Our text stretched from 24 to 41 last week: a base on which the work as a whole rests in terms of themes and arc. Here, Brit. and Art. at last meet, and Ed shows his plan to route the streams of love through the fixed, end marked paths of epic, one spouse joined to her chos’n in the end. J. W. put it so: Brit. is the knight of the rom. and the gal of that form which the bard of Chios once sung. She drives on—no truck with err—like the chief’s wife whom the sire of Greek plays brought to life: of a “man’s” mind? But the spur to fight for Brit. was, and will be, an ache b’low the waist. The words of seers comes to a blind date.
Yet this bit also sounds with com.: notes of mirth and hot spice. Why? There’s the rub. Claire looked back to the time-tried loves of mythed courts; J. Y. looked forw’d to those realed plots of 18th and 19th c. books. M. K. peered at how Brit. and Art. peer at their mate—as one mirr’r matched to the next, while Em. brought us to care—to those looked out for. Scud. seems ill-fit to the needs of this form, we thought, and S shows his nerves—per the us.—’bout the stage. Jeff helped—per the us. too—with the case of Will, his “erotics of contingency” and the way things sort out in the end. Ed plays by a set of rules at odds with these—at times. To speak of odds: John called up “Care”—the rest here far flung from Scud’s in that place. And I glommed on: the bods of these knights, their feels and sense, pose new quests for us: what’s a blush that can’t be seen? And how does one press down that which bucks the will, ev’n as they voice that which they would like not to. Rest, in the mean time, seems fine here—a thing to be marked! But it’s for the end of a “well-woo’d” bride-to-be: and that new kind of goal draws in a new set of rules.