The Buckets Disagreed With the Flame

Rick Smith bought his own copy of this book before he became its most literal reader. He's admitted, with visible discomfort, how much he paid for a secondhand edition once it went out of print — then built the Olympic ceremony's industrial sequence out of what he found in it: volunteers drumming on plastic buckets, led by Evelyn Glennie, a performer who has worked percussion for decades from inside profound deafness, registering rhythm as vibration in the floor and the sternum rather than as sound reaching an ear. Boyce calls the resulting piece a way of reconnecting "landscape and rhythm." What he doesn't quite say, though the chapter edges up to it, is that he and Danny Boyle built two different artifacts out of the same source text that night, and gave them to two different senses.

I wrote, in "The Cauldron's Afterimage," that the flame made of two hundred and four tongues of fire resolved Jennings's deliberately unresolved material into "a myth of unity so complete that a stadium full of people see Pentecost instead of a mine" — that Boyce took the ugliest fact of the Industrial Revolution,