Sometimes
the detail you want comes to you after; there's a delay, short in
length yet long enough to be too late. So although now better
informed, it cannot be used. It must be squirrelled away for the
future; a future that may come or it may not. Even squirrels forget
where they've buried nuts or dig another squirrel's up, stuff in
their cheeks until they're distended and can then be relocated: to a
new burial spot or a hole in a tree (or do they build a nest in the
branches, like birds? I'm sure I read that somewhere... Oh, their
nest is a 'drey', but in tree branches, could that be right??); but
if unable to wait, they sit and nibble at them then and there before
a squirrel who thinks these nuts are rightfully theirs comes along
and starts a chasing fight and chatters angrily. Squirrels, rivals or
friends, reds or greys, seem to like admonishing one another. A good
telling-off is a good day. Unless that telling-off is given by a dog,
of course.
Information-gathering
has many squirrel hallmarks. When you purposely hunt for it, you
don't often find it, or you find some other equally interesting
related or unrelated bit of trivia; when you forget it, it suddenly
arrives, in your lap, so to speak, with very little effort on your
part or expenditure of energy.
Both
the hunt and the late discovery are irritating, for in the former you
can only furnish an article with the sparse detail you have unearthed
or know, or forgo that angle altogether; and in the latter, well,
it's already been written and revised. For example, it would have
helpful to have understood more about the judging process and staging
of Greek plays; and that I would feel less troubled by Aristophanes'
comic choruses; and that Euripides was, and perhaps is, considered a
misogynist, a few weeks back, because now I have no use for that
information, and so the pieces published are exactly that:
less-informed and less informative.
Why,
you might ask, didn't I go back and revise? Simply, or complicatedly,
because it would have changed the whole tone, the whole piece.
It's
laziness, then? No. It's a principle. I always stand by what I've
written, which includes honouring the time and place it's been
written in. I didn't know then what I know now. What I subsequently
learned would, as it invariably does, have altered my views, my
assumptions, which weren't wrong but were formed from another premise
entirely, and would therefore destroy 700 words or thereabouts.
Somehow, for some unknown reason, that matters to me. Almost as if
I'm charting my scholarly progress or assessing my honesty. I didn't
think I was doing that, but perhaps I am subconsciously...
See,
snippets of unlooked-for information surface all the time and give
you something else to ponder...
The
information I've presented is not then false, just representative of
where I was in my thinking. But have I, then, falsely led the
audience I think I'm writing for, like some sort of Pied Piper or Pan
figure? Have I spoken in riddles like Beatrix Potter's Squirrel
Nutkin? Am I, in fact, doing both?
Well,
if I am then I'm leading myself on and confusing myself too.
Yet,
like the Piper, I attempt to lure information to me with pipes or a
flute; or, like Squirrel Nutkin, taunt an old Master, dead and
forgotten or dead and remembered, with riddles and songs until they
give in and send pearls of wisdom, sky-downwards or from the
underbelly of the world where such masters reside. But because I fail
to make the usual offerings (of foodstuffs) and libations the
information sometimes comes not at all, or more often in dribs and
drabs, or is delayed, so, for example, those I wanted in April I
gathered in May, and those I wanted in May are coming now, in June.
Somewhere,
a whole island awaits me. Of information called-up by me but
uncollected and unused because permission hasn't yet been given to
receive it. And other parties, in this time, may have pushed to the
front of the queue. My only option, as I see it, is to lure these
other interested squirrels away with my rustic flute-playing and find
a way to seize all
the nuts.
Picture credit: Squirrel Nutkin, 1903, Beatrix Potter (source: WikiArt)
