Two lumps or three ?

Another mention-loop .

Last night, zapping the TV before going to bed, I was struck sleepless by a stage production of The Messiah from 2009 in Vienna, shown now on the German 3Sat channel. I am neither prone to sleeplessness, nor at all partial to Baroque music. In fact, for the last 10 years I haven't listened to music at all. I find it intolerable because it distracts my thinking.

Anyhoo, there was this modernist scenery on a giant almost-empty stage which had separately revolving sections for scene changes - you know the kind of thing I mean, art imitating life. There were a couple of soloists and a group of choir-folks, all in contemporary dress, participating in a plot of marital despair and hope analogized on the oratorio text. (This itself consists of passages from the Bible, I now discover.) The musical sections had been reordered to suit the plot.

So, one naturally thinks "O my god" as the thumb edges toward the off-switch on the remote. BUT - the businessman who turns out to be Christ and the husband (as a cast member apparently a dancer, who doesn't say a word) was standing there glancing repeatedly at his watch, straightening his suit lapels and looking very unhappy. He was cute in a stressful kind of way, and there was another guy in a suit sitting on the ground in the shadows with his back to the wall, who also looked promising. So I thought: "let's look at decorative guys a bit longer".

The guy on the ground gets up, eases over to Christ and starts singing. A countertenor ! Singing his part at an exquisitely slow tempo ! Every syllable, every note made me shiver - and countertenors are certainly not my thing. It was almost unbearably beautiful. If he had been a book, I would have had to shut it to avoid being overwhelmed - as I have had to do occasionally with books chock-full of fabulous ideas, for instance Luhmann's. As for decorative and promising - when the guy you had your eye on suddenly spreads his wings and is revealed as an archangel, sordid intentions tend to give way to wondering whether you should get out grandma's best tea service.

The entire oratorio was performed in this pensive, penetrating slow-motion. The "Halleluja Chorus" was sung quietly, respectfully, hopefully by the choir members sitting in rows of chairs at the funeral of Christ. It was not sung in the loud, triumphant, buzz-off-O-ye-of-little-faith fashion we know so well.

I found a review of this production that sums it up well:

The musical structure differs only slightly from Handel’s operas, with the exception of the central role played by the chorus (which is typical of oratorium). The work can be seen as a group of the faithful talking to themselves in a struggle to find solace in faith. Their dismay at their own entanglement in sin is offset with their assuring themselves that they have been promised salvation by the saviour. The point of reference of this hope is the fear of death. When performed in concert halls the work can easily be reduced to a devotional and edifying solemnity, bereft of real content. But played out on stage, the scenes portray specific situations dealing with the circumstance that the world is yet to be saved. The Messiah succeeds as a theatrical production.

The mention loop began to form 3 days ago when I picked up a paperback edition of Stefan Zweig's little book of essays Sternstunden der Menschheit from the steps of the small theater down the road from me, where people deposit books that they think they don't want anymore. The second essay, Georg Friedrich Händels Auferstehung (G.F.H.'s Resurrection), was about the composition of the Messiah. Y'all read it for Händel as a man of sorrow, and acquainted with grief.

All shall be well

Here is another mention loop.

After all the nerve-wracking business of "Language Hat: The Movie" and "Hat Audio: Barchester Towers", I thought of mailing Crown an encouraging word. The phrase "all shall be well, and all shall be well" occurred to me. Where did it come from? Ah, Julian of Norwich (beware the electronic harmonium in your ears when the page has loaded), a 14th century English mystic. A woman called Julian?! But wait: "Little is known of her life aside from her writings. Even her name is uncertain, the name 'Julian' coming from the Church of St Julian in Norwich, where she was an anchoress". I found the phrase in the Revelations of Divine Love:

It is sooth [95] that sin is cause of all this pain; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner [of] thing shall be well.

[95] i.e. truth, an actual reality. See lxxxii.

I wondered about this gloss on sooth as "actual reality", because of soothfastly, For I saw soothly in our Lord's teaching etc. elsewhere in the text. [Mental note: why does truth = "actual reality" seem crazy to me? Because I think of truth exclusively as contrasted with falsity, i.e. as belonging to propositional logic. That other truth, being contrasted with illusion, I call "reality". Oops - I'm smack-dab in the middle of Begriffsgeschichte].

So, I checked the OED. Under "say", at 11 a., I found "sooth to say" as expected. Then my eye caught this at 11b. "not to say", a loop-back to Barchester Towers:

Trollope Barchester T. xliv, ‘Am not I [growing old], my dear?’ ‘No, papa, not old—not to say old’.

Jigsawing on the high seas

I've started rereading Mansfield Park with a view to hatcasting it, as just suggested by Crown, or perhaps doing something entirely different. Already towards the end of Chapter 2, I encountered the very passage about jigsaw puzzles that was referred to in a recent TLS review of Margaret Drabble's new book The Pattern in the Carpet (see below for an excerpt from the review). Last week I listed Drabble among the novelists I had read in the 70's.

I experience such mention-loops frequently, in my philosophy and sociology readings as well. In some cases, I have surmised that my activities and interests must partly overlap those of other people, in some cloudy network of association and cross-reference involving certain publications and the internet. They're not just coincidences, but nor do they add up to a Zeitgeist. More like a gang of Caspar-the-ghosts.

Yet the temporal proximity of these semi-events is strange, when they come to my attention. It's not surprising, for instance, that I read Austen novels long ago, and that many other people have read them too, and that someone mentions one of her novels today. That's merely due to a certain type of shared cultural background. What surprises me is that a particular detail in a particular novel of Austen crops up within a short space of time in contexts that have nothing to do with each other.

In view of the enormous quantity of stuff "mentioned" in the internet, and of the fact that I am not a culture-vulture, and read seemingly quite disparate things in a disorganized way - what could explain these mention-loops? Perhaps it's a kind of "statistical observation defect" on my part, as I think it's called. Precisely because I can't really organize the enormous quantity of stuff that goes through my head, I clutch at coincidences. Thus "primed" to see coincidences, I then see them everywhere. It's the kind of thing that leads some people to a belief in telepathy, or to paranoia.

It may just be a way of clinging to the mast as my ship tosses on the high seas of words. Order out of noise.

The review of Drabble's book starts in this way:

Virginia Woolf once used the idea of patchwork to describe biography, an art which tacks together pieces of stuff with torn edges. Margaret Drabble, instead, chooses the jigsaw puzzle as the controlling metaphor for her new memoir. This book, she tells us, was originally intended as a “harmless” jeu d’esprit on the history of the jigsaw; personal material began to creep in; but then jigsaws reasserted themselves, pushing the autobiographical elements to the edges of the frame. The result is a generically indeterminate work of covert sophistication – “I am not sure what it is”, writes Drabble with deceptive artlessness – whose meandering surface hints at personal depths often too painful to apprehend directly.

The phrase “jigsaw puzzle” was not coined until the late nineteenth century – from the narrow-bladed tool known as a jigsaw, originally designed for cutting fretwork, and fitted to a treadle in the 1870s, allowing for the easier production of the puzzles. The earliest examples, dating from the 1760s, had smooth, rather than interlocking, edges, and were educational aids designed to teach geography. When one of the Bertram sisters ridicules Fanny Price in Mansfield Park for being unable to “put the map of Europe together”, she is referring to just such a puzzle. It is not surprising that the impoverished Price family could not afford one, as the cost of these magnificent “dissected maps” tended to confine their use to upper-class households; they were also considered helpful for teaching young royals about world domination.

One of the earliest jigsaw manufacturers also produced silk kerchiefs printed with maps. Other novelty hankies soon followed – presumably the Chatterton one was for weeping into – and once it was realized that any image could be broken up and reassembled, the scope of the jigsaw itself expanded indefinitely, eventually encompassing, as it does today, images from high art (the Jackson Pollock Drabble mentions sounds particularly terrifying to do)