‘Everyone in the world is looking for something,’ said Jachin-Boaz to Boaz-Jachin, ‘and by means of maps each thing that is found is never lost again’....
‘If everything that is found is never lost again, there will be an end to finding some day,’ said Boaz-Jachin. ‘Some day there will be nothing left to find.’
Although most years I have managed to get out and slip a few pieces of yellow paper into the world sometime within a week or so of the fourth, I have rarely managed to get these exploits written up and posted, with or without photos.
One year not so many half-decades ago, I actually organized a little dinner gathering at a restaurant, and placed a folded yellow paper by everyone's place setting. I took pictures of all this. At the moment I have no idea where they might be -- no doubt flotsaming around somewhere in my exobrain. But I certainly never got around to writing the cheery and amusing account of it all that I'd envisioned.
This year, in hopes of keeping both the 4Qation and its documentation more streamlined and therefore more like to make it to the Internets eventually, I limited myself to a single quotation, forbade myself to even think about photography, and for the first time ever hand-wrote the thing on a sheet of yellow paper like Ms. Slickman originally intended instead of typesetting some elaborate handout with multiple quotes like I'd done in the past.
I decided to pick a quotation from a book I'd never 4Qated from before, and something from a relatively recent book (rather than a classic quote from the First Six Novels, which I have mined so heavily over the years).
So I chose this early passage from The Bat Tattoo, which is hands-down my favorite Hoban book of the 00s -- the one I think most deserved a US release and yet inexplicably didn't get one.
Here is what my yellow paper said.
***
February 4, 2009
"Looking for a particular thing in a museum is like looking for a word in the dictionary -- you keep being led astray. Bodhisattvas, Buddhist banners, bronze and jade and robes with dragons. Little earthenware ladies out of tombs: their robes were glazed, their faces not, their mouths were closed. Horses, T'ang Dynasty -- their saddles were empty, waiting to take the dead to paradise. Just looking at those horses you could hear the clip-clop of their hooves in the silence.
"There was a little bronze tomb guardian, something between a dog and a nightmare, who looked as if he could lick his weight in demons or anything else that came his way. Although I wasn't dead I felt safer with him around. A place like that Chinese gallery is bound to be haunted by ghosts, demons, who knows what. For that matter, every place I know is haunted by ghosts, demons, and absent friends."
-- Russell Hoban, The Bat Tattoo (p. 3)
Compliments of The Kraken
In honor of Russell Hoban's 84th Birthday
sa4qe.blogspot.com
***
I wrote this out on a sheet of paper at the neighborhood pack-and-mail store, copied it onto roughly half-a-dozen sheets of yellow paper, and then slipped them inside copies of a few of Chicago's alternative weeklies at a couple of different coffehouses in Andersonville (my neighborhood in Chicago). I also slipped a couple between boxes of tea at the neighborhood supermarket.
Thus endeth the 2009 report, submitted only about two months late. Next year my goal will be to get it filed while the sun is still in Aquarius.
Dave
=============================
~~~ http://www.ocelopotamus.com
'I'll leave you to it,' he said, and his footsteps walked away.
When I came out the lobby was pretty empty. I got my things and went outside. The air was cold and seemed heavy with snow that was almost ready to fall. I walked across the forecourt, under the arch, over the road and hailed a taxi. Piccadilly was full of lights and traffic, with a lot of blackness around the lights. When we turned into Park Lane the cars rushing through it looked as if they were emptying London; soon there'd be no more people, only driverless cars hurrying into the night. The trees in Hyde Park were pale under the lamps, with cold black shadows. Bayswater Road stared at me as if I were a foreigner. When we got to my place in Notting Hill the street was deserted, the lamps were dim. I'd left lights on in my house but they looked like lights in an empty house. I could hear a helicopter quite close, then farther away, then close again. My cat Stevo came out to meet me and we went inside together. Before I closed the door I looked back at the street and it was like a photograph of something that was gone. I shook my head and locked the door. I didn't think I'd be phoning Elias Newman.
To be and not to be. That is the answer.
After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?
Fidelity is a matter of perception: nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart.
People write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don't think it's for the children at all. I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: `This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.' Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: `This is not a world, this is nothing, there's no way to live at all.'
Right, said Kleinzeit. Enough. He opened the door of the yellow paper's cage, and it sprang upon him. Over and over they rolled together, bloody and roaring. Doesn't matter what the title is to start with, he said, anything will do. HERO, I'll call it. Chapter I. He wrote the first line while the yellow paper clawed his guts, the pain was blinding. It'll kill me, said Kleinzeit, there's no surviving this. He wrote the second line, the third, completed the first paragraph. The roaring and the blood stopped, the yellow paper rubbed purring against his leg, the first paragraph danced and sang, leaped and played on the green grass in the dawn.
One wakes up every morning and puts on oneself. Everyone has experienced this: the self must be put on before any garment, and there is inevitably a pause as it were a caesura in the going forward of things before the self is put on. Why is this? It is because our mortal identity is not the primary one, not the profound, not the deep one. No, what wakes up from sleep is not Tiglath-Pileser or Peter Schlemiel or Pilgermann; it is simply raw undifferentiated being, brute being with nothing driving it but the forward motion imparted to it by the original explosion into the being of the universe. For a fraction of a moment it is itself only; then it must with joy or terror put on that identity taken on with mortal birth, that identity that each morning is the cumulative total of its mortal days and nights, that self old or young, sick or well, brave or cowardly, beautiful or ugly, whole or mutilated, that is one's lot.
London City
I have London, London, London-
all the city, small and pretty,
in a dome that's on my desk, a little dome.
I have Nelson on his column
and Saint Martin-in-the-Fields
and I have the National Gallery
and two trees,
and that's what London is - the five of these.
I can make it snow in London
when I shake the sky of London;
I can hold the little city small and pretty in my hand;
then the weather's fair in London,
in Trafalgar Square in London,
when I put my city down and let it stand.
| A yellow paper at the Academy of Fine Arts, Umeå, Sweden (photo below). The paper said; William dragged out the first crate, tipped it on the trolley and wheeled it away with an amount of noise that would have waked the dead. I followed with the rope. from Turtle Diary Happy Birthday Russ !
If you have any problems viewing the above video try watching it on YouTube |
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