Enchanté

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

The whale moves in a sea of sound:
shrimps snap, plankton seethes,
fish croak, gulp, drum their air-bladders,
and are scrutinized by echo-location,
a light massage of sound touching the skin.
The small, toothed whales use high frequencies:
Finely tuned and focused sound-beams,
intense salvoes of bouncing
clicks, a thousand a second,
with which a hair, as thin as
half a millimeter, can be detected;
penetrating probes,
with which they can scan
the contents of a colleague’s stomach,
follow the flow of their blood
take the full measure of
an approaching brain.
From two cerebral cavities
in their melon-shaped heads,
they can transmit two sonic probes,
as if talking in stereo,
and send them in any direction
at the same time:
One ahead, one behind, one above, one below…
lengthening the sound-waves,
shortening them, heightening them,
until their acoustic switchboard
receives the intelligence required.
Spoken to in English,
the smallest cetacean, the dolphin,
will rise to the surface,
alter its vocal frequencies
to suit the measures of human speech,
pitch its voice to the same level
as that of human sounds
when traveling through air –
an unfamiliar medium –
adjust the elastic lips of its blow-hole,
and then, after courteously waiting
for silence,
produce a vibrato imitation
of human language:
Words, phrases, sentences…

(Heathcote Williams, Whale Nation)

…and:

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot’s turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm’s blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its [absurd] worst… it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your fists, your back, your brain, and then — and only then — it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is a parcel bound in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings. It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you would hit it out of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow motion; its wings beat slowly as a hawk’s.

(Annie Dillard, from The Writing Life [source])

Not from whiskey river (or its commonplace book):

Contemplative Rant

Style is the particular in spite of the general — the difference between Howard Keel and Ray Charles singing Some Enchanted Evening. Style amplifies content with personality and at its best has panache and a confidence in expression: Greta Garbo or the Bugatti Roadster. At its worst it is merely mannerism, a confection.

(The Art of Looking Sideways)

…and:

My father tilts his head back, his eyes bug open, and he makes a thread of saliva come out of a hole under his chin — a wound from his days as a partisan. We call it “mooky-worm.” My father knows when it’s about to thunder, he knows the spell to attract fireflies into the palm of your hand. My father has a friend who is a witch and who can — if we turn out all the lights in our bedroom — make it rain candies. My father can transform himself into a fire-breathing dragon, into a hypnotizing snake, into a child-eating ogre.

Sometimes I’m embarrassed by him in front of my friends because he calls them “his little old ladies.” He always exaggerates. When we invite my friends to a restaurant, he forces them to eat snails or, at the Chinese place, snake soup. And I’m embarrassed by him when he swears that as soon as Clara and I have suitors he’s going to kick them head over heels down the stairs. And I’m embarrassed when he sends our dressed-like-an-admiral doorman to pick us up at school.

Sometimes he surprises me, taking me to eat ice cream at the Hilton at eleven at night or to a late movie in the middle of the week. When I’m the one to ask him to take us out he surprises me: “Yes, tonight we’re going to the Teatro Bianchini with blankets and cushions.” Then I might sit on his knees and lay my head on the curve of his stomach. And there, sucking a cube of sugar dipped in cognac, I can feel the very center of his breathing.

(Linda Ferri, from Enchantments [source])

Whew, what a week… Hope that you all have found things to cheer about, laugh at, mull over, and just generally be enchanted by. On the Web, while working on this post, I was delighted to find the entry above at the blog called The Art of Looking Sideways, previously unknown to me. Delighted for what it said about style, but also delighted that it gave me — ready-made, as it were — two images to illustrate the post, and that it raised a mystery in my head: Howard Keel and Ray Charles? two versions of “Some Enchanted Evening”? say what?

“Some Enchanted Evening,” from the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical South Pacific, is the sort of song which used to make me think I hated musicals. There doesn’t seem to be much of wit to it, for one thing: its words and tune — and usual performance style — seem designed to discourage thinking. (I don’t know, though. Maybe that’s the point?)

Wikipedia says of it:

According to the running commentary on the DVD release of South Pacific, this song provides an example of Hammerstein’s use of verbs in a song. The DVD commentary mentions that Lehman Engel remembered how Oscar Hammerstein II wanted to write a song that used verbs, but waited ten years to do so before he wrote this song. The song is rich with verbs, such as “see”, “hear” and “find.”

“A song that used verbs”? The mystery deepens.

Well, draw your own conclusions. First, the lyrics:

Some Enchanted Evening
(music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II)

Some enchanted evening
You may see a stranger,
you may see a stranger
Across a crowded room
And somehow you know,
You know even then
That somewhere you’ll see her
Again and again.

Some enchanted evening
Someone may be laughing,
You may hear her laughing
Across a crowded room
And night after night,
As strange as it seems
The sound of her laughter
Will sing in your dreams.

Who can explain it?
Who can tell you why?
Fools give you reasons,
Wise men never try.

Some enchanted evening
When you find your true love,
When you feel her call you
Across a crowded room,
Then fly to her side,
And make her your own
Or all through your life you
May dream all alone.

Once you have found her,
Never let her go.
Once you have found her,
Never let her go!

First, here’s Howard Keel’s version:

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left -- a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:56 long.]

See what I mean? Soaring, chest-bursting, rafter-rattling — yet, to my taste, oddly leaden.

…and now Ray Charles’s:

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left -- a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 6:07 long.]

Now, that’s personality — that’s style!