Jellicle Cats Are Black And White

As a kid I was a long term subscriber to Cricket magazine. It was a wonderful magazine full of real literature, but packaged for kids. Clifton Fadiman, the initial editor/publisher, assumed that talking down to children wasn't really necessary. In its pages I made my first acquaintance with Isaac Bashivas Singer, Lloyd Alexander, Langston Hughes, ee cummings, Carl Sandburg, Pamela Travers and many other brilliant writers.

At some point during our subscription, we purchased a recording from the magazine of some of its top pieces. Included among the gems on this disk was TS Eliot reading his own poem, Jellicle Cats. I loved the poem; soon I had it memorized and would recite it, even imitating his British accent. To hear him you'd never know he was born in St Louis, Missouri, just a few hours drive from where I live.

Never did it matter to me that I had no clue what "terpsichorean powers" were. I was in high school before I thought to look it up and learned about the muses,

For Our Conversation Is In Heaven

Richard Ledderer relates the story that when St. Paul's Cathedral burned in the fire of 1666, Sir Christopher Wren was hired to rebuild it. After 35 years of work the new building was finished and Queen Anne came to see it. After a tour she told Sir Christopher that his cathedral was "awful, artificial and amusing." He was delighted! What splendid praise from the queen!

"Awful" of course meant awe inspiring.

Scissors, Pants and Glasses

I've noticed that some funny words only exist in English in the plural. We can hold a pair of scissors, but there is no such thing as a single scissor. And we put on our pants, one leg at a time, but still that one leg is in our pants, not our pant.

Of course, there can be scissor marks on a piece of paper,

Like A Pressed Flower

INKSPELL, the second in the INKHEART trilogy, is already fascinating in the first few chapters. Cornelia Funke's THE THIEF LORD is among my very favorites, so I went looking to see what else she has available.

INKSPELL is remarkably set simultaneously in two different worlds. Her debt to CS Lewis is obvious, but she doesn't live their as a burglar. Instead she moves into (what seem to me) completely new realms of imagination. Her first world is ours,

Poetry and Language

TS Eliot says in THE SACRED WOOD that the purpose of poetry is to teach people how to speak. It is to clarify and clean the language, and the use of it. It is to move language forward. The poetry of today is the language of tomorrow, and it must always be progressing for just as pure water grows stale by being trapped, so language can not sit still without stagnating.

What was crisp and clear in our diction when I was a kid is no longer vivid. It has become stale. So language must always be moving, changing, evolving, disintigrating or growing.

Words (Pt 2)

Today two of my daughters gave me a perfect illustration for the last post, the one about words, and our need for meaning. One was being rather obnoxious and talking in nonsense words. "Schlreg mehug nopan, so ranis gelush," and so on. It ran on rather long. Got on my nerves a bit, but what interested me was her younger sister's reaction. She put her hands over her ears and started howling, "Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!"

Nothing out of the ordinary here, for our house. Perhaps not that odd for your house either. But it intruiged me because I was already thinking about the subject of meaning.

Now Hope does not react this way when her sisters and I speak in Spanish, nor when the older two girls speak in French. Instead she listens intently and always asks what we were saying, what it means. She then repeats it all to herself. She also does this with our many international friends who regularly speak Korean, Mandarin, Turkish and many other languages around her.

But she recongnizes when there is meaning in words and when there isn't, whether she understands them or not. When she has a sense that there is meaning she is attentive. When she can tell there is no meaning, but just nonsense, she is almost frantic in her desire to be away from it.

Don't we all have this inate desire for meaning? Isn't this part of what makes us turn off certain television shows and what brings us back again and again to the great writings, especially the Bible? The one seems intollerably shallow and the other reveals to us new depths of meaning every time we immerse ourselves in it.

Words, words, words

After a very long day at work I sat down and turned on a cd of Cui Jian, one of the most popular Chinese rock musicians. I love his music, the driving rhythms, the passion, and the words.

But how do I love the words? I don't know a bit of what he's saying. I can't say hello or goodbye in Mandarine. He might be saying terrible things. I very much doubt it, but I don't really know. So how can I say I love the words?

Is it just his voice? His inflection? The passion in his voice? That portion of his poetics that transcends linguistic differences?

I don't know, it probably has to do with all of these. If the same songs were played without vocals they wouldn't have quite the same appeal that they now have.

But the fact that the words do have a meaning, whether I understand it or not, is important. Lewis Carroll wrote some very fun (and funny) nonsense poems in which the voice does all of these things, inflection, passion etc., and I enjoy those poems. But they don't move me like listening to Cui Jian. If in hearing him I were to think that his words were nonsense words like in Jabberwocky then I don't think that I would respond to the songs in nearly the same way that I do.

And yet I am less able to come at the actual meaning of the words than I am in Jabberwocky.

In all this I know I am not alone. Ask any kid listening to heavy metal music, or most any rock, what the song is about and they won't usually be able to tell you. But they listen to the words, sing along and probably wouldn't listen many times to an instrumental version of the song. Same goes for the upper crust listening to opera, be it Italian, German or whatever language. Even English operas are mighty hard to follow, yet I wouldn't even begin to sit through it without the vocals. But those very vocals are only bearable because I know there is MEANING buried there. Buried beyond my grasp most of the time, but still it is there.

And while I bask in the assurance that something, be it a song or my life, is meaningful, my understanding is not really necessary. Understanding would be a bonus, but it really isn't essential. The assurance of meaningfulness is primary.