Why teenagers shouldn't necessarily be encouraged to write!

 When I was in the 6th form, a school friend and I spent some time trying to write a play. This was in the mid-1960s, the heyday of the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd”, led by the great Samuel Beckett and the now-sadly-forgotten N. F. Simpson, and our production was intended to be very much in that vein. The curtain would rise to reveal a nondescript middle-aged couple watching television. On one side of the stage there would be a staircase ascending into the darkness. It would become apparent that the couple had never ventured up these stairs, nor did they display any curiosity as to what might lie at the top. The audience would be able to hear, though not to see, what was being broadcast on the TV, which would be of a distinctly surrealist character, during which the couple would exchange desultory and inane dialogue.

Every so often, other people would enter the stage. They would be generic types; a policeman, a poet and so forth, and each of them would have a different motive for wanting to climb the stairs. The couple would, of course, ignore them.
So far, so good, you might think. They trouble was, we had no idea of what should happen next, let alone what denoument (if any) there should be. Now it’s all very well for the audience not to be sure what might be found at the top of the stairs (in fact, usually in this sort of play, they’d be no wiser at the finish than they were at the start), but surely the authors ought to have at least some notion of what it all meant? Was the staircase perhaps a religious allegory, or what? And we simply hadn’t a clue.

So in the end we gave up, and our play duly took its place in that great gallery of abandoned projects, known to some as “the round filing-cabinet”. It was to be joined there some months later by a very different, though equally derivative, aborted production; a play for Easter, to be entitled “The arrest of Jesus, as performed by the cast of Z Cars”. Looking back, I’m inclined to believe that this latter effort was rather better, but before people start to have thoughts about mercy-killing, I’ll end by saying that that is (or to be more exact, might have been) another story.

P.S. Thought for the day:- “Youthful vanity and dullness, determined to write, will almost certainly write in the dominant form of their epoch” (C. S. Lewis; “The Allegory of Love”).

Badlands

 I found myself in a desert of mounds and hollows. In places the soft rock of which it was composed had been warped and twisted into fantastic spires and towers. Dark caverns gaped.  Everywhere was a pale yellowish brown, save where the livid sunset ahead of me stained some the colour of old blood. Nowhere was there was the least sign of life: not a single insect, not a blade of grass or the skeleton of a dead tree. Nevertheless I pressed onwards towards the light; there was nothing else that I could do. 

Happy Christmas!

 An orchestra of angels. A stained glass window from the Priory Church at Great Malvern

Three very short myths

 1. Perseus killed Medusa the Gorgon and took her head, which turned everyone who looked on it to stone. Passing along the coast, he found the beautiful Andromeda chained to a rock to be devoured by a sea monster. Perseus rushed to help her, but lost his footing on the slippery rocks and dropped the Gorgon's head. Without thinking, he bent down to pick it up and WHOOPS! 

2. Jason assembled a crew of heroes to sail in the "Argo" and find the Golden Fleece. Unfortunately the ship met rough waters in the Dardanelles, and sank.

3. Theseus made his way through the labyrinth to fight the Minotaur, clutching in his hand the thread given him by Ariadne to enable him to find his way back. It is believed that he killed the monster, but in the struggle he must have let go of the thread, because he's not been seen since. Maybe he's still down there?

Puss in Boots retold

   The miller's youngest son set out to seek his fortune, accompanied only by his cat, Puss. After they had walked for several days, they noticed a royal cortege approaching, and Puss told the young man to undress and jump into a nearby river.
   Puss then ran up to the King's coach, calling, "Help! Help! My master, the Marquis of Carabas, was bathing in the river, and robbers have stolen his clothes!"
   The royal carriage stopped, and the King motioned to the young man to stand up in the water, which fortunately was deep enough to come up to his waist.
   "Goodness!" exclaimed the princess,who was accompanying her father, "What a handsome young man!"
   "That's as maybe", said the King, "But I don't think I've ever met the Marquis of Carabas. Do any of you know him?" he asked the courtiers. But it turned out that none of them had ever met such a person either.
   "I must say", mused the Lord Chamberlain, "He doesn't strike me as being a nobleman. Look at his hair! Look at his hands! Now then", he said to the young man, "Can you name any nobleman who will vouch for you?"
   But of course the miller's youngest son couldn't.
   "He doesn't talk like a Marquis either!" was the Lord Chamberlain's verdict. "And if he is a Marquis, why does he choose to bathe in this muddy river? Hasn't he any lakes or streams on his estates?"
   The King considered. "Now look here, my man", he pronounced eventually, "I've no idea who you are. We'll give you some clothes to make you decent, then you'd better be on your way. If you really are the Marquis of Carabas, then I apologise, but you surely understand we can't be too careful with strangers in these dangerous times".
   So the Lord Chamberlain gave the miller's youngest son a set of clothes and a few coins, and warned him not to come near the King again. 
   "The cat, however, is a different matter", said the King. "Just fancy: a cat that talks! Would you like him as a pet, my dear?" he asked the princess.
   "Oh, yes please daddy!" she exclaimed.
   So the miller's youngest son walked disconsolately away, but Puss was taken to the palace, where he lived happily ever after.

Visions

In his dreams he saw many strange and wonderful things, and when he woke he tried to turn his visions into poems, though he found that most escaped his memory soon afterwards. But as time progressed, and the drug increased its hold, his visions brought darkness amidst the beauty. He saw a pavilion, set in marvellous gardens above a river, but he knew it was doomed to destruction. He saw himself on a mountain peak near his friend’s home in the Lake District, and listened to the music of the bells ringing in the valleys below, but the songs the bells sang were songs of death. He saw a young bride entering the castle of her elderly widower husband, and she was very lovely, but her stepdaughter saw in her face the yellow unblinking eyes of a serpent. All these things he was tried to record, which helped to relieve his pain. Each time his apprehension increased, but he could not abandon his search now.

After a while, waking and dreaming seemed to merge, and he was left unsure which was which. Sometimes when he walked through the streets at night, plagued by the insomnia resulting from the opium, he thought he had found the wondrous city that he had so long sought, only it was no longer marvellous, but sinister and haunted. Evil lurked around every corner, watching him from a distance, just out of his sight, and the people he met (but could not speak to, nor did they speak to him) were not noble heroes and ravishing beauties, but ghosts, who wore the masks of death. He realised he was being punished for his temerity. His awareness of guilt deepened, until he came to feel he had committed a crime so monstrous, so horrible, that even he could not be told what it was. I have blasphemed against the gods, he thought: no, it is far worse than that: my crime somehow threatens the very basis of the universe; and my punishment will be like none that has ever existed before.

He only knew of one way which might allow him to escape from these horrors: he must set them out in a poem, which would tell of a man who is guilty of a terrible crime and justly suffers an equally terrible punishment, but is eventually redeemed by his suffering and pardoned. Such an ending would provide him with at least some hope of release. But what precise crime would the man in his poem have committed, since he could not know it himself? He consulted his closest friend; also a poet, but more down-to-earth in his ideas. And William pondered for a while, and then said, “I was reading the other day about a sailor who was marooned on a desert island by his shipmates, who were disgusted by the fact that he had shot an albatross. It appears that sailors regard this as a very wicked act, and also an extremely unlucky one”.
"Thank you, William", said Samuel, "I shall write the poem, and I shall call it 'The Ancient Mariner'"

A Puzzle

   I came away from the auction with a small box of Chinese bric-a-brac, which I had bid for because I liked the look of a piece of jade which formed one of the items. When I got it home, however, the jade turned out on closer inspection to be obviously modern, and not even very good quality at that; and I was relieved I hadn’t bid more. 
   Most of the other items in the box were frankly rubbish, but one or two attracted a second glance, if only to try to convince myself that my money hadn‘t been completely wasted. There was a carving in dark wood, beneath a glass dome smaller than a child’s fist, consisting of a man in a robe seated at a table. There was a teapot and a cup detached from the main carving and lying loose: probably the carving had been broken, but somehow it reminded me of those cheap little toys where you have to manoeuvre ball-bearings through a maze, or into slots in a picture. I even attempted to shake the dome to get these objects back onto the table, but failed miserably and gave up after a few goes. 
   At the bottom of the box was a medallion the size of a coin, on a chain. There were characters I couldn’t read on one side of it, and it surprised me, because I didn’t think it was the sort of thing the Chinese went in for. I suspected it wasn’t really Chinese at all, and I certainly didn’t find it at all attractive, but in an idle moment I hung it round my neck.
   For some reason, I suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to return to the game, or whatever it was, under the glass dome. I shook it, and it took very little time or effort to get the cup and teapot into their right places on the table; but somehow they weren’t tiny any more: the whole carving had expanded until it was life-size, and I was right there beside it, watching. And the man in the robe was alive and moving. I watched as he poured himself a cup of tea, and then picked it up to drink it. And I realised that he mustn’t drink it, because the tea was poisoned; and I tried to shout at him not to, but no sound came out.The poison must have been very potent, because he collapsed almost immediately. And he realised what had happened to him, because he was able to lift his head from the table to look directly up at me, and his look said,
“YOU DID IT!”