A little from Stoppard

I first came across Tom Stoppard through On the Razzle, this play I had to study for an entry level module to English Literature. My lecturer was a odd guy though, and especially eccentric when it comes to comedy. So he starts by saying comedy is a tough thing to teach(this I quite agree), and then he goes on to highlight the different devices employed in comedies, i.e malapropism. Then perhaps being in awe of the ample instances of comedic devices, he starts describing the play as "stuffed", and that is the keyword for the rest of the lecture. I do remember him re-enacting some of the scenes in the play, but apart from that, nothing much remains (except the "stuffed" of course).

After that module, I did manage to read Invention of Love by Stoppard, which is quite different from the pure comedy in On the Razzle. It's quite a inter-textual play that ask quite a few interesting questions. Recently I manage to pick up a book on Tom Stoppard, and came across this section extracted from Coast of Utopia, one of his more serious plays:

His life was what it was. Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what only leaves for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and not built to last....It's only we humans who want to own the future too.....Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those that come after us.

Something written a year ago

For my dear friends, who once liked, that which is in this poem -

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Characters inscribed, finger after finger
Upon the screens our stares transfixed
So little the space, yet so much transpired
Across and through what is, communication?

It is communication,
But I never know, what, when, where or how
The prefigurations before you, typing now
Except that my act, some form of interruption

Interrupting something I can only presuppose
Reconstitute, reconstruct but not yet
Realise, what will happen next
As eyes lie in anticipation, how your senses react

Absurdity. As the surrealness threatens to absolve
The very conscious certainty of it all. Does it mean
Anything, the physicality of seeing, meeting,
Or is it the insistence of a mind
That seeks to comprehend its own existing

Thoughts too light, polarizing
I look up, and
The sky takes on a starker azure blue.

Samuel Johnson

When my friend first told me about Samuel Johnson's "A Dictionary of the English Language", I think what stayed iny head, is probably his most famous (seemingly anti-Scottish) definition:

Oats: A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people.

But there are times, where his definitions are ironic, by this i mean the play of irony is onto the author, the compiler of the dictionary, the lexicographer himself:

Dull: Not exhilaterating (sic); not delightful; as, to make dictionaries is dull work.

Lexicographer: A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.

His attitude towards his own work is somewhat similar to a researcher. (Do we really call ourselves researcher? Tough really, miserable students/lowly staff often identify themselves as being in research, but not being a researcher) I guess research work is interesting, sometimes engaging, but that is not to deny that it can be boring and tedious. Why stick at it? I really don't know. Maybe that's why people start to be conscious of this lingering absurdity in their research work - that all could amount to nothing.

I suppose Samuel Johnson can be considered a 17th century researcher, one of the pioneers in his field of supposedly, lexicographers. John Murray, who subsequently compiled the OED, (a remarkable feat considering the 400, 000 words in his first edition of OED, compared to Johnson's 40 000), was partly inspired by Johnson's words in his preface to the dictionary. It is quite long, but there is this part which resonates in my mind (when I have to write this bloody thesis a year ago):

When first I engaged in this work, I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature [....]

I resolved to show likewise my attention to things; to pierce deep into every science, to enquire the nature of every substance of which I inserted the name, to limit every idea by a definition strictly logical, and exhibit every production of art or nature in an accurate description [....]

To deliberate whenever I doubted, to enquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end, and, perhaps, without much improvement; for I did not find by my first experiments, that what I had not of my own was easily to be obtained: I saw that one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to persue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chace the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them.

Writing to be

Why do we write? Do we write our existence to save it from the effacement of time, or do we write, to give our thoughts and emotions, a substantial body? Much as we would like to claim the writing as a recording of history, it is also a form of re-writing over factual events itself. Writing is not necessarily cathartic, nor is it strictly narrative in nature. Sometimes what we realize in words does not bring any form of relief, nor does it essentially bears a story to tell. For all you know, it might be about nothing at all, if this statement in any sense, prove to be self-reflexive for my ponderings thus far.

If you would think this, as an emptying of Pandora’s Box, then I’m afraid this time it isn’t. I cannot place the act of writing within any single definition. If writing is an art, then it is having the space of a desk before you, the trickle of time ahead of you, to let your thoughts roam and express themselves in a language, real yet exploring the latitudes of imagination. If it is play, it is also exertion. For writing is to me at times, a tedious negotiation that seeks to resolve, the intense conflicts of the mind.

But writing is not about word play, which is something I have come to realize. Writing is beautiful, only when it lends shape to a seemingly beautiful thought, story, person. Writing for the sake of writing something beautiful, is at times superfluous, never as real. Like I’ve said, writing lies between resolving and imagining, and the final realization, a distilling of thoughts themselves.

Through writing, you come to embrace who you are, a person bearing the contradictions of the world. You come to face the lies that creep upon your very own consciousness. I think more than ever, writing has made itself to be, a returning to something that was first loved and often rebuked, that which lies between a reading and a writing. It is the intimacy of the person that seeks to pen, a certain narrative; the inclination that seeks to tell his friends, a little poem, he love so dearingly.

Emily Dickinson

The bulbs are in the sod –
the seeds in homes of paper
till the sun calls them.

A voice to undo the folded lie

"In the human voice we have before us the most perfect and, in fact, the most wonderful of all instruments" - Johann Sebastian Bach.

How do you describe someone’s voice? Sometimes it is amazingly hard to manage that feat, at least with words. More often than not, we have to rely on analogies, for example describing someone’s voice like a certain singer.

Within the memory space itself, you would realize it is rather hard to recreate a person’s voice, in spite of any vividness that is possibly retained. It is as though the exact memory of the person is sometimes, barely audible. Even though you might remember what was being said, it is hard to instill the tone or texture of the voice into the bare sticks of words.

Having said that, this reminds me of Isak Dinesan’s prose, which elutes with a seamless fluidity, almost mellifluous, when voiced in the mind. (or read out loud should you have that habit). And below is an excerpt which I feel, best captures the acoustic dimension, of a poem, being read.

As they had become used to the idea of poetry, they begged: "Speak again. Speak like rain." Why they should feel verse to be like rain I do not know. It must have been, however, an expression of applause, since in Africa rain is always longed for and welcomed.

Almost, you can feel the voice becoming the narrative. Well, at least that’s what I feel when I hear something being read. But something one would have noted, textual description of voices always comes down to metaphors. Two excerpts below, the first one I find rather amusing though.

Her voice is like butter. I want to wrap myself in her voice and go to sleep.
– Time traveler’s wife

Is it her singing that enchants us or is it not rather the solemn stillness
enclosing her frail little voice?
- Josephine the singer

And, my own clumsy attempt to depict a voice, in this instance, verbally:

I would say, the voice reminds me of the lushness of summer. But having said that, my idea of summer is always spring in fact, but not exactly spring though.

No, it’s not the summer on a beach or the sound of gentle waves for that matter. Never any sea in my imagination. But more like the intensity of green and leaves. The sound of the rustling leaves. A voice that is slightly raspy.

Well let’s put it this way, you see that tree there, under the sun. Stand under it, and when there’s a wind, the sound you hear, leaves against each other, under brightness and heat of the sun, against the green, is exactly the voice I heard.