Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

First there was Gothic horror, then the Goth punk/alternative style -- black fingernail polish, dark clothes, eyeliner, and blood-red lips -- but where did the terms “Goth” and “Gothic” come from? These words came to be identified with the macabre in a round-about way that I find fascinating.



I mentioned the word “Goth” to a friend of mine who is a former college professor of architecture, now retired. He told me that Gothic architecture is also called "Christian" architecture. That sounded strange, so I asked him why. Here is the story:


Back in medieval times, around 200 A.D. just before the middle Ages, a tribe of Germanic people called the Goths (similar to the Huns) invaded the Roman Empire. They eventually wiped out the Roman Empire, or as some people see it, the Roman Empire blended in with the Goths. Then, at some point, the Goth leaders converted to Christianity. The churches and other buildings they constructed had high pointed arches, rib vaulting, and other things that gave it a certain style. It was known as "Christian" or "Goth" because it was built by the Goths after their official religion became Christianity.



Now -- fast forward to the 1800's – hundreds of years after the Goth invasions. Writers found that their readers loved “safe danger" – this meant you could read about something really scary and get the thrill of terror, but you knew it was just a story so you enjoyed the rush. Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein in 1818, Edgar Allan Poe wrote his Tales of Mystery and Imagination in the 1840's, and Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897. There were many others as well.



It just so happened, by coincidence, that in England during the 1800’s, they were discovering a lot of the old Gothic architecture from centuries earlier, much like the pyramids were rediscovered in Egypt. It became popular to copy the old Goth style, or restore some of the old castles and churches. Nowadays we might call it “retro.” Many of the horror stories written in the 1800’s would feature an old Gothic structure for the vampire’s hideout or the madman’s lair. Some of the writers actually referred back to the medieval days and some just wrote about their own time, but Gothic art & architecture became associated with stories of the grotesque, the mysterious, and the desolate.


- End

Astonishment, suspense, uncertainty, ambivalence, play--such is the axis along which the gothic moves. What we can never know for sure is what stimulates our imaginations. Darkness begets striving: this is the literary discovery that makes the gothic the bridge between the wasteland of graveyard literature amd the exaltation of the great romantic novels, the philosophical discovery that leads Kant from the wilderness of the antinomies to the sublime ideas of pure reason. In the middle lie Tantalus and Job, the most cosmic of jokes. From the time of Walpole on, the gothic novel and the gothic novelist rarely seem to take themselves seriously. "I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination," we read in the 1818 preface that Mary shelley's husband wrote for her. (267); "Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me," she remembers the horrific moment of inspiration in her 1831 introduction (264). The greatness of the gothic--inseparable from the seeming frivolity of all its greatest exemplars--is not that it plays with terror and insanity, but rather that it plays with these things, that is, that it imagines them.

http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/G ... tml#morris
I got a couple of Gothic eidetic images in my mind, childhood fears, boys to men. I can't remember how I surfed into that link I think it was a couple of days ago maybe a week, I suppose I am pretty gothic at that, I had this vain notion I was going to sit down at this computer and just write the whole dam thing, just see how far one of these text boxes will scroll, visions of st jack and his scroll, but I am satisfied just to get a little of it out at a time, these days, I was working on Freud and Uncanny, "something old and familiar to the mind" Two Towers two houses in baltimore gas street lamps, lamplighter making his rounds...........ramble brobmlbe rambpe

good post for me bill, timely, I hope this ramble relates somewhat.