Word: daemons
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Planned Hibernation. Though Williams' first professionally produced play was titled Battle of Angels, he and his heroes have more frequently and more valiantly battled with the devils of dread, insecurity and panic. In the past, Williams could cast out those demons with the daemon of his art. He could control his craft with poetic precision, and the battle erupted in blazingly memorable scenes and plays. With In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel he has been invaded by his fears, and the battle of existence has become a forlorn lost cause...
...wouldn't have thought that your daemon specialized in happy endings," Wilderness' wife Primrose remarks. Yet that is exactly what Lowry has written, with desperate passion, despite the fact that he considered it "rather a second-rate ambition to be an optimist." Lowry could no more round off his hope than his book. But at a time when the fashion for the novel is basic black-when despair has gone slick-Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid once again gives the struggle between good and evil the dignity of an even match, and the excitement...
Demian is the hero's daemon, a figure that embodies the latent power of his own personality, the god within him that is evil as well as good. The novel describes how at first the opposites oppose each other but at last are reconciled in the self the hero becomes. In effect, the book is a case history of the integration process as Jung describes it, and as such it frequently suffers from schematism. The characters are concepts and their lives are theories, but somehow the abstractions are all bathed in a luminous and powerful stream of feeling that...
...Steinway, improvises in an ecstasy that lasts all night. At 13, carrying a couple of stolen instruments, he heads east on a slow freight. He lands in New Orleans, immerses himself in jazz, and suffers a creative convulsion that brings him to the edge of madness. He follows his daemon to East Harlem, then on to Germany, where he composes an electronic symphony, scores it for soprano, orchestra, tape, women's high-heeled shoes, and vacuum cleaner. When it is performed back in the Hollywood Bowl, some cheer and some jeer, but he is accepted by the public...
...Schrade, the idea of the fated personal daemon helps clarify "the eternal enigma of the extraordinary man." The visionary gift of the creative artist originates in his acceptance (albeit unconsciously) of this force for which he expends his energies to the limit of his nature. This drive is common to an artist's creativity and work and a stateman's wickedness alike, to both Beethoven and Napoleon; it features an enormous confidence and a wisdom far beyond common...