This text comes from my confused reading of the mediaeval love poem Roman de la Rose. Without the slightest knowledge of mediaeval, or indeed any classical, myth nor allegory, my stumbling upon a framed miniature, set within manuscript 169 of the Fitzwilliam Museum collection, led me to pursue my researchings of this epic poem with a level of blissful naivety. Finding my motivation in the visual stimuli of both English translations of the poem and snippets collated from manuscripts held by the Warburg Library, this text unfolds some of my thinking in relation to one moment in chapter four of the Romance (Rose).
Beginning with an end
Like waking from a dream
Like stumbling ’pon love
Then dissolving
Crackle, rain
A joyful scent
Heard through atmospherics
‘Many people say that in dreams’ — Institute for Research and History of Texts, n.d.
Soft curves bubble from barbed hands (fig.1). Hatch and hatch, hatch and hatch. Shadows – amalgams of mass – absenting light, break forth in and as blossom. A suffix sketch to preface fin’ amor. Love to be found in and after elongated swoons through deep (d)ream sleep.
‘Explicit with scribal sketch […]:
Finit le Romant de le Rose
on lart damour est toute enclose
. deo gracias.
[Here ends the Romance of the Rose
in which the art of love is wholly enclosed
. Thanks be to God]’ — Blamires and Holian, 2002, xvii)
An epic poem, nay dictum guide manual for love, Roman de la Rose (Rose), or Romance of the Rose (Rose), to use the English translation, is a wheel through mediaeval social thought; through ideas around ‘love and marriage, gender and sexuality, sin and free will, language and power, human society, nature and the cosmos’, to cite Blamires and Holian (2002). Composed by two writers, Guillaume de Lorris (c.1200–40) and Jean de Meun (c.1240–1305), the poem recounts one man’s odyssey, and his search for the gifts of pure love. Imagined as a burgeoning rosebud – ‘one so beautiful that […] all the others seemed worthless in comparison’, one that ‘shone with colour, the purest vermilion that Nature could provide…’ (Lorris, de Meun, & Horgan, 2008, 26) – their protagonist, par amour, battels to pluck this love blossom, encountering, in his strife, a host of vices, deities and allegories of courtly attitudes.
Premised, par amour, our Lover enters into this quest one night in May, as he slips into the folly forms of his dreams. Rather than an immediate record of some sonje along a midnight road, de Lorris’s first and unfinished section of Rose is built around the memory of a nighttime flirtation, as we are told, five years prior. It is interesting to consider these rememberings as a form-giving device; where this epic narration of loves ends, becomes through a, indeed through n – where, n = author a at t1 [de Lorris] + author b at t2 [de Meun] – distant recollection(s) rather than via a, indeed n, documentary-type record, or reason.
Scientific madness!
In accuracy!
The hopes for love pure, amour pur,
n folly!
Finding and treating encounterings as a point of in flow, albeit wakeful RE(A)M flow, this departure into the folly form of librarial daydreams is a reflection on fantasies woven from quick kisses from n Rose.
Folly
From Old French folie, ‘madness’, in modern French also ‘delight’, ‘favourite dwelling’.
A sprawling range, kiss kiss kiss, from numerable translations to illustrated accounts, happening upon Rose is like dreaming in facsimile; like getting caught up in cacophonous songe. Drawn across four encounters, this converging unbounds through some kinda ad hoc negation; through piecings together of buds reaped from sources not quite at the point of full blossomed understanding – nor reason.
‘To open a manuscript containing illustrated (‘historiated’) initials or (as is the rule with the Rose when it is illustrated) containing framed miniatures, is to experience a heightened anticipation, a rush of adrenaline…’ — Balmires and Holian, 2002, xvii
‘The miniatures in a Rose manuscript do not constitute a coherent interpretation of the poem so much as they constitute (and constituted) a series of pleasurable ad hoc visual stimuli whose generation of interpretive questions was substantially a matter of chance.’ — Balmires and Holian, 2002, xxxvii
Indeed, if the vastness of Rose ‘yields a rich variety of material: interpolations and abridges’ (Balmires and Holian, 2002, xvii), this reflection in flow becomes just another delightful dwelling; a place to play in the considerings of an escape out into n somewheres not found in the confounds of reason nor liturgy (from the Greek, via French or late Latin – ‘public working’).
It, this, is sybaritic. A sweet moment of conceptual intimacy; with, in and through days of dreamings, days of flows and poetic recountings. It’s an illuminated folly of one’s own. A folly formed through moments found after waking to the generative, ad hoc pleasure with, in and through as Rose’s vast stimuli.
Songe or Sonje (Dream)
From Latin somnium (genitive somniī), ‘dream’, ‘vision’, also ‘fantasy’, ‘daydream’.
La Maison Fortune
Black on white. Wisps of illumination give way to nothing but the added patina of time.
Squares on circle, elongated, circle in circle, in semi-circle vice, whilst square sits in tattered square in sketchy ruled lines holding narrative: folly, dream, weather. Love weather.
Reflecting, with no interpretive dictum but holding a narrative all the same, this aerial view (fig.2) breaks with the divine authority of Western point-based perspective. Glimmered, as if omnipotent, La Maison Fortune shows its oblique face stitched in and seeped in an ‘assaulting deluge’ (Lorris, Clopinel, & Ellis, 1900, 212). In the negative, here, La Maison Fortune breaks seams, teetering precariously between strangery smoking rock and
‘Tumultuous roar’
Where
‘The rude waves beat for evermore.’ — Lorris, Clopinel, & Ellis, 1900, 212
Indeed, Fortune
‘Is not
So blessed; instead her dwelling is very perilous.’— Lorris, de Meun, & Horgan, 2008, 91
Woodwind crackle, jitter, La Maison Fortune, a dungy double, two follies in an enclosing enclosure. An allegory, perched, deep in the in accuracy of epic rememberings, battered by n double dose of time. Wind, rain, time. Weather.
Reason describes the strange residence of Fortune on a rock in the sea, buffeted by the current.
Strange, how Lover’s encounterings with Reason lays bare the double face of Fortune. At once La Maison Fortune appears a place of enclosure, one place perched between some kinda good and some kinda bad river, and yet, a folly on the verge of collapse.
This folly don’t fall. Its confounds with, in and through fall.
Like a dream: a place becoming through its ends.
Dreams: vast follies of foolful revue.
Love, as Lover sees
Sees flowers dressed as stars
Hears midnight songes
Tinted, gilded.
Descending in and in RE(A)M
Rapid heart-eye moves
As love dreams
Dreams Becoming weather.
‘No one has suffered who has not tried love’ — Lorris, de Meun, & Horgan, 2008, 16
But in a world so sick,
‘Love has been put up for sale’ — Lorris, de Meun, & Horgan, 2008, 79
Dreams: vast follies of foolful revue.
Love, as Lover sees
Hears songes
vast follies of foolful revue
Got up with strangery
Love dreams as if love dreams
Of islands.
Havens out in crashing seas
Weathering suffering and its sales
Where messed up sensible things
Rock. Rock with
‘Fearsome wood’ — Lorris, Clopinel, & Ellis, 1900, 213
With
‘Strange-grown trees, both bad and good’— Lorris, Clopinel, & Ellis, 1900, 213
Where
‘Nightingales forsake
Their tunefulness, but screech-owls break
The silence, whose discordance song
Gives prophecy of woe and wrong,
Sad heralds, clad in hideousness,
Of evil happening and distress.’ — Lorris, Clopinel, & Ellis, 1900, 213-4
‘Give ear: A folly most extreme
It is that men should Fortune dream
A Goddess, up to highest heaven
Exalting her, for ne’er was given
To her by reason nor right
In paradise a mansion bright;
No house ending hath she got,
But one right perilous, God wot.’ — Lorris, Clopinel, & Ellis, 1900, 212
Rose, hatched and hatched, hatched and hatched here through half-had rememberings, through semi-encounterings, ney and fortuitous collapsings. Recollections that depart into some kinda songe or sonje through, where the dictates of Reason call out the fallacy of Fortune. But Fortune is weather, not folly. And roses are plants, not sees or sures (sic). And dreaming par amour, with par amour, Love is not found in confounds, but with confounding kisses, and swims in the grain out-from some narrative, folly, dream, weather.
Toby Üpson, 2022.
Works cited:
Institute for Research and History of Texts, Notice de CAMBRIDGE, Fitzwilliam Museum, 169, no date, Jonas.irht.cnrs.fr at https://jonas.irht.cnrs.fr/manuscrit/77655
Alcuin Blamires and Gail C. Holian, The Romance of the Rose Illuminated: Manuscripts at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, 2002, University of Wales Press.
Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, Frances Horgan (trans.), The Romance of the Rose, 2008, Oxford University Press.
W. Lorris, J. Clopinel, F.S. Ellis (trans.), The Romance of the Rose, 1900, Volume I, J M Dent & Co.
Originally published – https://engineforthinking.cargo.site/Toby-Upson
Toby Üpson 