INTRODUCTION
by the author
Remember, there are no small parts, only small actors.
- Konstantin Stanislavski
Once upon a time, not so long ago, but just long enough that the days belong to
another chapter in Time's book, there were great virtuosos, who spoke the same
language as you and me, but spoke it as if the words were not only words, but
as they were musical instruments. In those days, just beyond the reach of our
willing but too-easy remembrance, English was the language for poetry, a
language of many members to be collected and arranged according to form;
English was like music. When they made this music, it was to an audience
willing to hear it, on new strings, with a strong, resilient bow and a gleaming
chestnut case, and it was excitingly new. Today, what was stained wood with a
brilliant sheen is cracked and yellowed, and the strings do not have the
resistance and fidelity that they should, and the bow is sadly frayed, lacking
completely the tautness of a former day. This is the result of such fervent and
continued performance.
I know not who, if any, should hear my inventions, but if there is music left in this dusty saw, it would be terrible to let it go unheard. Having chosen to inherit the instrument of a passed year, it would be well to familiarise my audience (should I ever attain any) in the method. Music is genial to the ear; there is no such rapport between the eye and the word. This 'play' (not so much a stage play as the playing of this verbal violin) is written, in the greater portion, in a form of verse named iambic pentameter. This particular verse is one of English's best treasures. Each versed line contains five iambs (poetic 'feet') of two syllables each. The stress in each iamb goes on the second syllable. A topical example of an iambic pentameter line might be "We shall steal of the farmer's grain no more." (There is also some of the so-called 'feminine verse' throughout; these lines contain an extra unstressed syllable after the last iamb. A good example from the play is "I have no lance, O, and on George's errand!" in act 4, scene 2.) Although most is written in this fashion, there are also other meters utilized, and sections written in prose, not having any deliberate meter at all.
The questioning reader may wonder, given that I have chosen to write a work in a form altogether curious, in which almost nothing has been written in the past century, why I have made the choice of double jeopardy and writ it on such subject matter that I have. The savvy reader will wonder further what I have done with the resource material. The matter was chosen as somewhat of a joke, I admit. But I believe that what one writes should be representative of one's beliefs; further, I believe that a valuable belief-system is not one to be distilled in one or two works, no matter how poignant or pithy they may be. Each work illuminates but one facet of the great jewel of Truth, and as this dazzling stone glares so brightly, our eyes may but afford the examination of one side at a time.
What facet, then, does Mrs. Brisby and the Rats of NIMH represent? What does it try to say? Well, when one writes, out spill a universe of ideas and issues. At the center is the great, central, unifying force behind the work. All others merely gravitate towards it. Just as countless bodies may exist in any solar system - there may even be more than one star - this 'play,' as a meld of ancient imagery and the classical sonata form (yes, with a touch of facetiousness) is full of different themes. But there can exist but one center of gravity, one crux on which everything else rotates, and without which, all would fly willy-nilly into chaos.
The great star towards which all tends toward in Mrs. Brisby and the Rats of NIMH is a particular idea of our dependence... even helplessness. This is not a dirge of despair, however, but a glory in it. When one is dependent, one is dependent on one's friends.
It seems that a great buzz is made in this world about one's independence. Men with wyvern's tongues tell us we are nothing until completely isolated, until we are closed from outer support, until we are allowed to be ourselves alone, free of influence for ill or good. Can we ever be independent? Would we be anybody whosoever, but for other people? Of our parents, may we grow to self-realization, say Corban, and forevermore be done with them? No, we cannot: we wouldn't be for them. How of our loves? Shall we be able to cast them off, be disposed and yet remain composed? Despite the wisdom of the age, we shouldn't. Remember that you wouldn't be who you are today, but for them. To be through with them means to deny something in yourself. But what of friends? Ah, what of our friends? Though parents and lovers find analogies throughout the living universe, friends seem unique to intelligence, to souls - an unwieldy piece are they!
This 'play' is a story of what, if comparison can truly be drawn between any two loves, is perhaps the greatest of all: that of friends. It is not a selfish love - how could it be? It is a dedicated love that sees others as prospering as one's self. When a person in taken in Love, his or her character is taken in with the other's - and a fellowship of people, which have mutually found commonality between themselves in some way (for such are friends) - especially if it is in their humanness - are bound by the fact of being. So an ordered verse play, written in sonata form, brimming with comparison and delight in common threads, is a beautiful setting for the story.
Friendship, further, is a love which fails to be jealous. The friendly pair is happy to find another who may share their story... who are also playing their melody, their form, in some dynamic, passionate fashion... in variation. What better way to express this, then, than in the verse play; whose observations are written in variation, with as few breath pauses as necessary to keep the players alive. The verse play is continually changing - but only to speak the same truths as before.
No love, no love whatsoever, is afraid of change. The heart which wishes to remain as it always has been never matures; furthermore, it may never express Love - for Love's face bears a changing expression; today it is a laugh, it is foolhardy to suppose what it is tomorrow. Never be afraid to change - though some make it to be the greatest of all evils. Some say that to seek to never change is to seek to never die. I make the counterassertion: to seek to never change is to seek to never live - we shall all die without a nod to our respective desire to do so; and death, as far as time is concerned, is the ultimate stasis. Some say that to seek to never change is to seek to never have pain. I, once again, will be troublesome: to seek to never change is to seek to never have joy. It is the truth that every joy one comes upon brings new opportunity to be pained. Once happiness, once joy's store is depleted, there is no threshing-floor to go to, to beg for scraps. Joy brings with her the reapers, and we all enjoy a jubilee of plenty; then she goes, leaving us (much as foraging mice in the wan of Winter) to scrape and nape. Happiness and Joy are wandering visitors, whose arrival is inflected with great and ever-gloriously differing confitures, whose tenure inflicts an assortment of such raptures, one would wish to die in their presence. One cannot, but it is good - as you shall read in these pages, one suffering in Loss' dominion, even those pinched by the evils of Death, may have an amazing respite; one need only accept it - and what is more important, one must not be afraid to let one's self be reshaped by it.
Some say that to seek to never change one's love for somebody is to seek to love them forever. I cry, False demon! That is the deadliest of these traps... for it appeals to one's desire to continue love, and does so seemingly reasonably. My refutation is as simple as it is conclusive: as the object of your love will change tomorrow (it is inevitable!), should you continue to love in the same way as before, you are loving something that is no more. And in a sleight-of-hand trick, your love has vanished... and your object will fail to understand your love, as it is directed towards something which only was in the past. There is no such thing as a habitual love; love delights in devising new and wonderful expressions of itself... both the beggar and the king love, love may make from each either, but to rope love in - to seek to confine it - is to seek to own or control it. What was once a pleasing sacrifice becomes idolatry, what was once pure devotion is an evil dementia, and the heart as galloped over the greatest mountains and soared toward the loftiest pinnacles of mortal aspiration becomes a homeless cripple, forced to wander forever, seeking that which he lost; coming even to the point of wondering if it ever was at all, but never realizing that it is no more. What is, is no longer; what breathes, breathes no longer; what stays, stays no longer; such is the way of life in the lands governed by Loss.
Returning to the 'play,' we see these truths variously stationed, in every place elaborated upon: the villain is simply one who would not change, the heroine, one who will not stay; the friendship between Mrs. Brisby and Mr. Ages is true, the so-called 'friendship' between Jenner and Sullivan is, in truth, merely an intimate evil - wrong, taken in intimacy and trust, configures itself in a manner similar to love. When Mrs. Brisby makes a friend in act 1, scene 2, it is with Jeremy, who is bunched in cords he was gathering for a love-nest. How is Mrs. Brisby his friend? In that she is willing to release Jeremy from his trial. Jeremy does Mrs. Brisby a favour in return for hers by taking her to the Owl's nest. The rats of NIMH, who rescue Mrs. Brisby's son from the plow, do the act because of their friendship with Jonathan... who set them free, in turn, from an even worse evil. Notice that here, the true friends are those who set each other free from bondage - they are the yokehefters. Jenner, a false friend, keeps Sullivan in bonds to him - forever obliged to him, but for no reason; Sullivan, caught in his love for Jenner, always seeks to release Jenner in his stops, but walls himself in until he cannot see where it leads: he is blinded.
But is this the only way to tell true friendship? Are friends our friends merely because they help us in life's burdens? Once a friend has helped us in our need, are we in the right to demand service from him later, as he has become our friend? If I go to my friend to use him, if I go to my friend to order his action, then I am setting myself up as a liege, a king, over my friend, and he as my servant. But this is not reversible. If I am lord over my friends, and they my servants, they cannot in turn be lord over me, and I cannot be their servant - just as to say that one owns one's self is inherently somewhat contradictory. If they are my friends because of their service to me, how can I then be their friend? The wisdom of the age would have dogs be dogs: chasing their tails incessantly, futilely: are we to do likewise? No, it cannot be. If we are to be friends, we are either all kings together or all servants together.
What, then, is to be said? If I help my friend because of our friendship, am I being subjugated to him? Is his use of me an insufferable violation of my humanity? Certainly not. The difference is entirely in what spirit your friend pleas in. If my friend comes to me in dire want, begging and pleading deliverance from some trial, and I help him, am I not his deliverer? Did he not come to me in abject humility, even begging? How could he, then, make himself lord of my actions? Did he try to manipulate me? If he haughtily asked me to get him a package of Planters from a vending machine in the hall, not because he wanted the peanuts, but just to see if I'd jump to his aid - well, the additional ingredient here is a poison named Pride.
Pride is what makes the difference. Jenner makes a salient point in act 5, scene 2, when he says the Owl is a far more fearful beast than the cat - who kills more than the cat ever could - but yet, Mrs. Brisby fears and hates the cat, and has befriended the Owl. Why is the Owl forgivable? Jonathan, Mrs. Brisby's dead husband, could well have been killed by the Owl instead of the cat (had the Owl not known him,) why, then, is the Owl's advice of any more worth than the cat's dreadest lurkings? The answer is in the Owl's lack of pride. When Mrs. Brisby comes for help (and she does so with no pride whatsoever; she begs, and is indignant only when the Owl ignores her entirely under the cloak of 'wisdom'), the Owl guides her without pride ("I am not wise, if I suppose I'm all, / From slightest things, I can learn volumes yet.") Jenner, however, is a paragon of Pride, and does not recognize this. It is finally his pride in himself - not just this, but the fact that he continues to be proud even when it can gain him nothing - which leads to his fall.
Friendship here is central. In Jeremy's bright, many-coloured cords, we have a permeant image in the play. The play begins with them and ends with them, and in them. In their strength, they depict life, in their confines is dependency, solidarity, and the bonds of marriage, in their taut is the song of all the players, worked upon a musical instrument. This play is wrapped, from beginning to end, with them; this play is bound tightly by the cords of friendship. If it weren't for them, Mrs. Brisby's unhappiness and the problems of all on our stage would rampage toward the inescapable. We are all pinioned - for our own good, lest we become prideful and then mindless - in these cords, the cords of love, the cords of friendship... and the friend as comes to set us free shall not see us unbound long, nor shall we see him or her free long. This is a true wonder: to be fully insufficient in one's self, but to impart one's ability to the good of another, and to incur their good back, in great swells, and in this mutual benefaction, have our chains broken. We are then able, and in each other we see models for our common selfhood, for our common world, for our common God. These are the most uncommon things imaginable... but, then, how often is the everyday resplendent with the colours of the exceptional!
I wish I could speak for pages in this Introduction on such things. But to do so would be unnecessary, and painful: to reduce the ideas would be to adapt them, to contract these passages would be to lose some meaning; to simplify the expression would be to wash out the subtle sky - it is blue, but such a deep blue - and to caricature the whole from horizon to horizon with a quick brush sweep would be misrepresentation. Should I wish to confine this play to these meager leaves only? This would be a waste of work, and a disservice to myself. I apologize for wishing without first reflecting.
Simple things should be said simply, but the great things cannot be said in any way other than in poetry. If ideas seem worn to you today, it is only through use, for truth is truth, and if a word is spoken well, it is repeated on many other tongues - not because the mimics heard the first sage speak, but because they discovered it on their own, and in their experience and in the application of the knowledge it sparkled for them. It is truth, and a thinking mind will find it. If great things like friendship and beauty and love seem trite, wonder to yourself, reader, wonder at this. Is it not because you have merely heard them and seen them and read them and spoke them and felt them and lived them a thousand thousand times before? If it is so, good reader, bright audience, then it is now time to disengage your cynicism - for a moment, pray! - and see the world with a gleam of knowledge... the knowledge that you do not understand this world, and with hope. Is it a coincidence that our players are small? Not at all, see the world once from their perspective, and realize that you, also, are very small in the order of this universe.
I would not dare elucidate everything in the following pages. They speak well enough on their own, and although this "play" is speckled with some passages I feel compelled to write merely as a bow to the old sages (odd to have the playwright bow before the players!) - oddities perhaps notable only for their opacity - it has inherited a wealth of honesty and veracity from what has been before. It is so true that heroes are to be found in the meekest of things, in the humble, in the small. The proud wish to be applauded as heroes for simply being themselves. They need not change. Here, good reader, set yourself a while. Read these words. Do not, please, see yourself in the oncoming spring. That is a role too great for any of us to play. Do not nod at Doom, Fate, Loss, or the witless stars... they are unseen players; they are not fitting for us. What you cannot apply you are no worse for... though should you find something pleasing, or (dare I hope!) useful, take upon it vigorously. Where vision into these matters is practical, turn your eyes around every corner of the words. Their very shape assumes meaning, their shape adduces form... membered, they still say the same, rhymed and rearranged, they still stand at their stations; where vision is practical, I say, see this: if humble letters may together make a word, if words themselves, concatenated in some deliberate fashion, attain worth in sentences, if sentences (O, small bodies in themselves!) can be suitably numbered and termed, something comes of the process. Again, a playwright is nothing great, an audience multiplies him tremendously, and if you collect all of the playwrights, and all of the audiences, and all of the stages and all of the bookmongers and all of the mallards and the cheerful and stormy and helpless and glorious things on the earth, and if they all pour out a blue drop of ink still fresh from the Playwright's pen, why, we are something, then. And though we are awed by the grandeur of a starry night, do we not still carefully distinguish one fellow human being from the next? Though the century has seen great unification, and we have learned much of both the very great and very small, are we ourselves no greater or smaller than before? Pay attention, dear reader. The greatest things are noble enough not to steal the importance of the small... what we can hardly face does not destroy what we embrace.
I said I should stop, and I dare go no further. Stay alert, reader. Remember always as you read this that the true story is not told in the words of the characters: the true story is told by you. What you read in the play, just as what you hear in music, is all that is of importance. If you came to this work with a love for iambic pentameter, I hope you shall find it satisfied. If you love the theater, sit down, read, and hear the voices ringing in your ears. If you love the book or film which this play is balanced upon, then I am sure you shall find this work intriguing, for good or ill. When one becomes affectionate towards anything specific, one begins to demand much of it - and one becomes propense to jealousy. You shall either rejoice at this setting of a old, beloved 'sparkly' in a noble and glorious form, or deride it as a needless retelling of a story set only for prose. It is easy to pander to those who love meter: only write meter for them. They as love poetry should be given poetry. But those who love a specific story present a ticklish problem: is it best to handle such-and-such tactfully, or tacitly? Never overlook the meaning of a tale: the author chooses even words for a defined reason, and as this, too, is specific, he also is jealous of them.
Here, I contribute this widow's mite to an
empty almsbox. If any who read glean what I fashion, and can condense what I am
saying into two or three sentences, then that may be something worth writing
down and pasting somewhere. If, however, any who read this work can understand
why writers write, it is something to shout to the world. Having said that, to
speak any more would be to detain you. You've an adventure to set upon. Let us,
then, turn to our world of runes, where spring's advancing winds may do our
mice to death, and primeveral currents may sweep them off to Doom...
CHRIS
STREET
11 January 1999
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Partake
recess an hour here, my friends; |