A FEW WORDS FOR THE Discworld Chronicle: Bernard Pearson
As those who were at the recent Clarecraft Event or who
have perused the dedicated corner of L-Space will know, I have been
occupying my old age with sculpting the Unseen University.
It is sometimes said that those whom the gods wish to destroy they
first make mad: well, that could easily be the case. I feel however
that those whom the gods wish to destroy they give a good idea to.
Gosh, I thought: what a good idea to really make the UU real, to
bring it to life, as it were.
Now, one of the great pleasures of
my life - one that ranks alongside eating big dinners and quaffing - is
to make the words that wriggle out of TP's books and land splashing
images on the inside of your skull real, or as real as you can get
them. All right; just some of the words that join together in a
blissful harmony of destructive prose, a bit of the picture that you
can hold in your hand as well as your mind. Books are for reading, I
know: but sometimes the clever bugger creates such a powerful image
that I can almost feel it wants to come to life through my hands. If
that sounds spooky or somewhat presumptuous, well all right, maybe it
is; but each to his own. It's a harmless pursuit.
Anyway, there I was contemplating the idea of probably the most
involved piece of architectural sculpture I have hacked to date, and
then I talked to the man himself. Joy of joys, he said yes! Whoopee!
(etc, etc.)
Isobel did her usual trawl of the books to lift out the descriptive
prose, CMOT Briggs was threatened with the VAT until he divulged other
arcane details, and Tom and I embarked on it. First the easy bit - ha
bloody ha! - the Tower of Art. Hundreds of bricks later, and some very
serious mouldmaking, and there it is: bloody huge. (Please Note: the
fruit of loin Tom whose job it was to mark out the scale of the UU
buildings and other pithy details was somewhat vague as to the height
the finished tower should be.) I stopped at 20 inches: in fact, it
should have been about 8 feet. All well and good so far. Erm,
well...
For the last week of my life I have been sculpting the front facade,
clock tower, and abutments to Sator Square. Bloody hell - talk about
eye platting! Think on the description in the Companion of the guided
tour, of what the statue of Archchancellor Bewdley is doing with his
hands. Small though it is, it has to be there, so I have resorted to
jewellers wax for those and other details; and if you look very
carefully, just where you are told to in the Companion, there he is,
and there are his two little fingers. That, my dear friends, is what I
mean about bringing bits of Discworld to life: making it if not real,
then as real as my skills will allow. My hope is that what I can
achieve as a cunning artificer in some way comes near to the genius of
Terry's books. I know I will never be able to get it entirely
'right' but, by Jingo, I will try.
We all read the books, we all rejoice in the world he created, and
by sharing my skills amongst friends and fellow fans it allows me not
only the opportunity to indulge my skills as a craftsman, but to reach
an audience who will look and really see where I am coming from and
what I was trying to achieve... to bring just a little bit of Discworld
from our mind's eye into our everyday life.
Issues index.
Web pages designed by Derek Moody
May 1998
