STEVE LONG
Tring, UK
I have a photo of a large lion taped up on a partition by my desk, because I like the lion and because of the Hoban connection. I say the lion is large, well it is, literally huge. At Whipsnade zoo, not far from my home, they carved a lion shape in the chalk of the hillside some years ago, in the tradition of ancient and not-so-ancient chalk figures in the landscape of southern England. In recent years the zoo people have taken to illuminating the lion's outline at night, and last spring I attempted to photograph it. I don't have a fancy camera, and what I ended up with, flash turned off, camera zoomed right in and held as firmly on the top of a gate as I could manage, was a somewhat blurry but (what I think of as) atmospheric photo of the lion. There are better photos of it on the internet, but I like mine. There is a sense of movement in the photo (maybe even motion/stillness to use a Russ-ism), that for me gives it an interesting quality.
That was the inspiration for my SA4QE this year. Being tight for time I thought the least I could do was 4Qate at work, and I printed the following quotations on the regulation Ryman "gold" paper and taped it up below the lion photo. Both are taken from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz.
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Jachin-Boaz… took the master map out of a drawer and spread it on the counter for his son to look at. "I have been working on it for years," said Jachin-Boaz, "and it will be your when you are a man. Everything that you could wish to look for is on this map. I take great pains to keep it up date, and I add to it all the time."
Boaz-Jachin looked at the map, at the cities and towns, the blue oceans, the green swamps and grasslands, the delicately shaded brown and orange mountains, the clear lines in inks of different colours that showed where all things known to his father might be found by him. He looked away from the map and down at the floor.
"What do you think of it?" said Jachin-Boaz.
Boaz-Jachin said nothing.
"Why won't you say anything?" said his father. "Look at this labour of years, with everything clearly marked upon it. This map represents not only the years of my life spent upon it, but the years of other lives spent in gathering the information that is here. What can you seek that this map will not show you how to find?"
Boaz-Jachin looked at the map, then at his father. He looked all around the shop and then at his father, but he said nothing.
"Please don't stand there saying nothing," said Jachin-Boaz. "Say something. Name something that this map will not show you how to find."
Boaz-Jachin looked around the shop again. He looked at the iron doorstop. It was in the shape of a crouching lion. He looked at his father with a half smile. "A lion?" he said.
"A lion," said Jachin-Boaz. "I don't think I understand you. I don't think you're being serious with me. You know very well there are no lions now. The wild ones were hunted to extinction. Those in captivity were killed off by a disease that travelled from one country to another carried by fleas. I don't know what kind of joke that was meant to be." As he spoke there opened in his mind great mystical amber eyes, luminous and infinite. There blossomed great taloned paws, heavy and powerful. There was a silent roar, round, endless, an orb of reflection imaging a pink rasping tongue, white teeth of death. Jachin-Boaz shook his head. There were no lions any more.
[...]
Darkness roared with the lion, the night stalked with the silence of him. The lion was. Ignorant of non-existence he existed. Ignorant of self he was a sunlit violence with calm joy at the centre of it, he was the violence of being-as-hunter constantly renewed in the devouring of non-being. The wheel had been when he ran tawny on the plain, printing his motion on the grateful air. He had died biting the wheel that went on and left him dead. The wheel continued, the lion continued. He was intact, diminished by nothing, increased by nothing, absolute. He ate meat or he did not eat meat, was seen or unseen, known when there was knowledge of him, unknown when there was not. But always he was. For him there were no maps, no places, no time. Beneath his tread the round earth rolled, the wheel turned, bearing him back to death and life again.
Through his lion-being drifted stars and blackness, morning sang, night soothed, dawn burst its daylight from the womb of vital terror. Oceans heaved, frail bridges spanned the winding track of days, the rising air sang lion-flight in wings of birds. In clocks ticked lion-time. It pulsed in heartbeats, footsteps walking all unknowing, souls of guilt and sorrow, souls of love and pain. He had been called, he had come. He was."
from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz
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At the bottom I simply put the SA4QE web address, because if anybody wanted to know more they could just ask me. Shame that nobody did. Possibly just too weird in an engineering R&D department!
I like the first passage just because it makes me think about the relationship I had with my father as a young adult. Russ has captured that difficult time when I wanted to be independent, and anything Dad did or told me was of no interest to me, and the frustration Dad no doubt felt at my rejection of his attempt to pass down to me the wisdom of years. Perhaps this is typical of many father / adolescent son relationships, but I shouldn't make that assumption.
I like the second passage simply because it is Hoban as his best, his most articulate and powerful. The words are a joy to read.
All the best,
Steve
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Steve's 2007 4qation
This year's SA4QE began for me when I got hold of a copy of The Trokeville Way. It arrived on Saturday 3rd Feb, and I noticed that Russ had quoted a couple of lines from AE Housman's poem A Shropshire Lad at the front of the book. Things immediately began to slip into place - I had been planning to visit Shropshire on the 4th Feb for some weeks, for another reason. I had seen it as an opportunity to 4Qate somewhere different, but the reference to Shropshire in the Hoban book suddenly made it significant.
On Sunday morning I was running in a hill race on the Long Mynd, a hill above Church Stretton. It was a dry and sunny day, although the ground was still frozen underfoot where it was shaded by the hills. The views were superb. The race over, we wanted to look around Ludlow, an historic old town with plenty of timbered buildings, cobbled passageways etc. We found a market there, a typical Sunday market with stalls of collectibles, bric-a-brac, old books, jewellery etc.
I was looking out for
some Hoban symbolism, and saw for example a turtle brooch. Then rummaging at a
bookstall I noticed a book by a Norma Ridley, called something like
"Northumbrian Approach". The similarity between Ridley and Riddley, Russ's Mr
Walker, was too good to miss. The book was in a box containing an assortment
of hardbacks including some art history, e.g. on van Gogh, and appeared to be
popular with the browsing public. I slipped my yellow paper between Ms
Ridley's book and the next.
The yellow paper contained the following text:
| He went to the window, looked at the
frost-sparkling cars, thought of the seasons revolving inexorably while
metal rusted and flesh decayed, thought of trees across the common, now
bare, how in the summer dawns they swayed their leafy tops in the early
breeze, indifferent to humans who slept and woke and slept again. from Angelica's Grotto
The world is full of ghosts: not the kind who groan and clank their chains, not even people ghosts, but the ghosts of the touches of hands on what has been used, worn, handled. Might it be a kind of metaphysical DNA, so that from the touch of a woman's hand on a necklace, a man's hand on a knife, the whole person might be called into being? Indeed, has the whole person ever ceased to be, entirely? from The Bat Tattoo |
I like the first quotation because it makes a beautiful contrast between nature's cycles and the more superficial cycles of man. Hoban's words show how nature's cycles have such permanence and reliability in comparison to our own. They highlight how unreliable our actions, and how impermanent we are.
In the second quotation I like the idea that anything touched by us somehow retains a memory of us. Things like hand rails and old stone steps are obvious examples, but Hoban uses much lighter touches, contrasting male and female aspects. This sensitivity and closeness of observation is one of the reasons I like Russ's work so much.
On another stall at the market in Ludlow I happened on a copy of A Shropshire Lad, a 1948 reprint of an 1896 edition, and I bought it.
Best wishes,
Steve
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Steve's 2006 4qation
I had no preconceived ideas about where I was going to leave my yellow paper this year, but found myself outside Tring zoological museum, and then inside the museum looking at lion and bat and turtle displays. I left the yellow paper on a bench between the bats and the turtles. If I had thought about it before I might have chosen a quotation from a more relevant book, but the one I had copied out was this:
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There are all kinds of things that have no name and can't be described, really scary dreadful things that live in the mind and maybe you say, "They're only in the mind." Then suddenly you find that you yourself are in your mind with them and there's no escape. "Oh God! How did I get into my mind! Please, please let me out!" And God smiles and says, "Sorry, your mind is the only place there is."
from The Bear in Max Ernst's Bedroom (The Moment Under the Moment) |
All the best,
Steve
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Steve's 2005 4qation
Hi,
Here’s my SA4QE experience:
My first quote came from Kleinzeit. It was one of the entrants in the convention t-shirt poll, and I didn’t realise then that it didn’t come from Turtle Diary. It’s a beautiful couplet – I love the idea and the way it’s written.
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If sky were earth and ocean sky, Green turtles would be kites to fly |
I was hoping to find a good quotation in Amaryllis Night and Day on the dream theme, and was surprised to happen upon this in Pilgermann. It seems all Hoban books are connected: are all nodes on the same network. I think it’s easy to underestimate the importance of dreams, and the idea that they are a greater reality than our wakeful condition is intriguing.
| How can it be that pictures can be seen with the eyes closed? Dreams! Maybe there were dreams before there was anything else; maybe there were dreams before there were people to dream them. Maybe dream life is the real living and our waking life is just the necessary exercising of our bodily functions in between dream time. |
I wanted to include something from the
more recent books, and these next are from The Bat Tattoo. The first
has been used by
Olaf in one of his animations,
but I liked it a lot anyway. I think you need to have travelled on the
underground with your eyes closed to appreciate it, but it does strike a chord
with me. The second quote could apply to the
Some-Poasyum!
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Sometimes in the underground I close my eyes
and the sound of the wheels on the rails and the surging and swaying of
the carriage become the rolling passage of the years in the darkness of my
mind. ~ ~ ~ ~ It’s astonishing, really, how quickly the
strange becomes the usual. |
Beforehand, I bought my yellow paper at Ryman. It seemed appropriate to get it
from the same place as Kleinzeit.
Borders in Watford was the venue for my first drop. I left it amongst the Hobans on the shelf – it’s good to see they have restocked recently, now having at least two of most books, including Come Dance With Me. I left another next door in Tesco, on a shelf in the “home style” section.
Back in Tring, my home town, I left one in the Tesco there, on the organic food fixture, hoping it would be seen by the right kind of people. At the public library I left one in the Hs in the fiction section – plenty of Hornby but no Hoban. Finally, I drove down to the station and taped one to the outside of the phone box just where people come out from the platforms and stand waiting for buses and lifts. It was still there yesterday morning.
Belated happy 80th birthday Russ - sounds like you had a good one.
See you all at the
convention,
Steve