tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6525336614537205367.post6246866814608567886..comments2024-01-25T22:17:57.303+02:00Comments on The Cybercades Project: SELVA OSCURAxtinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12382568987548153336noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6525336614537205367.post-49261513387166895382012-12-22T23:36:59.969+02:002012-12-22T23:36:59.969+02:00(A memory not heuristically equipped was called a ...(A memory not heuristically equipped was called a silva, a "forest" of disorganized, unretrievable junk.) <br /><br />http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/connotations/carruthe22.htmxtinahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12382568987548153336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6525336614537205367.post-45497314067651364432012-06-13T22:04:33.906+03:002012-06-13T22:04:33.906+03:00http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNGzoJFj9g8http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNGzoJFj9g8xtinahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12382568987548153336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6525336614537205367.post-81918103142049579852009-10-18T20:20:07.655+03:002009-10-18T20:20:07.655+03:00Roman writers treated their country estates as res...Roman writers treated their country estates as restorative havens<br />from the corruption and pettiness of urban life, but those estates were<br />not primarily forests, which remained forbidding. Shakespeare in<br />several plays uses the natural world — the forest of Athens in A<br />Midsummer Night's Dream or the forest of Arden in As You Like It — as sites<br />of reversal of city relationships and restoration of right order. With<br />Romanticism a new appreciation of wildness emerges, especially<br />forests, mountains, and seashores, sometimes with religious intensity.<br />Coleridge recalls how he pursued “fancies holy” through untrodden<br />woods and there found “The spirit of divinest Liberty” (“France: An<br />Ode” 11, 21). Wordsworth claims “One impulse from a vernal wood / May<br />teach you more of man; / Of moral evil and of good, / Than all the sages<br />can” (“The Tables Turned” 21—24). In Germany the forest, especially the<br />Black Forest, became a symbol not only of the true naturalness of life<br />but also of the “roots” of the German nation. Wanderers and huntsmen<br />abound in the poems and stories of the period. The Grimm Brothers'<br />fairy tales often turn on forest adventures; dwarves and gnomes and<br />other woodland creatures know things and do things townsfolk cannot.<br />The Grimms published a journal called Old German Forests, which linked<br />the forests to the true German culture.<br /> In ancient times the myth of Arcadia countered the more frightening<br />and realistic image of the forest. In book 8 of Virgil's Aeneid Aeneas meets<br />the Arcadians at the site of future Rome, and their simple forest life<br />stands, perhaps, both for the natural roots of Rome and for what has<br />been lost with the building of the great city. Much of American litera-<br />ture deals with the theme of the “virgin land, ” through which brave<br />(usually male) explorers and fighters penetrate, leaving civilization<br />behind; their more primitive life serves as a standard for judging the life<br />of (usually female) settled society; but sometimes there is a feeling that<br />the conquest of the American wilderness is a rape of the land and an<br />unjust slaughter of the “savages” (the word comes ultimately from<br />Latin silva), or that to “go native” is itself false or dangerous.xtinahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12382568987548153336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6525336614537205367.post-47188688884302695552009-10-18T20:19:32.724+03:002009-10-18T20:19:32.724+03:00Forests used to be places of danger to a degree di...Forests used to be places of danger to a degree difficult to appreciate<br />today, when for modern city-dwellers they are retreats or playgrounds;<br />perhaps only arctic forests or tropical jungles retain something of the<br />fearful vastness and strangeness they once implied. Forests are tradi-<br />tionally dark, labyrinthine, and filled with dangerous beasts.<br /> The earliest literature is sometimes structured on the contrast<br />between city and wilderness. The Gilgamesh epic, for instance, moves<br />from the walls of Uruk to the pastures of Enkidu and thence to the great<br />cedar forest of the monster Humbaba. Euripides' Bacchae sets the civic<br />order of Thebes, in the person of King Pentheus, against the wooded<br />mountain Cithaeron, where the maenads dance to the alien god<br />Dionysus.<br /> To be “lost in the woods, ” or “not yet out of the woods, ” remain<br />common phrases. It is there that one loses one's way or path, which<br />taken allegorically has meant to wander in error or sin. So Dante finds<br />himself in a selva oscura or dark wood at the opening of the Inferno, and<br />Spenser sends the Redcross Knight and Una into “the wandring wood, ”<br />the den of Error, where the trees shut out heaven's light (FQ 1.1.7,13).<br />Bunyan's pilgrim progresses through “the wilderness of this world”;<br />Shelley, following Dante, goes forth “Into the wintry forest of our life”<br />(Epipsychidion 249). Hawthorne's character “Young Goodman Brown”<br />leaves his wife, Faith, to go into the forest where he has an experience<br />that leaves his faith shattered. The natural basis of this symbolism is sec-<br />onded by the ancient notion that “wood” (Greek hyle, Latin silva) is fun-<br />damental matter, the lowest stuff — hence Dante's punishment of<br />suicides, who treated their bodies as mere matter, is to imprison them<br />in, or change them into, trees (Inferno 13).xtinahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12382568987548153336noreply@blogger.com