Tales from outer turnip head...

Tales from outer turnip head...

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Allusions and "a penny for the Guy"...

Friday Pizza and a Movie: I've been watching the new series of Doctor Who with my family lately. It has become a feature of "Friday Pizza and a Movie" in my house. It is wild how sucked-in my children, my wife and I have become with the series. The dog usually joins us on the couch too...

Which is your favorite Doctor?: Doctor Who originally aired in 1963 just after JFK was assassinated. I wasn't alive then. I found the Doctor—who was was played by Tom Baker—in reruns on PBS airing BBC at odd hours. I do not know how old I was, but the Doctor I grew to like was on air originally from 1974 to 1981—the "current" Doctor of my middle school years played by Peter Davidson was not to my liking. I stopped watching when the reruns of Baker stopped airing...

Complexity: In 2005 the series started up again after nearly a decade hiatus. It is brilliant fantasy, sic-fi, horror, story telling. What I love the most about the series is the complex plots that are played out over multiple episodes and sometimes whole seasons. No spoilers here. Doctor Who feels smart to me. The Doctor is quick and compassionate (when he has his human companion present). He is well cultured and read. He knows history like he's lived each and every moment. And he knows the future and the galaxy, and he is the lat of his kind and alone.

I love the little nods to literature, pop culture, history,  and science often placed in episodes here are a few examples from episodes we have recently watched in my household:

Episode 183: "The Lazarus Experiment"
Both the Doctor and Lazarus quote T. S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men. The Doctor completes Lazarus' quotation with the line, "Falls the Shadow" — which has been used as the title of a Doctor Who novel. There is also a Doctor Who novel called The Hollow Men featuring animated scarecrows. The Doctor later tells Martha that Eliot got it right in saying that it all ends "not with a bang, but a whimper". The Doctor also alludes to Eliot's reference to Lazarus in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead." [wikipedia]
Episode 184: "42"
A security question needed in the plot of the show requires the next  number in a sequence. The answer is the next "happy prime."
A "happy number is a number defined by the following process: Starting with any positive integer, replace the number by the sum of the squares of its digits, and repeat the process until the number equals 1 (where it will stay), or it loops endlessly in a cycle which does not include 1. Those numbers for which this process ends in 1 are happy numbers, while those that do not end in 1 are unhappy numbers (or sad numbers)." [wikipedia] 
A happy prime is a number that is both happy and prime. The episode name references the answer to "Life, the Universe, and Everything" in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I love these little allusions as they offer deeper meaning to the plot than initially perceived.

Episode 185a: "Human Nature" & Episode 185b: "The Family of Blood"

The "bad guys" in this episode rely on reanimated straw men to do their dirty work. The story draws from the 1995 book Human Nature, but the scarecrows are from the 1998 book The Hollow Men. The layers of complexity are excellent, and the continuity to the The Doctor Who canon is phenomenal.


So, to continue three weeks of posts with ties to T.S Eliot, here is his 1925 poem, The Hollow Men:



The Hollow Men
by T.S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.
      A penny for the Old Guy

                I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.


                II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom


                III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.


                IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.


                V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
                            For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
                            Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                            For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

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