A Literary Archaeologist at work:
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-custodian-of-forgotten-books?mbid=social_twitter
Been wondering what to hang 'the work' I want to create on. I think I'm probably a sculptor, not a writer - I need a framework, then I hang the words onto it. Looking around the Prado Museum in Madrid the idea of a triptych struck me:
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| Hieronymus Bosch, Triptych of the Epiphany, c. 1495, oil on panel. Museo nacional del Prado, Madrid |
So you could have;
'Panel/Voice 1': the epic
'Panel/Voice 2': the science
'Panel/Voice 3': some synaesthetic iteration
'A performance' could then consist of samples taken according to some formula (perhaps a data-mash) from all of the three 'panels' and mixed anew each time. Each performance would then be different.
The triptych concept also lends itself admirably to a gallery or other space installation: one panel runs 'a film', one runs the words (as words), the third does something else. Anyway, 'a circle of three' is always nice: inferno/purgatorio/paradiso; the three Norns etc.
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| Goya - the Three Norns - Prado |
'The Epic' requires a protagonist; it needs to be written in the first person. I'm getting a Loki-figure.
The Norse Loki is a trickster-god, a shape-shifter, he is eventually bound by the gods with the entrails of one of his own sons. So we've got trickery/cruelty/wyrd. In Loki we have the wily, amoral tragedian. Mix him with African trickster culture:
It is generally believed that enslaved persons did not share with prying researchers the tales containing human characters because the protagonists were primarily tricksters, and the tales showcased actions that allowed those tricksters to get the best of their so-called masters. In some of these instances, as Lawrence W. Levine notes, perhaps the actions of the characters did indeed reflect the actions of those enslaved.
The records left by nineteenth-century observers of slavery and by the masters themselves indicate that a significant number of slaves lied, cheated, stole, feigned illness, loafed, pretended to misunderstand the orders they were given, put rocks in the bottom of their cotton baskets in order to meet their quota, broke their tools, burned their masters’ property, mutilated themselves in order to escape work, took indifferent care of the crops they were cultivating, and mistreated the livestock placed in their care to the extent that masters often felt it necessary to use the less efficient mules rather than horses since the former could better withstand the brutal treatment of the slaves.
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1865-1917/essays/trickster.htm
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| "The children of Loki" (1920) by Willy Pogany |
Ralph Hoyte