Notes on the source material

Edward Lear (1812-1888) was the twentieth child of Jeremiah and Anne Lear. His mother had quite understandably enough of looking after children by the time he came along and abdicating her responsibility of care, had little contact with him. As a result he was brought up by his sister Anne. He was an epileptic; sometimes having up to a dozen fits a day. He was homosexual and the need he felt to keep these two things hidden contributed towards his solitary leanings: to his feelings of loneliness and of being an outsider. Though primarily remembered for his nonsense works, he made his living as a painter.

Early on he produced meticulous watercolours and lithographs of birds and other animals; many of which were commissioned to be included in lavish volumes such as “Birds of Europe” and “A history

of British Quadrupeds”

Later, he became a landscape painter. This was partly influenced by health needs. A chronic asthma sufferer, with regular bouts of bronchitis and rheumatism, he felt he needed to be in sunnier climes. He travelled widely, producing thousands of topographical studies in Greece, Turkey, Italy, Egypt, Malta, Corfu, France and India; as well as publishing richly illustrated accounts of his travels

His work brought him into contact with wealthy and privileged patrons such as the Earl of Derby and Queen Victoria to whom he gave drawing lessons. He was friends with Holman Hunt and Tennyson and yet his constant need to scrape a living and pay for his extensive travels by touting for commissions, the attitudes of some of the moneyed people, who considered him their “social inferior “, and his doubts about the quality of his own work made him unhappy. He was by all accounts, warmly regarded for his humour and empathetic character, but he was prone to bouts of extreme depression, which he called “The Morbids”. His peripatetic lifestyle contributed to his general sense of isolation. He had never come to terms with his mother’s rejection of him. Towards the end of his life, as his health and eyesight failed he became increasingly irascible, disillusioned and reliant on alcohol. He had wrestled throughout his adulthood with the question of whether to seek a life partner; it seems he was in love with a man called Frank Lushington who remained unaware of his feelings. On many occasions Lear was close to proposing marriage, notably to a woman called Gussie Bethel, but was held back by the need it would entail of disclosing his epilepsy, and by the feeling that he would only make a wife unhappy.

Lear’s nonsense poems are filled with references to the far-flung locations he travelled to. Nonsensical place-names coexist with

equally preposterous sounding real places. His eccentric cast of characters behave in ways that seem to mock Victorian sobriety. In contrast to the nonsense works of Lewis Carroll, which can feel emotionally detached, Lear’s are often filled with sadness and yearning for things lost or never attained.

“The Jumblies”, published in 1871, is relatively upbeat. But I think it does contain a bit of an irritated poke at the attitudes of Victorian tourists. Whether in Rome, Athens, Corfu or Cannes, Lear would rent accommodation big enough to open one room as a gallery in which to sell his landscape paintings. He would be reliant for his income on travellers from his own country, such as those from the moneyed classes doing the grand tour. They would want to buy paintings that would remind them of their trip, and in his letters and diaries Lear could be very impatient and insulting about these people and the stupid things they would say. He was equally impatient with the attitudes and lifestyles of the ex-pat communities that he felt forced to consort with. I think this irritation is reflected in this poem, where the eponymous travellers who “went to sea in a sieve” are far too pleased with themselves. They are shallow and unthinking; passing through exotic places: sight-seeing and collecting souvenirs and stories in order to impress the folk back home

“The Dong with a Luminous Nose”: a sort of sequel or companion piece was published six years later. Behind the nonsense and the preposterous imagery, the cynicism of the earlier poem is replaced here with a darkly wistful tone. The descriptions of the hostile landscape, the inspired image of the dong traversing the night with this strange contraption strapped to his face and the reaction of others to him, come together to portray the Dong’s deranged state of mind. Lear admired the romantic poets (an unfinished project of his was an illustrated volume of Tennyson’s poems) and “The Dong with a Luminous Nose” reads almost as a satire of romantic poetry-except that it is also a cry from the heart.

Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven” was first published in 1845; thirty two years before The Dong with a Luminous Nose. For all their obvious differences, the two poems seem as if cast from the same mould. Each has a protagonist who is a driven to despair by his refusal to accept that he will never see the woman he loves again. Neither of the women in question appears to have died, and what is driving each man insane is his hope, against all likelihood, that he might be reunited with his love. Both the Dong and the unnamed scholar in “The Raven” are portrayed against a backdrop which coincides with and enhances the picture we have of their state of mind. In “The Raven” the scholarly hermit’s isolated dwelling sits deep in the impenetrable gloom of a bleak December night. Opening the door to see who is there: he tells us that there is “darkness there and nothing more” and his isolation seems complete. The Dong’s searches take him through a hostile terrain in the “awful darkness” of the “long, long wintry nights”. The sky is

filled with storm clouds and the waves break angrily on the shore; all in keeping with his desperate, albeit ludicrous, search. Apparently “The Raven” is a much satirised poem and admittedly there maybe something faintly ridiculous and a bit pompous in Poe’s use of terms drawn from classical mythology and the bible. Such terms as “the night’s plutonian shore” seem to find their counterpart in Lear’s “great Gromboolian plain” and “Torrible Zone”; which seem to satire references to mythological places found in romantic poetry.

But the most striking similarity of all between the poems is that each writer has found a simple corporeal motif of graphic simplicity with which to symbolise their protagonist’s state of mind. In the case of the dong, this is the phallus-like wicker-work nose he straps to his face; a searchlight that makes his hunt outwardly ridiculous whilst at the same time emphasising how unhinged its wearer has become. In the case of “The raven”: the raven himself is the embodiment of the narrator’s single mindedness. It is clear that all roads in the scholar’s mind lead to the same obsession. The bird is like an unwelcome thought that won’t go away.

It is not clear whether the name “Dong”, with its unfortunate phallic connotations, is an honorary title given to some important functionary within the community, or conversely a pejorative term: a dismissive nickname given to one seen as an outsider? Are those “…who watch at the midnight hour, from hall or terrace, or lofty tower” commenting on the mad antics of one who was until recently, respected among them, or one who they have always held in suspicion?

Environmental influences

Other imagery that may feed into the interpretation of the poems relate to my experience of moving to Hackney in the mid-eighties. I remember being struck by the number of outwardly eccentric characters seemingly living in a world of their own, who were wandering the streets. Presently, my brother came to live there too, and we would often comment on these characters, giving nicknames to some. One of these we named him Harvey Bickle, on account of his seeming to us like an amalgam of two characters from the film ”Taxi Driver”: one played by Harvey Keitel and the other called Travis Bickle. Wearing Cuban heels, fancy waistcoats,

numerous gold rings and bracelets and heavy chains around his neck, Harvey Bickle is still walking the streets of Stoke Newington with a proprietorial air. At any moment it seems that someone might approach him, kneel down and kissing the rings on his fingers, ask for his help in sorting out some local difficulty.

Mentioning this man to two friends: they knew exactly who we meant, and told us that they called him “Cuban Pete”. It makes you wonder how many other nicknames, unknown to him, he has been given.

The second character that stands out for his sheer bizarreness is a man we named “The Christmas Tree”. From the neck up he looked a lot like Santa Clause, with long white hair and beard. But from neck down, a whole other thing was going on: he was always dressed in layers made up of numerous ladies nighties and fine net curtains. On his feet he wore sandals and socks. His age was difficult to discern, clouded by the beard and layers of flouncy net that made him look like an overweight fairy from the top of a Christmas tree; but he was quite old. I remember thinking how Hackney was the best place for someone like him to survive because there was at that time a degree of tolerance of difference that one may not have found elsewhere. There in Stoke Newington, where coincidently Edgar Allen Poe went to school, I can still picture “The Christmas Tree” sitting at a window table in a tea shop and a seemingly unfazed waitress placing in front of him a pot of tea and a small jug of milk.

Then there was a character who we called “Raskolnikov”, because his outward appearance reminded us of the impoverished student who killed his landlady with an axe in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”. Tall and gaunt with a straggly beard he was

always strikingly dirty and wore an unidentifiable object on his head that looked like a homemade bearskin hat.

We knew nothing about “Raskolnikov” other than what could be gleaned, rightly or wrongly, from his appearance and that he seemed to live on the outskirts of Stamford Hill. Stamford Hill is home to a large community of Hassidic Jews and it is possible that he might have been influenced by them in his choice of headwear.

The question that arises with these and other characters, and one we could ask of ourselves, is how they got from being a baby, fresh to the world and with the potential to become anything, to the point they had arrived at. What is their life story? What troubles has life thrown at them, for them to arrive at their present persona?

We moved to Stamford Hill in the mid to late nineties. A good proportion of the houses there are occupied by Hassidic Jewish families. It would be fair to say they keep themselves to themselves. From an outsider‘s point of view, it seems as if they want as little contact with non-Hassidim as practically possible.

What are the things that any of us do, that others might find strange? It is difficult to know, but during the years we lived there, strange sights to us soon became familiar by their seasonal repetition; affording glimpses into the traditions which hold their community together. For example, on a certain day of the year people you pass will be carrying a palm leaf in a special see-through plastic carry case. Little make-shift shelters, covered in these leaves will appear on the street and in back gardens or on balconies. Their purpose has something to do with providing a place for families to eat under the stars, re-enacting a time, I think, when Jews were wandering in the wilderness.

Then there is Purim. As a rule the Hassidim seem very conservative. They follow a strict dress-code; women’s fashion seems to be frozen in the fifties and menswear in an earlier era. There is nothing frivolous about what they wear and there is little sign of personal choice. When out on their own, young men from the community tend to walk very quickly with their eyes cast down.

It is easy to make the assumption that there is very little humour in their lives, which of course is not true. On the festival of Purim there is something of a carnival atmosphere on the streets of Stamford Hill. Hassidic men might wear brightly coloured wigs or cowboy hats; or tie ribbons in their beards. Some make a point of showing how drunk they are. Open-backed trucks playing klezmer music full blast on huge speakers are driven round the streets filled with inebriated men. A huge upturned whiskey bottle mounted on top of a truck’s cab with a tube leading from its mouth to the open petrol cap might indicate that even their mode of transport is getting drunk. Children wear very elaborate fancy dress costumes on this day; toothpaste tubes can be seen walking hand-in-hand with New York cops and Snow White with a giant rabbit.

On different sides of a crossroads in a side street in Stamford hill, there is a synagogue and a mosque; two next door neighbours with just a narrow road separating them. People come and go all day. At times crowds are pouring out of each place of worship simultaneously. I would pass this place regularly and would never see any interaction between the two communities, of either a friendly or a hostile nature. The one occasion that I saw some communication between the two institutions was after an incident on a local bus, where a Muslim youth had stabbed a young Hassid. The morning after this incident occurred, there was a small group of Hassidic men stationed over the road from the mosque. One of them was informing the people inside that they, the Hassidic community, were not Zionists and that there should be no

hostility between them and the Muslim community. But instead of knocking on the door he stood at a distance and used a megaphone.

Other influences on the visual imagery of the piece

TelegraphyThinking about long distance communication brought me to look at Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet: a book about the history of the telegraph. It tells how before electricity was harnessed, optical telegraphs were employed, such as the system of rotating shutters pictured below.

And this one with adjustable arms, where different positions corresponded with different letters

Samuel Morse created his famous code of dots and dashes in the 1840’s. Still in use throughout the twentieth century, it was used as the international standard for maritime distress up until 1999.

“But one morning he made him a slender wire,

An artist’s vision took life and form

While he drew from heaven the strange, fierce fire

That reddens the edge of the midnight storm;

And carried it over the mountain’s crest,

And dropped it into the Ocean’s breast;

And Science proclaimed, from shore to shore,

That time and space ruled man no more”

This rather over the top excerpt from “The Victory”: a poem written in tribute to Samuel Morse bears a passing resemblance to The Dong with a Luminous Nose.

The shipping forecast, a warning system for those at sea, initially used telegraphic communications as its means of broadcast. To some remote communities it must have been a lifeline.

Easter Island menThere are 800 or so totemic figures dotted around the Easter Island or Rapa Nui.

These sculptures, which could be described as its oldest inhabitants, stare out to sea as if keeping watch.

Other sculptures that spring to mind when thinking of these background characters are those by Henry Moore or those from a group of artists whose work was dubbed “Geometry of Fear

And Alberto Giacometti

Closer to home, the corbels or brackets nestled under our eaves and windowsills are like stern faces observing the goings-on in our street.

I like these corbel-faces. They have a simplicity that would translate well into puppet heads. Variants of this design feature on the Victorian houses in Clapton and Stoke Newington. On part of Brooke Road their chins are more prominent, on Bayston Road their noses are more snubbed and do not come straight down from the forehead. Like the Easter Island figures they just seem to passively watch.

The Festival of Britain

The 1951 Festival of Britain was created to engender a feeling of optimism and recovery at the end of the war. Britain was coming out of an age of austerity. The country had been bankrupt and massively in debt to America. The festival was intended to showcase what was considered the best of British arts, design and technology. Festival director Gerald Barry described the event as a “A tonic to the nation” Fine-artists featured in festival exhibitions included Victor Pasmore

Reg Butler

John Tunnard

Henry Moore

And Barbara Hepworth

But this idea of the festival being “A tonic to the nation” seems, in my mind at least, to be exemplified by the textile designs of Lucienne Day

Lucienne Day was inspired by the work of painters such as Joan

Miro

And Paul Klee

The proposal

I have been convinced for a long time that “The Dong with a Luminous Nose” would make a great puppet show and have played out a number of very different versions in my head - sometimes only tenuously based on the original poem – only to give up on them as unworkable. It is still by no means clear to me how the show could be realised, but I remain convinced that it is a

great subject for a puppet- led piece: one where puppetry is the primary medium. Whether the production would even use the original text or indeed any words is an open question. I would be interested in looking at ways to integrate the poem into a visual storytelling style, but puppetry, image and music might be enough. The similarity between Lear’s poem and Poe’s “The Raven” is appealing in that it brings two very different artists into the frame, and I have wondered whether a cross fertilisation of the two poems might produce interesting results.

My first thoughts about the poem, in relation to making it into a show, was that the image of The Dong: searching through the night with this great contraption strapped to his face, was crying out to be realised as piece of Bunraku-style puppetry, but with dance-like choreography.

Lear’s drawings for his limericks depict figures in extreme poses, often tiptoeing or rocking on their heels with arms splayed out, and it would be great to capture some of this in his puppet’s movement.

Below I have set out some preliminary thoughts set as rough notes or images. They really are very rough and by no means definitive

Image 1Just a single point of light moving in the dark- pausing, and creeping

Image 2On a windswept island or the rocky shore of an isolated outcrop of land, time-lapse film clouds hurtle by at an impossible pace. The sound of bells clanging fills the night. Dark figures, reminiscent of Easter Island men; carrying French loafs, hold onto their hats and struggle against the wind or get carried along by it. Hats fly through the air- French loafs spin across the stage- newspapers wrap themselves round their weary bodies - a figure loses its balance and turns an involuntary cartwheel across the stage- another, swept off his feet, grabs onto a tree that has been stripped bare by the relentless wind, and is compelled to hang horizontally like a tattered flag and look on helplessly as the wind robs him of his trousers Imagine then this windswept island: Easter Island/Geometry of Fear/ corbel-faced figures scuttling for shelter. The houses are lightweight shacks, liable to be uprooted by any strong gale and blown around like tumbleweed. Trees too, are uprooted. The islands topography is in a constant state of flux. Retiring for the night on one side of the island, a family might wake up on the other - with new neighbours.

Image 3A house, bigger and more solidly built than the rest and with a prominent bell tower, stands immovable near the shore. With the night raging outside, a middle-aged man sits in its cosy interior. Hunched over a small device, he is listening to radio signals and trying to unlock their message. The radio signals sound like the

white noise you hear in-between radio stations -muffled voices emerge; mixed in with Morse code signals. The man is losing his temper. He searches through books as he listens – throws them down – focusses once more on the radio waves, trying to make his mind go blank, to be more receptive.

Image 4 On a sunny morning 30 years or so earlier, a happy and excited family pour out of the big house; weighed down with suit cases and picnic baskets, they tumble pell-mell into a waiting boat. As the last child is about to jump in, his father stops him. Reminds him that someone has to stay behind to ring the bell! Feeling hurt, the boy watches the boat depart until it is a small dot on the horizon. He wanders off listlessly, but is drawn back to the point on the sea shore from where the boat set off: where he sits late into the night; watching and waiting. Image 5The boy wakes up on the beach. An urgent sound – a telephone ringing? - Comes from the big house - a group of islanders have gathered in expectation: waiting for him to ring the bell.

Image 6 The boy is on the beach again; staring towards the spot where he saw the boat disappear. Two islanders: a man and a woman draw near, silently and unseen by the boy. The man reaches out as if to put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, but something stops him. The woman gently pulls him away.

Image 7Morning, the boy opens his front door to find his neighbours have left French loaves - a kindly gesture. The boy sees red - he wants his parents back, not French sticks – he stamps on them and throws them in the sea.

Image 8Two islanders look down at the broken remains of their gift: their French loafs bobbing on the waves

Image 9 Evening: lights in the windows and sounds of laughter from within the islanders’ homes. The boy watches at a distance - shadowy

figures making neighbourly visits, carrying cakes, musical instruments, boxes of backgammon and dominoes.

Image 10Time passes. The boy is grown-up into the man we have seen struggling to hear the radio message. Once again, he is sitting on the shore watching the point on the horizon where the boat disappeared. Once again, the islanders have gathered round, waiting for him to ring the bell.

Image 11Imagine then, that this bleak, derelict island is almost monochrome; as if the extreme weather conditions that it and its inhabitants have endured, has drained everything of its original colour. A muted, limited palette prevails Life is colourless.

Image 12The bell tower

Image 13

Loud clamours as all the bells are rung simultaneously. The islanders run for cover and batten down the hatches.

Image 14A colour storm: The Jumblies arrive in a deluge of brightly coloured shapes

The Jumblies are an unpredictable, wild assortment of abstract shapes; always jumbling themselves up into new combinations; they can be whatever they want to be. They can be animal, fish or fairground ride; they can be arms that welcome you in or spikes that prod and push you away.They can be a whole lot of fun, or a whole lot of trouble!

The islanders are unsureShould they run inside and bolt their doors and wait for them to be gone? Or does something of the festive spirit rub off?

Image 15The Dong has no such qualms. He has been terribly lonely.

Image 16 The Jumblies are callous and feckless tourists. They are out for a bit of fun and do not care what mess they leave in their wake - and the dong is easy prey. Out of their chaotic shape-shifting mass, they tease him with the image of the Jumblie girl. Her image will appear then dissolve, then appear and dissolve again - back into the mass of shapes. With these repetitions of her image they draw him into their net; where life seems one big multi-coloured playground.

Image 17

But there is a turning point: at the height of all the festive fun the shapes turn nasty, they become barbed and spikey, and push the dong away, leaving him with the feeling that it is his fault - that he has done something wrong: has overstepped the mark somehow

Image 18All colour drains away as the Jumblies desert the island

Image 19The dong frantically searching

Image 20The dong sitting on the seashore, once more looking out to sea

Image 21There are sounds of industry coming from inside the dong’s house. The islanders approaching and listening

Image 22Darkness: a point of light is moving swiftly and with great agility; darting from here to there effortlessly and with great sense of purpose.

Image 23 The light sputters and fizzles out as the day breaks to reveal the exhausted dong, gasping for air and wearing a great big smouldering wicker-work nose

Image 24 Over the passage of time he is becoming more cranky and eccentric. His extensive searches have turned up numerous scraps of colour that he has pinned to his coat; so that he now looks like a shabby home-made bird of paradise. In order to hear better during his nightly excursions he has fashioned a great big pair of hearing trumpets and he straps these to his ears. As darkness falls he steps out into the night. Dark once more: his light falls on the faces of frightened islanders and small burrowing animals taking flight