The Troubles of Reading Music

 

We might all play an instrument, or not, to each their own, however, very few are music literate. Reading music is certainly something that I personally have trouble with. An immediate issue, I have come to find, while reading Texts for Nothing. It seems Beckett has decided to begin writing Jazz, which I can only speculate to be in the key of X. Particularly in the 7^th installment, or chapter, or contained verbal purge, do you find an exceptional playfulness in word choice, repetition, and construction. Do not misunderstand, the vignette is quite grave, but compared to the rest, one could rightfully consider it comical. The image of the ridged man at the terminal awaiting a train that would never come, with ticket gripped between thumb and forefinger, and both hands arrested by the knee, I found to be a ‘Laugh-Out-Loud’ moment. I imagine a monstrous grin on his face and perhaps an uncontrollable cackle polluting from his mouth, with a slight sway from side to side. The image of insanity; and I find it hilarious. Now, this is just a vision I experienced, and not the privileged analysis of a scholar. I am sure the scholar would find a more justified purpose or intention in #7, or even Texts for Nothing as a whole, and I am sure there is one, considering that Beckett is notorious for working on many simultaneous levels. But I know Jazz when I see it. The unpredictable unassociated combination of sound and fury that makes a Miles Davis album so endlessly entertaining, is the same concept applied by Beckett in this text. It is not so much about the association of one sentence to the next, or that of the previous. It is one simultaneous frame of an ‘imaginary’, dissected into fractions that hold the continuity of the image when read in linear fashion, for no particular reason other than by default of convention. The individual sentences might serve much the same purpose if they were scattered about over a page and meant to be read individually, but here convention works to the benefit of author, as a way, much like in music, for the reader to keep an ambivalent tempo of their choice. What I believe to be the intended effect is a loss of the reader to wild irregular free association of the mind while the eyes they continue to read. Texts for NO-thing. ‘No thing’ is a place you go when you’re absent from the thing you’re currently engaged in. Time does not exist here because it has been forgotten. But the piece ends and with it comes the wrath of time and a return to the world.

“Did I try everything, ferret in every hold, secretly, silently, patiently, listening?”

Well you have now, Mr. Beckett.

Krapp's Verbal Masturbation

Krapp’s Last Tape is the love of oneself. The love accompanying the hatred of ones existence. A lonely aging cynic struts around his dim lit room eating bananas; up there with pomegranates in pageant for ‘Most Salacious Fruit’. What I will assume, perhaps falsely, is that it was lust summoning the desire to recall past memory. He questions the contents of the ledger. Things like, “memorable equinox” don’t seem to be ringing any bells. Though he is stunned as he finally reads, “Good bye……love.” I would argue that those inclined to lust are as well inclined towards ‘sensational self-pity’ of one sort or another. What I mean by this is, he is a self-hating hedonist. Which pursuits does Krapp seem to be staying alive for? He drinks constantly and maintains a steady diet of victual bananas; has been for thirty+ years knowing full well that he should be doing a lot less of both. These are pleasure drives of the body. Another is sexual desire. Our man is Krapp, full of both.

But a man past his prime, lonely in his bitterness, stays alive only by a romantic egoism. It is epideixis at large. It explains the innumerable tins of tapes of personal narration. He even says on box-3-spool-5 that he was listening to an earlier year before the recording. Reveling in the sultry tenor of his own voice. Now if I can speak from personal experience: there isn’t a thing the self-pitied loves more than the wrenching heartbreak of lost love. Chewing the cud of that memory is enough to keep men alive. For men must have a justification for sadness, and women are the greatest source of sadness and a justification there of. It was the recollection of love lost that sent him towards the tape, not because he felt so deeply for this woman, but because it was a woman and it was over. When you feel nothing, an emotional vacuum, even self directed loath is pleasurable.

It reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s, The Sunset Limited, in which White says,   “If people saw the world for what it truly is. Saw their lives for what they truly are. Without dreams or illusions. I don't believe they could offer the first reason why they should not elect to die as soon as possible.” Krapp has nothing left to live for, but he is struggling between a world of illusions and the world for what it is. He fast forwards through the revelation that drove him thirty years prior to make a recording that night. There must be something on there that he does not want to realize he remembers. All he wants to do is remember the love that he lost and how it troubled him, troubles him, aches and burns, rekindling the love of the jaded ego and ever perpetuating the reasonable life. 

John Hurt, in his rendition, is, I believe, groping the tape recorder, as it plays:

 “I said I thought it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her eyes... I asked her to look at me and after a few moments-- after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over to get them in the shadow and they opened... Let me in... We drifted among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem. I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side... Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.”

Endgame

It wasn't until I was able to see the play acted that I lost all meaning ascribed to the drama while reading it. But as we have all come to understand: from one minute to the next, opinions, interpretations, and messages received from a Beckett production are subject to change. It was after I saw the setting and positioning of the characters on the stage that an interesting thought came to mind. Perhaps the room could be understood as a human head (with two windows for eyes), and entities inhabiting it are the different drivers (and baggage) of our minds. Hamm would, under this interpretation, constitute the central processing unit. The one who gives commands, sits about and expects to be pampered, or at the very least, entertained. Clov could be considered a symbol of the body, weak yet able, and always a slave to the mind. Now, the implications of this paradigm are seemingly endless, and I am in no way confident enough to face them, let alone explain them. Such as, if Hamm had found Clov when he was a boy and 'took him in' than that could suggest that the mind is eternal and constantly in search of a vessel. I would highly doubt that Beckett would be comfortable with these implications or even this analysis (No symbols where none intended, naturally). No matter how far from the mark it may be, the interpretation, I do not think, could be exhausted of all its veracity. We are of course invited into some form of a mind in this play, and what better setting for such a exploration than within the mind itself. The wonderful nature of Beckett is his ability to present his audience with something so useless to interpret that it becomes infinitely approachable. Tomorrow I expect to chastise myself for having such an elementary interpretation and proceed to replace it with one as equally feeble.

"Why didn't they do Oklahoma!"

I'm sure someone has stumbled upon this beauty already, but I couldn't take the chance...

Pot of Godot at the end of the rainbow

I don’t seem to be able……… to depart.

Such is life.

If Samuel Beckett wanted to bring Minimalism one more step along, he could cut away all dialogue except the snippet above, and still have produced a play as powerful as “Waiting for Godot”. The prolonged moments of inaction, the sparse and confusing dialogue, and the absurdity of the characters, mimics the qualities of life that are rarely thought to be elements of the theater, and even as such it captivates the audience who know that Godot will never come and hang on until the end in suspended disbelief. Such is life. “Godot” challenges the individual to question what it is that we keep alive in wait for. Where is that pot of gold on the other side of the rainbow, the promise of ‘something’ that we expect to be gold, shiny and satisfying. “Godot” is that gold. The secret that Beckett is enlightening is that there is no gold, there is no “Godot”, there is only every reason for one to believe that there is. Even little messenger boys, innocent and ambiguous, come along when hope of a purpose—like the twilight—grows ever more pale. It is just enough to lend the strength to live a couple more hours, days, weeks, years without pondering life’s meaninglessness. These signs, these suggestions are everywhere in life from the pang of hunger, to the desire to attend college: “If I eat I will keep my strength to find more food, to eat more food, to keep my strength…”; “If I go to college I can get a job, to make more money, to be comforted, to…”. But they always result in a next step and never an end result, and we know this. So in suspended disbelief we go on watching our lives, and waiting, and “[We] don’t seem to be able………. to depart.”

Such is life.  

"Dear incomprehension, it' thanks to you I'll be myself (again), in the end."

Few words given from a damaged mind having completed, The Unnamable :

 

I see a cue ball. Pure white and spherical, if not elongated like that of an egg. It is a swirling vortex of ‘thought’ or the voices that play such a prominent role for the ‘unnamable’, which is what I suspect to be the narratorial voice. It must be of another dimension, where the vortex of ideas are translated so feebly, these swirling voices that are at once ‘stirring’ and stilled. The human being is motionless as the subject, whose viewpoint is imprisoned somewhere behind the eyes, but as object the body is in constant motion and its physicality defies inertia always. Phenomenal and noumenal. As the voice that is at once ‘I’ and ‘not I’, Beckett continues to give life to these paradoxes and make sense of why we can’t understand them, by understanding them. How can one cope with being an innumerable lot of personalities, ideas, directions, while convinced at the same time of being a singularity. It’s the identity crisis, the existential crisis, and the death and life crises’, presented in the terminal of what I imagine to be the Grand Central Station of thoughts and Ideas. And this dark, or azure terminal has found a voice of it’s own, thrust into existence by, “Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving.” He is born. And being suddenly aware, which I am sure is not the first time, but perhaps the last, he tries on all sorts of gawky words that don’t help him very much at all, HE NEEDS PRACTISE, and that is what the book is. The practice enough to fumble around with many foreign, beguiling, uncertain words, enough to somehow state ones existence better than was able before, before dying. 

Die Malone

What is Death?

There are no words within these pages for a reader to rely on. Both writer and reader recognize this disconnection between a thought or idea and the words there are to express it. That being said, how are we to interpret the death of Malone. We have a fairly good idea from the title that he's not going to pull through, but I have a hard time believing that he is going to die in the traditional sense of the word. For one thing, Malone is not an flesh and bone existent, and while crawling through Beckett's mind these are significant factors of consideration.

  Perhaps Malone only goes as far as the numbered pages, and when they come to an end so does he. Which, it is true, can be said about any narrative in fiction, or even for a human in reality. So then the narrative is the personal rationalizing of death. But what if Malone is supposed to be considered a figment of Beckett's imagination, whose death is only the slow fade into nothingness as Beckett looses the need for an old, retired idea. Than, as such a cynical figment, who begins the only narrative it will ever call its own by acknowledging such a close proximity to his own death, the entirety of his life is but a funeral dirge. He slips into a psychoanalytical mantra, a self-expunging confessional that blends his life with the lives of (other) fictional characters and essentially acquits himself of memory and then all characteristics that would prove his existence. This is his life. To formulate the agony of dying. There for, To live is to die... and to live for death is... well... "Yes, I shall be natural at last, I shall suffer more, then less, without drawing any conclusions, I shall pay less heed to myself, I shall be neither hot nor cold any more, I shall be tepid, I shall die tepid, without enthusiasm."