Or the Palimpsest Samizdat
There are times when I am sure there is a meaning to life, others when attaching a meaning to something we are perhaps intrinsically unable to grasp seems not only pretentious but meaningless.
In all this, there are a few things I feel I can do, things which even I can grasp, and hope to share the meaning farther along.
It all has to do with stories.
Stories are such fragile things, subject to all manner of transformations in the telling. Each time a story is told, it is different from the last.
Who told the FIRST story, and what was it about? To whom was it told, and where? Whenever and wherever it was, it must have been in a hugely wild world, with a skybowl of living stars, a world-horizon measurable by eye, and nights of great danger with glowing eyes.
It seems to me we’re likely still telling the same story, dressing it in the fashion of the times, trying to convince ourselves we’ve grasped some sliver of insight, trusting in the usefulness of what we have to say, believing in the truth of our fictions.
Do whales tell stories, do dolphins or chimpanzees? How I wish I knew.
Telling stories is what makes us human. The more stories we tell, the more stories we are told, the more humanity we have.
That’s how it seems to me. Truth is a samizdat, that we must transmit against all odds, but it’s also a palimpsest, since we are doomed to pen it from memory on those very same oft-scraped pages before we pass it along.
The Neuchâtel-Ischia-Mons-Carouge-Neuchâtel Express
You can always gauge events by how well they look after their hapless and often bewildered guests and being lucky four times in a row is rare.
Ischia was lovely, like renting a room in a Mervyn Peake novel. The documentary There & Back Again was screened in a ruined baroque church, open to the sky, Alan Lee and I gave a little talk on fantasy film architecture and we had a wonderful time watching incomprehensible films in foreign languages and absorbing half a dozen granitas a day…
Mons was… how to say, rather a blur. Whisked from airport to conference to signing session to hotel and then up at 4.30 a.m. to get the flight home. What a lovely crowd the Belgians are – affable, worldly, multilingual – with a curious propensity for wishing to have photos taken with tired, bleary-eyed and perspiring illustrators.
The show in Carouge looks really fine – alas, we weren’t able to shoehorn all the images into the museum (short of building a new wing on it that is).
And, the Neuchâtel film festival was good fun, with a special guest who is the most well-represented film-maker in our DVD collection. (The best moment was when we came up absolutely simultaneously and spontaneously with the title of the worst-designed fantasy film in recent history.)
Snail mail
In this case, the expression refers to me… I have, once more and despite my misguided optimism to the contrary, let a monstrous stack of mail accumulate on my desk (at least, I assume the desk is still under there somewhere) and cannot find the time or the tools (pickaxe, shovel, explosives) to take the job on of excavating letters and books-to-be-signed-please and replying. I will get to it this summer. Speaking of which…
Out of the Office
Time to sign off for summer, this season is better spent watching sunsets than writing long newsletters. See you in the autumn, (but by then I may be concentrating on falling leaves). So many distractions… have a lovely summer.
John
