His baby talk letters whilst queasy also have the dissociative quality of poltergeist speak. Hearing Hayley's performance this would be equally apposite for the creepy Ruskin. There is a wonderful description by Mark, of Parkin, the central character in Oh Whistle, as “a crumbling logical positivist”. The term crystallisation has become codified in therapeutic parlance as the extreme end point of limerence. I suspect Ruskin's fixation for his young cousin is an example, par excellence, of Stendhal's theory and experience of “crystallisation”. In Ruskin's mind, young women and xenoliths fuse to render inorganic angels.
#WHITE DAY A LABYRINTH NAMED SCHOOL ALL GHOST STORIES SERIES#
Interspersed with the deeply infantilised love letters of a clearly psychotic Ruskin, the performance also took excerpts from a series of lectures by Ruskin discussing morality - through the metaphor of crystals. A fascinating counterpoint to James' inorganic demons was disturbingly presented by Hayley Lock in her performance of John Ruskin's letters to his cousin Joan. Mark's essay discussed the recurring motif of inorganic demons and xenolithic artefacts in the stories of M R James. One prisoner is even tortured in the hollow of a tree. Beautifully manicured lawns become the venue for exquisitely fiendish executions. The subversion of locus amoenus has its decadent counterpart in Octave Mirbeau's Torture Garden. I can't help but feel that James' used this arrangement of tree, grave and building as the inspiration for the narrative structure of the story. If you visit the village of Great Livermere, where James resided as a child, then you will find many Mothersole graves, including one beneath a large tree that leans onto the church roof. In James' The Ash Tree the vengeful spectre of an executed witch, Mrs Mothersole, inhabits a tree and wreaks havoc on the nearby hall. The gothic horror of the rural is a Jamesian trope and there was an interesting correspondence between James and Ovid thrown up by Laura's recounting of Myrrha's transformation into a tree - after having being made pregnant by her father. It struck me that Laura's delineation of Ovid's grim subversion of the locus amoenus was a very necessary and gothic reality check against the contrived naivety of rustic psychogeography.
Tate as Prosperina, Robert Black her suspected killer, the Plutonic delivery man to the underworld. Her case study was Ovid's Metamorphoses – Prosperina is raped while collecting flowers, it's an eternal image and one salaciously put to effect by the mass media – the abandoned bicycle of Genette Tate on a quiet county lane in Devon still haunts the newspaper pages of my childhood memories. Through a series of provocative annotations her talk revealed the omen of the idyll as a sure sign that something terrible is about to happen. The crime scene featured heavily in Laura's deliciously morbid investigation into the paradox of beauty and violence.
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