No Man’s Land ( - and, on the occasion of the second anniversary of „The Crucible“: why theatre is so good when it is NOT theatre …)

I think I kind of expected that I would use my blog as a “scrapbook” for a time. Of course I would need a scrapbook, and it was already the day after I published this swan song on my blog that I saw “No Man’s Land” with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in the “Cinema”. Very fitting title for continuing my blog in 2017 by the way … But I won’t write any theatre reviews or the like just because I don’t have anything else to write. This will still be about reading.

As usual, I went because I wanted to see these two actors, and I didn’t make up my mind about the play beforehand. I didn’t know anything about it, and I didn’t read it – which would have been a complete waste of time anyway. Though it might have been interesting to see what would have “happened” if I had tried to read it aloud. But I doubt anything would have happened in this case. And I couldn’t have understood it any better than I did because I understood EVERY SINGLE WORD anyone said on that stage. (Finally everybody was speaking so slowly that even I could follow – and it even was the perfect way of speaking the text!)

The reason why I am writing about it is, as usual, because I enjoyed it and wanted to know why. I especially enjoyed the “aftermath” which is always significant. It began immediately after I had seen it. There was a q&a, and it was still before ten, but I didn’t want to stay for it. And I think this was because I didn’t want to spoil the mood. Strange, because it is certainly one of these plays I usually would have felt to be depressing and boring, and then I liked the experience so much that I didn’t want to spoil it.

The immediate reason was certainly that the actors - all four of them, by the way! - spoke the text so beautifully that they easily convinced me that it is special even though it didn’t yield any meaning. But meaning can “happen” in very different ways, and there was definitely something happening for these four actors. And without a text that works great on the stage you would never see four great actors WHOEVER they were! (Though I couldn’t escape the impression that Patrick Stewart might actually play a chair and “we” might like to watch him doing it …)

What jogged my brain and made me realize what exactly happened on that stage was picking up a scrap of conversation during the interval. A woman explaining to some younger people that the play was kind of “Waiting for Godot” … And I would have liked to pitch in spontaneously and say: No, it is NOT, stupid!

But of course I would never have done something like this. And she might not even have been COMPLETELY wrong. But if this was “Waiting for Godot” it was certainly an “adult” version for people who worked out that their brain isn’t just there to produce thoughts and reproduce stuff they have learned at school, but that we use it to create emotions and impressions OF OUR OWN. “Waiting for Godot” I had done at uni and had hated it, of course. It is exactly the kind of stuff I hate because it actually IS boring, and in this case I am sure seeing it in the theatre wouldn’t have changed this. Because it is about nothing happening, and that’s all there is. So THERE IS NOTHING HAPPENING on that stage whereas there was definitely something going on in “No Man’s Land” – apart from Ian McKellen being in love with his text and Patrick Stewart sitting in a chair in the most significant manner I have ever seen anybody sitting in a chair. But what was it?

I think that “No Man’s Land” actually isn’t ABOUT anything. Nothing significant happens – in terms of “story” – and nothing anybody says really MEANS anything, or yields any real insight into these characters. Who they are doesn’t really matter, nor what they are talking about. But all of it is used in a “material” way, as “stuff” to create something quite different. At least in this production, “No Man’s Land” is a performance to create something on the stage which is appropriately called “No Man’s Land”, and which is something that actually exists in real life but that we seldom become aware of. I’d describe it as some kind of space in between the layer of talking – which actually is something “we” apparently HAVE to do, even if there is no reason or thought or point to it, just like we need to breathe, and which is an activity I try to avoid … pointless talk. A space between this constant activity of mindless talking and the human being which is the physical and psychological source of this talk. This space, or void, is something we usually don’t feel, or become aware of, and which might be so small that it is almost inexistent, or certainly “unfelt”, especially when we are young. But when “we” are growing older, or old … and nobody is interested anymore in us as the physical and psychological unit we are, it begins to become bigger. And it was getting bigger and bigger on that stage until it became REALLY big, and really dark. It even had a different “sound” to it, like the sound of the void as distinct from the beautiful sounding text, like being in a large cave where sounds are different from the outside, or like standing inside a big sphere … And to see or feel this space being created on the stage as something that ACTUALLY EXISTS was totally exciting. Even more so as there is something beautiful being created from an experience which in real life must be ugly and depressing, through language and “physical” playing. And this is exactly the kind of thing I like to see in the theatre. And which can happen ONLY in the theatre, by the way – even if the stage is a cinema screen.

And of course it can only happen when you have these great actors who can “fill” the stage like this, having this sublime awareness of language as well as this complete understanding of themselves as physical beings. Especially Patrick Stewart was incredible. I last saw him in the RSC’s “Hamlet” (with David Tennant as Hamlet), and I almost couldn’t believe it. Kind of like it was to see Cate Blanchett in “Carol” – AFTER “Blue Jasmine”, or Richard Armitage as the “Red Dragon” even after “The Crucible”. How can there be SO MUCH MORE even after this? All these examples aren’t really something to compare, and I am in no position to judge anyway, knowing so little of his theatre-work. But he definitely is one of my favourite actors now, if he wasn’t before that, which are the ones of whom I EXPECT that they will surprise me.

And I know I should have stayed for the q&a, if only to confirm something I came to suspect many times. That, as a reader, I can have a “better”, more complete or significant, understanding of a text than any of the people producing it – directors included. Which doesn’t mean that the act of creating it wasn’t a much more INTENSE experience than watching (or reading) it. It certainly was, but I am in a much better position to see what actually “came out” of this act of creating. When everything that they put into it is coming together. Well, I couldn’t confirm it in this case, maybe another time …

Anyway, it was one of the purest examples of something I probably appreciate more than anything about reading. That there is a very distinct state created WITHIN MYSELF that is DIFFERENT from any other state I experienced until then. And it made me see even more clearly what I need this blog for because, if I “just” experienced it, it ends there. I don’t know what it is I have been feeling, and I won’t remember it later on unless I can repeat the experience and feel THE SAME again. Sometimes I am able to describe or explain it satisfactorily – as in this case, or when I read “Vanity Fair”, or when I am watching “House of Cards”. Or reading Shakespeare, by the way. I know WHY it is special. Sometimes it is probably a too complex or singular and personal experience so that I have never been able to describe it properly as, I think, was the case with “The Crucible”. I am getting better at explaining what happened, though. I just realized, putting together my “diary” from 2015 (which is more like a “bimonthly”), that this exceptional theatre experience now dates back two years, and I couldn’t believe it! The only thing that is more strange is that I am apparently still “working on it”. But I am fairly certain now that it turned out this way because I had a personal history with this play – having seen the film twenty years ago – WITHOUT REALIZING IT when I finally saw it in the theatre for the first time. I don’t even think that I would ever have wanted to admit this, but it was one of these texts that had a similar impact on me – especially on the part of me that is female! – as, for example, “The Scarlet Letter”, or “Madame Bovary”, or “The White Peacock”. So, I got ambushed by my own UNRESOLVED personal issues at the same time I enjoyed the beauty and perfection of it. And this personal content cannot be “appropriated” in the same way as other more “generally accepted” emotions, though I think a lot of it can be “used” for reading, but then it is already altered. That is what I think happened when I read “The Shrew” where I used a very personal experience to get all the fun out of the play, and almost all the “life” into it. But with “The Crucible” it was different, and I believe that I even WANTED it to come out like this, in a way as bad as it really was. And I kind of liked feeling REALLY BAD for about three days after I had seen it because this was how I found out what had happened. I even like to think that this was because they really “meant” what happened on that stage. This utter determination to get to the bottom of the truth of this play was what I felt from the beginning and what impressed me more than I can say. And made me rediscover how much I love theatre – when it is NOT theatre.  

Thinking about this I hit on at least one issue about reading where I’d very much like to dig deeper. It was there as an underlying experience especially when I compared watching Shakespeare plays as stage productions and on screen. And I had a go at it once, trying to explain, clumsily I think, what happens when I “hit” the fourth wall. Until now it has proved epistemologically useful to treat every text – be it a book, a film, a theatre production, or a tv series – the same: as the beginning and end-product of a reading process. But the differences had begun to show as well, as in this case the fundamentally different experience of watching a performance on screen or on stage. I am not really optimistic that I will ever get to the bottom of it, but it appears that the stage somehow is the ideal place for dealing with the TRUTH. In a way I haven’t even begun to describe, it is almost always more direct and honest, and I cannot protect myself from it in the same way I can when it is a film. Any film! – And I just had a short but no less interesting exchange with my brother about a similar issue. He has currently had a very significant experience about discovering reading as a “room of his own”, and gave an intense description of what happens when he is reading. I could slap myself that I haven’t actively put it to memory … And he told me that the experience of seeing a tv production of a story in his opinion could never compete with the experience of reading the book. And even though I don’t necessarily feel the same I know exactly what he means. The difference is that I love adaptations of great literature, and love and expect it to be a DIFFERENT experience. But undoubtedly there is a fundamental difference between what happens when we are watching and when we are reading. At the moment I mainly experience getting tired when I am reading. But this is not insignificant either because it suggests that reading, for whatever reason, appears to suck up much more of my energy. But it certainly is a lot more complex than that, and one reason for getting tired is probably that I am NOT reading Shakespeare at the moment but Philippa Gregory …

What happens in “Hannibal”?

The most important thing about STORY I have already written in my last post: that, for me, story isn’t important. So I expect this to become a very short post. But of course this is wishful thinking because I know that I am wrong about it. And I even think I actually learned something from reading Dover Wilson who thought it worthwhile to figure out what HAPPENS in “Hamlet” instead of leaning on prejudices and assumptions. But the essential part of reading where I have always been really bad at is “story”. Somehow I always get “trapped” inside the characters and lose sight of what is happening. Which can become kind of ridiculous. For example, I might be the only person in the world who can read whodunnits twice or even three times because I have forgotten who did it. In a way, I have always been bored by “classic” whodunnits like “Sherlock Holmes” or “Agatha Cristies”. But, for a time, I was an avid reader of Elizabeth George, Minette Walters, and other writers who take the structure of the whodunnit as a pretence for telling gripping stories about people and their relationships. And I got lost in these stories, completely forgetting to pay attention to who did it. And I remember that my reading of “American Beauty” was so exclusively aesthetical and character-based that I didn’t just not get it who killed Lester Burnham but didn’t even ASK myself that question! And, like in “Hamlet”, I had to admit that it actually MATTERS what happens because, failing this, I haven’t really understood the text. It actually matters much more than in a whodunnit because these stories are in fact ALIKE whereas “Hamlet” and “American Beauty” are singular texts where the information about what happens isn’t trivial. And, of course, “Hannibal” is the same. I might have considered it a minor inconvenience that, watching season three, episode 1-7 for the first time I didn’t understand ANYTHING, but of course this is kind of ridiculous. And, of course, when I made the decision to watch the series from the beginning I began to modify this single-minded perspective.

Nonetheless, it was the LAST thing I did. “Story” was the last thing I focused on, figuring out what actually happens. And the strange thing is: I think this is what made my reading so singularly enjoyable and successful in the end. The reason for this is exactly that, in “Hannibal”, what actually happens isn’t trivial but really important. I came to think that the “vortex” in “Hannibal” is not constructed through trying to tell a story but through creating these strong “force fields” which “we” are drawn into and which, by this, begin to interact. And, what I appreciate more than anything, the most important of these force fields are created by the actors. The best and most important example of this being of course Hannibal himself. It is mostly Mads Mikkelsen’s incredibly precise and resourceful acting which creates this very large force field that, like a giant magnet, achieves to orientate the other force fields to create the structure he wants. And this is what happens in “Hannibal”, or rather the first half of it. And I think it is already obvious that, to figure out what is happening EXACTLY, I needed, and could apply, a lot of input from all the other “areas” of the text. That is, from what I analyzed FIRST.

Still, this happens “naturally”, I think, when we “play along”. What I kind of struggled with watching season one and two for the second time, and then watching season three again, was the second part which basically is about Will Graham. I even kind of grasped the genius construction of this character in the beginning when I began to call him “everyman”. This was partly removing him from me because, unlike with the “bad” characters, I really, really, REALLY didn’t want to get involved with him. And it was partly underestimating him which I think “we” do, especially in the beginning, but which is part of the learning curve we have to perform. In the end I came to love it how he slowly goes from “blurry” to lethal, without being able ONCE to “nail” him and put him into one of the many categories that might apply … because this is how he “escapes” Hannibal. Being this “blurry”, permanently “unfinished” person with this kind of energy none of the other characters can identify completely – not even Hannibal! – he becomes the only one able to create a force field which can interfere with Hannibal’s. And he becomes the love of Hannibal’s life because of this: that he is unable to PREDICT him. It is of course one of these trivialities about love that we want to be SURPRISED by the person we love, but I think it is very rarely true.

So, through this description, I have entered still another category which is a big creator of force fields, and which I’d call CONCEPTS or SEMANTICS. And it is of course another level of the text which I was constantly about to figure out. In this case usually characters dropping one of these “big” concepts, and I taking up the ball and trying to figure out what it might mean. Which is obviously a game I love to play, but never quite like this. I never became aware of it as something where I, as a reader, call the shots. I already mentioned that I didn’t BELIEVE Hannibal. And I had in fact a lot more work and trouble to figure out what I chose to “believe” and what I chose to discard as bullshit than usual, but I came to like this very much. And, in the end, it might have become the second most important reason why I loved “Hannibal”. I had always thought that I preferred texts which somehow get rid of the bullshit, kind of cleanse their semantic world of it and emerge as a world of pure truth … Bullshit! I thought “Shakespeare” was such a world, or carelessly assumed it was. But there is a lot of bullshit in “Shakespeare” as well. I assume it is kind of like we need the bad to actually see the good, or the ridiculous as a background for what we take seriously. The bullshit is imminent, it is part of our world, especially every fictional world. What makes them different in my eyes, better or worse, is kind of how they deal with the bullshit. And this is that “the text” isn’t “trying” to infect us with it but kind of makes us responsible for identifying it and for deciding what we want to do with it. And, in this respect, “Hannibal” is just incredible. I actually WATCHED MYSELF moving about, picking up balls and following leads, dodging bullshit … and, actually, getting smarter! And I liked getting smarter, I love GETTING BETTER at what I am already good at!

And I am still not talking about story. In this respect I was right about myself: story, in the classical sense, is boring. It is the boring part when we already HAVE the story. And, in fact, it is so in maybe eighty percent of the “mainstream” stuff I watch: you just need to guess once or twice, and in each case of guessing there are only these two possibilities – so, what kind of an occupation is this? It is even more boring than watching football. In “Hannibal”, once I had become involved with it, I never stopped figuring out what was REALLY happening, not even when I had already seen it (- as I watched everything at least three times, probably more often). It appears that story, as a “living” part of reading, has in fact these two extreme poles: as a preconceived structure of events, and as something we DO, trying to make sense of unrelated events and observations in the same way we do in real life. In real life there are no “stories” but we rarely become aware of this because we aren’t even used to live without them. What we do with unrelated, shocking, or unusual events is to put them into the structure of prejudices or patterns of events we are used to. Which quite often means to “clothe” them in bullshit. And somehow playing with this occupation in a fictional context can achieve what we usually are unable to do in real life: make us aware of what we are actually doing and identify the bullshit.

This might have something to do with the reality of “force fields” within texts, which is something that ISN’T THERE in real life. There actually ARE people revealed and exposed by the actors where they are concealed and removed from us in real life, and there are these concepts which are thrown into our way for us to use. I have already identified some of them in “Hannibal”, namely LOVE and ART, and probably a few more, but there is one which I mentioned in passing and then threw into one of these “drawers” to examine it later – which, in the case of “Hannibal”, is even more strange than doing it with “story”. I meant: HORROR. But because of what I have just written I came to understand how this worked. In fact, “horror” was always there, as a concept, IN THE BACK OF MY HEAD. I always considered it but was not overwhelmed or even greatly affected by it, and this is because “they” actually leave you a choice. This might not be true for everybody, but I can rarely be the only person who felt like this about it. In the same way the “bullshit” didn’t turn my reading into bullshit, the horror didn’t turn my reading into something I didn’t enjoy anymore, or didn’t really want. Which means that MY FOCUS didn’t HAVE to be where the bullshit was, or where the horror was. Nonetheless it became extremely important as something that HELPED ME FOCUS. I think this will become clearer when I come to my conclusions about what “Hannibal” actually was about for me. I came to these conclusions reviewing my reading, and that was when I opened that drawer and examined “horror”, and came to realize how important it has been. So, for now, I’ll try a simile: I don’t listen to music that is just horrible noise that jars my nerves, I only listen to something with a tune or identifiable pattern I like. But the kind of music which only consists of a tune is not great music either. It is what stays in my head, with what I am able to sing along. But only the “background” of accompanying instruments really turns a tune into music, something I actually LISTEN to. And this was kind of like horror worked. It very rarely compelled me to focus on the things “highlighted” by horror, it rather changed the “tune” of the whole text so that I ACTUALLY LISTENED to a lot of what I probably thought I already knew. And discovered that I didn’t … It wasn’t important as something I focused on, it just changed force fields, and the pattern of evaluation I applied to the text, completely. It changed EVERYTHING. And it is strange: I knew from the beginning that it would be important, I just never knew in which way until I had finished reading.

Now I think I am finally done with examining the preliminaries: laying down in what way exactly STORY IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART of a text. It is when figuring out what actually happens means trying to make sense of this world the reading got us into. Even if this world might still basically be a load of bullshit. Watching the second half of season three for the last time, I had this revelation: It is STILL bullshit, and there is STILL MORE beauty and truth than there was when I watched it the last time. Which just means there must be a REASON that I never stopped trying to make sense of it. If, for whatever reason, we have come to love a text, that is what we do. And, as I said, does “average” life, with its pointless cruelty and vague sadness of endless repetition, really make that much more SENSE …? It is WE who are trying to make sense of it, that’s what we are bound for. And there is actually a lot about this in “Hannibal”. It is obviously not “just” about killing, cannibalism, and cruelty. Hannibal himself is certainly extremely successful at making sense of what is “in” him. He just has an unusually “literal” way of expressing it. I think he knows how successful he is, but this is obviously not enough …

Of course, like most great stories, “Hannibal” is about LOVE as well. But here it is particularly disagreeable to even become aware of this universal truth. I think I deliberately blocked it for some time in order to understand it better when the whole thing would make more sense. And, as in other cases, this was probably a good idea. And I think I begin to understand now because, writing about this, I have begun to see a PATTERN …

I detected this pattern writing about humour in my last post. Humour and irony stripped of everything about it that we enjoy, or even recognize as humour. When I finally became involved with Will Graham I was of course mainly interested in his relationship with Hannibal. And I confirmed my impression time and again: there is certainly hatred, fascination probably, but it is certainly not a “love-hate relationship”. THERE IS NO LOVE in any sense “we” might understand love. But it is still love, even more so because it is love stripped to the bone. It is even about the reason why “we” are so obsessed with the CONCEPT of love. So much so that it can never hold what it “promised” in a real-life context. It is the part of love that is ABOUT US – not the other person. We HAVE to love the person that makes us see ourselves in a TRUE light, EVEN IF we hate him or her. It just so happens that it is THIS person who does this for us.

And this doesn’t even have to be a good thing! – even though Hannibal thinks that it is under any circumstances. Or maybe “good” doesn’t exist or, at least, becomes extremely volatile. ALL these deeply rooted notions get shifted about but in a way that definitely makes sense. And finally HORROR reveals itself as an epistemological concept. Kind of like humour did, only, in this case, it is much more important. It is the main tool to create this kind of “estrangement effect” that makes us SEE things “as they are”. Or makes us SEE THINGS, full stop.

I think I already wrote that I kind of liked the sex scenes. (There are about … four of them - in the whole series! And I think I said as well that I kind of liked “Standards and Practices” …?) The reason is that I dislike POINTLESS sex-scenes and feel that they are humiliating for the actors. But in “Hannibal” there is always a point to it. And in at least three of them there is definitely an epistemological impact. They are about people coming to know themselves. So sex can be used like this as well, epistemologically, when it comes into a text. But, at least in “Hannibal”, horror is a much stronger tool to reveal the meaning of love. It couldn’t be if it was the kind of horror that blinds us with blood and drowns our thoughts in screams and our feelings in terror. The kind of horror I hate. As I said, it works epistemologically, shifting deep-set notions, until everything becomes crystal-clear. It makes us perceive Hannibal as somebody who CANNOT be loved or give love in a sense that we understand as love. Instead the harsh and unemotional “mechanics” of the NECESSITY of love is laid bare in this relationship – the part of life that makes us REAL people.

And this is a function of literature that I find extremely important: that these “big” notions like “love”, “soul”, or “heart” have to be cleansed perpetually of the bullshit that makes them sell mainstream books and films. And that is because they are REALLY important. Maybe my favourite bit in literature at all is a small paragraph from “A Single Man” by Christopher Isherwood where he describes his notion of “soul”. Because I never knew what a soul was supposed to be until then, and I think that most people don’t. But we know that it is a name for something that makes us human. He writes that at day-time we are like the little pools at the seaside – everybody his tiny, very limited world. At night-time, when we dream, we are these pools when the flood comes in, and suddenly we are connected with everybody and EVERYTHING. And, I think, because this happens (supposedly) in our sleep it is very seldom that we really experience ourselves as being “connected” in this way. But maybe still more often than we think, for example when we are reading … And I definitely felt connected with something when I was watching “Hannibal”. Very much so. This was how I felt about it ALL THE TIME, and why I enjoyed it so much, and I didn’t know how this came about. And now I have even succeeded to explain it!

So, that’s great. But what is definitely NOT is that, for the first time, I published a post without the next one already in the making. There are few things I have written which have amazed me in the same way as this blog. I began with Shakespeare, kind of starry-eyed and curious, just PAYING ATTENTION to what actually happens when I am reading. And I couldn’t believe what happened when I did, and still cannot believe the strange place I ended up. This is great, of course, the great thing about writing for me: that I never know where I will end up. Unlike going to real places which began to turn out to be the same each time. Which isn’t so curious because what makes them different isn’t just the places. It is what is inside me to connect me with them. But what IS curious is that now, for the first time, I feel as if I was in a place where I really want to be. And of course I want to stay there …

But it might not be possible because, at the moment, it feels as if this was all there is. I cannot really face it, but what I have always dreaded most was my life becoming a sequence of meaningless repetitions. That’s why I dislike birthdays and anniversaries and this kind of thing. I hated Christmas until it began to turn out different every year and surprised me. So, this wasn’t “just” about reading … Or rather reading turned out to be about what I know about the really important things in life. And it wasn’t as little as I thought I did. (At least if I assume that they are not making money, Bayern München, and sex.) Of course it is irrelevant for any other person in the world but it is ALL I WILL EVER GET. I learned tons about beauty, how important it is for me and in what way, and about love of course – as documented in this post! Maybe the most important thing about it, which is the same for reading and love, is something quite simple. It is that I am actually DOING something when I am reading – or when I am loving (which isn’t even possible to say, staying “inside” grammatical boundaries …) That what I am DOING is the most important thing, not what I am feeling – even though feeling is tremendously important as an INDICATION of what I am doing. And as some kind of “reward” for doing something. But it doesn’t occur without having done something in the first place. So, as it turned out, to love means to do something rather than to feel something, and without my blog I can’t “do” it anymore. But even Shakespeare could write sonnet 33 only once, so, of course, it has to change. If it will live it will have to change. As it did before …

Something happened recently that I feel might be a proper ending – if it is one. My sister told me that she had watched “The Fellowship of the Ring” again (there is an anniversary, by the way, the 15^th! Which I would have missed, of course …) though she only got to the council of Elrond because then she had to cook as the kids were coming home from school. And the way things turned out there won’t be an opportunity to go on with it in the foreseeable future. Tough! – But the really important thing was that she told me that she cried – I don’t know about what exactly, maybe, as usual, there wasn’t really time to talk … But it made me remember that my absolute favourite moment of all the six films, apart from the very beginning of “The Fellowship”, is the short sequence right before the end of “The Battle of the Five Armies” where Bilbo is standing in his empty living-room. I didn’t cry, not even then, because it was such a beautiful experience to feel that “they” had understood so exactly what Tolkien’s books are about - after they had blown it in “The Return of the King” with this awful scene of the “Grey Havens”. I remember myself thinking: of course it had to come to THIS in the end! But it wasn’t the end. “The Hobbit” was kind of a second chance – and “they” took it! So there is always hope – if you pin it on the RIGHT spot. And I don’t know if Schiller would have admitted that he liked it when people were crying in the theatre, seeing his stuff, but, in principle, it is exactly what he was dreaming of, and why he knew that serious playing is one of the most important things in the world. Because it creates a space for people to meet AS WHO THEY ARE. And creating this space, making it bigger, even only within my own little world, I consider a serious occupation which will be going on in some way. At a moment like this, with my blog coming to an end and the whole world at jeopardy – I don’t really want to consider either just now! – this is the only thing I know for certain.