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| Thinking too hard makes you grey |
I recently wrote about a James Joyce anecdote and since then I have been thinking about it some more... let me repeat it here because I am trying to work stuff out. In response to Yeats' father's suggestion that if he gave him money he would only spend it on drink, Joyce replied: ‘We cannot speak about that which is not.’ It is Joyce’s reply which is of interest to me. Why indeed should he confirm the suspicions of a man whose question was rhetorical and was not going to indulge him in the first place? Sometimes writing about writing for children is seen to be just like that. As adults, we ask of children that which we have no right to receive answers to because the question is always rhetorical and the answer always already presumed, and thus always assumed that the child does not have an answer to give which we do not already know... It is almost a Wittgensteinian idea, is it not? Viz: ‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.’ Trans. ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Sometimes it just does your heid in trying to get the sense out. Why are there so many words to clutter up our brains - that's what I want to know. Och, its Sunday, let's give it the elbow and go out to play on a day like this - "throw those curtains wide... " and crank it up
