A Colorful Character . . .

Scarlatti Chromaticism?
Google Books

I'm trying to finish the talk I'm scheduled to present sometime next Friday at the BK21 Plus International Symposium, and here's my provisional introductory paragraph:

I am a hopeless, incorrigible, uncurable chromatic, a man in love with the vast, rich chromaticism of stories. As in the case of Don Quixote, a vast spectrum of colorful, disorderly notions, entire worlds of them, plucked from books and other sources, have crowded into my misshapen, mis-educated imagination (Cervantes, 4), forming and re-forming themselves there into a sea-change of new stories, rich and strange (Shakespeare, Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2), against the background of "a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, . . . birds singing on the bushes, . . . various insects flitting about, and . . . worms crawling through the damp earth" (Darwin, 863). Worms? Where did that come from? This talk begins already to sound rather morbid, don't you think, getting down there in the muck with worms? I mean, that's where we all eventually end up, right, and nobody wants to think about that, do they? We’d prefer a happy ending, okay? So, let's strike out that part about worms, pretend we'll never lie there under the earth. We're too evolved for that - we'll lie here upon the earth instead. That's what telling stories is about, isn't it, lying upon the earth?

Now if I can just figure out what else to say! The theme is supposed to be "Storytelling: Trauma, Healing, and Pedagogy."

And, yes, I know the word's "incurable," not "uncurable," but the sequence sounds better with this wrong spelling . . .