Nature is a Haunted House
Nature is a Haunted House – but Art – a House that tries to be haunted. – Emily Dickinson, letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1876 Emily Dickinson first wrote to…
Ekphrasis of the Imaginal
The Greek word ekphrasis signifies the verbal description of a work of art, or of a scene. It’s a rhetorical device, a genre of writing that might seem especially unpromising….
Spanda: LeGuin, Woolf and the Wave in the Mind
Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention, beneath words, there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move. The writer’s job is to go down deep…
The Labyrinth and the Maze
This post forms the second half of a discussion opened in the previous one, ‘The Weird and the Uncanny‘. As a way to approach the psychotherapeutic implications, I want to…
The Infernal Medicine: the Madness of William Blake
“Blake … was … mad!” This was Jonathan Wordsworth’s introduction to William Blake’s ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’. A tall, patrician figure, with an air of amusement and a…