Mirror Of Gormenghast II by linarie-art
11 years ago on May 28, 2014 at 06:00am
As Fuchsia climbed into the winding darkness her body was impregnated and made faint by a qualm as of green April. Her heart beat painfully. This is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or of a woman for their world. For the world of their centre where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame.
The love of the diver for his world of wavering light. His world of pearls and tendrils and his breath at his breast. Born as a plunger into the deeps he is at one with every swarm of lime-green fish, with every coloured sponge. As he holds himself to the ocean’s faery floor, one hand clasped to a bedded whale’s rib, he is complete and infinite. Pulse, power and universe sway in his body. He is in love.
The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great coloured surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry upon his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes’ handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his halfborn. He is in love.
The rich soil crumbles through the yeoman’s fingers. As the pearl diver murmurs, “I am home” as he moves dimly in strange water-lights, and as the painter mutters, “I am me” on his lone
raft of floorboards, so the slow landsman on his acre’d marl — says with dark Fuchsia on her twisting staircase, “I am home.”
From Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake.
11 years ago on April 05, 2014 at 06:00am
Ah-ha,” she said slowly, as though she had come to a conclusion, “so it is you, is it? So it is the truant back again. Where has he been? What has he been doing? What trees has he been sitting in? What clouds has he been flying through? What a boy he is! What a bunch of feathered whiteness. What a bunch of wickedness!
Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan (1946)
11 years ago on April 04, 2014 at 06:00am
Once there were islands all a-sprout with palms; and coral reefs and sands as white as milk. What is there now but a vast shambles of the heart? Filth, squalor, and a world of little men.
Muzzlehatch, Titus Alone
(via steerpike)
11 years ago on April 02, 2014 at 06:00am
His mother, half asleep and half aware: with the awareness of anger, the detachment of trance. She saw him seven times in seven years. Then she forgot the halls that harboured him. But now she watches him from hidden windows. Her love for him is as heavy and as formless as loam. A furlong of white cats trails after her. A bullfinch has a nest in her red hair. She is the Countess Gertrude of huge clay.
11 years ago on March 31, 2014 at 06:00am
Linger now with me, thou Beauty
Linger now with me, thou Beauty,
On the sharp archaic shore.
Surely ‘tis a wastrel’s duty
And the gods could ask no more.
If thou lingerest when I linger,
If thou tread’st the stones I tread,
Thou wilt stay my spirit’s hunger
And dispel the dreams I dread.
Come thou, love, my own, my only,
Through the battlements of Groan;
Lingering becomes so lonely
When one lingers on one’s own.
I have lingered in the cloisters
Of the Northern Wing at night,
As the sky unclasped its oysters
On the midnight pearls of light;
For the long remorseless shadows
Chilled me with exquisite fear.
I have lingered in cold meadows
Through a month of rain, my dear.
Come, my Love, my sweet, my Only,
Through the parapets of Groan.
Lingering can be very lonely
When one lingers on one’s own.
In dark alcoves I have lingered
Conscious of dead dynasties;
I have lingered in blue cellars
And in hollow trunks of trees.
Many a traveler through moonlight
Passing by a winding stair
Or a cold and crumbling archway
Has been shocked to see me there.
I have longed for thee, my Only,
Hark! the footsteps of the Groan!
Lingering is so very lonely
When one lingers all alone.
Will thou come with me, and linger?
And discourse with me of those
Secret things the mystic finger
Points to, but will not disclose?
When I’m all alone, my glory
Always fades, because I find
Being lonely drives the splendour
Of my vision from my mind.
Come, oh, come, my own! my Only!
Through the Gormenghast of Groan.
Lingering has become so lonely
As I linger all alone!Mervyn Peake
11 years ago on March 29, 2014 at 06:00am
Gormenghast
Through an avenue off spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet bears away from a choked river. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs...
And darkness winds between the characters.
Gormenghast & Mervyn Peake appreciation blog.
And darkness winds between the characters.
Gormenghast & Mervyn Peake appreciation blog.