Lost and Found

 

 

I thought, as you do, of using some apposite quotation from the Parable of the Prodigal Son, or that bit in Matthew of “rejoice, and be exceeding glad” to express my delight at being presented with my Lost White Notebook (the capital letters indicating the growing importance that I have placed on it while it was lost) to accompany my post swim cup of tea.  I had obviously left the book or dropped the book at or near my seat and it had been found and carefully put away by the catering staff.  “Great happiness!”  Though that is not the King James Version of the Bible, but rather King Duncan in Macbeth, and his joy has to be viewed with a certain degree of irony!

     And that is always the problem with quotations, or perhaps it is their delight – that they come with associations.  You detach them from their contexts at your peril.

     The Parable of the Prodigal Son ends with the father telling his disgruntled elder son, that his younger impoverished, wastrel brother, “was lost, and is found.”  Simple, precise, and beautiful.  Applying the ‘mere’ words to my lost notebook may be accurate, but a book of my scribbles being kept behind the counter in the swimming pool café, waiting for me to reclaim it, is hardly the stuff of moral instruction, and the spiritual baggage of the quotation overwhelms the occasion.  

 

 

 

 

 

     Similarly, with the ‘bit’ of Matthew.  The words are spoken just after Jesus has delivered the Beatitudes and he encourages his disciples and followers to accept the persecution that will follow acceptance of his doctrine as a sign of their being blessed.  Not just popping a small notebook back in the pocket that it must have fallen out of.

     At one time an ‘educated’ person would have been able to use images and language from the Bible and the Classics and have a reasonable expectation that his ‘educated’ listener would be able to follow his examples.

     Today, what is our generally shared pool of knowledge?  I would suggest that even with a parable as famous as The Prodigal Son, and even with the phrase being part of reasonably everyday English, few know any details of the story, or even that it comes from the Bible.

     When I was teaching and trying to justify (is that the right word) Milton’s use of heavy religious and Classical imagery, I would ask the class to think of a simile, to make one up, but to use a figure or event or product that they knew well, with the aim to get the simile accepted by the whole class.  So, for example, you could say, “Complete the following simile, ‘As famous as ………..’ filling in the space with the name of a person, a living person, whom everybody in the class would know.”  The students usually forgot that I was in the class too, and their favourite and very famous singers or football players or television stars, did not sometimes figure on my list of the famous, which the kids used to call ‘foul’ to and say that to get someone even I must know would be impossible!  Which was part of the point that I was making.

     It was a useful exercise to show that there were various spheres of “You must have heard of him/her” where not knowing the “famous” person by a section of the class was greeted with astonishment.

 

 

  

 I also used the expression, “As faithful as Ruth.”  Not only had most of the classes never heard of the expression, they also did not know that there was a book of the bible called Ruth and they knew nothing about the story of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz.

     Of course, you could say that my generation of baby boomers was the last to be brought up on a diet of significant and generally accepted Great Literature, with poems from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury featuring heavily.  In my first year in Secondary School, we read from a slim volume called Men and Gods which gave brief and readable versions of some of the more famous Greek and Roman myths, giving us a fairly easy was in to hearing some of the Classical names that would feature in the literature that we would be presented with as we progressed through school.

     The odious Johnson peppers his discourse with references to the Classics, throwing a few well-worn Latin tags into his so-called conversation to give the impression of timeless erudition.  But he hides behind the effect, he does not use Classicism to elucidate but rather to intimidate.  He aims for the same admiration that right-wing thugs gave to Enoch Powell, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

when they vaunted his linguistic ability and his ability to read Latin and Greek as a way of giving themselves some reflected kudos from his academic reputation and using his assumed intellectual superiority to justify their base behaviour.

     A shared body of knowledge is only useful if it makes communication easier, otherwise it becomes a way of excluding and reinforces exclusivity.

     So, what about the expression of my glee at finding something that was lost?  Famous quotations come ‘ready-made’, but they come with associations that are rarely exactly to the point that you are trying to make.

     The only solution, of course, is to write your own!

    

The writing has moved on!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It looks as though I have lost/mislaid my current notebook.  This is a bad thing.

     It is a bad thing because the notebook represents, in however scrappy a form, my thoughts and ideas over a period of months.  It is also a bad thing because I am fairly free with my thoughts and ideas in it.  True, there are mundane comments about the weather and whether or not I had a lane to myself for my morning swim, but my thoughts can be more wide-ranging and much more personal than that!

     The only built-in security system, that virtually encrypts the notes themselves is the almost illegible scrawl in which they are written.  I have to admit that I sometimes, no quite often, find myself puzzling over certain extravagant calligraphic patterns and wondering if they have any relation whatsoever to English orthography.  This ‘difficulty’ does give a certain freshness to a perusal when undertaken long after the words were written.

     I have hunted around all the spots in the house where the small, pocket-sized, notebook could have been discarded or lodged.  I have checked pockets in a range of clothing.  I have checked down the side of the armchair that I use.  I have checked the car seats.  I have looked everywhere reasonable that could be a place where the notebook could be.  I have even looked in places where, where it to be there, I would spend the rest of my life wondering how it possibly got there.  But in places reasonable and unreasonable, the more I look, the more (as they say) it isn’t there.

     The only place left is the swimming pool.  At the end of my morning swim, as I have my expertly made cup of tea, I write.  I write something, anything, just to keep the process going.  Sometimes I am less than convinced by what I produce, but at other times the notes seem to write themselves and there is a sort of genuine excitement in the hastily scribbled lines.

     In some ways, I am hesitant to ask in the pool, because if they say that nothing has been handed in or found, then I am left with irreconcilable loss.

     Though, having said that, I have taken the cellophane off a notebook-in-waiting, and I jotted down my thoughts for the day.  Tomorrow will be the test, and if nothing is put aside waiting for the owner to turn up, then I will accept the fact that The White Notebook is no more, and I will get on with the new red one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a couple of days hiatus, my doctor phoned me in response to my asking for an appointment to see him with a view to Getting Something Done about my knees.

     I suppose that prior telephone conversation is the new normal for medical appointments nowadays, almost like a telephonic triage to see by electronic conversation whether further consultation of a more immediate and personal nature is necessary.

     As my knees have never been the same after a few tumbles form my bike, an x-ray was deemed necessary and I was given the time of a possible face-to-face appointment, as long as the x-rays had been taken before hand.

     I was phoned with the date and time of an appointment for an x-ray examination in short measure, and I was (or at least the knee part of me) was snapped from various angles and I was sent on my way.  This means that the x-rays are already in the possession of the doctor and my appointment on Monday of next week will be the next step in outlining the possible courses of action.

     It is at this point that I am reminded of an old tennis injury – well, not so much from the actual game itself, but rather from not quite jumping over the net to celebrate my victory, and landing on my elbow.  I split the bone and the bone has never been quite the same.  Some years after the initial injury, I had major problems with fluid collecting around the joint and then with persistent pain.

     The fluid was drained off, but the pain in my elbow and the arm did not give in so easily.

     After a failed process of sports massage (horrific!) and more conventional remedial massage failed to do the trick, I was sent back to the doctor, and I was given a (fairly gruesome) series of cortisone (I think) injections.  The term ‘series’ gives the impression of a number of injections stretching over an extended period of time.  It was not like that.  What I had was a single injection but administered in a sort-of internal jabbing sort of way.

     Whatever!  When I left the doctor’s surgery at the end of the jabbing, I had no pain.  It was positively magical.  And the problem has not (touch wood!) recurred.

     I am hoping that there is some sort of similar ‘magical’ injection that will do its stuff with my knees.  But my more fatalistic reality check suggests that the ‘answer’ will probably be an operation or two.

     My house is almost comically unfit for a person to recuperate who does not have full use of his limbs: the living room is on the first floor and the loo is on the second and my computer and printer is on the third.  There are lots of stairs and there is no lift.  Toni’s suggestion that there would be no problem as I could live in the bedroom, with an invalid table and a laptop, is not to be considered without hysteria.

     Monday may well turn out to be a defining moment in my time in Catalonia.

     Or, given the backlog in routine operations, any medical intervention may be years in the future.  And that too, is rather a depressing thought.

     But I am running ahead of myself.  Sufficient unto the day is the imagining thereof!   

     Let’s wait for something a little more concrete than frantic supposition!

Ballet Preljocaj: Winterreise

 

The last time I heard a live performance of the song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey) by Franz Schubert was in the Arts Hall on campus in Swansea University some 40 years ago as one of the free Sunday afternoon artistic events the University offered. 

     I remember that we were given a little print out of the names of the individual songs and towards the middle of the recital I began counting the number of items of musical torture that I had to endure before I could make my escape.  I was then much more open to the bombast of full-blooded Bruckner rather than being a lukewarm lieder liker.

     The performance in the Liceu a couple of days ago was altogether a different experience, and the magisterial rendition of the songs by the baritone Thomas Tatzi with the graceful and sympathetic piano accompaniment by James Vaughan resulted in the warmest ovation at the end of the evening.

 

 

 

     The choice of Winterreise for a ballet (choreography by Anglelin Preljocaj) was an interesting one.  The number of the songs gave opportunities for a series of linked dances, though the general tenor of the songs was almost unrelievedly downbeat.  The winter journey is a bleak one for the singer/narrator and the questioning ambiguity of the last line of the cycle is emphatically answered in this production with the female dancers slowly sprinkling snow or earth on the prone bodies of the men in a clear indication of death.

 

 

 

     The production is set on a generally empty stage with the ground being covered by snow or dust or dead leaves in a manner reminiscent of the stage of Pina Bausch in her production of The Rite of Spring where the dancers danced and stamped their way through earth.  In Winterreise the substance on the stage is much more ethereal, and it drops onto the stage at periods throughout.  It is used by the dancers as celebration, commemoration and mood change and was effective and pervasive.

 

 Considering the sombre nature of the song cycle, Ballet Preljocaj did manage to inject moments of humour into the occasion, though the humour was sometimes grim as with the mutual miming of suicide by poison, but there were more light-hearted touches with the power of a pointed finger being made good use of at one point and a rather distracting episode where a central dancer seemed to be wielding illuminated batons more useful for guiding aircraft into their standings than being a focus for dance!

     The dancers were an enthusiastic ensemble, though sometimes their coordination was a little off, but some of the intertwined body pictures that they created on stage were startling and very effective.

     I always say that for me, Ballet is like banana yogurt: it’s not something you would choose, but when you are given it, it’s quite enjoyable. 

     Ballet Preljocaj was a very superior banana yogurt!