The challenge is to understand the real meaning and worth of all that glisters, golden calf, golden bowl. But the line of Verwoert’s that tickles most here (a throwaway irreverent line, in parentheses) is the one about true irreverence always having love at its heart.
In Colette’s story, it’s apt that the pure/impure lover-and-giver crossing the city in the night, dead at the start of the story then brought to rich, luxuriant life by Colette choosing to tell it, is a ‘good comic actress of road companies’ (NB too, to tell is also a verb that means to count, particularly to count coins; that’s why bank tellers are called tellers). The comic form and concepts of anarchy, irreverence, luxury, rags-to-riches, are connected to concepts of generosity and transformation.
The resolving force of coincidence, the generosity in the workings of Dickens’s plots, comes straight down the line from Shakespeare’s comedies, backed by the source of Shakespeare’s most powerful forms of magic and coincidence in his late plays, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, plays that fuse category to defy category, where tragedy and comedy coexist, fight it out, resolve in forms of uncanny rebirth, findings of those who were lost and restorings of the dead to life, usually via a display of working artifice.
Shakespeare’s late plays love and exalt the poor, whose comic literary ethos, over the centuries, takes the form of sharing, inclusion, and hospitality, from the taking in and rescuing of the abandoned baby in The Winter’s Tale to the taking in and bringing up to lives of comic thievery of lost boys which forms the employment of the markedly much more comic creation of Fagin in Lionel Bart’s 1960s stage musical.
In Carol Reed’s 1968 film version of this musical, Fagin is played by Ron Moody as practically benign, a much more generous, much less threatening and doomed creation than Dickens’s original, in a London whose comic commoner ethos, so long as ‘nobody tries to be lah-de-dah or uppity,’ is that ‘there’s a cup o’ tea for all,’ a twentieth-century mockney first cousin to the cup o’ kindness Robert Burns proffers in Auld Lang Syne, the song where old friends, long parted, promise hospitality to each other infinitely. Auld Lang Syne is the closest thing to a worldwide ritual of well-wishing we have — a New Year song that holds the worth of the past and all kind hopes for the future in the exchange of hands. The word kindred and the word kind are related; the words for kindness and family have etymology in common.
‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us!’ That’s Burns too, in To a Louse, a satire addressed to a louse making its way across the bonnet of a lady in a church, a lady who thinks herself finer than she is, in a world where riches and rags are both a kind of fodder. Arguably some mischievous god heard Burns and granted this wish to our culture: blessed, we are, with the gifts of celebrity, surveillance, and reality tv. O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us to act like Chaplin, irreverent, anarchic, empathetic, the most world-famous and the richest by far of the comic actors of road companies. No stranger to poverty, he played it playfully, as a state in which real richness is having finesse, delicacy, and generosity when you have nothing else; typically, as David Robinson records in his critical biography, looking out of a window with his two small sons, Chaplin ‘would train a telescope on some far-off pedestrian’ and tell them, ’You see that man? He must be going home after a day’s work. Look at his gait, so slow, so tired. His head’s bent. Something’s on his mind. What could it be!’
This is part empathy, part thievery. Empathy, in art, is art’s part-exchange with us, its inclusivity, at once a kindness, a going beyond the self, and a pickpocketing of our responses, which is why giving and taking are bound up with the goods, with the gods, with respect, with deep-seated understanding about the complex cultural place where kindness, thievery, bartering, and gift-giving all meet, make their exchanges, and by exchange reveal real worth. We are what we give. ‘To give, it is a witty thing,’ Ovid says, via Christopher Marlowe’s translation of Elegies of Love. Actually Marlowe’s whole line is: ‘(Trust me) to give, it is a witty thing.’ Exchange is dialogue (and that includes the exchange between Ovid and Marlowe, the dialogue that the translation represents). But more — in this single line the verb to give is held between two opposing notions. Being a witty thing, giving is about knowledge, about knowing (these are some of the synonyms for wit). But before you even get to giving, something must be taken — on trust—and this is where the exchange becomes to do with an act of faith in something beyond you. (Trust me.)
2. Hello my darling, how are you? I hope you are very well, are you?
I sat up. I read that title over again.
Hello my darling, how are you? I hope you are very well, are you?
Below it, you had typed up the following, in a slightly smaller size of typeface like you did when you were quoting someone, and as if it were part of your talk.
I mean, seriously, what are the chances of you ever reading this essay? ha, essay happens to be one of the words I found in Chambers Dictionary when I looked up offer, next to the word attempt. Attempt, essay, offering. If you ARE reading these offerings, remember, they’re just attempts. You know I can’t do argument (apart from with you, I mean — we do have some really good arguments, I’m quite proud of some of them).
Anyway a minute ago you were in here trying to persuade me to write about Oliver the musical. See above. I’ve quoted Consider yourself and have riffed it in (in a critically really unproven way, may God forgive me) with Shakespeare and Burns especially for you, will that do?
One of the reasons I’m writing this is that I was rather harsh with you just now. I’m sorry.
It’s actually because you nearly caught me.
You don’t know. You think I’m in here working really hard and listening to Beethoven on the headphones, when I’m actually sitting looking online — Not looking up porn (though I have done, and it’s interesting to; an awful lot of take and not much give, not much edge, pretty standardized form, and, from what I can see, bloody well endless) — no, I’m watching a blonde girl singing and dancing in countless bright 60s film sets.
What — a sea-change? no, I’d never be able to get that much distance on my true character this late in life, no, it all started because I was thinking about Antigone, the girl from Sophocles’s Theban Plays who tried to bury her dead brother, but her dead brother had been declared a traitor, so her uncle the king, who’d ruled this burial against the law, condemned Antigone to death for breaking it, then decided he’d bury her alive instead, put her in a cave and wall up the mouth, a death that wouldn’t look quite so bad to the populace. I was trying to remember a quote, I can’t find it, I don’t know whether it’s in one of the Sophocles translations or Anouilh wrote it or Brecht or maybe it’s in Heaney’s version, or maybe I’ve even just made it up. But what I think I remember her saying is something like: being alive is nothing, it’s trivial, compared to all the not-being-alive we did before we were born and the not-being-alive we’ll do after we’re dead.