Sacred Imagination for Chapter 12

[pobble_reads]

Sorry for the delay in getting around to posting this - chronic illness is boring (I find it particularly frustrating when I more or less have the spoons to post less involved entities on my own journal but can’t quite manage anything that involves concentration. Anyway I’ve chosen the passage describing the Punch and Judy Company arriving at the unfriendly village for Sacred Imagination practice:

One day they came to the village that was less pleasant than the rest.
The houses were grey and dirty. No flowers grew in the gardens, which were full of weeds. The street was littered with rubbish, while the pond on the village green was thick with duckweed and slime.
Nobody came out to greet the Punch and Judy show when the showman put up his striped box on the green.
A few children, slouching home from school, stared rudely but went home to tell their parents, for just as the showman was about to move on, a few people began to straggle up and stood about in little groups to watch the show.
The showman would willingly have left such disagreeable people behind, but being a merry-hearted man himself, he thought he had better do all he could to cheer their misery, so he set Gobbolino beating a drum and drew up the curtain.
The children and their parents watching did not clap their hands as most children did.
Instead they began to make rude remarks.
“Punch has cracked his nose! Judy’s pinny is torn! Look at Toby‘s face! Who ever saw a black dog Toby before?”
“The old show-box could do with a clean! And the showman too, I dearsay!”
“And Dog Toby, he’s black enough!” shouted someone else.
All the children laughed, but it was very disagreeable laughter.
Suddenly a voice from the back called out:
“That isn’t a dog at all! It’s a cat!”
Gobbolino bristled all over with rage, and the voice called out again:
“It’s a cat, I tell you! And what is more it is a witch’s cat, or I am very much mistaken!”

Comments

[pobble_reads]

I started out imagining that I was a random unknown member of the Punch and Judy Troupe. When we arrived at the village I wondered what had happened there? Had there been some sort of tragedy that either physically prevented people from taking care of their environment or destroyed their motivation and sense of community? It felt like visiting the scene of a disaster- the greyness and emptiness of the village felt oppressive. It seemed weird that all of the houses were neglected - whatever the problem was must be community wide and it must have lasted for long enough for the streets to fill up with rubbish and the pond with weed.
I was quite worried for the villagers - and a bit for us in case there was some kind of still present danger. I wondered if we could cheer them up or if they would find our presence inappropriate after whatever the problem was?

[thinking that made me realise I hadn’t previously given much thought as to why this village was so different? There seems to have been a vicious circle of unneighbourlyness and neglect but I wonder what the initial trigger was. Had an initial handful of antisocial people brought the rest of the village down to their level or had something more dramatic happened?]

When we first saw the children on their way home from school I was glad. I thought a performance might help bring them out of the oppressive negativity of this place and assumed that they would respond as positively as the children in other villages. I assumed that children would be easier to reach emotionally than the obviously closed off adults. I was surprised how quiet and uninvolved they were as our performance began. It seemed unnatural and worrying...

[pobble_reads]

As the performance began I switched to being one of the puppet performers. It felt like being on “the front line” The heckling felt like an attack.
I wanted to keep on with the show and hoped that at least some of the younger children would get swept up in the magic of it. I’d performed in show after show and knew there were always a few people you couldn’t fully reach but thought at least some of the audience might appreciate us.
As the insults continued it became harder and harder to continue with the show. We all lost energy and struggled to remember lines and queues but were determined to keep going. We are actors after all and The Show Must always Go On...
I started to get worried that they might throw things at us

It was noticeable that the previously apathetic seeming and mutually hostile villagers seemed to gain strength and a sense of communal purpose in their nastiness. We had wanted to bring them together - but not like this!
Finally the insults directed at Gobbolino stopped the show. It was one thing to talk about cracked noses and torn pinnies (which was unkind, and maybe a bit exaggerated, but true) but he was visible angry that someone called out that he was a cat rather than working with the theatrical conventions that puppets can play people and one animal can play another. That disrespect hurt all of us. We might still have been able to carry on but him being publicly labelled as a Witch’s Cat was too much - the crowd (which now felt like a mob) became so hostile that we couldn’t continue. I was genuinely frightened for our safety after that - eventually we had to run.