Word: goddesses
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...port of Callao, the "coke" capital of Peru, the vice is out in the open. Hundreds of peddlers, many of whom are their own best customers, offer a variety of items ranging from the plain leaves to pichicato or la diosa blanca (the white goddess), the drug in its refined form. Snuffing up a pinch of the powder in full view of passers-by last week, one old peddler brazenly solicited customers: "The only danger is that the wind will blow the pichicato away, that...
Goodbye to the Dam. In fact, everything is so cream-smooth in New Crete that Poet Venn-Thomas wonders 1) if the magicians, who are vegetarians, wouldn't be better off with a few chunks of red roast beef and 2) why the Goddess ever brought him there...
...soon finds out, when the Goddess herself appears in the form of an unscrupulous female named Erica-a "triple-faced, ash-blonde bitch" with whom Poet Venn-Thomas had had a gruesome love affair in the Late Christian Epoch. What Erica does to overcivilized New Crete is something awful. She plants some 20th Century cigarettes in the closet of a cute little nymph named Sapphire; she fouls up the witches, hexes the horses, mortifies the magicians. By the time she's through, New Crete is on the verge of collapse-at which point Poet Venn-Thomas sensibly decides...
What Graves seems to be saying is that the Goddess is malevolent, too, and that her worshipers must recognize this or degenerate into stagnant smugness...
Watch the North Wind Rise is no great shakes either as a novel or a sociological essay. But it manages to stand up-and to stand out-as another rich expression of Robert Graves's fantastical mind. To laugh in the face of his Goddess is only natural; but without this pure yet beastly muse Graves would probably not be what he emphatically is-one of the finest poets of the Late Christian Epoch...