Durant & Bohemian cave artists

Once upon a time, 2009, I think it was, when I was still writing the fictions, I came up with a story for the origin of the 7 Dwarves. It fit into a poem thing, like a ballad or a really long story-song only fit for performance by Arlo Guthrie, you know? It was not long after that I found that I had been preceded in telling that story (not entirely the same, but close enough) by someone much more well known that I ever hope to want to be. (also, dead, so, yeah) Unintentionally derivative. There were feverish texts to a friend (it warranted that level of immediate attention) and finally it occurred to me that it is no shameful thing to have found a similar narrative question answerable in a similar way. Storytellers do not have the luxury of copyright on asking and answering narrative questions - we come and go, the stories last.

I read of young scholars consulting texts at random as part of a kind of prophetic parlor game with much the same sense of wonder at connection. It pleased me more than sherbet. I picked up the habit from Next Stop Wonderland, although it struck me as an entirely correct thing to do when I saw it happen in Career Girls, a movie I saw while I was trying 'dating' after my first divorce. The movie was delightful, even though the company was a bit, um, dull.

Prophecy bores me. I can never see the point of caring much how the story claims to end as eventually all books must be closed and life continues regardless. I am much more interested in the turning of the tides and the pages and all the wonderful things that get in the way while the writer is desperately trying to make an end viable or at least less contrived than the one she knows will win her an audience. Turning the pages of a book to wherever they will open allows me to delve quite briefly into something I may or may not want to pursue - it is how I decide which of two novels to purchase, whether I will commit to all of the poems in a collection or exactly how well decorated 5 or 10 minutes of my life will be in someone else's words.

All of my books thus far have one slight disadvantage: someone else wrote them or arranged them. There is this pervasive sense of order in things that gets a bit chafing. I see no reason not to discuss Egyptian philosophy and romantic capers from the 1970's in the same breath (provided a random and suspect connection). As I haven't got around to making myself a book of my own words (that I'm willing to flip through at will without the aid of tequila and King Arthur - i.e. journals don't count), I've turned one of my blank books into a quotation and bibliography collection.

This is not an academic sort of thing; there is no consistent style of bibliography and the passages I've written down are not the stuff of papers or presentations, they just make me happy.

Also, I can open the book almost (as it is not yet full) anywhere and read something like this:
Bogin, Meg. "The Women Troubadours: An Introduction to the Women Poets of the 12th-century Provence and a Collection of their Poems." WW Norton & Co. 1980 - Someone wrote this book, and it can be bought and read. What joy!

I've begun Volume I of Durant's The Story of Civilization and while there are 80 very meaningful years between him and me, I get to find and save little (some less little than others) nuggets for future random inspiration.

The whole interpretation of history as progress falters when we consider that these statues, bas-reliefs and paintings, numerous though they are, may be but an infinitesimal fraction of the art that expressed or adorned the life of primeval man. What remains is found in caves, where the elements were in some measure kept at bay; it does not follow that pre-historic men were artists only when they were in caves. They may have carved as sedulously and ubiquitously as the Japanese, and may have fashioned statuary as abundantly as the Greeks; they may have painted not only the rock in their caverns, but textiles, wood, everything - not excepting themselves. They may have created masterpieces far superior to the fragments that survive. In one grotto a tube was discovered, made from the bones of a reindeer, and filled with pigment*; in another a stone palette was picked up still thick with red ochre paint despite the transit of two hundred centuries**. Apparently the arts were highly developed and widely practised eighteen thousand years ago. Perhaps there was a class of professional artists among paleolithic men; perhaps there were Bohemians starving in the less respectable caves, denouncing the commercial bourgeoisie, plotting the death of academies and forging antiques. (97-98)

 * see page 17
** see page 45

Open Library: I love that you exist.

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Be well, beloveds.
I have more date with learning.