Eliot Weinberger, "An Elemental Thing"
A happy accident: I had yesterday morning The Idea of how my HP/Firefly crossover should end, and later that same day, I bought a book of essays by Eliot Weinberger while I was walking to uni, An Elemental Thing.
The preface tells an Aztec myth, according to which the world was on the verge of coming to an end every fifty-two years, and the rituals and human sacrifice the empire must undertake to safeguard another fifty-two years of life. I was a bit spooked when I read it, because it seemed too much of a coincidence when I was writing about a similar situation. It occurred to me that the problem I was having, trying to write about two timelines of events, interlaced - both simultaneusly the past and the future, and both containing River Tam - without losing all my element of surprise, could be solved by condensing one of those timelines into a single myth, like the one in the preface. Everything then fell into place.
The rest of the book, to my immense joy, is full of treasures like that.
From "Wind and Bone":
Between the classicists and the vanguardists, the ascetics and the hedonists: Liu Hsieh, Chamberlain for the Surrogate Secretary in the Eastern Palace, whose book, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, the first extended book of Chinese literary criticism, promoted innovation based on the classics, "continuity and change." He wrote: "Look toward the present and create the unusual; consult the ancients to establish the laws." And: "Style has progressed from simplicity to solecism. The more recent the period, the more insipid it has become. By striving for the modern and neglecting the ancients, the wind has died down and vitality dissipated."
The twenty-eighth of the fifty chapters in his book is called "WIND BONE," wind and bone, and is the most mysterious. To express emotions one must begin with WIND [風]; to organize the words, one must have BONE [骨]. He whose bone structure is well-exercised will be well-versed in rhetoric; he who is deep of wind will articulate well his feelings. It would seem that WIND is sentiment and ideas, and BONE is language, but Liu also says that to be thin in ideas and fat in words, confused and disorganized, is a sign of the lack of BONE. And yet when ideas are incomplete, lifeless and without vitality, it is also a sign of the lack of WIND. What is WIND and what is BONE have never been conclusively determined by the generations of Chinese critics, but what is certain, according to Liu Hsieh, is that the perfect combination or balance of WIND and BONE, the metaphor for the ideal poem, is a bird.
The preface tells an Aztec myth, according to which the world was on the verge of coming to an end every fifty-two years, and the rituals and human sacrifice the empire must undertake to safeguard another fifty-two years of life. I was a bit spooked when I read it, because it seemed too much of a coincidence when I was writing about a similar situation. It occurred to me that the problem I was having, trying to write about two timelines of events, interlaced - both simultaneusly the past and the future, and both containing River Tam - without losing all my element of surprise, could be solved by condensing one of those timelines into a single myth, like the one in the preface. Everything then fell into place.
The rest of the book, to my immense joy, is full of treasures like that.
From "Wind and Bone":
Between the classicists and the vanguardists, the ascetics and the hedonists: Liu Hsieh, Chamberlain for the Surrogate Secretary in the Eastern Palace, whose book, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, the first extended book of Chinese literary criticism, promoted innovation based on the classics, "continuity and change." He wrote: "Look toward the present and create the unusual; consult the ancients to establish the laws." And: "Style has progressed from simplicity to solecism. The more recent the period, the more insipid it has become. By striving for the modern and neglecting the ancients, the wind has died down and vitality dissipated."
The twenty-eighth of the fifty chapters in his book is called "WIND BONE," wind and bone, and is the most mysterious. To express emotions one must begin with WIND [風]; to organize the words, one must have BONE [骨]. He whose bone structure is well-exercised will be well-versed in rhetoric; he who is deep of wind will articulate well his feelings. It would seem that WIND is sentiment and ideas, and BONE is language, but Liu also says that to be thin in ideas and fat in words, confused and disorganized, is a sign of the lack of BONE. And yet when ideas are incomplete, lifeless and without vitality, it is also a sign of the lack of WIND. What is WIND and what is BONE have never been conclusively determined by the generations of Chinese critics, but what is certain, according to Liu Hsieh, is that the perfect combination or balance of WIND and BONE, the metaphor for the ideal poem, is a bird.