h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

invisible salamanders and mystic maps are my life ....



Ah Footnotes! Now I surely see
The ways you have enlightened me!
You guide me through my abstract text
And find a word to rhyme with .

! Of course! I know this rhyme!
I'm lost for words and lost in time
Yet Mariposa** flutters by
In guise of phantom butterfly

I'll dot my i's and change my tense
And sharpen my poetic sense
And yet my cause is all in vain!
Without these Footnotes to explain

Who writes these words beneath my text
When I am anxious and perplexed?
'Tis Mariposa**! Winged** sage!
Who scatters wisdoms on my page

They travel at the speed of light!
In crazy guise they bring delight
When hope is lost in times absurd
Sweet Muses sanctify the word





**could be a reference to SS Mariposa. This writer keeps company with spirits beyond our earthly realm. For further details ask anyone named Gheorgheni or try asking anyone not named Gheorgheni while you are about it ....

** needs an accent. wing-ed. two syllables ... I have no accents, only hope and astral muses who bring me footnotes ...

I need a soundbite here.

The soundbite would be Elektra chuckling, 'Hehehehehehehe...'



I'm glad you enjoyed your footnotes. I enjoyed what I footnoted, very much.

What Dmitri said. I totally enjoyed this, your kingdom of no time.
I could lose myself in it.
And I your verses, too.
But now I must return to now time to cook dinner for the family.

This is as lovely on second reading as on the first.

But I suspect that many of us live in the land of Never-enough-Time. Where there is never enough time to read that book, catch that train, make that cake, sit on the beach....

Never Enough Time .... .. tell me about it .. I've just been dealing with aspects of this particular situation .... how to make space for creative expression (and therefore sanity) in tricky sticky situations ... trying to find that moment of brain-space when all I get is sticky complications traversing my headache like strands of warm toffee ....

what exactly am I talking about? .... I ask myself .. on this golden- russet-ochre-green Autumnal Saturday ...

actually the answer came to me two days ago whilst passing three whirring dancing reindeer and a plastic winking bearded goblin, whilst trying to find the third floor of the department store, to buy pyjamas for my father, when the escalator was broken and the lift was full of chatter and boxes and red ribbons, and the sweat of panic was drenching my shirt ......

.... and I might try to write a story about it ... ....

uh oh ...



and thankyou all for your response to my story .. it means a lot to me in fact ... as I have decided to try to face down my fears about many aspects to do with writing ...

... and I appreciate the support and feedback from other writers and deep thinking creative types .. and its good to be back in .. and hey! my sky didn't fall in .. so perhaps my fears are receding .... or else I just surrendered to the mystery of it all ...

H

exit pursued by three whirring reindeers, a plastic bearded goblin and a lime-green salamader wearing a crown of tinsel ....

PS ... regarding Footnotes ..... ..... I always said to myself that if there should ever be a time in my life when I am confronted with The Footnote Episode then that will be the time when the Footnote Episode can ... erm ... swim away .... and haunt me no more ..... so begone ye monster Footnote of the deep .... begone!



what? ... let me explain about The Footnote Episode... but laugh ye not, or else I shall tell thee to exit in my plummiest voice ..... .... and speak in olde Englishe to ye until the end of thyme .....



so I'm about twelve years old, in English class, and we are studying Shakespeare .. but I can't remember which play ..... all I remember is there was a footnote which used the word as meaning or .....

and the footnote ... which was describing some kind of gathering ...said something about ....

so I handed in my essay, in which I wrote that . ....

so ..OK ...there weren't divers around in the time of Shakespeare ... not with flippers and snorkels and oxygen tanks and wetsuits ... but ... hey ... ... why did everyone have to be sooooo mean to me .... like wah. .... ...

OK so I'm over it now .... except my spouse teases me about it every time Shakespeare is mentioned ..... and I panic every time I see a diver on TV ... which is rare ...because I am scared of nature programmes .... and big yellow fish ...

I like the idea of the divers, complete with flippers and snorkels, in among the noblemen and courtiers.

And the idea of being pursued through the shopping centre by reindeer and goblins.

What a great story. I love it. Isn't it fun what we made of the world when we came at it naively? Maybe they were sponge divers, eh? Or pearl divers? There's an old poem called 'The Pearl'...

I used to get comments like that from students. A friend would invite me to help him read the essay answers in his Music Appreciation test.

'The Unfinished Symphony is called that because it seems to go on forever.' (Not a fan of Schubert, are we?)

A paper for my Latin class:

'The Roman Empire went downhill quickly after Charlemagne.' (I SHOWED them where the books were.)

I once spent an evening in the university library because of a Chaucer footnote. I'm not sure if I should put the Chaucer line here, because even though it would probably sneak past the filther, it's naughty...

Anyway, I couldn't figure out the meaning of a word, because Chaucer spelled with with 'qu' rather than 'c'......and the footnote was in Latin, which I did not know at the time......

I finally found the answer in a medieval Latin dictionary, when I looked up the verb 'pudendare', to be ashamed, translated it into German in my head, figured it out, went , aw, shucks, shame on you, Geoffrey, go wash your mind out...

I'm glad for the internet, really I am. That was a lot of running around just to read a fabliau. (I am also grateful to my Latin instructors for enlightening my darkness. )

The moral of that story: Learn things in the right order. Learning Old English and Middle English before learning Latin so that you can read stuffy professors' coy footnotes can get you into hot water.

Now you have the benefit of my wisdom...

..... ...

... in my production, there would be divers divers appearing on stage at regular intervals ... cue divers divers! .... .. all kinds of divers ... ... hah! diversity! .... now I get it ...

and thankyou for all shining pearls of wisdom .... .. knowledge with a shine ... I love gems of knowledge ... even with a bawdy twist concerning divers fabliaux... ... ?

I've been finding out about The Pearl ... that Middle English alliterative poem ...

alliterative poem? hmm ... now, of course, I want to write an alliterative poem ..... so now I have to go and remember things about alliteration ... dive deep into my subconscious ...

By coincidence, for weeks I have been deeply engrossed in one of my all time favourite books .. .. Miserable Miracle by Henri Michaux .... which, of course, has many footnotes ... as the text is so obscure ... but I never read these strange notes so thoroughly ... until today ... hah!



In fact, the text of this book is so obscure, that, not only are there curious cryptic footnotes, there are also subtexts in the margins which are a poetic translation of some of the paragraphs ... .. although, to me, it is all poetic paradise ... my Eden my Eden! ...my garden of the word ....

hmm

so now I will disappear into the gardens of the mind, to write alliterative subtexts for a text that consists entirely of footnotes and a mosaic of memory fragments that shine in the morning rain like precious pearls washed with dew ...

sort of thing, like ....

I yearn! I yearn! I yearn for alliteration .....



and are there more time travel pieces in tomorrow's Post? hope so hope so hope so .. have to wait and see.

poor Dmitri is alliteration-proof: I love alliterate headers for and will always try to have some if possible.

Bel's one of our star alliterators.

Alliteration: The gift of the Angles and the Saxons...

See 'Beowulf'.

You have two half-lines, d'you see, two words in one half-line, and one word in the other half-line, alliterate:

'Weorc Wuldorfaeder Swa he wundra gehwaes'

Sorry for spelling, that's by memory, and I think I remember it in your local dialect, Cactus, not mine, which would have been Mercian, since we came from Chester...it means, 'The work of the Father of Glory, as he all of the wonders (made, but that's in another line, 'cos it's like German, all the verbs come at the end).

From 'Caedmon's Hymn', the first hymn in the English language. Wait, I'll stop being lazy and go look it up.

http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/369.html

I like this translator's comment:

'Caedmon gives hope to all would-be poets.' I wonder if those monks realised that most revolutions in art, music, and poetry in the old days came from shepherds.

now I've met my match ... ....this will teach me to travel into the kingdoms of poetry without packing my sandwiches .... ... push the door of alliteration and lo! it will open .... but 'tis a one-way door .... and now I hunger! I hunger! ...

I feel like Paul Klee returning from Tunisia .. who realised that . quote Paul Klee

actually he also said

. quote Paul Klee

I love that. Very intense.

all of this is, of course, irrelevant to Caedmon's Hymn and alliteration and everything else we were talking about ..

except! except! it isn't .....because it is the same intensity. The word. And now I am in love with Caedmon's Hymn .. especially the original. Even though I don't know what it sounds like.

I have to find out .. no point telling everyone that one of my favourite lines in literature is

quote Caedmon's Hymn

if I can't even say it ..

beauty beauty language

gotta go .. drinks with the neighbours .... ... I shall try reciting my new found knowledge ... ...

Wait! Don't go yet!

Your wish is my command:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAZyc8M5Q4I

That's the dialect I know, good old West Saxon. The way the King of Wessex spake...

Now you can say it.

I understand about the colour - yep. Alliteration, rhyme, colour...colour commentary to the action of the words...

, indeed. Sweet honey in the rock...

thankyou! this is seriously beautiful ... the sound of these words ... honest .. I want to learn to recite like this .... truly amazing ...



had a great evening with the neighbours ... who didn't throw at my suggestion that I recite Caedmon's Hymn in its original format ...

(I wasn't throwing s at you ... my friend and mentor .. but you know that hey .... (quick sensitive moment here ... you know me .. I get lured by these strange little pictures ....which lead me into worlds) ...

ah the rose ... ah Mars ...... The Rose of Mars .... etc etc

actually I love that .. The Rose of Mars ... hmm

anyway ... I digress! ...the neighbours were very interested in fact ..and offered me a footstool as a stage ... .. only I didn't have the Knowledge .... at that time ... hah! ...... so they sat me in the corner with and Hans Jenny's book on Cymatics .. with all those beautiful graphics that look like soundwave-UFOs .....have you seen that book? its amazing .... and then I was well away .... ..

ah yes yes yes .... next stop is the essence of Cymatics and Strange Attractors recited in a curious language that sounds like Caedmon's Hymn but isn't .. quite ...

OK .. enough! enough! .. over to now ....

No, I don't know this Cymatics of which you speak. I shall have to learn about it, shan't I?

Learn Old English. It's your heritage. Read 'The Dream of the Rood'. You will understand it:

http://www.dreamofrood.co.uk/frame_start.htm

The Rose of Mars sounds like an idea for a short story...which I will now proceed to steal............