Friday, June 22, 2012
Minor
Keys No. 12
Some lines of poetry guide you through
life. Believers may find them in the Koran, the Bible or the Vedas but for me
the distillation of meaning that a poet achieves occasionally is
inextinguishable, burning like pure sulphur on water. Here is a quote from one
of Rilke’s poems about The Unicorn.
O this is the animal that does not exist,
But they didn't know that, and dared nevertheless
To love it...and because they loved it, it came to
be a...pure creature.
They always left a space for it,
and in that space, clear and set aside,
it lightly raised its head, and hardly needed to be.
But they didn't know that, and dared nevertheless
To love it...and because they loved it, it came to
be a...pure creature.
They always left a space for it,
and in that space, clear and set aside,
it lightly raised its head, and hardly needed to be.
Why do I find it so
powerful? It is an emblem of the imagination. I wrote in a recent tweet, “Reality is limited only by a lack of
imagination” (@profjacksanger). Literature is an outlet for boundless
thought as in all the arts, including film – Tarkovsky’s Stalker comes to mind as having similar power in fuelling my own imaginative
output. The key for me in the Rilke lines is that the artist creates what was
not there and it becomes ethereally extant, a new reality for those who see,
touch, read it, affecting their lives forever, in some way small or big.
Creating the other
world of Azimuth allowed me to
construct a space where I and my readers could play. All the elements of life
that are hard to fathom – death, love, war, existence – could be explored,
shaped, remodelled, dissected and in such a way that we become one step closer
to understanding the nature of our living reality. But lightly, with amusement
and tolerance for how patched up and imperfect we all are as human beings.
A minor character that
makes just one appearance in Azimuth: the Second Journey, is the assistant
librarian. He is introduced thus:
Where
were the vibrations from above made by slippered feet or the movement of
furniture? Even though it was just daybreak there should have been much servant
activity. Then he caught the sound of someone coming down the circular stairs.
He was unnerved but fought off the desire to hide and sat facing the bottom of
the staircase where three steps were visible. First a pair of red slippers and
then the hem of a robe became visible until finally his assistant turned the
bend.
His story (beyond the
pages of Azimuth) is a familiar one.
He was born into a family which for generations had been literate. Not
scholars, you understand, but the kind you still see today in countries where
education is sparse and who sit at desks with typewriters in village squares
preparing documents for their illiterate fellows so that they might navigate
the imposing tyranny of a country’s bureaucracy. Apart from an arranged
marriage and the rare day when he is allowed to see his wife, the assistant
librarian’s whole world is encompassed by the circular walls of the royal
library, his vitality sucked from him by the shelves of dry parchment and arid
tomes. He has none of the gifts of the royal historian, being, essentially, a
trained orderer, tidier, cataloguer, categoriser of the artefacts that are
collected for the royal library. He reads enough to place them where they can
be found again but little more. There is too much to be done and his existence
does not allow for the self-advancement of his mind. Thus he lives and dies -
and it would be hard for anyone, no matter how much s/he believes in the value
to humanity of every individual’s life, to make a case for the assistant
librarian’s as offering anything to the common good.
(Azimuth by Jack Sanger also in Kindle
books at Amazon)
All works by this author (and aka Eric le Sange) at www.chronometerpublications.me
Labels: Writing. Minor characters. Back story of the assistant librarian.
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