News from a country not yet visited.

Another quote from The Narnian by Alan Jacobs, page 314. These are C S Lewis's words. They were read  at Kenneth Tynan's funeral. 

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things  - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard; news from a country we have never yet visited. 

At risk of adding to Lewis's excellent words, this should encourage us that what we write is always more than we know. 

Toon

While we were in Auckland over the last couple of weeks, we frequently noted trees with strongly pink leaves scattered around the city.  They were quite striking, and stood out wherever we saw them.

By chance I met a lady at the zoo - where there were several of these trees - and, since apparently she knew something about trees, I asked her if she knew what the name of these trees were.  She said she thought they were called a Chinese Toom Tree.  I may have misheard her, because in fact they're called Chinese Toon Trees.  She made the interesting comment that while the trees are striking when they're pink, they're almost unnoticeable once the pinkness goes, and they revert to a much more common green.

Seemingly these trees are well-known in many parts of the world, and quite apart from their colour, their wood is useful for furniture, and their leaves for medicinal purposes.


Curiously, neither of the Wikipedia articles I looked at mentioned their wonderful colouring. Yet that seems to me to be their greatest feature. Obviously those who wrote the articles thought in terms of practical uses. I tend to think, as I so often do, in the purely un-useful: therefore it's the appeal to the eye that I found most interesting.

I don't know whether they grow here in Dunedin, but if they do, I'd love to have one!

Heaven

Boughton says he has more ideas about heaven every day. He said, 'Mainly I just think about the splendours of the world and multiply by two. I'd multiply by ten or twelve if I had the energy. But two is much more than sufficient for my purposes. ' So he's just sitting there multiplying the feel of the wind by two, muliplying the smell of the grass by two. 'I remember when we put that old wagon on the courthouse roof,' he said. 'Seems to me the stars were brighter in those days. Twice as bright.'

From Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, page 147 Picador edition 2007

Alexander McCall Smith II

What of other lies - lies which did not necessarily make us act to our disadvantage, nor took anything from us, but which just misled us? Why should we be hurt by them?

It is all because of trust, she decided. We trusted others to tell us the truth and were let down by their failure to do so. We were hoodwinked, shown to be credulous, which is all about loss of face. And then she decided that it was nothing to do with trust, or pride. It was something to do with the moral value of things as they really were. Truth was built into the world; it informed the laws of physics; truth was the world. And if we lied about something, we disrupted, destabilized that essential truth; a lie was wrong simply because it was that which was not. A lie was contra naturam. Truth was beauty, beauty truth. But was Keats right about that? If truth and beauty were one and the same thing, then why have two differnet terms to describe it? Ideas expressed in poetry could be beguiling, but philosophically misleading, even vacuous, like the rhetoric of politicans who uttered the most beautiful-sounding platitudes about scraps of dreams, scraps of ideas.

Alexander McCall Smith in full philosophical flight - while wearing Isabel Dalhousie's contact lenses - in chapter 11 of The Comfort of Saturdays.

Arundhati Roy

Roy purposely throws out the split infinitive...but says a good deal in the process:

The only dream worth having ... is to dream that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead ... To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or to complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

- Arundhati Roy
From her book, The Algebra of Infinite Justice

Now for athlete's hands

It’s difficult to resist coming back to the topic of athlete’s foot/fingers/hands even though the focus of this blog is supposed to be the arts rather than the sporting world. Still, if one can’t be a bit random at times in terms of topics on a blog entitled Random Notes, what’s the point of having such a blog? And, after all, searches for athlete’s foot/fingers/hands are very common; whereas searches for other topics on my blog aren’t quite so frequent.
So, onto the gross part: as a result of checking out the searches for athlete’s foot/fingers/hands I discovered an article on ‘why athletes pee on their hands.’ O…k….
Seemingly it’s a waste of time for them to do so, so it’s a bit of a superstition, and the writer of the article Why Athletes Pee on Their Hands explains why. Urine, rather than toughening the hands, actually softens the skin, since it’s a form of moisturiser. One lives and learns. However, I won’t offer that usual advice: Don’t try this at home. Try it - it certainly won’t hurt you. Just make sure you clean up after you!
Another site notes that, ‘One of our most cherished honours is to have become the preferred destination for care of the professional athlete’s hand and wrist.’ When I wrote my original tongue-in-cheek post I hadn’t given the care of athlete’s hands the slightest thought; while the fingers had come into the picture, the hands hadn't. And there’s no doubt athlete’s hands suffer enormously, taking a huge amount of strain. This applies especially to those who toss themselves around by the hands on athletic horses or those uneven bars. The strain on the hands must be enormous. (I was watching some young people doing just this on telly, on the weekend.)
Yet another good reason why people should stick to music and forget sport. If you’re going to have some form of RSI, then far better to have got it in the pursuit of beauty.