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| Saturday, March 07, 2009
Three Things featuring Christopher Tan In this new series, individuals will illuminate three works of art that have inspired their faith, life and own creative journeys. We begin with Christopher Tan, a writer, consultant and author. He sings with the Christian a capella group Agapella, and worships at Faith Methodist Church. He is also a member of the CreateLeVoyage.com Writers' Group.1. A River Runs Through It: original movie soundtrack by Mark Isham.  (a) a river runs through it - the book (b) the soundtrackThe river, and fly fishing in it, are used in both book and film as frames and metaphors for an understated, largely unspoken examination of matters of grace, family, forgiveness and free will. They form the only arena in which the story's principal characters, a father and his two sons, understand each other with wordless ease. Mark Isham is probably better known to the general public for his jazz albums, although he is a prolific and almost bizarrely versatile film scorer - among the hundred-odd films he has composed for are Crash, In Her Shoes, Blade, Thumbelina, and The Black Dahlia. Never have I heard music that evokes a living river as immediate and ravishing as his. I am listening to it as I write this, and through my mind's eye flows the river: now slow and wide, now rushing shallowly over stones, warm and glinting in late afternoon sunlight, gathering force as it narrows and bends, surging through stone confines. I can see the trees leaning over it, the land bending around it. So real is the vision that I find it hard to think of the music as music, and not some mysterious fourth form of water. Scattered through the mostly short orchestral pieces are snatches of alternately sleepy and jittery jazz, background music to the 1920s bars and city scenes in the movie, including a sweetly raucous rendition of The Old Rugged Cross. They do not disrupt the overall mood of the album, which remains one of contemplation, the kind of mood that only sitting by a river can engender. This soundtrack fills me with the longing - the Longing - of which CS Lewis spoke, the innate intimation of and desire for something higher, deeper, better than the world we see. It shows me a glimpse of heaven that cannot be measured in words, but in the quickening of a heartbeat, in the thickening of a spirit. The river somehow bursts the banks of the stave and flows on into 'our own far off country'. Some far off day I will flow with it. 2. Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, a book by Annie Dillard  (c) Anne Dillard's wonderI remember plucking this book at random one day from a crate outside a second-hand bookshop, more for the painting of daisies on its cover than its 'winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize' subtitle, buying it, walking to a park bench, and then being unable to move for a long time, so hard did it grip me. It is a meditation on a year spent living by a creek in the wilderness, but Dillard is not your common or garden nature-gazer. Her prose transfixes and dissects what she sees while leaving its mystery intact; she calls on textbooks, poets, rabbis, the bible, medical reports, and medieval mystics in expressing her wonder about creation. Dillard has described the book as being about 'theology', though in her online CV, she describes her religious affiliation as 'none'. This is ingenuous, or perhaps refers only to organised religion. Pilgrim At Tinker Creek is nothing if not a quest for the divine behind the created. In it she returns again and again to the idea of the natural world's magnificence and power as signposts of the holy. She seems to mean this in the sense of [my paraphrase] Job 41 rather than some woolly pantheism, though to her God appears largely silent, or in any case unapprehensible by normal or expected means; she speaks of "the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam". When epiphany finally does come, "It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance." And also as if "I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck." At the time I read this book, my psychology uni lecturers were teaching me to use words as hard-edged tools to lay bare the world unambiguously and with precision, like a diamond-cutter's saw. Then along comes Dillard, throwing words around just as precisely and effectively, but larded with metaphors as muscular as wrestlers. She writes spectacular passages about light and vision, invokes dizzying shifts in geographical and temporal perspective to pose questions and point out curious facts, and revels in the unexpected. From her I learnt - I learn - wholly new ways of wielding language. Dillard in later life has described Pilgrim At Tinker Creek as embarrassingly overwritten and self-absorbed in parts. As these are the same traps I fall into in my own writing (only much deeper and with much less skill) I find this curiously consoling. 3. Encounter, an ice dance by Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean. In the early 1980s, British televisions were full of national sports heroes especially Torvill and Dean. Newly arrived in London and largely dependent on TV to get me up to speed with the culture, I couldn't escape them. I didn't know anything about ice skating, but this young couple - formerly a clerk and a policeman - competing in the ice dance discipline held me (like the rest of the British public) utterly rapt. Invented in 1952, ice dance was essentially ballroom dancing on ice until T&D, who brought in elements from ballet, mime and modern dance. Not all Brits are stiff. They won numerous World and European championships, and earned an Olympic gold medal in 1984 with a near-perfect score for technical difficulty, and a perfect one for artistic impression (then the twin yardsticks for ice dance judging). Encounter, set to a George Winston solo piano piece titled January Stars, was choreographed during their professional career as a performance piece, not a competitive one. The skaters start at opposite ends of the ice, tracing out solitary orbits that spiral and cross before eventually meeting. They entwine around each other, clinging and separating, leading and being led, giving and trading momentum. Something of Rodin hovers in their poses and attitudes. Centres of gravity spin, split and recombine. Some of the moves flirt with danger - one slight slip and an artery gets sliced - but this never intrudes on the feeling, the flow. Note: the previous description sounds silly only if you think of ice dance as sport in the narrow sense. T&D went far beyond this definition, pushing to their limits the artistic possibilities of movement unencumbered by friction. The new boundaries they set still stand; no one after them has been their equal, which sounds unbelievable, but is true. A truthful translation of emotion into motion is a rare thing. I find it difficult to describe the intensity of feeling evoked by this dance, which to me is clearly T&D's creative zenith. It's as far away from the jazz-hands, cheesy-smile end of ice skating as you can get. Watching it back in 1984, first on TV and then at T&D's live ice tour, blasted my eyes open to what the human body is able to express through movement. There are two performances on youtube, made ten years apart. (d)1984 1984(above)which has its beginning chopped off and some very irritating commentators, and 1994(below) which is recorded in full. It is fascinating to compare the raw emotion and grace of T&D's younger selves with their wearier, more fragile interpretation a decade later. (d)1994 This marks the end of the article. Join us again for the next issue, and "three things" featuring another writer. To find out more about Christopher Tan, please click on the following links: 1. Shermay's Cooking School -- Chef Instructors 2. Blog Images & Videos (a) Taken from http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=33345, viewed 7 March 2009 (b) Taken from http://www.amazon.com/River-Runs-Through-Mark-Isham/dp/B0007NFL54, viewed 7 March 2009 (c) Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrim_at_Tinker_Creek, viewed 7 March 2009 (d) Taken from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgxsXC5xDP8, viewed 7 March 2009 (e) Taken from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztjx33vC3dk, viewed 7 March 2009
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