Poetry is a particular outlook on life and a constant search for truth and knowledge. It is a profound and esoteric experience which penetrates and acts as a catalyst in every aspect of a and Graves actually practised this belief and took his person’s life, role as a poet very seriously. Another war experience that is resonant in the theory of the White Goddess is the experience of trench warfare itself. Inherent in the trench both as a location and a concept is the notion of liminality. It is a locus of engagement with the enemy, but without actual confrontation with the enemy, who remains unknown and unidentified. From a spatial point of view the trench is a liminal, in-between space, a threshold of victory and conquest. It is a fixed and geographically designated territory and at the same time the arena of the continuous struggle for conquest. The soldiers do not fight in the traditional manner, which involves a linear progressive movement towards the enemy and his territory, but are restricted to a minimal space where they are engaged in a process of a distant exchange of fire which in turn metaphorises the semantics of trench warfare. Fighting in the trenches is therefore not a clash in the traditional form of a confrontational, territorial fight but a peculiar form of warfare based on distant fighting and in that sense a precursor of the modern virtual war that we have been witnessing during the last few decades. This absence of linear movement combined with territorial restriction results in a transcendence of space, since the soldiers are physically in the trench but at the same time the impact of their military activity is on the other side of the wire where their shells and bullets conclude their deadly journey. Consequently the and the ‘here’ their fixed definitions and signification, they merge ‘there’ lose and are transformed into a liminal where boundaries Überspace and territorial demarcations are blurred. This signifies Überspace the spatial liminality inherent in the experience of trench fighting and which in turn suggests a temporal liminality where time is suspended precisely because of the absence of the traditional soldier-to-soldier confrontation. As a consequence of the distance,
Poetry is a particular outlook on life and a constant search for truth and knowledge. It is a profound and esoteric experience which penetrates and acts as a catalyst in every aspect of a person’s life, and Graves actually practised this belief and took his role as a poet very seriously. Another war experience that is resonant in the theory of the White Goddess is the experience of trench warfare itself. Inherent in the trench both as a location and a concept is the notion of liminality. It is a locus of engagement with the enemy, but without actual confrontation with the enemy, who remains unknown and unidentified. From a spatial point of view the trench is a liminal, in-between space, a threshold of victory and conquest. It is a fixed and geographically designated territory and at the same time the arena of the continuous struggle for conquest. The soldiers do not fight in the traditional manner, which involves a linear progressive movement towards the enemy and his territory, but are restricted to a minimal space where they are engaged in a process of a distant exchange of fire which in turn metaphorises the semantics of trench warfare. Fighting in the trenches is therefore not a clash in the traditional form of a confrontational, territorial fight but a peculiar form of warfare based on distant fighting and in that sense a precursor of the modern virtual war that we have been witnessing during the last few decades. This absence of linear movement combined with territorial restriction results in a transcendence of space, since the soldiers are physically in the trench but at the same time the impact of their military activity is on the other side of the wire where their shells and bullets conclude their deadly journey. Consequently the ‘here’ and the ‘there’ lose their fixed definitions and signification, they merge and are transformed into a liminal Überspace where boundaries and territorial demarcations are blurred. This Überspace signifies the spatial liminality inherent in the experience of trench fighting and which in turn suggests a temporal liminality where time is suspended precisely because of the absence of the traditional soldier-to-soldier confrontation. As a consequence of the distance,
9901_maria_palaska,_%5c'the_ultimate_trench%5c'_(final).docx