[Image: a “mood board” generated by a team brainstorming the design of an alternate-reality game (ARG). Found it here. Click to enlarge.]
From whiskey river:
We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don’t know.
(Annie Dillard [source])
…and:
The Unwritten
Inside this pencil
crouch words that have never been written
never been spoken
never been taughtthey’re hiding
they’re awake in there
dark in the dark
hearing us
but they won’t come out
not for love not for time not for fireeven when the dark has worn away
they’ll still be there
hiding in the air
multitudes in days to come may walk through them
breathe them
be none the wiserwhat script can it be
that they won’t unroll
in what language
would I recognize it
would I be able to follow itto make out the real names
of everythingmaybe there aren’t
many
it could be that there’s only one word
and it’s all we need
it’s here in this pencilevery pencil in the world
is like this
(W.S. Merwin [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Emily Dickinson’s To-Do List
Monday
Figure out what to wear — white dress?
Put hair in bun
Bake gingerbread for Sue
Peer out window at passersby
Write poem
Hide poemTuesday
White dress? Off-white dress?
Feed cats
Chat with Lavinia
Work in garden
Letter to T.W.H.Wednesday
White dress or what?
Eavesdrop on visitors from behind door
Write poem
Hide poemThursday
Try on new white dress
Gardening — watch out for narrow fellows in grass!
Gingerbread, cakes, treats
Poems: Write and hide themFriday
Embroider sash for white dress
Write poetry
Water flowers on windowsill
Hide everything
(Andrea Carlisle [source])
…and:
I have thought often of old Mary Macarthur, and of her dream of holy St. Bride, and of that older Brighid of the West, Mother of Songs and Music — she who breathes in the reed, on the wind, in the hearts of women and in the minds of poets. For I too have my dream, my memory of one whom as a child I called Star-Eyes, and whom, later, I called “Banmorair-na-mara,” the Lady of the Sea, and whom at last I knew to be no other than the woman that is in the heart of women. I was not more than seven when one day, by a well, near a sea-loch in Argyll, just as I was stooping to drink, my glancing eyes lit on a tall woman standing among a mist of wild-hyacinths under three great sycamores. I stood, looking, as a fawn looks, wild-eyed, unafraid. She did not speak, but she smiled, and because of the love and beauty in her eyes I ran to her. She stooped and lifted blueness out of the flowers as one might lift foam out of a pool, and I thought she threw it over me. When I was found, lying among the hyacinths, dazed, and, as was thought, ill, I asked eagerly after the lady in white and with hair “all shiny-gold like buttercups,” but when I found I was laughed at, or at last, when I passionately persisted, was told I was sun-dazed and had been dreaming, I said no more. But I did not forget.
(“Fiona MacLeod” (pseudonym of William Sharp) [source])
…and:
He remembered a Chinese fable Ellen had once told him about a man who falls off a cliff, saves himself by clutching at a plant, and then notices that two mice are gnawing away the branch on which his life depends. There is a fruit growing on the branch, which the man plucks and eats. The fruit tastes wonderful.
“How did the mice come to be halfway down a cliff in the first place?” he had asked her. “And why didn’t they eat the fruit themselves?”
He couldn’t see the point of the story at all, but Ellen refused to explain. “You must experience it,” was all she would say. “One day it’ll suddenly hit you.”
(Michael Dibdin [source])
I think I’ve always been a sucker for good reimaginings: familiar stories (often mythic or epic in scale) reworked and remolded, sometimes into unrecognizability, by writers unafraid to monkey with tradition (often sacred) and talented enough to pull the whole thing off. The first time I became at all aware that such a practice existed, I think, the writers had tackled one of the biggest sacred epics of all in Western civilization, to produce Jesus Christ Superstar.
Back then (1969-70) — in the days when the work hadn’t yet been staged or filmed, simply recorded as a double-LP rock opera — my experience might be described as “profane titillation.” I liked the music well enough. But I think what most hit me, embarking as I was upon the era of making my own decisions (and of course my own mistakes), was the little frisson of blasphemy surrounding the story as told therein. The writers had shifted the emphasis away from Jesus, towards Judas — not quite making of him a hero, but (to me) unquestionably the protagonist. They overturned the only version of events I knew, practically by heart: the apostles had become a gang of goofy ne’er-do-wells, Mary Magdalene an unrequited lover, and Herod an almost unbearably witty interrogator.
With time, though, I think my favorite thing about Jesus Christ Superstar is how its makers simply cut off the storyline at Jesus’s death. They took no side, ultimately, on the whole Easter story (which I can see, true, as either a cop-out or an act of bravery). Indeed, the last song on the album was a simple two-minute instrumental titled “John Nineteen Forty-One,” referring to a New Testament verse which goes like this (King James Version):
Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid.
And that was it.
After all the sometimes raucous melodrama of preceding events, and the music written around them, this feels like closing on a breeze of fresh air.
Hyocynth says
I have been listening to the score of this for the last few days, as is my wont at this time of year. What I truly love about the score is that Jesus became human to me for the fist time, not just some storybook character who could perform magic (Shazam!). But of course for me the real magic happens on Sunday. Happy Easter bro and may the fresh air continue to blow your way.
John says
The Missus and I last listened to the whole soundtrack a few years ago, while playing cards at about this time of year (not exactly coincidentally). And that was the first time I’d heard it in probably 15 years. Amazing how it sticks in the head, especially the way one song leads into another. (Something much lost in these days of pick-and-choose whatever songs you’d like from an album.)
Froog says
I have a feeling I’ve seen the Merwin piece before somewhere. I’m probably going to add it to the personal anthology of poetry I am supposed to be compiling for teaching purposes.
Rather a lot of such chores on my plate at the moment. I have to produce a similar selection for short prose – fiction and non-fiction. And draft a policy for the more effective promotion of English reading and writing skills.
And than I have to revise the procurement lists for three different departments. This wouldn’t be so bad if it was just one list, but each department has a list of teacher’s resources, a list of required texts for detailed study, a list of topic-specific texts (and DVDs etc.) to support the curriculum, and a list of general recommendations for the school library. And in English, of course, the latter is further sub-divided into several different categories – novels, poetry, short stories, non-fiction, and so on. There’s no concordance between these various lists, and they’re not even presented to me in a single format. Oh no: some are in Word docs, some in Excel spreadsheets, some presented as Amazon ‘wish lists’, and others again via a Follett website called Titlewave (which our main school librarian favours). So, that’s about 20 different lists I have to revise.
Ah, and since I am the experienced ‘China guy’, it also falls to me to come up with recommendations for the fiction and non-fiction lists in the China section.
Sorry – just venting. This is why I don’t have much time for commenting currently.
But I am, more than ever, extremely grateful for the diverting new material you introduce me to with these posts.
John says
You made me nervous that I might’ve used “The Unwritten” before, but apparently I have not. (Especially for these Friday posts, it’s not uncommon for me to discover just in time — just before posting — that a given selection has turned up before, especially with favorite authors/poets. Then I have to scramble to find a last-minute stand-in.)
“The more effective promotion of English reading and writing skills”: are those to be promoted among a select Chinese audience? or is this for a more general audience?
For what it’s worth, I’m confident that whoever comes along after you will have a much easier time with all that than you’re having. You’ve written before of the sort of disorganized Chinese approach to many practices and institutions which would be much improved if they’d been organized from the start; I wonder if they’ll fare better, later on, once you’ve straightened it all out for them.
Whereabouts in China are you these days?
Froog says
The new job is with an international school, but one based in Hong Kong; so, the majority of the students are Hong Kong Chinese. These days, most middle class Hong Kongers speak excellent English (it wasn’t always so; I think there’s been a tremendous improvement in the last 20 years or so), and it is often a joint first language in the home, alongside Cantonese.
Hence, the dragon we have to slay with our reading & writing initiative is not years of bad teaching and ingrained habits of Chinglish, as it is in the mainland, but the disruption brought by the sudden proliferation of portable devices. I am inclined to banish all digital devices from the classroom, but that might be hard to swing past some of my younger colleagues who are terribly gung-ho about the opportunities for digital delivery of teaching materials. (Our school’s leading IT evangelist recommended the other day that we arrange desks facing outwards, towards the walls, so that we could stand behind our pupils and thus ensure that they were looking at what they were supposed to be looking at on their laptop/tablet screens. Where do I begin??)
I’ve been mostly in Hong Kong for the past couple of months, attending various meetings with staff at the parent school. Currently, I’m in Shanghai, having a hedonistic farewell to China – here for four days of debauch before flying back to the UK for the summer. The new job will be starting late summer in Hangzhou, a city just west of Shanghai.
It is exciting to be setting up a brand new school. Things are inevitably going to be a bit exploratory and disorganised in the first year, but we are sort of hoping that might actually become one the big pluses of the project, part of its characteristic ethos – it’s a year removed from the pressures of the main school and the claustrophobic environment of Hong Kong, a year where we can be a bit more flexible and spontaneous, just try stuff out. It might well be a disaster – but a magnificent disaster, I hope.