Inez Madeleine is a recent graduate of the RCA Writing MA. She writes interdisciplinary literary criticism. Interested in the intersections of poetic form, art, horticulture, travel, and food.
Inez is currently working on her first book entitled Amaranthine Thirst. Continuing the research I began on my writing MA on elegy, focusing on Austrian poet Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Amaranthine Thirst takes a single image from each of Rilke’s ten elegies and re-furnishes the quotation with a new landscape of references. The image in each epigram is used as an expanded visual metonym – and these metonyms are swelled into personal elegiac essays. Attempting to reconcile the transience of human experience as set out by Rilke to be ‘the task of the poet’ – to give the ‘earthly’ duration within language. The question of Amaranthine Thirst – how to accept the failure of both experience and language? – exposes a tension and desperation within myself, as the narrator; how to sublimate the self to the hollows of experience but to also keep a critical distance from the world. This tension erodes me towards an increasingly bare vulnerability; entrapping myself in the pursuit of imperfect, and yet definitive, failure and loss. The framing of the ‘elegy’ form is important to the text, as it considers how we orient ourselves around loss – and how loss-of-self can become a centralised pillar of self-understanding; as an indelible and recurring event in our lives which forms and reforms our identities.
Amaranthine Thirst is both an exploration of the aesthetic of elegy and an elegy itself. An exercise in the emotional quality of scholarship, its sensitive prose seeks to apply sensation to thought and to avoid overly sentimental reproduction of experience. Gillian Rose’s memoir Love’s Work was a great influence on my style, her prose is without sentiment but remains compassionate to its subject and reader.
The solitude of thought that the books analyses and maps is a state of strength and frailty for me, as the narrator. Thought has through academia and other avenues become an increasingly inaccessible medium. Thought has also depreciated in our technological age of ‘communication’. The duality that thought provides, a corner stone of our philosophical canon and literary conception of ourselves, has become an inconvenient truth and experience. Interior contradiction is no longer a privileged site of self-understanding, its risk has been devalued or nullified by our desire to control the landscape of our lives. Solitude is a site of contention and thought its material.
Inez Madeleine 