my reading of Washington Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle’ in which the fictional historian character named Mr. Knickerbocker relates to the native American legend of an old squaw spirit living on the Catskill Mountains in New York. I envision her as a fantastic fairy version of Michelangelo frescoing the vault of the Sistine Chapel and as a fabulous gardener tending the earthly garden with tenderness and quiet assiduity. What a fascinating vision of a magical magnitude it is!
Fairies: A Dangerous History by Richard Sugg
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
According to the races of the supernatural world, there are classes of spiritual beings that humans have arbitrarily defined with ostentatious pedanticism. For we treat the otherworldly guests of honors, such as archangels, angels, principalities, vampires, werewolves, trolls, big-foots, and even extraterrestrial aliens with awe-inspiring reverence. In contrast, fairies are regarded as sort of the underclass, juvenile guests reluctantly invited to a terrific festival of supernatural beliefs. Such spectral discrimination, argues author Richard Sugg in his Fairies: A Dangerous History, results from the fact that unlike demons, angels, and other ethereal beings of educated Christianity, fairies are in want of respectful scholarship codifying their existence and nature, cultural influence on arts and literature, and spiritual elements of faith/belief traditions in lettered authority.
The book is a meta treatise on why the author himself believes in the belittled mystical beings’ existence. Sugg takes us to Shetland’s remotest area to listen to a nonagenarian man whose vivid memories about fairy sights are amusing. Thenceforth, the author brings the readers to the fantastic feasts of fairies as seen and described by William Shakespeare and Edmund Spencer as the rulers of the Vegetable Kingdom in their Elysium of poetic fancy, Sugg keeps us hooked on pages after pages filled with his magic spells of words because he sees and believes in fairies with their own dangerous history. It is dangerous because the truth about them is theologically reasonable, spiritually potent, culturally dominant, and physically palpable.
In sum, this book is one fascinating account of fairies that serves the author’s purpose of educating and entertaining readers. The book is filled with the glamour spells of the author’s erudition. This book is something of the authorial account of the Fairy Folk.
P.S: It’s Fairy-tale Tuesday on Twitter, and this is my poesy contribution to the weekly fairy twitter feast for those of you who take a fancy to fanciful elements and dwell in the beauty of the mysterious nature.
In the wilderness of the great ocean
Lies a secret script of the Fate of Man
Sealed in the silence of tidal motion
In dissimulation of the opprobrious plan
Harboring the secrecy of the Age of Man
That gods so have kept to themselves alone.
The Ages of Man, the Plays of Man
On the Stages of Acts in Humanity –
Those gods wrote and watched for fun
In the theater of Comedy and Tragedy
As the Wheel of Fortune decided what
Would be played the next, and whatnot.
The heart of the ocean sends a pulse thru me
Of the secret hidden in the watery main
With the sunny breeze that pushed Odyssey
To sail forth against the forces of the divine
To find and write a new Age of Man to witness
The victory between the Scylla and Charybdis.
P.S.: This is a poem written out of my existential crisis in the reflection of Herodutus’s theory of the Age of Man. I am not a fatalist but a believer of luck as Shakespeare was. I believe that time and chance are what ascribe to the fulfillment of your ends in life or for the nonce. Didn’t Thomas Alba Edison also corroborate that a genius is made of 1 percent of ingenuity and 99 percent of efforts? I want to embark on an Odyssey to claim my own destiny.
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