Icarus skywriting # 34

Tanglewreck

I have been reading a remarkable set of poems with the titles, 'Naucrate takes her time; Ariadne and the Ocean; Minotaur and Pasiphae dies, and I confess there is a certain enchantment in the way they 'adopt' the stories. I have been thinking about 'adoption' for some time because I am giving a public talk (Theatre Royal, Winchester, 10th October 2012 at 6.30) entitled 'Adopt,Adapt and Act' which is about the artistic life of stories. Marina Warner said, ‘Artists don’t make up myths; they take them over and recast them…’ and I accept this. We adopt a story and recast it via our own artistic impression of what the story represents. And this artistic impression can be any art form, dance, song, music, poetry, painting, sculpture and so on. But in looking back at the poems listed above, I am also taken by an idea I read it in a novel written for children, called Tanglewreck, by Jeanette Winterson because it captures the essence of storytelling: '…all time is always present, but buried layer by layer under what people call Now. Today lies on top of yesterday, and yesterday lies on top of the day before, and so on down the layers of history, until the layers are so thick that the voices underneath are muffled to whispers… [we] listen to those whispers…' which are traces of existing and surviving and ongoing stories we adopt and which come to be named as myths because they continue to resonate. Or as Brecht said, Nothing comes from nothing; the new comes from the old, but that is why it is new. This isn't a new song but another honest, heart on the sleeve, Steve Earle moment which actually says a lot about men.