I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the 1992 movie The Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day-Lewis? It’s got one of my all-time favourite scenes in it, near the end where the heroic Uncas confronts the villainous Magua on the cliff-top – and loses. I find it particularly effective because there is almost no dialogue, the tragedy unfolding with only sound effects (mostly gunshots, echoing round the cliffs) and a marvellous folk tune grinding away underneath on a solo violin before the whole orchestra come in with the main theme, desperately sad.
In fact this combination of action and music got inside my head to such an extent that I did something I hardly ever do, and bought the soundtrack album (if you don’t know it see if you can find a sample online, it’s the track called “The Promontory”). But because I wanted it to remain special, I’ve been careful not to listen to it too often. (Bob Dylan’s stunning song about despair and death “Not Dark Yet” is the only other song I’ve treated with the same reverence.)
So imagine my feelings when I found that almost every street in Edinburgh has shops with loudspeakers positioned outside on the pavement, almost all of them playing this same tune over and over, usually with a pounding rock accompaniment. It’s everywhere and it’s inescapable and it drives me mad. And as I haven’t found anywhere nearby that sells axes, and I assume the authorities would frown at finding one in my carry-on luggage, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot I can do.
Meanwhile I’ve been listening to recording of Shakespeare’s comedies for a change while I knit of an evening, an hour or so at a time. (A good cast certainly brings the text to life, but the downside is no one seems to be able to act as well as I can in my head…) Anyway, I came upon this quote from Twelfth Night about an old song, a quote that’s probably familiar to you all:
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones
Do use to chant it: it is silly sooth,
And dallies with the innocence of love,
Like the old age.
Presumably they’re not weaving thread with, say, femurs here, or dinosaur fossils?
Definite progress this week, my theory being that you speed up as you near the end of a section (it feels, as Treebeard says in The Two Towers movie, “like going downhill”).
Progress continues to be slow this week, partly the result of actually having to work for a living, which is a bit of a shock. Many of the professional bodies in Scottish archives have been meeting this last week, and I had to attend them all, and give presentations to several of them into the bargain. (I was prepared to offer a Cadbury’s creme egg as a reward to anyone unlucky enough to have to listen to me four days in a row, like Captain Ahab offering a gold doubloon to the man who first spotted the white whale, but no one did.)
Anyway, the rows continue to accumulate under my needles, and in a week or two I’ll have to start thinking about dividing front and back. Though I did hit a low point when I discovered that I’d lost concentration at the start of a pattern row and had knit 4/purled 2, instead of knit 2/purl 2. And then made the same mistake again later in the same row after I’d unpicked it all. Sigh.
I tend to ricochet backwards and forwards between light and heavy fiction in my reading, and after an extended sojourn in Steven Erikson’s astonishingly violent fantasy universe I’ve gravitated to Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. It’s a sort of antidote to conspiracy theories like the Da Vinci Code, in which some publishers get so exasperated by the insane theories about the Templars, Rosicrucians, and the Holy Grail that are submitted to them they decide to compile them all into a master conspiracy theory as a joke – and then find out it really exists.
I used to have a rather naive view about creative artists; I suppose many of us do. So, I used to assume that someone who created works of art (novels, poems, operas) which express worthy and admirable sentiments must themselves be worthy and admirable people; or else they were hypocrites.
And yet, and yet. Does any of this matter? I think not, because in each case there is no reason to believe that their works of art were insincere. In other words, just because they also behaved in ways that we find repellent, it doesn’t devalue their ability to encapsulate the nobler aspirations of the human condition in a song, or poem, or music drama – which is what I find so admirable about them. It just means, to be cliched about it, they were human. In fact, I wonder if this isn’t the point? Maybe because they were fallible, they were all the more able to articulate what they aspired to. (After all, how many religious leaders who have attained enlightenment have written songs like “Help!” or “In My Life”? Not many, and I bet you can’t download them from iTunes.)
I’ve had plenty of time for this sort of thinking, as I’ve been on leave this week, enjoying the sunshine back in Somerset, reunited with my music collection, cleaning up cat vomit (on one occasion, after I’d stepped in it cold in bare feet the following morning) and catching up on the knitting. The back is finished and the shoulders and neck are each on holders of yarn from my previous gansey, so it’s a case of “haul away and sheet her home me boys” for the front.
I’m writing this on the day that the 68 year-old Bob Dylan’s 33rd studio album has reached number one in the album charts. Which seems significant somehow, though I’m blowed if I know what it means. (It’s also baffling, even accounting for the fact that you only have to sell three copies nowadays to get a number one album. I mean, who’s buying this stuff?) Even more bizarrely, the young whippersnappers (i.e., the under 30s) I’ve talked to at work can’t believe that I was only, what, 3 years old when “Blowin’ in the Wind” was written – they seem to think that once you get near 50 everyone old is somehow your contemporary.
So what have we learned so far? First of all, that the old knitters knew what they were doing, and were probably right not to attempt this version of the pattern; that one pattern row to two plain rows isn’t an easy one to keep track of without keeping careful records; and that, as a pattern, it’s not the most visually striking. No great surprises there, then.
Other news – I’m adjusting to the floaters (I just pretend I’m living through a Victorian London smog) and no longer assume that movement I keep seeing out of the corner of my eyes is rats, or the creature from Alien slowly uncoiling behind me. And there are still no computers at work, but I’ve found if I take my Mac laptop in to work it automatically connects to the wi-fi hot spot across the road, so progress of a sort.