I first became aware of the SA4QE in about 2005 from an article in The Guardian. At that time I was mainly housebound with chronic illness, and knew no one else who participated, so I did the event solitarily for several years, leaving sheets of (I have to admit non-yellow) paper around the local village green next to the river. Leaving Hoban’s quotes here felt playful and subversive, a fitting tribute to a quixotic writer. In 2013 I joined Twitter and was excited to connect with a few Hoban fans there, and particularly with one I have become close to, so this year I felt able to participate more collectively, albeit from my cul-de-sac of rural England.
I selected quotes from The Moment Under the Moment, which I’ve been pondering recently, as well as from The Medusa Frequency, my favourite Hoban tome, and duct-taped them up (it was a wild, blustery day) on the green and by the river. I wanted the quotes to express what I love about Hoban - his mix of poetry, profundity and humour, his ability to veer effortlessly from the sublime to the comic. My chosen quotes are also either perennial favourites or ones that have particular personal resonance.
As I was finishing up, a woman with a golden Labrador walked past, stopped, read a couple of the quotes and looked at me. “Oh,” she said. “Oh. Oh.”
“Yes, Oh,” I said.
She nodded and walked off. I felt it was a suitably Hobanesque encounter.
Everyone lives a life that is seen and a life that is unseen. Our dreams are part of our unseen life. We often forget our own dreams and we have no idea whatever of the dreams of others: last night the person next to you in the underground may have ridden naked on a lion or travelled under the sea to the lost city of Atlantis. Along with the dream life there is the life of ideas and half-ideas, of glimmerings and flashes and indescribable atmospheres of the mind. What we actually do in what is called the real world depends largely on how we live this unseen life in our inner world of words and images, songs and bits of poems, names and numbers and memories and dreams remembered and unremembered...
Manny Rat's housewarming was a great success. He had invited the cream of rat society, and all of them attended, twittering and squeaking with high spirits as they climbed the string ladder to the dolls' house. Grizzled old fighters and their plump, respectable wives touched whiskers with gentleman rats grown sleek by cunning and lithe young beauties of vaguely theatrical connection. Debutante rats and dashing young rats-about-town, all the golden youth of the dump, arrived in little laughing groups that achieved the effect of brilliance even in the dark, while doddering dowager rats came escorted by gaunt artistic rats with matted fur, burning eyes, and enormous appetites. Last up the ladder were a scattering of selected social climbers, followed by various hired bravos, obscure ruffians, and cheap hustlers whose good will was worth cultivating.