If I’m going to soliloquise, I like to have music.
Siblings are great things. Great inventions. Inventors.
The Williams sisters dominated tennis; the Wright brothers
invented the airplane.The Wright brothers decided who would first become
airborne on a coin toss. Wilbur won, but attempt failed, so Orville was the
first brother airborne. The first man to fly. Luck doesn’t ever mean you will
succeed. It just means you won the coin toss. Be gracious. Let others be great
too.
Hug your brothers and sisters. Especially if they learn French
so they can hobnob with the European aristocracy for you.
What about the Bronte sisters, or the Brothers Grimm? Great
writers. Shakespeare gave birth to twins. One of them, Hamnet, died at age 8.
Constance, in Shakespeare’s King John, lamenting his dead
son says:
‘I will not keep this form upon my head
when there is such disorder in my wit.’
And it makes me want to cry. It’s as if to say I will not
keep denying myself my true emotions.
Another of my favourite lines in poetry is one of Rumi’s
poem titles:
‘NO ROOM FOR FORM’
As people, trying to keep ourselves together, we have this
concept of form. That we must be strong, or structured, that we must keep
going, that we must obey however much we hate it. And then somebody dies, or we
fall in love, or we think the world is ending because we’re sure the sky is
falling upon our heads and suddenly we realise there is no such thing as form. I’m
jealous of all of space and time. It has rules beyond my comprehension.
The hot air balloon’s predecessor was called the passarolla.
Dreamt up by a Brazilian Jesuit priest, an unmanned balloon was sent into the
air. The Jesuit wrote a piece entitled: A short manifesto for those who are
unaware that is possible to sail through the element air.’ As if to say, to all
those who has spent their short and squalid lives blissfully ignorant of the possibility
that we could be all be floating instead, you are stupid. Here is a short (but
no doubt compact in its condescension) manifesto. The first manned hot air
balloon was invented by two French brothers. Is there some relation between aeronautics
and fraternity? In a demonstration for Louis XVI, they decided to use animals
instead, for fear of their lives. So, at the blast of a cannon, at 1 pm, a sheep,
duck and cockerel entered the round wicker basket tied to the balloon by a rope
and took flight in front of the King.
And what a time to live that must have been! 1783. You’re living
in Paris, probably are a peasant, probably suffering from typhoid. Ravel won’t
be invented for another hundred years, so you sit in silence with nothing to
feel depressed to, and a cockerel gets to go for a trip in a hot air balloon.
