Monotony

The following being an attempt in which the caffeinated author tries, earnestly, to draw on several of his varied current interests: viz., the 1890s, art criticism and the care of a 3-year-old.

Because, really, that's what the last few days have been made of. Cape Town, of course, is a modern city, with more than its share of splashy cafes and slick design firms. But I've found myself gravitating towards its older traces: towards the city as it stood in the last days of Victoria's reign and in the years shortly before WWI. And so I swim laps in the century-old public pool complex (where signs forbid, among a longish list of trespasses, petting and the preparation of food), and then walk a long block to Hiddingh Hall, the university art library, which stands directly next to a wonderful Egyptian revival structure and which offers, on its open stacks, improbably old volumes by Ruskin, William Morris, and peers. And so I sit down and read them: excerpts from The Stones of Venice; News from Nowhere, and on, and on.

And then I walk up the hill, past the mozzarella bar and the gothic fashion store, and dive into a different sort of pool: the world of imaginative, fluid play. This world has its own logic and rules: yesterday, for instance, Cleo suggested that we skip around the sofa, before augmenting the exercise with small, percussive egg rattles. After a few minutes of skipping and shaking, she paused, and suggested that we build a nest out of blankets and pillows, and tend to those same violently shaken eggs. And then this, in her enthusiastic little voice: "How about Lisa gonna shake her hair and Lisa gonna be silly?" Sure, Cleo, I said: go ahead. You pretend to be Milkshake's singer, and you shake that hair, girl. It's simply nice to see you healthy and happy.

Do the two spheres have anything, though, in common? Not, on the surface, much. But there's this: I can see, in Cleo's play, the same involved absorption that Ruskin and Morris sought in work. She is, as she romps in the living room, as far from alienated as the fulfilled craftsmen in Morris' late utopian novel. But I'd go further than that, in fact, because I'm also fascinated by the rhythm of Cleo's play. I remember, from her first couple of years, regular periods of relative tedium, as I tired of reading the same book, or repeating the same action again and again. But her current pace is more involving, from my point of view: just as I begin to feel a certain monotony setting in, she too seems to yearn from something new, and to suggest a change of course. And the resulting effect is engaging, or even powerful - an aspect that Ruskin, in fact, once noticed in great art and thoughtful music. In "The Nature of Gothic" (a section of The Stones of Venice that was later republished by the deeply impressed Morris), Ruskin wrote the following:

"Monotony after a certain time, or beyond a certain degree, becomes either uninteresting or intolerable, and the musician is obliged to break it in one of two ways: either while the air or passage is perpetually repeated, its notes are variously enriched and harmonized; or else, after a certain number of repeated passages, an entirely new passage is introduced, which is more or less delightful according to the length of the previous monotony. Nature, of course, uses both of these kinds of variation perpetually. The seawaves, resembling each other in general mass, but none like its brother in minor divisions and curves, are a monotony of the first kind; the great plain, broken by an emergent rock or clump of trees, is a monotony of the second.”

May we collapse two separate fields, then? Each turn around the sofa, plastic eggs in hand, resembles the last in general mass, but never repeats it in minor divisions and curves. And soon enough, you're building a nest.