Re: Teddy and Booper
Sundeep Dougal (holden@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in)
Sat, 18 Sep 1999 15:31:06 +0530
> PS RE Inverted Forest...I just went to a friend's website and found
out that
> it's a reference in the Upanishads to the Universe -- whose roots
are in
> heaven and the branches/leaves are the earth. Sheesh...I never knew
that :)
I am always reminded of what Robert Frost is said to have said about
how _The Road Not Taken_ was actually just about a road on a trip
someplace or some such. Or consider this which I happened to have on
the computer:
Lennon: In those days I was writing obscurely, a la Dylan, never
saying what you mean, but giving an _impression_ of something.
Where more or less can be read into it. It's a good game. I
thought, _They_ get away with this artsy-fartsy crap; there has
been more said about Dylan's wonderful lyrics than was ever in
the lyrics at all. Mine, too. But it was the intellectuals who
read all this into Dylan or the Beatles. Dylan got away with
murder. I thought, Well, I can write this crap, too. You know, you
just stick a few images together, thread them together, and you
call it
poetry. Well, maybe it _is_ poetry. But I was just using the mind
that wrote _In His Own Write_ to write that song. There was even
some BBC radio on one track, y'know. They were reciting
Shakespeare or something and I just fed whatever lines were on the
radio right into the song.
Playboy: What about the Walrus itself?
Lennon: It's from "The Walrus and the Carpenter." _Alice in
Wonderland_. To me, it was a beautiful poem. It never dawned on
me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist system.
I never went into the bit about what he really meant, like people
are doing with the Beatles' work. Later I went back and looked at
it and realized that Walrus was the bad guy in the story and the
carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the
wrong guy. I should have said, "I am the carpenter." But that
wouldn't have been the same, would it? (sings, laughing) "I am
the carpenter..."
...
Playboy: Glass Onion?
Lennon: _That's_ me, just doing a throwaway song, a-la "Walrus,
a la everything I've ever written. I threw the line in -- "The
Walrus was Paul" -- just to confuse everybody a bit more. And I
thought "Walrus" has now become me, meaning "I am the _one_"
Only it didn't mean that in this song.
...
<end excerpt>
I am not saying it is not possible that JDS may have picked the name
from the Upanishads or the Vedas or any other such, but let me instead
share this passage that I just read in my old copy of _Educating
Rita_, in _Not Really An Introduction_ to which, Willy Russell
recounts with some exasperation how he was harangued by one
interviewer that surely at the end of the play when Rita sets about
cutting off Frank's hair, he was alluding to that Biblical passage
where Delilah cuts off Samson's hair, thereby robbing him off his
power, of his strength?
"I explained that no, this was not the case, and that in fact I'd
chosen to end my play with the haircut because theatrically
my instinct told me to close the play on a comic moment, with
a joke, a gag...But he wouldn't believe me. His actual words
were, 'Oh no, come on, that can't be it.' I felt rather accused,
as if I was being determinedly lowbrow, which I wasn't...
Perhaps the problem was that he wanted my play to be less
easily explained, wanted mystique in place of communication,
wanted evidence of serious and noble intent which would then
justify the use of comedy... nothing I have to say will deter
you if you're bent on finding Samson and Delilah dancing with
Pygmalion in Frank's study, Tennessee Williams and Sam
Shephard out with the boys in Stags and Hens or Francis J. Child
and Raoul Walsh up there in a window, hovering above the streets
of Blood Brothers.
"But then again, why should I attempt to deter you from
anything..."
Yeah right, as I have always believed that it was actually an inverted
paper-weight which inspired JDS's title more than that Eliot poem. Or
maybe it didn't. The answer eitherway is 42.
Sonny