calarielesque (or redefining arcadia)

It occurs to me that I am a romantic (something which will, of course, come as no surprise to most people.) Not in the traditional modern sense of flowers and chocolates, of holding the door for your lady and laying your cloak down so her shoes won't get muddy (though I suppose it has it's charms if you like that kind of thing). Not in the Arthurian/Victorian Pre-raphaelite sense of knightly honour and maidenly duty (though perhaps that too if I get to be part knight as well). Not in the rennaisance sense of dreaming of a simpler life of chasing maids and lads across hillsides and rolling in the hay far from responsibilities (though rolling in the hay does have its place). Not in the troubadour sense of placing your beloved on a pillar and telling yourself you are far too lowly for her (*shudders*), nor in the historical sense of Shelley and Wordsworth (since I really don't care for fields of daisies and I find political poetry deadly dull on the whole. Though 'vile stimulants' do have their place). But then, to some extent, all of those things and more.

I believe that art has a place and purpose and is vital. I applaud when Mr Keating quotes Whitman and sends shivers down my spine. I weep with him when Eliot places the Fisher King by the Thames in his life-draining, polluted city. I sing as Shelley and Mallarmé talk of bringing the divine to earth. As Wilde talks of meaning as only a vehicle for beauty, I wish him well but I will have beauty and meaning in equal measure. I adore piazzas and secret passages and hidden meaning and fantasy mingled with reality. I can believe in faeries and dragons, in psychic powers and cybernetics and spontaneous combustion and rains of fish. I like folklore and myth and urban legends and murder mysteries. I can have a boogie man in my closet and a sock monster in my laundry. I love love. I believe that everyone has the power to change the world. I will rejoice in Hughes' thought-fox and let in wander freely in its midnight-moment's forest. I will dance a mad and muddy mooncalf minuet and thumb my nose at the gardenias.