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Lud in the Mist: The Platypus Reads Part CCCXXX

This post is edited from a letter on Hope Mirrlees' Lud in the Mist



First, thanks for passing on "Lud in the Mist". It's the kind of book I'm constantly hunting for and have increased trouble finding lately (Phantasties, Idylls of the King, The Last Unicorn, Lovecraft's Dream Cycle, The Queen of Elfland's Daughter, anything by William Morris, and the short stories of Clark Ashton Smith having already been encountered). There are very few books that I read at a positively leisurely pace for pure pleasure anymore and this was one of them.

Second, I'm a historian and connector by nature and training, so I often access a book by linking it in with everything I've already read and letting my thoughts whirl like the music of the spheres. It seems like to immediately jump in to discussing Lud like that does violence to the Art. I feel the same way about Phantastes. I don't even know if Phantastes can be discussed in that way. Hope Mirrlees understood the hauntedness of Nature in a way that few do. I understand why she was a friend of T.S. Eliot's ("I think the River is a strong, brown god..." Change that to three Algonquin maidens and that is The Housatonic). She captures in scenes like the sunrise on Nov. 1st the same feeling I've gotten watching the leaves dancing in the light of a New England summer. There's a valley between Shelton and Monroe that fills with light like a bowl with water at about 4 or 5pm -that's my "Note". That's a haunted world, like George MacDonald's books.

Third, there are few allegories I can stand. I like the kind that Tolkien wrote: Leaf by Niggle and Smith of Wooten Major, or Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Lud in the Mist convinces me that there is a Victorian and Edwardian sort of Allegorical-Metaphorical writing that all three authors are partaking in -like Virgil at his best. All these stories can, and probably should, be read without any reference to their allegorical elements (Purgatory for writers, Passing on a Sacramental understanding of Nature in a corrupt and decadent Church, re-uniting Head, Heart, and Hands in a Modern world with no coherent world-picture, Understanding the need to for the secular and the sacred to be kept in balance by the Church in post-Reformation/post-Industrial-Revolution England). The allegory is not the point. It is a power of allusion that blends seamlessly with the story itself to create a very special enchantment that seeps deep into the soul. I loath Williams as a man, but he did have a point when he said "Flesh knows what Mind knows, but Mind knows it Knows. Mind knows what Spirit knows, but Spirit knows it knows". Lud in the Mist is a story that is best known by the spirit.

Fourth, I think the ending of the story is brave, scary, and sad, but True, and therefore I love it. The other books that come to mind are of course, Leaf, Smith, Phantastes, and Idylls, but also The Last Unicorn. As Tennyson said "the goal of this great world lies beyond sight" or Lewis: "if I find myself with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, then perhaps I was made for another world". Chanticleer's "Note" anticipates Lewis' "Joy". It is that spark that leads us ever upward, but also that pain that continues with us in some form until the day we die. Whatever we believe, we walk by Faith, not by sight.

I think I'll leave it at that for now. I want to geek about all the Bacchae references and dissect the careful English Catholic Revival allegory, but that seems like doing violence to Mirrlees book in a "first thoughts" email. Maybe another time.
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