The Forger's Shadow [antikvár]

Before He wanted to dream a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality. Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Circular Ruins' Can you imagine a whole new world? Can you even imagine one Vast methodical fragment of an unknown planets entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with all the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas'? Or at the moment of genesis would you prefer to forge the poetry of an unknown place, and so bring a world into being as if it were merely the shadow of its own purest expression: as a mystery to be divined, and at your will? To write such poetry is to craft an Adam from the dust, and breathe life and fire into his blood, and then hear him sing, as Prometheus moulded men out of clay, imitating their bodies from those of the gods. He inspired his children, and they awoke from the slime. Perhaps, as some Gnostic heretics compellingly recognized, the Biblical creation of Adam is a corruption of this old Hittite account of the poet, the maker, the trickster, because Prometheus was plasticator ('the maker') as well as being the more familiar pyrphoros, or 'bearer of sacred fire'. The myth of Prometheus the Maker haunts the following pages as a story of making, a story of forging - and it has fascinated artists and poets too, particularly of the period I will be exploring. This book is about a certain dimension of making or forging - literary forgery -and about how various makers or forgers re-enact the myths of Prometheus in crafting persons and stealing fire to animate their dreams as believable realities.