1st Edition

Hinges Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination

By Grace Mazur Copyright 2010
    174 Pages
    by A K Peters/CRC Press

    Grace Dane Mazur uses the idea of the hinge to illuminate real and metaphysical thresholds in fiction, poetry, myth, and ordinary life. From ancient narratives of Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Parmenides, and Orpheus, to modern works by Katherine Mansfield and Eudora Welty, the exploration of the Other World acts as a metaphor for the entrancement of reading and writing.

    Looking at Lascaux, Renaissance and Byzantine images of Christ harrowing Hell, Rubens, Vermeer, and others Mazur contemplates writing, attention, Hades, the gates of Hell, trap doors, demons, love, the human body, forbidden looking, Virgil, Ovid, Nicodemus, Nighttown, and the melancholy of twilight.

    Entrance

    Acknowledgments

    The Hinges of Hell

    Introduction to the Hinge

    Hardware and Definitions

    The World of Fiction and the Land of the Dead

    Thresholds and Instabilities

    Descents or Passages to the Other World

    Lascaux

    Gilgamesh

    Odysseus

    Parmenides

    "The Garden Party"

    The Other World of Fiction

    Forbidden Looking

    The Story of Orpheus and Its Condition

    How Rubens Sees Orpheus

    What Rubens Knows about Looking

    How Virgil Looks at Orpheus

    The Difference between Looking and Seeing

    Getting around the Forbidden

    Ways of Looking at the Divine

    The Local Forbidden

    How Ovid Sees Orpheus

    Disobedience in General

    Forbidden Looking and Writing

    Hell and Hinges Revisited

    Christ Harrowing Hell

    Nicodemus on Hell

    The Importance of Hinges

    Hinges and Writing

    "Music from Spain" and Its Trapdoors

    A Trapdoor in Nighttown

    Hinges of the Mind and of the Heart

    Hinges and Creative Work and Demons

    And Saw That It Was Good

    The Hinge of the Act

    Notes

    Timeline

    List of Figures

    Bibliography

    Index

    Biography

    GRACE DANE MAZUR is the author of the novel, Trespass, and a collection of stories, Silk, which was a New York Times notable book of the year. After studying painting and ceramics at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, she went to Harvard University for her BA and PhD in Biology. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard working on morphogenesis and micro-architecture in silkworms when she hinged into literature. She now teaches fiction in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson and is the fiction editor at Tupelo Press. She lives in Cambridge and Westport Massachusetts, with her husband, the mathematician Barry Mazur.

    "Ordinary things can lie around unnoticed until someone comes along whose poetic imagination makes the vital connections and uncovers the riches lying concealed in their depths. Grace Dane Mazur has created an inspired fugue, writing with sensitivity and passion as she finds in the common hinge a multilayered, apocalyptic and powerful metaphor of entrances and exits, openings, initiations and descents."
    —MARINA WARNER, author of Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century

    "Hinges, by Grace Dane Mazur, is a masterpiece of literary and artistic insight. To read it is to experience all over again the thrill of reading. It makes you want to revisit the world’s great masters of verbal art—Homer, Virgil, Milton, and so many others. Page after page, the reader sees something radiantly new about each of them—and about the reader’s own self at the moment of reading them. The author of this remarkable book has an uncanny instinct for seeing things as they really are at that liminal moment when the reader, in reading, crosses over from the everyday to the eternal."
    —GREGORY NAGY, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

    "Mazur’s book is strange in wonderful ways. It perches itself on the liminal perspective, where the risks of instability can yield long sight. Reaching deep into inspired erudition, it is filled with quirks and profundities, told in a voice that is both of this world and not."
    —REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN, author of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

    "What lies between everything and nothing—asleep and awake, reader and book, the space between words, the hero/heroine and the world they occupy and from which they must escape—what lies between all that, and on what invisible spring is it all tightly held and delicately balanced and vulnerable to becoming undone? With stunning and direct simplicity, Grace Dane Mazur illuminates these darknesses, revealing an imagination that is original and vital. Here is a book I absolutely needed to read."
    —JAMAICA KINCAID, author of Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya