Time Is...
Feb. 5th, 2024 07:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo The story of the brazen head has nagged at me all my adult life. It crops up in various versions, but the one that nailed it down occurs in a funny-peculiar little comedy by the Elizabethan dramatist Robert Greene called Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. How odd, given my fascination with the story, that it's taken me till now to read it. Greene ain't Shakespeare. No, he's much easier, and his verse is pleasant and colourful and his play has all the depth of a Christmas pantomime. Mainly it's about love across the class divide- and it's silly and sappy and wholly unrealistic. The thread of plot concerning Friar Bacon adds a spice of weirdness....
Friar Bacon is the best magician in Europe. He has laboured for thirty years to make a brass head which- when activated- will reveal mysteries and work miracles. Unfortunately he falls asleep on the night of revelation- and his clownish apprentice fails to wake him. The brass head speaks three sentences and then implodes.
(Why are magician's apprentices in folklore always so goddam useless?)
Oh, but it hurts. All that labour for nothing. The secrets of the universe within reach of mortal man then snatched away.
And all we're left to puzzle over are the three cryptic sentences...
Time is.
Time was.
Time is past......
Friar Bacon is the best magician in Europe. He has laboured for thirty years to make a brass head which- when activated- will reveal mysteries and work miracles. Unfortunately he falls asleep on the night of revelation- and his clownish apprentice fails to wake him. The brass head speaks three sentences and then implodes.
(Why are magician's apprentices in folklore always so goddam useless?)
Oh, but it hurts. All that labour for nothing. The secrets of the universe within reach of mortal man then snatched away.
And all we're left to puzzle over are the three cryptic sentences...
Time is.
Time was.
Time is past......
