Moving slowly towards the end of Part I of DQ..
“the other Mick” planted a seed in my mind with his talk of Part II of DQ (see Tuesday November 15, 2005 - “As of about eleven o’clock last night”) and I have to admit it’s made me goal-focused in a way as I realized a couple of days ago that I was getting close to the end of Part I.
But I am so tired right now and I am reminded of what Mel said about reading (see Wednesday November 23, 2005, “The Truth about Reading”). I feel myself experiencing regression (“our eyes backtrack while we read and we inevitably re-read words or phrases”). I want to read ahead but can’t somehow. Am I perhaps enchanted?
I have actually reread the section of DQ I’m on right now. It’s just after the part where Sancho Panza tries to interest DQ in the idea that he actually may have the personal power to release himself from the cage & the cart due to the fact that he is not really under an enchantment. This is in Chapter XLVIII. It’s funny because Sancho’s proof revolves around the fact that DQ has an “inclination to make big or little waters” (ie. he has to go to the bathroom). From Sancho’s perspective, if you have “normal” bodily functions, you can’t be enchanted as enchantments remove all desire, all need for these processes. This is a logical argument but it seems that DQ’s desire to be enchanted is stronger because he argues that it may be the old way of enchantment, but that in this new age of knight errantry that he is pioneering, “time may have changed the fashion from one kind [of enchantment] to another” (434). So he determinedly stays enchanted.
Is this a kind of stubbornness to which we all fall victim? (Cervantes seems to think so at least in the relation to the “enchantment” of the Catholic Church – the intertwining conversation DQ has with the canon here is revealing…and funny…) What other enchantments do we feel committed to?
posted by Anne @ 8:21 AM
3 Comments:
Raymond Pettibon has a number of drawings and writings dealing with the subject of getting lost in reading,particularly his pieces about Gumby and Art Clokey's decision, which he later regretted, to let Gumby enter the world of literature. There's a good Phaidon paperback of Pettibon's art - if I lived nearby I'd show it to you.
Wow...thanks for the tip. I'll check it out! If I were fabulously wealthy, I'd come and look at your copy...
I like reading Teresa d'Avila and St. John of the Cross - mystics and friends, who are contemporaries of Cerventes. From her autobiography, Teresa was really into romance novels as a kid, and into glam in a big way. (Perfume, fashion, make-up, getting it on.)Then she went into the convent - which really was the thing to do for the wealthy at the time. Rich nuns had servants so convent life was a social club. But she went shoeless and set up a new branch of Carmelites who vowed poverty. Reading her books is interesting in view of what you're asking here - because she is always digressing into confessions of being mad and dimwitted and yet delivering straight forward, practical tools for self-study. I think of these mystics as artists who let themselves roam in their inner worlds, and the fanciful stuff that happens (like levitating or having great big gems appear on one's fingers) are just outgrowths of having a strong faculty for enchantment. The paradox is that they can lose themselves in a pinpoint.
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