Demons land: a poem come true

*恶魔之地：一首诗成真*是一个学术和艺术合作项目，探索以诗歌的形象建立一个世界或生活可能意味着什么，或者理解历史就像一首诗一样。这首诗就是埃德蒙·斯宾塞的《仙后》（FQ），也许是英国文艺复兴时期最伟大的作品。我们制作了一个多媒体展览，讲述一个岛屿的故事，在这个岛屿上，FQ美丽而可怕地诞生了。《FQ》是一部致幻杰作，色情、迷人、奇怪，而且经常非常野蛮。这首诗的灵感来自于激进的新教热情，创作于1580年代和1590年代的爱尔兰，当时斯宾塞在伊丽莎白征服时期最暴力的岁月里为英国王室服务。它呈现了一个未建成的世界，并提出了一个问题，即我们可以根据什么原则创造一个有道德的人和一个经过改革的社会。斯宾塞在爱尔兰的使命失败了。他的诗反映并试图弥补这一失败，提供了一个必要的未来的模型，就像对现在的诊断一样。因此，我们这个项目的想象前提是：随后的全球历史，一个不断重复的征服、教育和殖民使命，可以被理解为这首诗的故事，它以不同的方式出现，不完美地走向生活。长期以来，人们一直认为《FQ》是一首基督教人文主义诗歌的典范，因为它声称要改变或塑造生活。在我们的项目中，FQ成为未完成的现代性的文本。我们问的问题都是非常基本的。我们都很熟悉诗歌可以反映或记录历史的想法。但如果它能预测历史呢？如果历史本身的结构就像一首诗呢？我们可以把这些问题延伸到生活本身：如果生活就像诗里写的那样，只有被看到才有存在，或者只有被同情才有意义，那会怎么样？如果每个人的生命都不是一种自给自足的经历，而是另一种事物的寓言，那会怎么样？如果隐喻是正确的，或者生活是由押韵、诗节和无休止重复的节奏组织起来的呢？问题就变成了：一首诗的实现（对社会、历史或生活）意味着什么？像这样的问题不能用传统的学术形式来测试。他们需要一个相应的创造性实验。实现这一目标的唯一途径是通过知识交流，探索不同的工艺和学科——诗歌、绘画、电影、音乐、面具、木偶戏和创造性的文学批评——如何结合起来体现诗歌的愿景。首先，我们把《FQ》翻译成一个叫做《恶魔之地》的新故事，这个故事最初是在帕尔弗雷的一部批评小说中讲述的。这是一个关于收藏家的故事，他是一个浪漫主义者，在1800年左右发誓要把世界底部的一个岛屿改造成一个诗意的乌托邦。恶魔之地成为英国最臭名昭著的殖民地的影子历史，这个监狱岛被称为范·迪门斯岛。就像斯宾塞在爱尔兰的使命一样，收藏家的梦想失败了：不是因为他的世界不像这首诗；而是因为这首诗和这片土地都和他想象的不一样。他们有自己的能量、生命和未开发的内涵，这是他的学科无法想象的。然后，我们通过电影、绘画、声景、音乐、散文和木偶戏等艺术将这个故事动画化，这些艺术在一个展览/装置中汇集在一起，讲述了这个实验的历史。除了在线版本外，我们还将在不同的地点展出，这些地点的历史与我们的项目有关，并根据每个主持人的情况调整我们的叙述。第一次展览将在斯托国民信托的花园和寺庙中进行，这是在18世纪早期设计的，是一个像仙女女王一样的建筑，就像恶魔之地一样，是一个按照诗歌形象建造的地方，作为政治批判和梦幻理想主义的行为。第二场展览将在苏格兰的布特（butte）上的哥特式斯图亚特山（Mount Stuart）别墅举行，这是另一个被围困的理想主义纪念碑，也是一个半消失的历史反映了恶魔之地（Demons Land）历史的岛屿。

*Demons Land: A Poem Come True* is a collaborative scholarly and artistic project that explores what it might mean to build a world or a life in the image of a poem, or to understand history as being structured like a poem. That poem is Edmund Spenser's *Faerie Queene* (FQ), perhaps the single greatest work of the English Renaissance. We make a multi-media exhibition telling the story of an island in which FQ comes beautifully and terribly to life.FQ is a hallucinogenic masterpiece, erotic, ravishing, strange, and frequently very savage. Inspired by militant Protestant zeal, the poem was written in Ireland during the 1580s and 1590s, when Spenser served the English crown during the most violent years of the Elizabethan conquest. It presents an unbuilt world, and asks on what principles we might create a virtuous person and a reformed society. Spenser's mission in Ireland failed. His poem both reflects and tries to redeem this failure, offering a model of the necessary future as much as a diagnosis of the present. Hence the imaginative premise of our project: that subsequent global history, a repeating mission of conquest, education, and colonization, can be understood as a tale of this poem coming differently, imperfectly to life. It has long been understood that FQ, in its claim to change or to model lives, is an exemplary Christian humanist poem. In our project, FQ becomes the text of unfinished modernity. The questions we ask are very basic. We are all familiar with the idea that a poem might reflect or record history. But what if it predicts history? What if history is itself structured like a poem? And we can extend these questions to life itself: what if lives happen as they do in poems, where they only have existence if they are seen, or only matter if they are sympathized with? What if each individual life is not a self-sufficient experience, but an allegory of something other? What if metaphors are true, or life is organized in rhymes, stanzas, endlessly repeating rhythms? The question becomes: what does it mean (for society, or history, or a life) for a poem to come true? Questions such as these cannot really be tested in conventional scholarly forms. They need a correspondent creative experiment. The only way to achieve this is through knowledge exchange, exploring how different crafts and disciplines - poetry, painting, film, music, masks, puppetry, and creative literary criticism - can combine to embody a poetic vision. First, we translate FQ into a new story called Demons Land, told in the first instance in a critical fiction by Palfrey. This is the story of the Collector, a Romantic who around 1800 vowed to remake an island at the bottom of the world into a poetic utopia. Demons Land becomes a shadow history of Britain's most notorious colony, the prison island called Van Diemens Land. Like Spenser's mission in Ireland, the Collector's dream failed: not because his world failed to be like the poem; but because both the poem and the land were other than he thought. They had indigenous energies, lives, untapped implications that his discipline hadn't imagined. We then animate this story through the arts of film, painting, soundscapes, music, prose, and puppetry, which come together in an exhibition/installation telling the history of the experiment. As well as an online version, we will exhibit in locations whose own history speaks to our project, adapting our narrative to each host. The first showing will be in the gardens and temples of Stowe National Trust, designed in the early eighteenth century as an architecturalised Faerie Queene - like Demons Land, a place made in the image of the poem, as an act of political critique and fantastic idealism. The second showings will be in Scotland, in the Gothic Mount Stuart house on Bute - another monument of beleagured idealism, and an island whose semi-disappeared history mirrors that of Demons Land - and in Glasgow, the great port of empire.