"What I am now is waves and particles, I don't need to walk around, I just go."
".....still I am of the world, still I have something to say, how could it be otherwise, nothing comes to an end, the action never stops, it only changes...."
"I always feel good in museums. I like the high ceilings and the acoustics, the footsteps and voices, the silence over and under the footsteps and voices and the individual silences of each thing, all of them different, all of them holding a long departed Now."
"At the corner of Parsons Green Lane I nodded to the two telephone boxes that stood like a pair of lanterns and paused to acknowledge the trees which were still embracing the night. I admire those trees; fashions come and go but the trees still maintain their original identity, their unfashionable mystery. They hold last night's darkness like lovers reluctant to let go....Sometimes I am astonished that there should be buildings built and institutions maintained to string out the brevity of human life over successive generations; trees don't do that, they just hold on to the darkness and accept the light night after night and day after day without pretensions to permanence."
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| Photo borrowed from this blog |
Everyone lives a life that is seen and a life that is unseen. Our dreams are part of our unseen life. We often forget our own dreams and we have no idea whatever of the dreams of others: last night the person next to you in the underground may have ridden naked on a lion or travelled under the sea to the lost city of Atlantis.
Then came the River Bend Nightmare, all of them wearing silvery, spangled costumes. They played a song called River Bottom Rock, and while they played, the coloured lights were making designs and patterns that jumped and shook like lightning on the walls and ceiling. The music roared and crashed and rattled windows all over town while Mary Jane Chipmunk moaned and hollered and screamed into the microphone.
"I am growing hard," he said, "And bitter. What a waste of me."
"We're toy mice," said the child. "Is it Miss or Mr. Mudd? Please excuse my asking, but I can't tell by looking at you."
"Miss," said the little creature. She was something like a misshapen grasshopper, and was as drab and muddy as her name. "I'll be your friend if you'll be mine," she said. "Will you, do you think? I'm so unsure of everything."
"We'll be your friends," said the child. "We're unsure too, especially about the little dogs."
"I know," said Miss Mudd. "It's all so difficult. And of course everyone bigger than I tries to eat me, and I'm always busy eating everyone smaller. So there isn't much time to think things out." As she spoke, she flung what looked like an arm out from her face, caught a water flea, and ate it up. "It's so distasteful," she said. "I know it's distasteful. I've got this nasty sort of a huge lip with a joint in it like an elbow, and I catch my food with it. And the odd thing, you see, is that I don't think that's how I really am. I just can't believe that I'm this muddy thing crawling about in the muck. I don't feel as if I am. I simply can't tell you how I feel inside! Clean and bright and beautiful--like a song in the sunlight, like a sigh in the summer air."
"I'm not wound anymore," he said.
"Well," said Frog, "I don't suppose anyone ever is completely self-winding. That's what friends are for."
Consider fiction phenomenologically. The word itself is derived from the past participle of the Latin fingere, to shape, fashion, form or mould. We take it for granted that there will always be fiction of one kind or another in the form of stories: forming; shaping. Why do we take that for granted? Why do we make fiction? Why do we say, ‘What if?’
We make fiction because we are fiction. Because there was a time when ‘it lived’ us into being. Because there was a time when something said, ‘What if there are people? A word, perhaps, whispered in the undulant amorphous ear of the primordial soup: ‘What if there are people, hey? What if?’
It lived us into being and it lives us still. We make stories because we are story. The fabric of our myths and folk-tales is in us from before birth. The action systems of the universe are the origin of life and stories. The patterns of blue-green algae and the numinous wings of the Great Nebula in Orion and the runic scrawl of human chromosomes are stories. Begotten by no one knows what, stories beget people to live them. We are the offspring of innumerable ideas.
The myths that are in us, whether they be of Demeter/Persephone’s winter descent or Orpheus losing Eurydice, are the dynamics of thing-in-itself acting itself out in the collective being and consciousness of which each one of us is a particle.
Huck Finn, standing alone against the authority of the failed-child establishment and refusing to sell his dark brother down the river, is about as unfailed a child as you can find: a child eminently practical and resourceful, cunning enough to survive the grey city of the world, a child in touch with the mystery of being and always in a state of innocently becoming. An American Dream with him in it has a good chance of not being a nightmare.
Certainly we are the slaves of that which looks out through our eyes, and it is nothing simple, that outlooker; does it want to live, does it want to die? As with my arms red up to the elbows I sew up the wounded I crave to be where the shouting is, the cries and groans, the clash of weapons. I am afraid to be there but what looks out through my eyes wants to put me there, it doesn't want to be left out of anything, it wants to be everywhere at once, it wants to be included in all matters of life and death, wants to be at the same time here in the shuddering light of the torches and there across the river in the obscurity of battle and the night.
"You know how it is when you’re sitting in a bar somewhere dark and quiet just breathing in and out and maintaining neutral buoyancy and a stranger starts talking to you and after a while he brings out of his pocket a letter coming apart at the creases; he brings out this letter to show you that at one time he mattered more than he does now and he tells you the story of his life. At first you wish he’d go away but perhaps you say to yourself, Maybe one day I’ll want somebody to listen to my story. Never mind. My name is Fremder Gorn. Fremder means stranger in German."
Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillness blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of mystery in which we are never allowed to rest.
There is a point where pattern becomes motion; the pattern has found me and I must move, must be aware of moving, must be a motion, an action of the Word. Poor bare tuned fork.
To me it seems that everything that happens is language, everything that goes on is saying something.
We are the children of the mystery that inhabits us and I believe that it wants us to meet it with innocence of becoming; not to meet it is to be a failed child.
The black howled in the tunnels, the tracks fled before the train. Whatever lived walking upside-down in the concrete put its paws against the feet of the people standing on the platform, its cold soft paws. One two, three, four, walking softly in the chill silence upside-down with great soft cold paws. Underground said words to itself, names. No one listened. Footsteps covered the words, the names.
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 1. 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.
What ben makes tracks for what wil be. Words in the air pirnt foot steps on the groun for us to put our feet in to.
I exist, said the mirror.
What about me? said Kleinzeit.
Not my problem, said the mirror.
Trubba not
I exist, said the mirror.
What about me? said Kleinzeit.
Not my problem, said the mirror.
Webmaster's note: Many thanks to Quillory who posted this report on Flickr. If Quillory would like to get in touch to add any further details about him/herself please email sa4qemail [at] gmail [dot] com
Tom liked to fool around. He fooled around with sticks and stones and crumpled paper, with mewses and passages and dustbins, with bent nails and broken glass and holes in fences.
He fooled around with mud, and stomped and squelched and slithered through it.
He fooled around on high things that shook and wobbled and teetered.
He fooled around with dropping things from bridges into rivers and fishing them out.
He fooled around with barrels in alleys.
When Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong asked him what he was doing, Tom said he was fooling around.
‘It looks very much like playing to me,’ said Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong. ‘Too much playing is not good, and you play too much. You had better stop it and do something useful.’
‘All right,’ Tom said.
But he did not stop. He did a little fooling around with two or three cigar bands and a paper clip.
The squidgerino squelcher was put together by the wizard Bembel Rudzuk. Bembel Rudzuk made up three jars of monster powder, then he added twelve buckets of water and Splosh! There was the squidgerino squelcher. It slobbered and it moaned, it left a loathsome track behind.
Everyone was terrified, everyone ran off and left the princess all unguarded.
The squidgerino squelcher chased her up a tower then it crept around to the bottom of the tower slobbering and moaning.
The princess looked at the mess the squidgerino squelcher was making and she became rather cross. ‘Where’d this monster come from?’ she said. ‘And who’s going to clean up after it?’
The electric light changed a lot of things. It was an Irish writer, maybe Padraic Colum but I'm not sure, who said that traditional story-telling had to do with the circle of the firelight and the night all round. When electricity banished the night something was lost.
It was between six and seven in the morning. The moon was low in the sky. It was a waxing moon, a gibbous one; it was a particular moon. I raised the window-blind. The pinky-orange hibiscus street lamp outside the window was the same as always. I opened the front door and went out into the foredawn, into the hissing of the silence and the humming of the underground trains standing empty with lighted windows on the far side of the common. Unseen birds twittered but there was no crow to shout and flaunt its blackness.
I heard my footsteps; I saw under the lamps my shadows first before me, then behind. 'Nothing to declare,' I said.
I crossed the common and headed down to the New King's Road. The Belisha beacons clicked as they blinked in the coldness of the morning. Cars at intervals hissed past me, in each one a face as questionable as the faces on the tin windows of toy cars from Japan. The shops stood like sleeping horses.
The lamps on Putney Bridge were still lit, the bridge stood in simple astonishment over the water, a stonelike creature of overness, of parapets and ghostly pale cool tones of blue, of grey, of dim whiteness in the foredawn with its lamps lit against a sky growing light. Far below lay the river; slack-water it was, turn of the tide, the low-tide river narrow between expanses of mud, the moored boats rocking on the stillness.
A sort of singing filled my head; it seemed an aspect of the particles of light and colour that made in my eyes the picture of this time just before dawn. I thought of the dew on the grass where the olive tree stood. There seemed to be a question on the air.
'Yes,' I said, 'I will.' I spoke aloud because I wanted my answer to be recorded on the early air.
Sometimes between two people it's as if one is a lock and the other is a key and they take turns being lock and key; but at other times it's as if both are keys or locks and nothing can be done.
More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other.
There's no end to me, no limit, no way to define or measure me, no way of knowing what I am or how much of me there is. There is an endless surging and undulating of me, and endless cycle of ebb and flow: that is called the sea. Little moments of me have lines drawn before and after and these moments are given names like Orpheus and Eurydice and they become stories. But I am wordless, heaving in the ocean night of me, stirring in the dark trees, breathing in and breathing out my soul.It's just such a poetic stream of words. What a beautiful way of seeing oneself, and one's place in the world.
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
If the human mind is still evolving, as I believe it is, if our mind/soul capability is still developing, then the pattern of our mental intake and sorting and storing is not static but changing. It may well be that we shall learn to let go rather than hold on, that we shall become capable of being with the world rather than attempting to consume it.
On 1 March 2012 Walker Books published Russell Hoban's final young-adult book Soonchild, with amazing illustrations by Alexis Deacon. Read a lovely review in the Guardian, see some exclusive spreads from inside the book and get more details and a text extract at the Head of Orpheus website. Walker tweeted photos of Russ and Alexis at their offices in January 2011.
Also, on 4 October 2012 Walker published a beautiful new children's book. Rosie's Magic Horse is illustrated by the legendary Quentin Blake (with whom Russ had formerly collaborated on Trouble on Thunder Mountain, among other titles) and tells the story of a little girl and her collection of ice-lolly sticks, which dream of being a horse.
On 4 February 2012 the Slickman A4 Quotation Event celebrated 10 years of sharing Russell Hoban quotes, with many fans across the world posting their favourites in public places both real and virtual. This site was updated daily between 4 February and 10 March 2012 with these quotes. See all 2012 quotes
Russell Hoban's last novel Angelica Lost and Found was published in November 2010 and is available from Amazon and all good bookshops. There were good reviews of the book in the Guardian and Independent and an excellent interview with Russell Hoban in the Scotsman, as well as a revealing audio interview at Tim Haigh Reads Books.
The London restaurant Gaby's Deli, which is mentioned in Russell Hoban's books The Bat Tattoo and Linger Awhile, is under threat. The landlords want to close it and, reportedly, replace it with a chain restaurant. Give their Facebook page a like or sign their petition.
In 2005 the first international convention for Russell Hoban fans took place in London, and was marked by the publication of a fantastic 48-page booklet featuring exclusive contributions from innumerable fans and associates including novelist David Mitchell and actress Glenda Jackson. A wonderful memento of the event, it's also a beautiful collector's item and must-have for any Hoban fan. Although in limited supply, copies of the booklet are still available at £6.00 each plus p&p. Order direct from the Russell Hoban Some-Poasyum website.
Russell Hoban turned 86 on 4 February 2011 and fans celebrated in traditional style by leaving quotes from his books in public places. Browse their quotes here. The Russell Hoban community group The Kraken sent Russ a birthday gift of The Kraken Rum. Read a report about this at the Fantastic Reads blog.
To celebrate 30 years in print of Russell Hoban's most famous novel Riddley Walker, SA4QE broke with its February tradition and conducted an extraordinary SA4QE on 5 November 2010 in which participants shared their favourite quotes from the book. This site was updated throughout November 2010 with the quotes submitted.
Richard Cooper's 2003 Hoban Adventure: 1 day. 29 London locations. 33 Hoban quotes. 2 sore feet.
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