Fimbulwinter

Sometimes the internet lets you down. The quote I really want here I can't find anywhere online, and I don't have the text or even the DVD to hand to supply it. So it will have to wait, and perhaps I shall edit this later to add it in. It is about snow.

There are many good things about the TV adaptation of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, but this, the thing I was looking for, is not one of them. On stage, it is a moment of perfect theatricality, a moment in which the collision of words and physical presence create actual, genuine magic, transformative, dazzling, transcendent. On the screen, there is nothing to transcend, and the moment is lost.

Alan Moore tells us (and has been demonstrating for decades) that language and sorcery are the same thing -- and that is the gods' honest truth. Language is magic. Words are deeds. All stories are true. But they are truer in some contexts than others.

It has been snowing, on and off, for more than a week now, yet London remains uncleansed, unblanketed, unwrapped. Elsewhere there are drifts and blizzards and severe weather warnings. Elsewhere crystalline perfection closes in. Here, the recurrent flurries taunt us. Their swirling flakes lend volume to the air, paint the contours of space in tremulous brushstrokes, but the ground and the city remain sullenly wet and coarse, grubby, gritty and unstilled. Warmed by the poisoned toxic unhappiness below, the throbbing radioactive heart of us. There is no cloak of silence here, there are no softened edges.

There is no forgiveness.

Posted by matt at February 28, 2005 09:32 PM