Castaway, Doors, and the Ancient Mariner

StoneOx17 · 10 Feb 2003, 14:59 · from urth-v0302.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: StoneOx17 at aol.com
Subject: (urth) Castaway, Doors, and the Ancient Mariner
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 09:59:14 EST
Message-ID: <urth-v0302-2919 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0302/2919.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

I think Charles Reed is absolutely right when he sees echoes of  the=20
Ancient Mariner in Castaway.  I just want to comment that the Ancient=20
Mariner is also referenced a couple of times in TAD, as well.  First, at=20
the Grand Hotel, when Green sees a ship motionless, fighting a headwind,=20
this makes him think of a poem: "A teacher had read it to him in school:
'As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.'"  Second, when he
is thinking about streetcars, he thinks "They had been cheap, energy=20
efficient, and nonpolluting.  Yet they had been done away with, and a=20
hundred harmful gadgets had been allowed to stay."  To my ear, this=20
echoes Coleridge:
The many men, so beautiful! / And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things / lived on; and so did I.

One thematic parallel of The Ancient Mariner to TAD seems fairly=20
clear:  Green's life is going nowhere until he finds religion/meaning/Lara.
I don't see any further connections of the poem to There Are Doors, but=20
they may just be more deeply hidden.

--Stone Ox

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net