| I met a traveler from an antique land, Who said–“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, . . . . . . And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. . . . from Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817) |
| “No one wants to read an epic allegory,” I was assured shortly after starting Glorianna in 1979. This may turn out to be true. It is also true that most of us live our entire lives and do our life’s work and leave no trace of ourselves, beyond a vague shadow cast on the sensibilities of those who survive us. The shadow may be dense and articulate enough to be characterized as memory, but it is unusual for it to survive three generations. This fact is undeniably melancholy. Any world lacking our real or even our remembered presence as a sad place to us. The craving for existence demands that we assert our personal reality, to aspire to an indelible reality, that is to say, immortality. How futile to attempt to meet that demand through an outworn verse form, a form “no one wants to read,” yet this has been my response for over thirty years, and it seems entirely appropriate. Most orthodox religionists believe immortality is a given condition of existence. I do not know if they are right or not, but to my mind immortality is achieved through creating works charged with generation-transcending meaning. The first immortal name that comes to mind is Shakespeare. The founders of what Toynbee described as the higher religions round out the list: Moses, Jesus, the Buddha, and Mohammed. I will reverently add Confucius, though he would not characterize himself as a founder of a religion. Then the field becomes crowded with names you may know, and I may not, or I may know and you may not. Every day the list gets a little longer at this chronological end, a little shorter at the other. They all come down to the theme of Shelly’s Ozymandias – the grasping for meaning that crosses time, the grasping for glory, for presence, for reality in the face of oblivion. In Glorianna, you behold my vast and trunkless legs of stone. I am David Keith Johnson, no king of kings, but the poet of a man named Fortus in a land called Faere. Look on my works, ye mighty, and know, not despair, but know me, or at least the shape of my shadow. On Sources Spenser’s Faerie Queene is the main inspiration for this effort. First encountered at Omaha South High School, (c. 1967) then further explored in an English Literature survey class at the University of Nebraska at Omaha a couple of years later, I was always the one whose response to the work sharply contrasted to the universal moaning of my classmates. When I later read about Keats’s enthusiasm, (he spontaneously stood to physicalize the “sea-shouldering whales” of Book II, Canto XII,) and then re-read the old book with this sensitivity to the effect of metaphor in mind, my fascination for the work blossomed. I was particularly impressed by the depth and dimension of each character whose whole purpose was representing Holiness, or Duplicity, or some other single quality. I understood that these ideas were simply their most salient points of reference, and that all the other aspects of each character’s humanity were, in effect, dragged in tow. Finally, Spenser’s comic sense was as appealing as the startling imagery and keen observations of nature and human nature with which he enriched the work throughout. Then there is the stanza. As a songwriter, a sonneteer, an awed admirer of the monumental musicality of Keats’s Odes, the astounding versatility of Pope’s heroic couplet and the web of reference and modernity woven into the long works of T.S. Eliot, I regard the Spenserian stanza as the best of all possible work benches. Its nine lines are short enough to forestall finality until the narrative requires it. Yet it transcends the curt periods of the ballad stanza, both in number of lines, and in line length. Its combination of quatrains and couplets, rounded out with the final twelve syllable line, offers optimal versatility, since one can with impunity enjamb and so approach the zip of prose, or versify in combination of two to four and up to the entire nine lines as appropriate opportunities present themselves, and so manipulate the pace and, related to pace, the musicality of the narrative at will. Diction was a problem to overcome. Spenser was an unabashed antiquarian, seeking through quaint spellings and usages to evoke and even openly imitate the writing of Chaucer. I began the work with a similar mindset, but after the first few cantos were drafted, the inappropriateness of this choice became apparent. I made a rule to use a Wordsworthian standard of common speech, avoiding unproductive neologisms. This implies a license for a certain amount of word play, and I do faintly echo the enviable freedom enjoyed by the Elizabethans in synthesizing new words out of old stuff when the circumstances seem to dictate it. I write this before the final editing has occurred, of course, so we shall see. I have named the characters with the intention of using transparent Latinisms. I may yet Anglify the lot of them. I hope the qualities they are intended to represent should be apparent without overwhelming the impression that these are plausible characters reacting to finding themselves in real trouble, or causing real trouble as the case may be. Spenser’s use of allegorical names, a few of which I have borrowed, was another point of moaning among my classmates. Yet they themselves bore names that had such meanings as “Messenger of God” (Michael, Michelle), “God’s Grace” (John, Joan, Jane, etc.), “Usurper” (James, Jacob), “Protector” (William), or more transparently, Lance, Hope, and Joy. I don’t believe a single one of them felt hampered in their humanity because their name had a meaning. (Mine means either “Beloved” or the moral equivalent of “Baby Doll,” depending on the authority you consult, yet I still manage to act disagreeably from time to time.) Poetry will only matter again when it reclaims its place as an indispensable element of daily conversation. It is more a hope than an intent that this work could contribute to that restoration. In any case, that is closer to my aim than the approval of academia. The person who told me no one would want to read Glorianna was a college professor friend of mine. I have no interest in changing his opinion, but hold out another faint hope, more like a dream, that a critical mass of non-college professors may come to disagree with him. Related to the diction was the discovery of a point of view that would inspire the last thirty (and no one knows how many more) years of work. Spenser’s stories reflected his cultural condition, an overwhelming nostalgia for the mythological realm of Arthur and his knights, when the ambiguities that in fact have always plagued the human condition supposedly did not trouble the noblepersons who were charged with society’s maintenance and improvement. Ironically, the characters he offers as exemplars of knightly qualities, for the expressed purpose of inspiring virtue in the young leadership of his day, spend a good deal of their narrative time on the horns of dilemmas or deeply deceived by artful seducers. So characters, deprecated by some as idealized “cut-outs,” are constantly confronted with the real, compelling challenges that beset us all, and again and again, respond as any of us would, with an admixture of confusion, despair, resolve and fighting spirit. Those challenges are presented in all their allegorical glory – dragons, wizards, entire landscapes fraught with malevolent intentions. This gave Spenser a chance to exercise his talent for the spectacular, and he does not disappoint. The social and religious allegory, the bane of my moaning fellow literature students of days gone by, can only be appreciated in terms of the realities these fantastic enemies represented. There HAD been a Catholic (more than Spanish) armada that HAD nearly succeeded in ravaging the country, well within the memory of the older generation. They had heard the stories of the terrible savagery of St. Bartholomew’s Day in France. The threat was physical, and profoundly frightening. Monsters, wizards, powerful, evil knights, the stuff of nightmares, were indeed the best ways to represent them. Spenser completed five books and began a sixth. However, his intention was to create twelve books of twelve cantos each, culminating in a grand siege of Glorianna’s capitol by a combination of the enemies introduced in the previous eleven books. This intent grabbed my attention. I had never been satisfied by The Faerie Queene’s picaresque scheme. There is very little connection from event to event, let alone book to book, and his intended final battle would have remedied what I perceived as a fault. Time and the grand scale of his intentions interposed. I saw his failure as my opportunity. While the concept of ideal femininity embodied in Glorianna appealed to my romantic side, as the child of the American working class in the twentieth century, I had another and finally most compelling incitement to write. Spenser described a landscape and characters that were familiar to his British readers, not only because of other things they had read and stories they had been told, but because he was reflecting some basic mythological archetypes that ran in his readers’ very blood. This is the “truth” of poetry, psychological as opposed to historical, and this is the truth that renders Spenser’s work significant to this day. Our contemporary Western blood, or more accurately, subconscious, is essentially the same as that of our Renaissance forbearers, only a few centuries further down the road. As such, it comprehends the same fundamental archetypal narrative, with additional further development. We no longer look to aristocrats singled out by heaven itself to guide our nations and shepherd our destinies. The fundamental shake-ups caused by revolution and attendant social evolution have put a twist on our archetypal story, a twist in the tale. So the hero of my book is not George or any of the other knights, nor is it even the woman named in the title, but Fortus, the untitled yeoman. Willy-nilly, he leads us through an apocalyptic battle into a transformed archetypal world. So I have written for the last thirty years and expect to write for many years more because I want to see what that world looks like. I do not know. When I sat in the Opel dealership in Council Bluffs, Iowa, waiting for my little car to be serviced, and began blocking out the narrative in the following pages, a narrative only little more than half realized as of this writing, my longing to see that next world flared and has burned with varying degrees of brightness ever since. So I offer you this, my shadow. If the light of longing still burns, you will be able to trace it in crisp outline. Addendum to the Apologia — January 2018 I don’t have a precise date for the above paragraphs of this Apologia, but it could be as many as ten years ago. I started Glorianna in 1979, and speak above of having worked on it thirty years. I am sure that was an approximation, but ten years is close enough. The final touches were placed on what I consider a competent first draft in 2017, thirty-eight years after I began, so a great deal of writing has gone on in the interim. There are many matters related in the above, so I will keep it in. But the truth is, until I was writing Canto X, I did not have a clear idea of what the work was about. “A clear idea” overstates the case. I have a better inkling. Phrases like “the part of you that never dies,” the impulse to persist in the face of both persecution and personal oblivion, the import of characters appearing after their deaths — these were perplexing given circumstances that erupted as the narrative unfolded in my mind. I was flummoxed as to their meaning or justification. The piece turned out to be grander than I had ever imagined. I cannot help but feel this was not my doing, but the doing of the piece itself. I have seen a TED Talk by David Chalmers on the “hard problem” of consciousness, in which he posits what he acknowledges to be a fantastic hypothesis that it might be an immanent feature of the Universe, like Space/Time, Gravity and other such all-pervasive phenomena. He adds a further thought that this consciousness might be universal, a function of the level of information processed by a system — the more information taken in and processed, the greater the degree of consciousness. In light of these theories, this work could have evolved its own consciousness and directionality and used me as its device to fulfill its own purpose. These theories are fantastic, yes, but this is precisely how the drafting of the last few cantos (and the subsequent revision of the whole which I conducted) felt. |
| Glorianna Table of Contents |
| The Cantos |
| Appendices |