Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

The Professor and Other Writings

New York

Harper Collins

2010

"I still have my old paperback copy of Spenser's poem and just looking at it--the pages and pages of bewildering verse in tiny print, the demented little crib notes I've scribbled in the margins--can induce in me a sort of mental seasickness."

To one degree or another in fact we were stoned for the whole duration of our affair. No wonder that struggling through Spenser's Faerie Queene was proving difficult: I was blotto upside the head. I still have my old paperback copy of Spenser's poem and just looking at it--the pages and pages of bewildering verse in tiny print, the demented little crib notes I've scribbled in the margins--can induce in me a sort of mental seasickness. After enough angst and pot and lack of sleep the poet's romance-world--so dense with weird archaisms and arcane symbols, bizarre characters, confusing plots and subplots--seemed more and more to allegorize the scary mental maze in which I found myself. The traces of my anguish are still to be seen. Like a doomed swain--or else some crushed-out girl in high school--I have inscribed the Professor's initials, I find, next to certain especially excruciating passages. ("As when a Beare hath seiz'd her cruell clawes/Vppon the carkasse of some beast too weake,/Proudly stands ouer....) And at the end of one of Spenser's more gloomy and sententious stanzas--
(pp. 292-3)

Body::Seasickness

Reading

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (New York: Harper Collins, 2010).

05/18/2011