tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post9199658653049727031..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: Edwin Muir: Post-Apocalyptic: The HorsesUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-75844676078685175672012-02-02T12:35:50.650-08:002012-02-02T12:35:50.650-08:00Steve,
So, how have we managed to evade that apoc...Steve,<br /><br />So, how have we managed to evade that apocalyptic prophecy this long?<br /><br />It can't have been virtue.<br /><br /> <br />Vassilis,<br /><br />Well, yes, the bandages.<br /> <br />Self-fulfilling prophecy, perhaps -- falling on one's face due to woolgathering over End Times?<br /><br /><br />Curtis,<br /><br />Many thanks. Happy you've found your way back to Precession.<br /><br />(My backwards version of "going forward".)<br /><br /><br />Susan,<br /><br />A folding back over, yes, that helps -- it's been something of a shoveled-under period here, but there is always the good thought of composting and recycling.<br /><br /><br />William,<br /><br />Well, yes, of course, those<br /><br />Zoomorphising Norse<br /><br />Named Orkney after a horse --<br /><br />And little luck<br /><br />One must confess<br /><br />Seeing a horse on the Isle of Muck<br /><br />From Deerness <br /><br />Though on a clear day<br /><br />One might make out <a href="http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/531314" rel="nofollow">The Horse of Copinsay</a>.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-21991716228476189832012-02-02T10:09:32.818-08:002012-02-02T10:09:32.818-08:00The best return to Eden poem ever in my book. I wa...The best return to Eden poem ever in my book. I want to thank you so much for turning me on to Muir, who I shockingly had never heard of before your Sunday post. Now I can <a href="http://billsigler.blogspot.com/2012/02/orcadian-hymn.html" rel="nofollow">almost ride without training wheels</a>. Don't think your efforts go unnoticed. <br /><br />As a minor quibble, the Orkneys are called the horse islands, yet you picture Hebrides horses. Here are some <a href="http://youtu.be/oaokX-_GTD8" rel="nofollow">Orkney horses</a> simulating the action in the poem (as long as you ignore the barbed wire).WAShttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-41577296877199478452012-02-02T06:55:52.736-08:002012-02-02T06:55:52.736-08:00This is just superb. So is your 10/24/11 Precessi...This is just superb. So is your 10/24/11 Precession post at Collected Photographs. CurtisACravanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00315707533118640284noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-59301890518096023812012-02-01T11:53:51.743-08:002012-02-01T11:53:51.743-08:00I'm glad wild, wild horses couldn't drag y...I'm glad wild, wild horses couldn't drag you away--though you were swaddled in bandages--from this apocalypse. As for <i>On the Beach</i>,I, too, remember the whole drunken silly pathetic lot a lot of us (or the whole lot?) are doomed to become.vazambam (Vassilis Zambaras)https://www.blogger.com/profile/14515165428574974933noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-85237848060938534592012-02-01T10:13:53.909-08:002012-02-01T10:13:53.909-08:00I like how everything is happening in this poem. A...I like how everything is happening in this poem. A crisis but not showing loose ends. A folding back over. Horses as herd animals with a bunch of young ones.<br /><br />It will take me the rest of my life to comb through these on your blog.Susan Kay Andersonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16277139119869470939noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-49749786976611559122012-02-01T09:49:57.292-08:002012-02-01T09:49:57.292-08:00Tom,
Stirring stuff, that orchestral "Waltzi...Tom,<br /><br />Stirring stuff, that orchestral "Waltzing Maltida" as the sub comes up, goes on, then goes back down again. My parents took me to see On the Beach when it first came out -- memory of looking across the bay at city empty of people, very strange (what did it mean, one wondered). Now we know, "We're all doomed, y'know" -- even those ponies on the beach on Muck Island, or maybe they'll survive it. . . .<br /><br />2.1<br /><br />grey whiteness of fog against invisible<br />ridge, shadowed bird standing on branch<br />in foreground, wave sounding in channel<br /><br /> the whites those of similar<br /> one, number and place<br /><br /> in one of the last and most,<br /> left hand, is lifting<br /><br />sunlit white edge of fog against ridge,<br />cormorant flapping across toward pointSTEPHEN RATCLIFFEhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12339481653546188412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-31280070791785308902012-02-01T08:35:38.660-08:002012-02-01T08:35:38.660-08:00By the way, that little guy in the crash dummy sui...By the way, that little guy in the crash dummy suit arriving on a moped in the upper left corner of the top picture has just arrived to tell the awful news about the radiation levels. But those Isle of Muck horses have already survived the Chernobyl plume, so what should they care?TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-44251069916908792292012-02-01T08:31:28.348-08:002012-02-01T08:31:28.348-08:00Thank you Nin. Something about falling on one'...Thank you Nin. Something about falling on one's face in the street on the night before a Big Primary always puts one in mind of End Times. Ah the nostalgia. Wake me when it's all over and the trumpet blows. <br /><br />Edwin Muir's 1956 poem, returning to the 1925 "primitivist" Horses vision through a sea-changed glass, always evokes a certain acutely tense Cold War period feeling; perhaps captured here as successfully as anywhere, though there were a few select contenders.<br /><br />For once upon a time it was impossible not to be moved every so often to thoughts of the civilization-ending, planet-dooming incipient inevitable post-nuclear-apocalypse end of the world -- by such artistic vehicles as, to take another good example, the 1957 Neville Shute novel On the Beach.<br /><br />Stanley Kramer's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Onethebeach.jpg" rel="nofollow">movie version</a>, with Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck and Tony Perkins, and photographed by the great Italian cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno (Rocco & His Brothers, The Leopard) still stirs considerations of What Might Have Been.. or yet could be...<br /><br />The Waltzing Matilda orchestral variations give way to the prophecy of a Chernobyl- or Fukushima-like dead zone, at 5:15 here:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfP1FCJTlo0" rel="nofollow">On the Beach (1959)</a><br /><br />If for nothing else, the film is memorable for <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIHa8Mb_bL8" rel="nofollow">a cuddly Tony Perkins doing an Aussie accent</a> -- and getting a reprieve from a love scene with Donna Anderson thanks to the radioactive cloud looming over Melbourne.<br /><br />(A terrible date movie this proved, by the by.)<br /><br />(Ava Gardner is to have said of Melbourne, "the perfect place for a film about the end of the world" -- what on earth could she have meant?)<br /><br />Also wonderfully out of character (the schizoid casting director should have got an Oscar) is Fred Astaire, voicing the up-to-this-point unspoken truth: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc7y8xs6QXw" rel="nofollow">"We're all doomed y'know, the whole drunken silly pathetic lot of us!"</a>TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-38636675163351183672012-02-01T06:35:17.546-08:002012-02-01T06:35:17.546-08:00Wow! A very haunting piece. Beautiful!Wow! A very haunting piece. Beautiful!Nin Andrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12643167108589844026noreply@blogger.com