Book Recommendation—Hinges: Mediatations on the Portals of the Imagination by Grace Dane Mazur

  

Tum demum horrisono stridentes cardine sacrae

  panduntur portae.                                                     

The awaited

Time has come, hell gates will shudder wide

On shrieking hinges.                                         

-Virgil, The Aeneid

My fellow St. John's alumni and current students may be familiar with Grace Dane Mazur: she recently gave a writing workshop here in Annapolis and her husband/mathematician  Barry Mazur gave the lecture What is the Surface Area of a Hedgehog? in 2011.

Hinges is a compilation of 5 essays: The Hinges of Hell, The World of Fiction and the Land of the Dead, Forbidden Looking, Hell and Hinges Revisited, and Hinges of the Mind and of the Heart.

Mazur unusual pedigree grants here uncanny perspective in the nature of  art, imagination, eros and death. She has studied painting and ceramics, morphogenesis and micro-architecture of silk worms, and teaches at the MFA program at Warren Wilson in Creative Writing..

Through this collection of essays, Mazur feels free to hinge (her verb of choice) between the classical works of Literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Parmenides-- to the classics of Visuals Arts, Ruben's Orpheus and Eurydice with Hades and Persephone, Fra Angelico's Christ in Limbo, and the 17,000 year old Cave Paintings of Lascaux. These literary and artistic investigations are punctuated by her personal accounts of the adventure to the Caves of Lascaux with her husband Barry and Eva Brann, the rape of Turk's Caps from a local farm, and her keenest interest--the act of writing. 

Mazur explores a question that I myself have been interested in for some time: why do men seek wisdom through Hades? What can we learn by traveling through the darkest parts of the soul and of the world? She explores this question through Odysseus, Gilgamesh, Parmenides, and the modern work of Katherine Mansfield's Laura in "The Garden Party". I continue puzzle over the descents or movements outside (Mazur stresses that we need not think of the journey into the underworld as strictly "under" or "below" but that the journey is simply into the world of the Other, free of strict spatial relation) of Don Quixote into the Cave of Montesinos, Dante into Hell, and Hans Castorp up to the Sanatorium. She has helped me reexamine these latent questions with honest blend of phenomenology and poetry. 

Mazur is most interested in the writing. This gives her writing an electric thoughtfulness that transcends a typical synthetic pan-department essay. This stands out with lines like, "Because the close, focused attention of the writer is often even more piercing and prolonged than that of the reader, the imagined world replaces by its intensity and brilliance the ordinary world of the living. This, too, can lead to a certain terror." P. 51

Hinges is a meandering journey through the soul of the artist. Mazur writes in an accessible syntax, approaching poetic heights. I would recommend this to all who are interested in the matters of art.