More on proprioception

More from John Jerome's book, Stone Work, on the subject of proprioception. Page 148 

Wading on through fallen leaves, I make one more small mental obeisance to proprioception, to the entire sensory universe that gives me a self to take out for walks like this. My head tells me this is true – that the sense are where the self comes from – but it is a touch too psychological, and therefore fuzzy, for my tastes. I’m more comfortable with the harder edges of physiology and physics. Ah, that’s it: proprioception is where physics and physiology come together. That must be why it fascinates me so. It’s the tool that helps you get the physics right, the means by which you get the pleasure out of physics. It is the internal rigging that locates the body in time and space, the three-dimensional internal map of the body that redraws itself, realigns itself, with every move you make.

I’ve been thinking and writing about proprioception for ten years now, in one forum or another, and keep failing to get its wonders adequately set down, the impossible riches brought to us in those mysterious moments when information turns into experience. Can’t find a way to say it hard enough, can’t sing that clear, clean line.

My frustration reminds me of Lewis Thomas’s essay ‘On Embryology’ in The Medusa and the Snail. He is speaking of the process that at some point switches on a single cell and allows it to grow into the brain. ‘No one has the ghost of an idea how this works,’ he says, ‘and nothing else in life can ever be so puzzling. If anyone does succeed in explaining it, within my lifetime, I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them, and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another, around the whole sky, until all my money runs out.’

From an interview with Richard Wilbur

This year I managed to memorise one of Richard Wilbur's longer poems, Lying. Not only one of his longer poems, but also the one to which his wife at first responded, “at last you’ve written a poem that’s unintelligible from beginning to end." She came to change her mind, and though I must admit I still don't understand all of it, it became clearer as I learned it. 

Here are a couple of paragraphs from a 1977 interview with Wilbur, who died in October this year [2017]

INTERVIEWER

How do you compose your poems? Do you write in long hand or on the typewriter? Do you write in bursts or long stretches, quickly or laboriously?

WILBUR

With pencil and paper and laboriously, very slowly on the whole. I do envy people who can compose on the typewriter, though I reject as preposterous Charles Olson's ideas about the relation of the typewriter to poetic form. I don't approach the typewriter until the thing is completely done, and whatever margins the typewriter might offer have nothing to do with the form of a poem as I conceive it. I write poems line by line, very slowly; I sometimes scribble alternative words in the margins rather densely, but I don't go forward with anything unless I am fairly satisfied that what I have set down sounds printable, sayable. I proceed as Dylan Thomas once told me he proceeded—it is a matter of going to one's study, or to the chair in the sun, and starting a new sheet of paper. On it you put what you've already got of a poem you are trying to write. Then you sit and stare at it, hoping that the impetus of writing out the lines that you already have will get you a few lines farther before the day is done. I often don't write more than a couple of lines in a day of, let's say, six hours of staring at the sheet of paper. Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.

INTERVIEWER

What is it that gets you started on a poem? Is it an idea, an image, a rhythm, or something else?

WILBUR

It seems to me that there has to be a sudden, confident sense that there is an exploitable and interesting relationship between something perceived out there and something in the way of incipient meaning within you. And what you see out there has to be seen freshly, or the process is not going to be provoked. Noting a likeness or resemblance between two things in nature can provide this freshness, but I think there must be more. For example, to perceive that the behavior of certain tree leaves is like the behavior of birds' wings is not, so far as I am concerned, enough to justify the sharpening of the pencil. There has to be a feeling that some kind of idea is implicit within that resemblance. It is strange how confident one can be about this. I always detest it when artists and writers marvel at their own creativity, but I think this is a very strange thing that most practiced artists would have in common, the certainty that accompanies these initial, provocative impressions. I am almost always right in feeling that there is a poem in something if it hits me hard enough. You can spoil your material, of course, but that doesn't mean the original feeling was false.

Quiz and a couple of movies

Last night my wife and I went to a fundraising quiz at one of the local taverns.   Nice and warm inside, but a bit of a shock to come outside and find a skiff of snow on the ground.  There'd been snow forecast, but nine times out of ten it doesn't arrive.  Anyway, it wasn't anything much and we drove home without incident.  This morning there was a bit more snow on the ground, but still not enough to stop my intrepid wife from driving part of the way to work and then walking the rest.  


I haven't been to many quiz nights like this: it was a combination of quiz questions (the winning team got a prize, of course) and endless raffles, and another thing where you got a celebrity name (I was Pavarotti) and if you're name was called you went up and got a prize.  They had prizes galore - obviously firms are happy to donate to these sorts of things, though they must get called on constantly for support.  


Pubs are noisy places, with the televisions going up on the TV mounts on the walls, and the filling of glasses at the bar, and the general chatter (including from those who aren't participating in the quiz night), and the restaurant area making its usual sorts of noises. 


We did quite well, all up, though we didn't get placed.  We needed to do better than our top score in a section, which was only eight.  I think we got down to five points in another section.  The sports questions were the worst, but a bunch of answers beginning with S restored our confidence.  And it turned out we had a 'rabid royalist' in our group (according to her friend) so she helped with the section on the monarchy.  


On Monday night my wife and I caught up on the film, Precious.  She'd been wanting to see it for some time, and certainly it was worth seeing, if only for the performances alone. Gabourey Sidibe is a revelation in the lead role, and Mo'Nique, who's apparently tended to play comic roles in the past, is a nightmare as the abusive and self-centred mother.  Mariah Carey also eschews her star presence and appears in a few scenes as the social worker.  Great film, though it was sometimes difficult to pick up on what the younger actors were saying because of their individual 'dialects.'  


We went to see the movie version of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, the other day, too.  Delightful movie, though I think it takes some liberties with the storyline as well as casting Kristin Scott Thomas as the PR person - this was a male character in the original.  However, Thomas does a great job with it, scary as hell, and plainly awful as a person.   The book's telling of the story through diary entries, emails and other notes is lost to a great extent - although Skype replaces some of the communications, and there are emails written at various points, with the text running over the screen.  I think the movie also changes the 'love story' between the two main characters.  It's several years since I read it, but I noted on this blog at the time "the romance aspect is quietly handled, and there’s no shattering of marriages or sudden changes of direction for the characters," something that isn't quite like the movie, where the two main characters obviously go off into the sunset with each other at the end, leaving the uppity wife and the returned soldier on the sidelines.   I'll have to check the book out again sometime and see how it deals with this.  


However the movie stands on its own feet quite comfortably, and retains at least one of the most delightfully funny lines from the book.  Fred, the main character, has had a bit of an argument with his so-superior wife, who always expects everything to be on her terms.  “The rest of the evening was a bit of a frost, but when we went to bed, I think Mary must have felt a little guilty about the way she had changed her plans. Suffice to say, my new Marks & Spencer pyjamas were not required for the early part of the night. A relatively rare event in our marriage of late. Afterwards Mary said, ‘There now, darling, that should keep you going for a bit.’” (Page 30)


Ewan McGregor is great in the main role.  He fits it like a glove, and of course, rolls his accent around the lines with great enjoyment.  McGregor has sometimes seemed out of 'fit' with his film roles, such as the young Obi Wan Kenobi, or in Moulin Rouge or in a sci-fi the name of which I can't remember at present.  But here everything works, and it's a joy to see. 

Downton Abbey

Much and all as I enjoy Downton Abbey - we're about half way through the second series here - I have to say that last night's episode just about took the cake for draining the last bit of sentimentality from the situations.   Mr Bates and Anna were reunited - in a manner of speaking - and had a little love scene out in the half-dark of one of the many yards at Downton, but much more over the top was the ongoing on/off relationship of Lady Mary and her cousin Matthew Crawley. 

Mary, who's wonderfully played by Michelle Dockery (I love the way she brings out the sardonic in her lines, in that deep mezzo voice) is constantly torn between deciding to marry Matthew or marry some other bloke (we know this other bloke is no good, but Mary, who also knows this, hasn't yet been able to get past that problem).   At first she was having to marry Matthew in order to keep Downton in the family.  Then when she fell in love with him, he'd fallen out of love with her - or given up on her out of frustration; I can't remember now.  Anyway, he's not only gone and got himself a fiancee (who's so wispy that she looks as though she'll float away before the series finishes) he's also over in France fighting the Bosch (along with William, the rather doughty young footman who's proposed to Daisy, the rather dopey young kitchenmaid - she's accepted, but not really - it's fearfully complicated).

So of course Matthew and William go missing in France.  Mary, who's practically the last to hear this piece of news, nearly faints at the prospect of him possibly being dead, but trouper that she is, she goes ahead and sings (with the sister she's invariably at odds with accompanying her, which gives her the chance to offer yet another sardonic remark) to the soldiers who are recuperating in the Abbey and causing their own havoc.

Right in the middle of the song, of course, who should turn up but Matthew and William.   And Matthew manages to join in the song (with a rather dubious voice - was he dubbed?), and Mary is beside herself, but not for nothing has she been trained in the art of stoicism, and she manages somehow to contain herself.  Just.

Meanwhile, the increasingly nasty Thomas (we felt marginally sorry for him early in the second series, but it didn't last long) and O'Brien - who caused her own bit of havoc in the last episode of the first series, but seems to have had a bit of a change of heart - are conniving in their usual fashion, and dropping hints of nastiness to come.   But the curious thing is that O'Brien doesn't seem quite to know her own mind any more.  Having Thomas repeatedly saying: You've changed your tune doesn't help.  It just points up the degree to which O'Brien seems to be heading for good one minute and heading for disaster the next.   And boy, can she put a damper on things.  If there's any chance of offering the put-down, she'll take it.   Why is she such an enjoyable character, you have to wonder?   Keeps us on our toes, I suppose.

I think Downton Abbey is tosh, some to the time, but the assembled cast is so capable, and so artful, that we skip over the tosh and just enjoy the way they delineate these characters.   All thirty or forty of them...

Easy Virtue

This makes the 1100th post on this blog. Doesn't seem that long since I was looking at a 1000.

Anyway, went to see Easy Virtue tonight, after having had it recommended by one of my work colleagues today. I don't know enough about Noel Coward's original play to work out what belongs to the original script and what doesn't, but certainly there are some wonderful lines. (I'm getting a copy out of the library to have a look.)

The cast are uniformly superb, and Jessica Biel, (someone I don't remember seeing before), is a match for all of them as the Outsider in the family. Colin Frith plays someone who is pretty much dead in his soul, which suits him well, as that seems to be the role he likes to play most of the time, and Kristin Scott Thomas as Biel's mother-in-law pours absolute venom with every line and look. Each and every smaller part is filled with a top-notch character actor, though perhaps Kris Marshall, as Furber the butler steals any thunder that's left over.

Fabulous stately homes play an important part, and the countryside looks terrific, thanks to Martin Kenzie. And then there's the 20s music, flitting in and out of the character's mouths and onto the soundtrack seamlessly.

What more to say about it? The story leaves all sorts of corners open at the end, even though the finale is satisfactory, and you have to wonder what a sequel might possibly bring. Death or life for those of the family who are left? Thoroughly enjoyable.