Lisa Greenstein 2012

Along with the dream life there is the life of ideas and half-ideas, of glimmerings and flashes and indescribable atmospheres of the mind. What we actually do in what is called the real world depends largely on how we live this unseen life in our inner world of words and images, songs and bits of poems, names and numbers and memories and dreams remembered and unremembered. Whether the song in our heads is Michael Jackson or Franz Schubert it is fitting itself to and reinforcing something in us that comes forward to meet it. That’s how art affects life; we use it to be more what we are and to become what is in us wanting us to become it.

- from The Moment under the Moment

He was almost on the point of crying, but he began to laugh.

    “And that’s funny to you?” said the father.

    “You don’t know what I’m laughing at,” said Boaz-Jachin. “Nothing is smooth and easy for me, and my life isn’t one girl after another — it seems to be one father after another. And how would it help you if I had a wrinkled face and clouded eyes and short hair? Would your daughter then become a nun?”

    The father’s face relaxed behind the beard and the glasses. “It’s hard to let go,” he said.

    “And it’s hard to hold on,” said Boaz-Jachin.

    “To what?” said the father.

    “The wheel,” said Boaz-Jachin.

    “Ah,” said the father. “I know that wheel.”

- from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

Posted to Lisa's blog, Facebook and Twitter

Lara Hoffenberg 2007

Just to add my little bit to Lisa Greenstein's tale of our 2007 4qation .... I never thought I'd 4qate a gym! Never thought I'd be the kind of person who went to a gym, in fact. So the issue of what's-possible, what's-in-you-but-not-of-you, fascinates me at the moment. I left my yellow paper in a locker, between the mats stacked by the huge exercise balls, and hidden in the health-food menus. This was my choice for 2007:

'Think of it," his father used to say - "in a thousandfold dilution, the memory of a single drop of medicine persists and works its cure. Only the memory! In a single cell of a human being is the memory of the whole design. In each of us is the memory, however inaccessible, of the beginning of the universe. We are the memory of the dust of stars." He would press his forehead against Max's. "In you," he said, "there must be memories inherited from me. I know I have these from my father - black trees, the smell of snow, the sound of cossacks. Ravens."

from Her Name Was Lola

Happy birthday Russ!

Lara

Lisa Greenstein 2007

So February swung round this year with a bit of a seedy thing going. I'd reached the end of my Year of Internet Dating, which had yielded more stories that can be related here, but then found myself reading Angelica's Grotto and felt like I'd been thrown in the deep end. So to speak. And in the background, for the past few months, Lara [Hoffenberg] and I have become regular gym-goers, and keep finding ourselves getting all sweaty on these squeaky machines while discussing not-so-squeaky things. So getting some yellow-paper action in among the locker rooms and weight machines seemed somehow.... inevitable really.

So first I hunted for some lockers that were, er, locked - it being late at night, there weren't that many. But #69 was forthcoming, along with #130 and a few others. Not #14, but you can't always get what you want, apparently. Then slipped some in between the 10 and 15kg weights on the thigh abductor machines. And that other machine where you open and close your arms like a book and it does amazing cleavage things.

Unfortunately we forgot the camera, so I don't have actual on-site visual evidence this time round, but perhaps that's in keeping with the subterraneanness of it all too.

The quotations follow below...

"Do you think men will ever feel equal to women?"
"Obviously they can't feel equal until they are equal, and whether or not that'll ever happen I can't say. But before any change can happen there has to be recognition of the present situation, and that's the object of this study."
"I'm afraid I'm too old to change, Melissa."
"Nobody's asking you to. I'm not exactly a role model either and I'm too perverse to change, so I guess the two of us will have to carry on being less than perfect."

from Angelica's Grotto

The sky grew dark as they went down Piccadilly towards Green Park Station, Klein whispering, "A winged horse can't do my flying for me, I have to do it on my own. We are something to each other. You don't always know what's happening when it's happening. `This can't be love because I feel so well…' " Suddenly there was rain beating down, urgent and shining and steaming on street and pavement. "You go on ahead, he said, "I can't run."
"A little rain won't hurt me," she said, and pressed his arm closer to her. Drenched and smiling, he felt almost middle-aged again.

from Angelica's Grotto

"I'm not in love with her," Klein whispered into his hand. "That would be too pathetic."
"What are you whispering?"
"I'm not in love with you, Melissa."
"That's perfectly all right, Harold, but if you want to be in love with me, that's all right too. An experience can be life-enriching even when it's emotionally frustrating."
She said this tenderly, with her hand on his arm and her blue eyes full on him. Klein kissed her and she kissed him back.
"This is my life now," he whispered into his hand. "The past doesn't go away, but the present steps in front of it."

from Angelica's Grotto

Love Lisa

Lisa Greenstein 2006

My first choice got tucked between the red velvet cushions at a bar called Joburg, where the barman said he'd run out of juice but could put together something tall and cool (and he did):

Whoosh! High in the sky goes Rocket Max. Showers of stars explode over the Coliseum, it's like a movie. The stick falls back to earth in St Martin's Lane. "This is it," he says to his mind. "This is the real thing. This is my destiny woman." All through the shop heads turn. "Did I say that out loud?" he says.

"Audibly," says Lola. Blushing.

"What do I do now?" says Max.

from Her Name was Lola

I left another copy on the chair of the next table in a burger bar called Royale Kitchen. The waitress (picture Amaryllis with an Afro and an apron) found it, and read it as she rolled cigarettes in the back of the restaurant. 'It's a quotation,' she told me as I walked past to the toilets.

Where I left the other:

Darkness roared with the lion, the night stalked with the silence of him.

The lion was. Ignorant of non-existence he existed. Ignorant of self he was a sunlit violence with calm joy at the centre of it, he was the violence of being-as-hunter constantly renewed in the devouring of non-being. The wheel had been when he ran tawny on the plain, printing his motion on the grateful air. He had died biting the wheel that went on and left him dead. The wheel continued, the lion continued. He was intact, diminished by nothing, increased by nothing, absolute. He ate meat or he did not eat meat, was seen or unseen, known when there was knowledge of him, unknown when there was not. But always he was. For him there were no maps, no places, no time. Beneath his tread the round earth rolled, the wheel turned, bearing him back to death and life again.

Through his lion-being drifted stars and blackness, morning sang, night soothed, dawn burst its daylight from the womb of vital terror. Oceans heaved, frail bridges spanned the winding track of days, the rising air sang lion-flight in wings of birds. In clocks ticked lion-time. It pulsed in heartbeats, footsteps walking all unknowing, souls of guilt and sorrow, souls of love and pain. He had been called, he had come. He was.

from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

Happy birthday Russ!

Love Lisa

Lisa Greenstein 2005

Hello all!

Well, it seems you can SA4Qate in pairs, as my friend Lara and I proved this evening. We both had busy weeks, so agreed to find our quotes of choice then join forces this evening for some yellow paper.

I decided to use quotations from Amaryllis Night and Day because it's the first Hoban book I read, and it was a birthday present, and this is my first SA4QE expedition and a birthday present too! Also, I have always been a weird and vivid dreamer, and I used to stand on the waking side of my dreams and peer in, pointing, like I was looking at animals in a zoo. Amaryllis showed me that the gate between the animals and me was never really closed, let alone locked, and the distinction between the animals and me was never fixed either. Suddenly we were all kicking around wandering into each other's territories with a lot less growling. The other wondrous thing about this book, for me, was the way that freedom to dream, freedom to love, and creative freedom all become part of the same dreamy this-is-it state.

Lara chose two quotes from Pilgermann; we printed these out (2 copies of each) and together we headed off to the large mainstream bookseller where we have both been repeatedly underwhelmed by the large stock of Tami Hoag and Nick Hornby muscling out the Hoban collection. We slipped our yellow paper into the title pages of appropriate - or suitably inappropriate - titles, which I've listed under each. Here they are:

I went to see if she was still asleep. She wasn't in my bed. She wasn't in the studio or on the balcony. She wasn't in the bathroom or the kitchen. She was nowhere in the house. The night was gone, the day was here; the tube trains were running and the trees on the common were swaying in the cool of a morning that was going to turn hot very soon. Some birds were twittering in a half-hearted way, as if they were working to rule. At that time of day I always have the feeling that if you gave reality a good kick, the scenery would shake.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

One of these went into a boxed set of books about Salvador Dali. The other went into a travel guide about London.

'Names are pretty useless, really. If you say the name of anything ten or twenty times it scatters and falls away and the thing that's named stands there all naked and unknowable. Sometimes it comes back to me that nothing can be known, nothing at all. Black is the colour, silence is the music, Spanish is the way to walk.' She liked to be baffling, or at least gnostic, wherever possible. Whether she actually walked Spanish I couldn't say, but her walk was well worth seeing from the rear.

from Amaryllis Night and Day

We looked long and hard for a book of baby names but they were out of stock and there was nothing on Tom Waits either, AND there was no stock of TeachYourself Spanish either. So we settled on something else, but in my head its in a book about Tom Waits and I can't move it now.

'I'll go to my bed now and you lie down here. Look at the Mobius strip while you go around it with the slider. You're going to be pulling me into your dream so you should have me in your mind's eye while you're sliding the Mobius. Easy does it, just float with it, OK?'

'OK.'

'You're going to do it, I can feel it in you.' She kissed me with what was unmistakably a destiny kiss. 'See you in your dream,' she whispered. 'What if one of us is still awake while the other one's asleep?'

'If we're tuned in right that won't happen. Trust me, I'm a weirdo.'

from Amaryllis Night and Day

One copy went into a book titled Snoring - Effective Relief. The other into the sole copy of Her Name Was Lola (actually there were two when we arrived, but we bought one so there was only one left after that).

And yet, so are we made and such is the action of the everything in this one moment that is every moment, that another thought flickers over and under my first thought: what style God has! What a truly godlike extravagance, to burst out all at once with a universe in which everything is going at once and humankind is let run with nothing to stop it from doing anything at all. And to make this running-loose creature with a mind that knows what it is doing and a soul in which Hell burns always and Heaven is grasped so rarely and so briefly that it lives in us as a continual yearning for what can never be held onto, for what must always always be lost: what invention!

from Pilgermann

One of these went into a book about god on the religion shelves; the other into Primo Levi's If this is a man.

'Forgive me,' he said. 'Please, please forgive me. I would do it again if I had the chance.'

from Pilgermann

One of these went into a book of erotica whose title I can't remember because there were so many pictures competing for attention. The other was supposed to go to our waiter, but after three pina coladas and dinner, I think we were all SA4Q-ated out by then.

Happy birthday Russell Hoban!

Love from

Lisa Greenstein & Lara Hoffenberg

Lara Hoffenberg 2003

This was my first SA4QE - I joined the Kraken too late last year to take part in the first event. I've been re-reading The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz a lot during the last year, finding new things in it all the time, and especially enjoying the tension between fateful inevitability / biting the wheel, and freedom / letting go. I re-read it after finishing The Bat Tattoo because so much of Lion was wound up, for me, in the crash test dummies. Anyway, I knew I wanted to use Lion quotes.

It was easy to find a place to leave them. Just above the university where I work, on the slopes of a mountain called Devil's Peak which has a commanding view of the Cape peninsula [you can even see both the Indian and the Atlantic oceans at once] is a monument incorporating 8 huge stoic lions. They keep a watchful eye on everyone below; the irony here is that there used to be lions on these 'plains' but now they too are gone. So I left a sheaf of yellow paper between the giant paws of one lion and on the back of another - weighted down so as not to blow away. I came back to the site four hours later and they'd all been taken.

The first two quotes from Lion hint at all the wonderful mysteries of the novel.


~ ~ ~ ~

from THE LION OF BOAZ-JACHIN AND JACHIN-BOAZ

The last lion alive was the one whom the others would have made their king if they had been allowed to. He was large, strong, and fierce, and with two arrows deep in his spine he was still alive. The arrows burned like fire in him, his sight was fading, the blood was roaring in his ears with the rumble of the chariot wheels. Before him and above him, racing away, the glittering king was calm in his chariot, is spear poised, his spearmen beside him. The dying lion-king leaped, clung to the tall and turning wheel that brought him up to the spears. Growling and frowning he bit the wheel that lifted him and bore him on to darkness.

The lion was gone. Where the lion had been was a sudden empty giddy blackness, like the sensation produced by straightening up too quickly after bending down for a long time.

~ ~ ~ ~

Darkness roared with the lion, the night stalked with the silence of him. The lion was. Ignorant of non-existence he existed. Ignorant of self he was a sunlit violence with calm joy at the centre of it, he was the violence of being-as-hunter constantly renewed in the devouring of non-being.

For him, there were no maps, no places, no time. Beneath his tread the round earth rolled, the wheel turned, bearing him to death and life again. Through his lion-being drifted stars and blackness, morning sang, night soothed, dawn burst its daylight from the womb of vital terror. Oceans heaved, frail bridges spanned the winding track of days, the rising air sang lion-flight in wings of birds. In clocks ticked lion-time. It pulsed in heartbeats, footsteps walking all unknowing, souls of guilt and sorrow, souls of love and pain. He had been called, he had come. He was.

~ ~ ~ ~

I chose the last two quotes because they reminded me that whoever we think we are, we're all something different to somebody else - and they made me smile:

from PILGERMANN

"Am I a mirror in which you see yourself?" I said.

"Everybody is," he said. "I am so infinitely varied that I never tire of myself. Mortals looking in a mirror see only me but I see all the faces that ever were and I love myself in all of them."

"You think well of yourself!" I said.

~ ~ ~ ~

from THE MARZIPAN PIG

"Friends unknown to me have heard of my disappearance and are coming to the rescue, " said the pig. "No doubt there'll be a big celebration when they find me. Crackers and party hats and probably a cake with pink icing. Perhaps I'll be stood on top of the cake and asked to make a speech."

He began to think of the speech he would make. "Dear Friends," he said, "having spent long months in solitude behind the sofa, I speak to you tonight of..."

"Sweetness," said a voice behind him.

"Who's that?" said the pig. It was a mouse. She was nibbling at him. "You're sweet," she said.

"There was a time when I was sweet," said the pig, "but I have known such..."

"Sweetness, sweetness, sweetness," murmured the mouse, and she ate him up entirely.

~ ~ ~ ~

Happy birthday Russ! And thanks for the chance to send these words out into my part of the world.

Lara