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Subject: jangle-poets-digest V5 #41
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jangle-poets-digest       Thursday, May 22 2003       Volume 05 : Number 041



                               Today's Subjects:
                               -----------------
  [JP] Literature & Water (fwd)                       [Nieldsforever@aol.com]

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Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 17:50:22 EDT
From: Nieldsforever@aol.com
Subject: [JP] Literature & Water (fwd)

> In fact, besides "Shearwater" itself, The Kennedys have recorded an
> extraordinary number of songs dealing with rain (like "Didn't It Rain?",
> "Right as Rain," "Blackberry Rain," and "Distant Thunder") and rivers
> (like "Bend in the River," "Crystal River," "Rappahannock," and "River
> of Fallen Stars").  There are probably others that have slipped my mind.
> Yay for water.

Here's the first forward.

Bruce

http://witcombe.sbc.edu/water/literature.html

LITERATURE and WATER
John Gregory Brown

Literature is the grand repository of our dreams and desires and fears, of
our longing for meaning and justice and redemption, of our yearning for
intimacy
and community and solitude, of our unquenchable pursuit of beauty. The great
aim of literature is to render in words the nobility and majesty of life.

That images of water should play such a prominent and recurrent role as a
metaphor in literature is hardly surprising, given the essential place of
water
in life itself. Water is, of course, mutable and sublime, sustaining and
destructive, and throughout literature water serves as a representation not
only of
birth but of death, not merely of placidity but of violence. Water transports

the hero to his great adventures and carries him home. Water holds the
promise
both of freedom and of enslavement, its shimmering surface inviting, its
depths mysterious and daunting.

And it is water in the form of the sea that has most captured the imagination

of authors. The sea "keeps eternal whisperings around / Desolate shores," the

poet John Keats observed, and those "eternal whisperings" have been
deciphered by writers for centuries, from Homer and Daniel Defoe to Walt
Whitman and
Edgar Alan Poe and Joseph Conrad, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of

the Ancient Mariner" and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Stephen Crane's "The

Open Boat" to Charles Johnson's Middle Passage and John Barth's The Tidewater

Tales.

"The sea's moods and uses sex it," the British novelist John Fowles has
written. "It is the great creatrix, feeder, womb and vagina, place of
pleasure; the
gentlest thing on earth, the most maternal; the most seductive whore, and
handsomely the most faithless. It has the attributes of all women, and men
too.
It can be both subtle and noble, brave and energetic; and far crueller than
the
meanest, most sadistic human king who ever ruled...In its rages we admire the

total lack of reason and justice, the blindness to all but the laws of its
own nature."

"Surely the sea / is the most beautiful face in our universe," the poet Mary
Oliver declares. "The sea is History," writes Derek Walcott. In literature,
the sea is whatever we dream and desire and fear. Like water itself,
literature's depictions of the sea are mutable and sublime, offering a metap
hor through
which we again and again attempt to better understand our own lives.

Check out the Kennedys' Official Home Page: http://www.KennedysMusic.com/
Fab photos, the Official tour diary, dashboard Buddha haiku, groovy
merchandise...what more could you ask for?

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End of jangle-poets-digest V5 #41
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