YVONNE STUDER
Zürich
Dear all,
With the Sun squaring Neptune today, my daily horoscope (at www.astro.com) advised me to use my "common sense even about ideals, and above all, deal with the real world as it is" and not as I would like it to be. All this while feeling depleted of energy! But if I made an effort, there might be a reward. The horoscope said, "You can work to make it [the world] what you want, but don't assume that it already is."
The world today meant a full day at school with report meetings taking place from early morning till late in the afternoon, a bit of teaching in between and no time to go to scenic places to spread the word, much as I would have liked to.
Anyhow, I opened a bottle of emergency Joie de Vivre so "feelings of inadequacy or futility" couldn't even begin to tempt me "to avoid direct confrontations with people and even to take more devious courses of action than usual." And then I carried out my very commonsensical and energy-friendly plan for this year's SA4QE and approached some of my colleagues at school to give them the five sheets of yellow A4 on which I had printed quotes from Russ's books. Some quotes had been chosen with the future recipients in mind, others were general enough to be given away spontaneously. I had to place two of the sheets in pigeonholes, because my colleagues were busy or had already gone home. But handing over the three other sheets definitely accounted for the most enjoyable and carefree moments of the day, and as usual, 4qating made me go home with a smile.
Here are the quotes:
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"Reason is not sufficient; I know what I
cannot explain."
"The stranger it took me the mor I fealt at hoam with it. The mor I fealt
like Iwd be long where ever it wer widening me to."
"Darkness roared with the lion, the night stalked with the silence of him.
The lion was. Ignorant of non-existence he existed."
"Everyone lives a life that is seen and a life that is unseen. Our dreams are part of our unseen life. We often forget our own dreams and we have no idea whatever of the dreams of others: last night the person next to you in the underground may have ridden naked on a lion or travelled under the sea to the lost city of Atlantis." ('I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping...', The Moment under the Moment, 1992)
"This house that childhood builds in the mind is a learning place and a place where we test words and images and ideas to find out what rings true. Also it's like a safe house in a spy film: in it the secret agent that is the child's mind can stay hidden until ready to venture armed into the hostile city. It isn't the world that is hostile – the stone and the leaf and the door of the world beckon and welcome – it's the grey city of the world that threatens, the grey city of the failed children of the world, the dry thinkers, the juiceless minds, the poison skulls that dream in numbers and megadeaths. They run the world, these failed children; they speak in all languages and in all languages their speech is vile." ('I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping...', The Moment under the Moment, 1992)
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Happy birthday, Russ, and all the best to everyone else!
Yvonne x
~ ~ ~ ~
Yvonne's 2007 4qation
Dear Russ, dear Krakenistas, and dear
6th-form students from HoPro Zürich
On my very first SA4QE tour in 2003, I half-secretly 4qated the school where I
work by hanging up quotations on various pillars and on a pinboard over the
photocopier by the entrance to the school library. Half-secretly, because I
told the deputy headmaster and also the librarian about my doings and met
nothing but support and big smiles.
'Sometimes one's got to laugh, you know, or go mad.'
'And,' said Schwarzgang.
(Kleinzeit, 1974)
The photo of the photocopier was used in the
collage on the 2007 SA4QE
homepage. This year something more effective was wanted, not least because
it's also the fifth anniversary of SA4QE. So I decided to read one of Russ's
books with my sixth form and somehow involve my students in this year's
celebration of Russ's 82nd birthday.
Originally, the book was to be Turtle Diary, but as this novel is still out of
print, Kleinzeit took its place and I'm happy to report that it is the
highlight of my working week when I can go into my English class to "teach"
Russ's novel rather than, for instance, the elusive differences between the
1001 ways of expressing future time in English...
As my students are very hard-working young people and since this time of the
year is particularly stressful for them, I didn't want to ask them to go
4qating with me today. Instead I chose an individual quotation from Russ's
works for each of them, printed it out on a sheet of yellow A4 paper and gave
them the sheets on Thursday, 1st February. Of course I first told them about
the project (they were properly introduced to the verb "to 4qate", including
its pronunciation "fork-you-ate") and I also showed them a few examples of
past 4qations so they could see what good company they would be in when I made
them part of it all.
These were the quotations:
| The moment will not stay.
We seek out places where the sorrow will be lessened, places where there
is heart's ease in the sorrow, heart's comfort amidst the pain. For good
or ill the moment will not stay. How fast the world flees in all
directions from us! (...) We must find in ourselves the shapes of letting go because we're not free to become what we're going to be next until we let go of what we are now. from "Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road", The Moment under the Moment, 1992
~ ~ ~ ~
Sometimes he played the guitar quietly, improvising tunes, but more often he had no wish to let out anything that was in him, nor did he look for anything new to take in. Whatever thoughts and questions were in his mind carried on their own dialogues to which he paid little attention. The feeling of emptiness rushing towards something became a waiting stillness. from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, 1973
~ ~ ~ ~
Oh yes, I thought, feeling something good just around the corner of my mind: just be all the way in it and you're all right. from Turtle Diary, 1975
~ ~ ~ ~
...The grown-up is only a thin coat of chocolate over the hard nut of the child. Whatever you were as a kid, you still are when the chocolate gets licked off or scraped off. from Linger Awhile, 2006
~ ~ ~ ~
Could I be a turtle? Could I through an act of ecstasy swim unafraid and never lost, finding, finding? from Turtle Diary, 1975
~ ~ ~ ~
from The Mouse and His Child, 1967
~ ~ ~ ~
'Con este tango nacio el tango,' she
sang, 'y como un grito salio del sordido barrial buscando el cielo' (With
this tango the tango was born, and like a cry it left the squalid slum,
seeking the sky).' ... Klein had no Spanish, didn't know what the words
meant, but they seemed vitally important to him, seemed the very flame of
life in the darkness... from Angelica's Grotto, 1999
~ ~ ~ ~
I was waiting for something now and the
waiting was pleasant. I was waiting for the self inside me to come forward
to the boundaries from which it had long ago withdrawn. Life would be less
quiet and more dangerous, life is risky on the borders. ... from Turtle Diary, 1975
~ ~ ~ ~
'Sometimes there's good news when you
least expect it,' he said. from Come Dance With Me, 2005
~ ~ ~ ~
The world-child has been told that this is a world, ... and it believes it; it is the energy of this belief that binds the world together. The world-child holds in its mind the idea of every single thing: root and stone, tree and mountain, river and ocean and every living thing. The world-child holds in its mind the idea of woman and man, the idea of love. from The Medusa Frequency, 1987
~ ~ ~ ~
Fidelity is a matter of perception; nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart. In love or in terror or in loathing one responds to them with the true self; fidelity is not an act of the will: the soul is compelled by recognitions. Anyone who loves, anyone who perceives the other person fully can only be faithful, can never be unfaithful to the sea and the mountains and the death in that person, so pitiful and heroic is it to be a human being. from
The Medusa Frequency, 1987 ~ ~ ~ ~
'Who can know anybody?' said the bookshop owner. 'Every person is like thousands of books. New, reprinting, in stock, out of stock, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, rubbish. The lot. Different every day. One's lucky to be able to put his hand on the one that's wanted, let alone know it.' from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, 1973 |
I'd be delighted if the yellow sheets were 4qated further but there is no need
for them to wander on as I know they are in good hands where they are now. The
only thing I asked my students to do is to pose for a picture with their
yellow sheets and their copies of Kleinzeit, which they all did, and
I'd like to thank them once again for being game.
Happy Birthday, Russ, love and all the
best to all of you,
Yvonne x
~ ~ ~ ~
Yvonne's 2006 4qation
Dear Krakenistas
As I have been feeling a little melancholy and middle-aged lately, my SA4QE
quotes all had to do with time and they were left in places which reflected or
recorded the passing of time in one way or another. I invited my husband Dani
to come with me because he knows the best second-hand shops in town. There
were two on our way, in case the first one,
Brocki Land, a huge shop for
antiques, knick-knacks, junk and second-hand records and books in a former
basement car park didn't offer a suitable spot for 4qating. But it turned out
to be marvellous.
You enter by walking down the spiral driveway that once led down into the car park. There are two levels. On the upper one you can get candlesticks, scales, baskets, toys, golf clubs, tennis rackets, chess boards, vinyl records, video cassettes, cameras and kitchenware, gratings for your fireplace (if you have one) as well as furniture. To go further down, you follow the spiral driveway along picture frames, framed and unframed kitsch paintings hanging on the walls or standing on the floor and chairs of all kinds, light, heavy, made of wood or of metal. On the lower level, there are clothes, shoes, flower pots, demijohns, bottles, wine, water, sherry and schnapps glasses, silver cutlery, china crockery and books, countless shelves of books. I put the first quotation on a shelf with English books which were beckoning and evoking London and Russ at the same time. To be more precise, I placed the folded yellow sheet between a book on Westminster and another one on Russian Icons, in the gap left by a fascinating book titled Secrets of the Inner Mind: Journey Through the Mind and Body, which I bought.
|
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 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?"
from The Bat Tattoo |
After leaving Brocki Land, a place teeming with ghosts, we went on to Buecher Brocki, another second-hand bookshop, and even though I had already used up my quotation and had therefore nothing to "give" to the place, I made an amazing find - my own book on one of the shelves side by side with that of a friend who had published a dissertation on texts by early African-American women writers! I guess they were orphans from one of the many local bookshops which have had to close down recently. The books looked new and untouched, and of course I was grateful for this special Russmas Day coincidence and didn't fail to buy them, too.
Then we went into the heart of Zurich to leave a second quotation on a bench on one of the historically most interesting spots in Zurich, Lindenhof.
Roman ruins, medieval ramparts and the rubble of buildings from all the centuries since Zurich was first settled form an architectural palimpsest underneath a square planted with lime trees. In summer, when their blossoms perfume the air, it's one of the loveliest places in town to spend an evening talking to friends, drinking a bottle of wine, eating food from a takeaway place and looking at the old town and the Grossmunster on the far-side bank of the River Limmat in the twilight. Even now that Zurich is chilly and foggy and utterly uninviting, Lindenhof is the place which preserves flavours and smells of other times attainable only through the mind as well as stories and secrets told long ago in the dusk.
There are flavours that one tastes not with the mouth but with the mind.
from Linger Awhile
The last quotation found its place at the foot of Sankt Peter, the church whose spire contains the clock with the largest face in Europe.
|
The moment will not stay. We seek out places where the sorrow will be lessened, places where there is heart's ease in the sorrow, heart's comfort amidst the pain. For good or ill the moment will not stay. How fast the world flees in all directions from us! (...) We must find in ourselves the shapes of letting go because we're not free to become what we're going to be next until we let go of what we are now.
from Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road (The Moment under the Moment) |
You can't possibly ignore the passing of time there, the huge clock face is too imposing. It would be nice to think that Goethe was inspired by it to create in Faust a restless character to whom it is forbidden to linger in a place, for the clock in fact already told the time in 1775, when the German poet visited Zurich and stayed with Lavater, whose vicarage was right opposite the church. The clock was made by Hans Luterer in 1538.
Whether or not it influenced Goethe, it certainly did its duty with me and, after remembering the Some Poasyum and meeting Russ last year, Dani and I put the yellow A4 sheet on a low wall, placed a stone on it so the icy north wind couldn't carry it away and then we left the place, looking forward to a nice hot cup of chocolate at home.
Love and best wishes to all of you, and the very best of best wishes to Russ,
Yvonne x
~ ~ ~ ~
Yvonne's 2005 4qation
I've only been able to do a little home 4Qating today
and have taped this quote on the wall next to my reproduction of the Vermeer
girl behind my desk:
|
I know now how fragile are the walls that keep out chaos – there are many weak spots and there will always be something or someone waiting to break in. Maybe I can reinforce those weak spots with the rock I'm leaving behind as I carve myself out and shape my destiny.
from Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer (1998) |
Best wishes from Zürich - happy 80th birthday, Russ!
Yvonne x
~ ~ ~ ~
Yvonne's 2004 Quotes
Dear Russ, dear Krakenistas,
On this year's SA4QE day, the question which directed my choice of quotations
and locations was how to turn the lead of our everyday life into gold and to
give new juice to a world getting drier all the time. My personal answer is
pretty obvious of course: read Russell Hoban and 4qate. But since the word
needs to be spread to become generally useful, I started by hanging up a
quotation from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz at a tram stop
called "Löwenplatz", a square so mundane, busy and evidently lionless that it
cried out for a magical infusion.
| For him there were no maps, no places, no time. Beneath his tread the round earth rolled, the wheel turned, bearing him 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. |
(The Lion of Boaz-Jachin
and Jachin-Boaz, 1973)
My second quotation was from Fremder. I hung it
up at "Stauffacher", a place where the church of St. Jakob is being renovated
at the moment and services are therefore held in a hut in front of the church.
I couldn't help responding to the symbolism of the situation. The hut in front
of the church stands for spirituality displaced to a cheap makeshift home,
waiting to be restored to its rightful place. But this can only happen if we
stop being as we are now.
| Can electrical impulses from the brain precipitate possibility? Leibniz says the world is as it is because God is as He is. But what if God is as He is because we are as we are? Then the world is as it is because we are as we are. |
(Fremder, 1996)
The third quotation, from Amaryllis Night and Day, went to a square with the fairy-tale name "Goldbrunnenplatz" (i.e. Gold Well Square), which doesn't even offer any ordinary frogs for princesses to kiss. Quite a hopless case as far as appearances go, but you never know, the quote might nevertheless raise someone's curiosity.
| People do it to each other all the time. The frog said he'd turn into a handsome prince if the princess kissed him but the princess said she'd rather have a talking frog. |
(Amaryllis Night and Day, 2001)
Number four, finally, was hung up at my second
workplace, Kantonsschule Riesbach, where the students are allowed to decorate
their lockers, which is something they obviously enjoy very much. A sign of
hope at last? I'd say yes, for creative students are definitely not on the way
to becoming monsters.
|
Goya wrote -- I think it was on the title-page of Los Caprichos -- 'The dream of Reason produces monsters'. I don't think that's how it is. I think it's when reason is not allowed to dream that it acts out its dreams while awake, and then it is that monsters are produced, in Goya's time and in ours. |
(Introduction to the
1977 Picador Edition of Household Tales by the Brothers Grimm,
reprinted in The Moment Under the Moment, 1992)
Four quotes for the fourth of February two thousand and four. It was a Hermetic day indeed.
Happy birthday Russ, and good wishes to you all.
Yvonne
~ ~ ~ ~
Yvonne's 2003 Quotes
Hello fellow SA4QE-yellow-paper droppers and Krakenites!
What admirable ideas you've all had for today: The lovely map of SA4QE locations and the Russagrams, the idea to put the yellow paper into a rucksack, or the one to send quotations to people randomly chosen! And what lovely quotes! Forgive the novice for being more modest at her first attempt; I promise to think of something more original for next year. Here's a report from my tour, located within a Bermuda triangle between my school, i.e. Kantonsschule Hohe Promenade, the English Department of the University of Zürich, and the ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, i.e. Polytechnic), where Russ gave a reading in 1983. I chose this area because within its boundaries, a lot of people will be able to understand the three quotations I prepared.
from THE LION OF BOAZ-JACHIN AND JACHIN-BOAZ
I tell you what I have paid years to learn: everything that is found is always lost again, and nothing that is found is ever lost again. Can you understand that?
I hung up the first photocopy of the quote at the entrance to the library of my school, for libraries are the very places to find and lose books and discover new authors. Moreover, there are computers for the students in a room nextdoor to the library so if anyone wanted to find out what SA4QE was, they would have access to the Internet right away (the links to Richard and Dave's websites were given at the bottom of each sheet of yellow A4 paper). The librarian was very interested in my action and asked me for copies of my other quotes. I thought that the interest stimulated at my current workplace was a very good omen: If you don't know how influential librarians can become, read the introduction to the Penguin edition of Michael Moore's Stupid White Men...
The second location for this quote was the library of the English Department. Unfortunately, the librarian was having her lunch break, so I couldn't recruit another accomplice. Still, I trust that a lot of people will notice the strange yellow attractor hanging on the glass door.
Thirdly, I put this quote on the notice board next to the door of the lecture theatre of the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), where Russ gave his Zürich lecture in November 1983 and thus made it possible to be found and lost and found again. Normally, it's engineers, mathematicians or architects who attend lectures there; but thanks to Professor Brian Vickers's efforts, English literature of the best kind has been taught there as well all these years. The lecture theatres are new additions to the nineteenth century building; like cylinders from outer space they disrupt the strict symmetries of the old building, so that, in the belly of the ETH, you can get quite lost in a labyrinth of corridors and in-between floors. Moreover, the atmosphere is a bit like inside the crypt of an old cathedral. A very hermetic place indeed. Small wonder it was here that I once found Russ.
from TURTLE DIARY
... more and more I think that madness is the world's natural condition and to expect anything else is madness compounded. In the train derailment scene in King Kong the engine-driver could not believe his eyes when he saw Kong's face rising through the gap where he'd torn away the tracks but that was just another day in 1933. That trains mostly stay on rails, that the streets are mostly peaceful, that the square continues green and quiet below my window is more than I have any right to expect, and it happens every day.
After getting such a positive echo for my first quote in the school library, I became bolder. I went to the office of the deputy headmaster and asked permission to hang this quote on a column beside the staff room. And do you know what happened? Not only did he not frown, but he smiled and found the quotation great and a very good comment on the current situation of the world. I HAD ACTUALLY FOUND AN ALLY IN MY BOSS! He even advised me to get the piece of paper stamped by the secretary so that nobody would remove it from the column. YES!
The second place where I hung the quote was the daily events notice board of the English Department. As one of my former professors was passing me, he nodded and said, "A little subversive action won't do any harm". You bet!
from THE MEDUSA FREQUENCY
An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of a night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do.
For this quote I chose only one place, the door to the office of Professor Vickers at the ETH, i.e. the man who invited Russ to Zürich twenty years ago. The corridor in front of his office is separated from the dimly lit belly of the ETH by a pane, not by a solid wall, which gives the effect of looking at the window of a night train standing still. Planning nothing but to hang the quote on his door, I was quite surprised to meet Professor Vickers in person, a coincidence that quite befits this day. Next year it wouldn't have been possible anymore since he will retire in March. He told me to remember him to you, Russ, and he sends his best wishes.
I've also enclosed a picture of myself with a quote I hung up on my reproduction of the Vermeer girl on 4th February, i.e.,
from THE MEDUSA FREQUENCY
I could feel that something had happened, I could feel the Hermes of it, could feel myself on a night road to somewhere else. 'I have no name but the one you give me,' I said, 'no face but the one you see.'
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Russ, and best wishes to all,
Yvonne
~ ~ ~ ~
Ideas, Obsessions, Intertexts: A Nonlinear Approach to Russell Hoban's Fiction
by Yvonne Studer
Available on inter-library loan or from Amazon.de
