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You’d hear snatches of poetry through the blaze of the kiln, and though I think we made fewer pots that week, they were stranger, more beautiful.
The arse is capricious and does not wed for life, and so perhaps, yeah, it is Homer’s chair.
Not much, you think? But great things are made up of a load of not much,
It’s a story of the old man’s life in song, and though it’s no special life, he sings it for all to hear, gives it everything he has, and I admire that.
“You don’t rob a man of his suffering,” says Gelon quietly. “That’s his.”
A tragedy without a tune is like a sun that doesn’t give off heat: dead, and nothing will grow from it. When men go to war, they do it to music. When they set sail for better shores and row into the vast blue, they do it to music. Even our hearts beat to some rhythm, and the director who neglects it neglects what makes us men.
It was probably lies, but any dream will do.”
He wasn’t rich but could have been if it were money he wanted, but that was too easy, too vulgar. He wanted knowledge and about all sorts of things. The tides, the wingspan of a fly, why leaves were green, and the movements of the stars. There wasn’t a subject that didn’t interest her da, and he could even predict the eclipses.
I think I’ve never had anything to work for, nothing to believe in, really, and a man needs that more than anything.
The tail wags merrily now, beats the air, and I rub behind its ears, and it licks my palm. That was a buzz, and I walk on feeling pretty good about the world and my place in it.
I listen to the sound the coins make in my pocket—much fainter than the din from the pouch Gelon gave me, yet its music is all the sweeter, ’cause it’s mine, and it’s hers, and I know in time we can make it a song.
It’s hope that makes us afraid, and I remind myself that a man should be grateful for his fears, ’cause it means he has something to lose and to win.
Sometimes I feel like crying, but I reckon that’s ’cause at last things are happening, and I care how they unfold.
They’ve nothing left, and they’re no longer even really afraid. It’s like they’ve gone past the point of fear and desire. Sure, if we gave them some food, they’d eat it, but I wouldn’t even say they want it now. Whatever is in them is a dying ember that one would have to take great pains to make burn, and we don’t.
“Why do you act the fool? You’re not a fool.” “I am. I just know it. I reckon that makes me cleverer than most.”
The key to directing is mostly just letting people do their job. Be clear and precise—after that, it’s up to them.
These Athenians haven’t worn new clothes in months, and when we hand them the costumes, they just hold them confused, rubbing them slowly like blind men, and then holding them up, smiles of naive delight, and it strikes me that they’ve returned to a second childhood. That suffering has stripped away the years in the way carpenters can uncover the youth of a tree by scraping the plane against the old bark. Yes, I think they’ve found a sort of innocence in their ruin.
Repetition only goes so far, and he wants them to be a little lost up there too. He says the best theatre isn’t about showing something but finding it. Certainty is the way of cowards and fools, and Euripides is neither.
“There’s more to Athens than tragedy,” says Paches with feeling. “We laugh till we cry, and we drink.” Another swig. “We drink till we fall down, but we’re up first thing in the morning to scheme and love and build and do it all again. It’s a city of belief, not despair.
Her mother thinks she’s mental. The chorus do too, and she probably is, but beneath the mania, there’s a point she’s trying to make—just ’cause their lives are fucked, it doesn’t mean they’ve nothing left. There’s always something left for the person who remembers. And Hecuba and her go back and forth, and it seems just an agon between madness and reason, but it’s not only that. It’s despair and meaning that are being pitted against one another, and it’s asking, if meaning departs from reason, might there not be wisdom in a faith-filled lunacy?
No, it was in a land of rain and woods, a green-growing world, but yet it happened in almost exactly the same way. The hearts of men are alike wherever you go. The rest is scenery.”
What people expect rarely happens. Things that seem impossible come to pass. It’s always been the way. The gods have the best seats in town, and we’re their favourite show.
Common sense is common, has no imagination, and only works by precedent. It leaves the man who follows it poorer, if not in pocket, then in his heart. Fuck common sense.
Those rats are the worst of everything under an indifferent sky, but the sound coming from the aulos, frail as it might be in comparison, well, that’s us, I say to myself, that’s us giving it a go, it’s us building shit, and singing songs, and cooking food, it’s kisses, and stories told over a winter fire, it’s decency, and all we’ll ever have to give, I say to myself, as my lungs burn and my eyes water, ’cause I don’t have much left, but I keep blowing away at the aulos, playing my song, but the rats are as loud as ever, and this is madness, I’m pouring water in the desert, hoping flowers
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The Athenians start cheering and beating their breasts, and even I join in a little, ’cause it’s only seeing it now, docked and undeniable, that I realise I didn’t think he’d be here. I never believed. I just needed to, which isn’t the same.
I rattle my coin pouches and force a smile. It’s a fine day. The finest in a long time, and the sea’s that summer blue that makes you want to drink it,
It’s not too late. I could find someone in the city who can show me how to write “Lyra.” But then I think this isn’t enough. I want to learn it all. I want to know all those different symbols by which a whole world is created—like those aristo kids in school who are given all the letters and all the words.
Yet, he reasoned, perhaps in the end it was fitting, for his master was ever in love with misfortune and believed the world a wounded thing that can only be healed by story.
