"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin.... "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn." -- T. H. White, The Once and Future King

Need a little bitter comic relief?

Howbout No Fear Shakespeare's online "translation" of Twelfth Night?

Yes, it's all so much clearer now, when lines like:
What country, friends, is this?
become
What country is this, friends?

or
For saying so, there's gold.
so clearly explicated as
Thank you for saying that—here's some money to express my gratitude.

Though my very favorite has to be:
CAPTAIN
It is perchance that you yourself were saved.
VIOLA
O, my poor brother! And so perchance may he be.
now
CAPTAIN
It was a total fluke that you yourself were saved.
VIOLA
Oh, my poor brother! But maybe by some fluke he was saved too.

One can only hope.

Since I couldn't get the insert to play on my response to rosenhaus' comment in my last post, I'll print it up here:

On the Media
Find Out What It Means To Me
January 16, 2009
President Bush bid his final farewell to the White House press corps on Tuesday. “Through it all,” he told reporters gathered in the briefing room, “I have respected you.” Really? Let’s look at the record.

"Confucius said:

The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago: the second best time is now."

-- Kelley Eskridge, in her A Leader's Manifesto to her initiative Humans at Work


"Have you ever noticed how a temporary setback and utter failure appear identical at the time?"

-- Frederick, my Feldenkrais instructor. (Here is a video of my actual class! Though I'm not sure I was there that day.)

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

We did our final show today. Our final two shows, really - 11 & 1. The 1pm show was so sold out that not only were kids sitting on laps, they were sitting in the aisle, where Solomon, Sheba & I, who all made entrances down it, did our best not to step on them.

I knew it was going to be hard to say good-bye to the cast, the crew, and the whole experience. And it was. As soon as the audience had gone, we actually broke down the entire set, taking down lights & curtains & the big painted backdrop; putting away costumes & props, . . . and I stayed to the bitter end, when nothing was left, and the people who'd been patiently waiting - lighting & set plots in hand - to start setting up the next show ("The Princess of Riverside Drive" - I kid you not!) were told, "We're done. It's all yours!"

In a way, I needed to be there to hear that.

I really hadn't wanted to take my silly big grey cloak off, either. And when I did, I insisted that Delia stand by to receive it, while I recited what I could remember of Prospero's speech from Tempest (above) - not much, unfortunately; I wish I'd written it down beforehand! but of course, I hadn't even thought of it til then - and although she said, "You're a nut," she patiently listened, and folded the cloak, and took it away I know not where.

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own....


And so, farewell. A new year dawns for us all.

Art is central to all our lives, not just the better-off and educated. . . I know that from my own story, and from the evidence of every child ever born — they all want to hear and to tell stories, to sing, to make music, to act out little dramas, to paint pictures, to make sculptures.

This is born in and we breed it out.

And then, when we have bred it out, we say that art is elitist, and at the same time we either fetishize art — the high prices, the jargon, the inaccessibility — or we ignore it.

The truth is, artist or not, we are all born on the creative continuum, and that is a heritage and a birthright of all of our lives.

-- Jeanette Winterson (author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit), from an essay quoted in NYTimes Sunday Book Review, 12/19/08 (line spacing mine)

In what was probably a case of youthful show-offiness, 19c poet Robert Browning wrote a nearly impenetrable poem called Sordello, which made even Tennyson feel stupid when he read it. Some years later, the story goes, someone asked him to explain a particularly obscure passage - and Browning replied:

'When it was written, God and Robert Browning knew what it meant; now only God knows.'*

I have been driven lately to quote that line more than once, as my French & Finnish translators ask me whether that capital letter in Swordspoint or strange locution in Thomas the Rhymer was intentional, or just an uncaught typo.

Hey. I wrote those books a long time ago.

*If you're sure you've heard it before, it was used in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a delicious 1931 play by Rudolph Besier which was made into a movie in 1934 (and deliciously spoofed by Emma Thompson & Stephen Fry.

"I may be a helpless amoeba floating helplessly on a sea of helplessness . . . but at least I look nice." -- deliasherman, who was having a terrible horrible day, but in a very snappy outfit

Thurs. night
Well, now I know why I thought it was pronounced a-FRAH-di-tee when I was a kid - (  I had this poem in a book: )

I looked this one up because we are to Santorini tomorrow morning, and fragments have been running through my head. We have seen many fine sights - Dubrovnik, Corfu, today Olympia - which I believe deliasherman has told you about. I am a pretty aggressive traveler on land. But at sea, I love just watching the color of the water as it moves out from our hull - a fizzy green - before deepening to the wine-dark sea beyond, at sunset. I read so much Greek mythology & stories like Mary Renault's as a kid, and haven't thought much of much of it in years - seeing these waters and these hills is like revisiting an old corner of my brain; but now I see!

Everyone walks their dogs on Riverside Drive, as it is across from the park. Today on our way to the gym we saw a woman walking a dachsund with markings I'd never seen before. "Look!" I said (softly); "a wiener dog with spots!" Delia loftily informed me that it was a brindled wiener dog.

I dare you to say that out loud. If you're having a bad day - or even if you're not - I can pretty much guarantee that saying "a brindled wiener dog" will make you laugh. If that doesn't work, let me know.

spelling corrected as requested

"Strike a light or light a lantern! Something I have hold of has no head."


Can you identify this quote?

Emily Dickinson wrote her letter to the world/that never wrote to me....

The impulse is there for us, to write up what we have learned about life for others to read after us. I recently recommended to a friend Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (full text here), which I learned about from my beloved Shakespeare teacher, Edward Tayler - he quoted from it often as the crystallization of late Renaissance thinking- Browne was mid 1600s, a good 50 years after Shaks., but his heart was there. It contains such gems as:( Read more... )

My father tells me that writing a "moral testament" is an ancient Jewish (and Muslim) tradition, and sent me to Google for a rich set of examples past and present.

I love this one( Read more... )
So if you've felt the impulse, start now.

You may want to do some revision over the years.

Or, like Sir Thomas at 30, you may want to take a snapshot of all that you have learned and come to believe - and open it again in 30 years, and marvel.

The numbers don't lie. And it's still a gorgeous poem. The ensuing discussion ranged from poetry to Artemisia F-L to how to read The Fall of the Kings, and even inspired the We Appreciate Marcus group on FaceBook . . . .It is good to revisit old conversations; these entries make wonderful markers to refer back to and realize how much has passed (or how little has changed) - like the next day's discussion with meritahut of putting "The Privilege of the Freaking Sword" on a T-shirt -- which at the time was just a joke, is now in a position to be realized (the putting, not the discussion)!

And in something I will now call "Spam Tarot," the whole reason I went back to that old post was to delete a spammie comment (offering unparalleled financial security) that came in to that page this morning. Wow.

All this looking back also causes me to note that my old posts and comments seem to be so much more lucid and lovely than anything I'm posting now! Oh, well....

The Story (from my 1/26 post) progresseth; it's turning up longer than I thought it would be. To clue you further in to my Process, here are some of the thoughts that ran relentless through my mind that first night, in between bursts of colorable sentences:

where am I going to sell this? nobody's writing stuff like this.
what if it's too old-fashioned? what if it 's not old-fashioned enough?
is this stupid? does this make any sense? (repeat ad nauseam or until all creative activity comes to a standstill)

Since these are pretty much the same thoughts I had when I was writing Swordspoint 20+ years ago - and pretty much everything else I've published in between - I quashed them as boldly as I could -- trying to bear in mind what my glorious friend Isabel told me last week (at my beloved Tea & Sympathy, where we'd gone to thrash out the meaning of life) when I expressed similar sentiments :

Listen to the voices.

Tell the story.

Good advice. And so I try.

"One's 40s are the old age of youth; 50s are the youth of old age."

Too damned true.