Dancing about Architecture
The title’s origin is obscure, but its immediate source is a weblog entry and ensuing comments: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
A related quote:
“At the still point, there the dance is.”
— T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” in Four Quartets
“Eliot by his own admission took ‘the still point of the turning world’ in ‘Burnt Norton’ from the Fool in Williams’s The Greater Trumps.”
— Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings (1978), Ballantine Books, 1981, page 106. Carpenter cites an “unpublished journal of Mary Trevelyan (in possession of the author).”
The following was written this morning as a comment on a weblog entry, but may stand on its own as a partial description of Eliot’s and Williams’s “dance.”
Three sermons on the Fool card, each related to Charles Williams’s novel The Greater Trumps:
To Play the Fool,
Games “Not Unlike Chesse,” and
Charles Williams and Inklings Links.
“Here is the Church,
Here is the steeple,
Open the door and see all the People.”
For some architecture that may or may not be worth dancing about, see the illustrations to Simone Weil’s remarks in my note of November 25, 2002, “The Artist’s Signature.”
I once heard that quote attributed to Elvis Costello concerning music. It was also used as the working title and as a loose theme in a a really nice (my opinion) ensemble film called “Playing By Heart” which has quite a cast including Sean Connery, Gillian Anderson, Ellen Burstyn and Gena Rowlands.
Comment by starboard — Monday, December 9, 2002 @ 2:53 pm