Sure as the morning light when frigid love and fallen doves take flight
Crossing recent streams, tonight I participated with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks in a reading of The Invention of Love (1997) in memoriam Tom Stoppard with a Discord group that does a different play every week. I was assigned Moses Jackson, the straightest himbo ever to play a sport. I consider it a triumph for the profession that I did not catch on fire enthusing about field athletics.
When I read in passing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) had begun life as a one-act comedy entitled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, I went to fact-check this assertion immediately because it sounded like a joke, you know, like one of the great tragedies of the English stage starting out as the farcical Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter and then a ringing sound in my ears indicated that the penny had dropped.
Speaking of, I have seen going around the quotation from Arcadia (1993) on the destruction and endurance of history:
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?
Stoppard was not supposed to have known the full extent of his Jewishness until midlife, but it is such a diasporic way of thinking, the convergent echo of Emeric Pressburger is difficult for me not to hear. I keep writing of the coins in the field, everything that time gives back, if not always to those who lost it.
rushthatspeaks in a reading of The Invention of Love (1997) in memoriam Tom Stoppard with a Discord group that does a different play every week. I was assigned Moses Jackson, the straightest himbo ever to play a sport. I consider it a triumph for the profession that I did not catch on fire enthusing about field athletics.When I read in passing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) had begun life as a one-act comedy entitled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, I went to fact-check this assertion immediately because it sounded like a joke, you know, like one of the great tragedies of the English stage starting out as the farcical Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter and then a ringing sound in my ears indicated that the penny had dropped.
Speaking of, I have seen going around the quotation from Arcadia (1993) on the destruction and endurance of history:
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?
Stoppard was not supposed to have known the full extent of his Jewishness until midlife, but it is such a diasporic way of thinking, the convergent echo of Emeric Pressburger is difficult for me not to hear. I keep writing of the coins in the field, everything that time gives back, if not always to those who lost it.
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"But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it."
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Understood. That line is something I happen to believe in, because whether we are aware of it or not, history still happened. I can feel that Septimus overestimates the odds of the plays of the Sophokles, but the idea of the record of time which holds what human lives cannot is a familiar and a meaningful one to me. This particular instantiation was written by someone who had lost an entire life by the time he was eight. I don't think it's shallowly stated. Among its assorted angles, the play is about the things that are lost to human knowledge: much comes to light in its course, but much remains known only to the audience, the stand-ins for the completeness of time. We are the only ones who can put all the fragments together and we have the advantage of not being part of the pattern. But the pattern would still exist whether we could put it together or not. That's where Pressburger came in.
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I like that.
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Articulated in comments above, but tl;dr the idea that all information can be reconstructed in the precise form in which entropy overtook it is not the part that resonates with me nor even a part I imagine the audience is intended to accept uncritically, it is the reserve of time itself.
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<3
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*hugs*
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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear
I love it.
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Thank you! In memoriam Tom Stoppard was important.
I love it.
I was delighted.
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I keep writing of the coins in the field
What story is this? I've been trying to line it up with the different folktales/parables/legends/etc that it could be, but nothing seems to fit the context.
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I'm really glad.
*hugs*
What story is this? I've been trying to line it up with the different folktales/parables/legends/etc that it could be, but nothing seems to fit the context.
It's an image from A Canterbury Tale (1944) that became a kind of touchstone for me as well as a shorthand for the way that things suddenly surface from time; it can be reliably found in my writing about the film, but it has by now escaped film criticism containment and just become part of my vocabulary. The coins are finds from a dig, apparently lost after their excavation, doubly precious in their return from an equally unexpected source. You have no idea where something will be saved or shored or forgotten. You can never trust that it will come back: that's why the film is about miracles. But connections, across distance, across time, across assumptions, keep turning up.
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I love it deeply and it may have saved part of my life. I hope it treats you well!