This is what today's assembly is going to do. It will take two phrases and put them together to create a narrative purpose in which it will follow a chain of ideas from one to the other, pulling in cross references and knowledge from literature, logic, religion, history, politics and geography so fast you'll have to concentrate to keep up. I'll name four poets, a goddess and a demigod, a novelist, three philosophers, an actor and a pop group. Extra credit if you spot all twelve. It will conclude with some personal news, four pieces of wise advice and a short recap before I send you all off for afternoon school.
So, if you’ll bear with me, we’re going to trip the light fantastic to the end of the road, two short phrases one of whose meanings is obvious but the other less so. We’ll start, therefore, with the light fantastic and get to the end of the road before the end of the assembly. The phrase “trip the light fantastic” originates in John Milton’s 1645 poem L’Allegro in which he has the line “Com, and trip it as ye go on the light fantastic toe” which is an exhortation to Euphrosyne to dance nimbly with extremely fancy footwork. Well, let us dance nimbly with those ideas – first John Milton, who was a 17th century English poet and civil servant best known for his epic poem “Paradise Lost”. If you haven’t heard of him then you are likely to have heard of those inspired by him, who include the Williams, Blake and Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy. L’Allegro is Italian for The Happy Man and is often paired with another poem, Il Penseroso, the melancholy man. Euphrosyne was one of three goddesses known as the Graces. She is the goddess of good cheer, joy and mirth and her name is a feminised version of the Greek word for merriment.
The Light Fantastic is also a book by Terry Pratchett, second in his Discworld series, books that I heartily recommend, although I don’t recommend starting with this one: the first book, The Colour of Magic, finishes on a cliff-hanger and The Light Fantastic continues where it left off. It is very nearly a literal as well as metaphorical cliff hanger as the hero of the piece, a cowardly wizard called Rincewind, sails off the edge of the world which is, as you might have already guessed, a flat disc and is left clinging on and staring down to the giant elephants that hold the Discworld on their backs and, beyond that, down to the space turtle, the Great A’Tuin that carries the entire ensemble through the universe. Actually, I wouldn’t recommend starting with The Colour of Magic either, I think Pratchett got better as he wrote more and so I suggest you pick up Mort, the tale of Death’s apprentice, or Wyrd Sisters, Pratchett’s version of Macbeth, or Monstrous Regiment, which pokes fun at both war and sexism, or Night Watch, an examination of policing in a dictatorship. There are 41 to choose from and wherever you start I can promise you merriment and a whole host of intertextual references to pick up and enjoy.
The central conceit, however, the idea that the world is a flat disc carried on the backs of four elephants standing on the shell of a turtle, is a curious one. It’s not Pratchett’s original idea, but has roots in Hinduism, Chinese mythology and the cosmology of some native American tribes. I first came across it in an old encyclopaedia picked up from a library as a child – it rejoiced in artists impressions of the planets (none of which have been endorsed by more recent photograph) and threw scorn on those whose views of the universe were less enlightened. There was a depiction of the Discworld myth that stuck with me – it’s possible that Pratchett saw the same one. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke compares a poor piece of logic to a believer in this myth who says that the world is on an elephant which is on a tortoise “but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad backed tortoise was unable to answer.”
John Locke was a contemporary of John Milton (30 years younger, but they overlapped). He was a philosopher and physician and is described as the father of liberalism. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau as well as the founding fathers of the USA and his reflections on classical republicanism can be picked up in the declaration of independence. His question about the turtle is one of cause and effect and the problem of infinite descent. If this caused that, what caused this and it’s a problem that all creation stories share – if the universe was created by the big bang then what caused the big bang, if it was made by God, who made God, if the elephants stand on the turtle, what does the turtle stand on? You can never get to the end of the road – although there is a (probably apocryphal) story of an old lady who was explaining about the disc and the elephants and the turtle to a scientist. He asked the obvious question “But what is the turtle standing on?” and her answer was very straightforward “A second, much larger turtle.” “And beneath the second turtle?” “I’m going to save you a lot of questions here, young man – it’s turtles all the way down.” It’s one answer – but however you do it, if you’re determined enough in your search for precursors then you never get to the end of the road.
Back to the Locke-inspired declaration of independence that is responsible for the USA. The colonies had been at war with Britain for about a year and the document set out the reasons for the demand of independence including unfair taxation and other laws, preventing good laws, depriving people of justice and maintaining an army in the colonies. Really, though, the American colonies were too big, too populous, too successful to be simply an offshoot of Great Britain and even if George III had been the most liberal and enlightened ruler, at some point the arrangement would have come to the end of the road. Signing the declaration of independence was a big step – it was a crime of high treason, which carried the death penalty and so the men who signed it had to be quite sure, and also had to have quite a bit of courage – to do what they believed to be the right thing even when it was definitely not the easy thing. For America, however, it was a beginning rather than the end: five years later, the colonies signed the articles of confederation, bringing them together in a union rather than merely allied independent states; and eight years after that, in 1789 the current constitution became law. At that point there were just 9 states in the United States with four more colonies waiting for their state parliaments to sign up. Very swiftly, however, nine became thirteen and thirteen became fourteen, fifteen and so on so that over a century and a bit the US got to 48 states by 1912 when Arizona signed up. Even that wasn’t the end of American expansion because there were two more territories that became states in 1959: vast, northern Alaska and, finally, sunny Hawaii in the south and west.
So our light fantastic brings us to Hawaii, which is an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean: a group of islands that have been formed as the ocean floor has moved over a hot spot – a volcano that pours out liquid rock. The oldest of the main islands is in the west of the group – it’s called Ni’ihau and has a large population of seabirds and 84 actual people. It is privately owned and is off-limits to everyone except the owning family, their guests and the US Navy. The next island down is more welcoming: Kaua’i calls itself the garden island and its main industry is tourism. It is also linguistically interesting in that the Kaua’i dialect of Hawaiian has the letter T that is missing from the other islands – in fact, to locals the island was called Taua’i until modern travel brought a degree of uniformity. Beyond Kaua’i, there is O’ahu, the most populous island, home to both the capital Honolulu and Pearl Harbour, headquarters of the Navy’s Pacific Fleet. Molokai, Lanai and Maui are grouped closely together, the first two best known for pineapple production whilst Maui is named after a demigod voiced by Dwayne Johnson. That brings us to Hawai’i island, The Big Island, Oh-why-hee, dominated by volcanoes – of which Mauna Kea is the world’s tallest mountain from its base far below the water to its peak and Kilauea is one of the most active volcanoes in the world pouring out hot lava into the water, creating new island as it does so. For Hawai’i, Kilauea is the end of the road.
The big island is also where I enter the story because I went on my honeymoon there, a long time ago, and as we drove around we listened to a local radio station that, for reasons best known to itself, kept playing hits from Philadelphia-based vocal harmony group Boyz II Men. They are now a trio, but when I was playing them slightly too loudly with my windows down enjoying the warm breeze they were a quartet, and the song they were singing, as I remember it incessantly, was their 1992 single “End of the Road” which is, if I’m honest, a disappointingly heteronormative piece in E-flat major in which the male narrator refuses to accept the break-up of his relationship. When we set out from the light fantastic I promised I’d get you here in the end – and the reason we’re here is that I need to tell you that this is the end of my time at Harris Clapham Sixth Form: I’ve been asked to take on other jobs for the Federation and from September you will have a new Executive Principal in Mr Astin. I can promise that I’ll miss you all – and that I’m enormously proud of this school, this community.
I do, however, have to go – and so, before I do, I need to provide you with some advice. What do I hope you’ll take away from our time together.
So, we’ve reached the end of the road for this assembly and retracing our steps we have a fond goodbye remembering a boy band played in Hawaii, the 50th state of a union kicked off by the declaration of independence, inspired by John Locke who commented on the Discworld which was written into a series of books by Terry Pratchett who named one of them The Light Fantastic after a line in a poem by John Milton. And we finish with L’Allegro, the Happy Man, and Euphrosyne, the goddess of merriment. Have a happy last week of term and a merry summer when you get there.
Footnotes:
1. John Milton is mentioned (as an inspiration to William Blake) in People are Strange. Wordsworth appears in Look Deeper, and Thomas Hardy, with two of his poems, appears in Frail Thrushes and Hope and Accuracy.
2. Terry Pratchett gets a fleeting mention in Endings, but is the central inspiration of The Song Remains and A Fine Thing.
3. The beginnings of the United States of America are the subject of Running out of Time.
4. Whenever I hear the phrase "trip the light fantastic", my mind slips not to John Milton but to Procul Harum (as in Start Here), and so this has been the soundtrack to writing this assembly: