Sunday, 13 January 2008

Cellar Door

"Most English-speaking people...will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant."  J.R.R. Tolkien

Cellar Door is an idea which was passed onto me through the film Donnie Darko. The idea for me gets particularly fascinating if you start to think about what may be behind that door, be it a physical or mental door. It could be a blockage or a pathway, although both are intrinsically linked, both are polar opposites.

Is the beauty in the passage through a door, the inability to break through the door or the moment when someone/something finally does pass to the other side of the door? As far as I can see there is an argument for beauty in all three. 

I'd like to explore this relationship and juxtapostion, to see if I can pinpoint the beauty in a door. Cellar Door maybe the way into this work but I don't think its essential to stick with the cellar door as the only type of door which contains, or 'is' beauty. 

...although I may find that Cellar Door is beauty.

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