Higher Things

The thing about that tiresome cliché about the magic of theatre is that, like all tiresome clichés, it's essentially true. It doesn't always work for everyone in the audience or on the stage, but when it works for most, it becomes a specie of rough magic, and on those rare occasions it works for all the roof comes off and something holy is glimpsed.

If it works all the time you're watching Shakespeare or Aeschylus or some such johnny done as it's meant to be.

I offer the conjecture that all art, real art, aspires to such transcendence. And the curious thing is that in the performing arts even the weakest performance can have its moments - which is why so many of those involved keep searching.

Getting On

Something I've discovered from years of mounting plays: at dress rehearsal stage it's generally getting the thing started that's the biggest headache one faces. Once it's up and running it runs, but getting over the tipping point often demands a ferocious effort of will. And when time is at a premium, as it always is, that effort of will is generally attended by a considerable degree of stress.

I'm getting too old for this.

But then it's doing it that keeps me young. (Well, youngish.)

Say Again?

For all connoisseurs of low level paradox, this is one overheard yesterday: A little pain never hurt anybody. Sadly I was the witless perpetrator. Sometimes it isn't terribly wise to listen in on oneself.

The Final Frame

Saddened to read in today's paper of the death of Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins, a finely unpredictable snooker player of some years back. I won quite a bit of money on him in the World Championship of 1982, having placed a wager at excellent odds when he reached the last sixteen (if memory serves me correctly.) The odds were excellent because, despite his undoubted ability, he had shown little sign of the discipline needed to turn that to real account since winning the title ten years earlier. In that ten years a lot had changed. The game had moved from seedy, dingy backstreet dives to becoming quite a television spectacle with the championship played at Sheffield's Crucible Theatre. (Not the most obvious venue - but somehow it worked.)

So snooker had become respectable, whilst Alex hadn't - which, I suppose, is why I backed him. And somehow he held it together for a change and surprised everyone. Then he reverted to being the archetypal Irish bad boy and it duly fell apart.

But it was nice whilst it lasted. And he's name-checked in Van Morrison's So Long In Exile, which is in itself a kind of (dubious) immortality.

Children's Things

On a whim I read Ted Hughes's How The Whale Became And Other Stories today and was very glad I did. A wonderfully anthropomorphic God, who wears a sun hat and calls endlessly for iced drinks on the particularly hot day on which he creates Tortoise, is just one of many splendid highlights.

And I was equally happy reading Leon Garfield's Apprentices a couple of weeks ago. In this case though any children attempting to read the stories would need to be considerably older than the seven or so recommended for Hughes's Whale tales. I remember Longmans publishing Apprentices in shorter versions - the original twelve stories, corresponding to the months of the year and various associated festivals, reduced to groups of four, was it? I got the impression they were hoping schools would pick these up as standard texts for literature classes, but I don't know how successful this was.

In fact, I'm not sure Garfield is read much at all now. Which is a pity since stylistically he's so interesting and 'usable' in the classroom. Certainly his Shakespeare Stories should be the prescribed text everywhere for schools who want to give kids a set of tales from Shakespeare. Astonishingly I've heard of the Lambs' hoary old versions still getting into classrooms, which is a crime when you consider the obvious superiority and accessibility of Garfield's work.

Branching Out

Trees, or rather bits of them, crop up in the oddest of places here. Early this afternoon Noi and I whilst shopping at the new Geylang Market were quaffing the cup that cheers on the higher level and munching some munchables. Looking out towards Joo Chiat Complex on the other side of the road I realised we were positioned at the same height of the canopies of the trees, raintrees, I think, planted along the roadside. The canopies, three in my immediate range of vision, were intriguingly variegated in terms of colour - one especially standing out with its gorgeous mixing of light greens and yellows.

There's a tiresome cliché trotted out here about Singapore being a 'garden city'. Tiresome because one hears it so often. But the profusion of trees goes a long way to making it not entirely vapid.

The trees, in fact, go an extremely long way to, if not making this a beautiful city, at least making Singapore a place where beauty is easy to find. Now if only the same could be said for the architecture.

Threshing Around

There's a lovely view through one of the windows of the SAC at work (that's the sort of canteen area.) It's of a garden, but not of the English style. Sort of orientally jungly, in the nicest possible sense. I often sit facing it, supping my tea and thinking zen-like thoughts.

Yesterday I noticed, really noticed, just how much movement there was in the trees out there. They appeared a good deal more animated than I felt. I don't think their movement had ever quite registered with me before, but their collective dance held me hypnotised for a good ten minutes or so - long enough for me to finish the tea, anyway.

I was reminded of a couple of favourite lines of mine from Larkin's The Trees: Yet still the unresting castles thresh / In full grown thickness every May. Of course, these trees weren't castles in any sense, and it's not May, but who needs excuses for recalling great lines? And I further decided that I'd read Larkin's Collected Poems from cover to cover which I'm now about to do - well, make a start, that is.

And I further reflected upon the fact that Larkin himself was, from all accounts, quite an awful sort of fellow. Sad, but in a nasty way. It's a funny thing, beauty. It can emerge in the most unexpected of places.

Not Despairing, Not Presuming

When attempting to bring some cheer to the lives of colleagues who are looking a trifle glum I've pointed out that all those impossible jobs on that depressing to-do list will be long gone in another year. The list will have been replaced by something most likely a few items longer. I sometimes think my good counsel leaves a little to be desired.

Making A Difference

Something fresh for me: I've just finished reading Garrison Keillor's poetry anthology Good Poems from cover to cover, keeping to the sequence of the placing of the poems. I don't think I've ever done this with any poetry anthology before and I suspect it's not something that readers generally do. A poetry anthology is more obviously for dipping into in a sort of random manner, and that's what I'd been doing previous to the read-through, such that I was familiar with quite a number of the individual poems as I read them.

So what difference did it make, going cover to cover? Well it certainly made me far more aware of the deliberateness of the editor's sequencing - I suppose that's pretty obviously bound to be the case. But I think it altered how I read the poems themselves. I certainly read more at one sitting than I normally would have done, almost as if I were attempting to maintain a kind of momentum. Of course this was done in the knowledge that I would inevitably revisit most of what I was reading, because that's what you do with poetry. But it meant that I was less inclined to dwell on a poem, or one part of a poem, and that felt curiously liberating.

We don't really talk much about exactly how we read things, or listen to music, or look at paintings and by not doing so we miss opportunities to widen our frame of response. I didn't really begin to understand serious music until I stopped trying to understand it and just listened.

Consolation

One of the ways I found to console myself over the weekend for Noi not being around was by viewing two of the episodes of the wonderful Planet Earth, the two being the last pair of the original series. (The DVD set comes with another three documentaries on an extra disk which I think are 'extras'. Good value, eh?) So I luxuriated in Seasonal Forests on Saturdays and explored the Deep Ocean on Sunday.

Each episode on the DVD set comes with a corresponding Planet Earth Diaries, a ten minute film of one aspect or another of the making of what you've just viewed. I assume these are part of the original series, being both illuminating and informative. In a way they bring you down to earth, showing you some of the impressive nuts and bolts of the filming. Watching them has served to make me more aware of the sense in which these programmes are genuine works of art. You realise just how impressive the editing of the images has been and how careful the selection has been. Ally that to the gorgeously expressive music by George Fenton and the commentary by David Attenborough which is informative, humane and emotionally engaging, often in a single finely crafted, finely enunciated sentence, and you've got something that does whatever art is supposed to do - with knobs on.

The last awesome image of the mighty blue whale making its way through the even mightier ocean, the camera then pulling away to the point the whale is no longer quite visible as Attenborough asks us do we intend to save the planet at this crucial time struck me as being as powerfully iconic as the gorilla sequence from Life On Earth - high praise indeed. The trouble is that watching it I couldn't get out of my mind the image of all that BP oil gushing into the ocean. And I still can't, despite their claims to have capped the leak.

I wonder if some hundred or so years in the future some kids will be viewing the image in a gallery somewhere as a reminder of a paradise we lost and can never reclaim. Not much consolation there, I'm afraid.