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."
       

Dumpster Love.

Molloy.

No matter what age or maturity level one may be, I am sure that no reader can peruse the text of Molloy and not be startled, or brought to hysterical tears, by the passages on ‘true love’. It is hinted towards on the first page that a passage will come up on his experiences with love, and it takes the next fifty pages to make the reader understand exactly what kind of sexual experience they should expect from such an odd character. Ah, but it is not just a sexual experience, it is ‘true love’, and he this he knows because she told him so.

I wish I could say that this was the most startling part of the passage but it certainly is not. Though it is worth much consideration, that she tells him it is ‘love’, and the confidence he has in her telling the truth about such, because he lacks the confidence of determining whether or not the ‘one who showed him love’ is named Ruth or Edith, or even a woman or a man. (“Perhaps she too was a man, yet another of them. But in that case surely our testicles would have collided, while we writhed. Perhaps she held hers tight in her hand, on purpose to avoid it.”) In every aspect of the experience in which he describes he begins confidently and ends so ambiguously that it is hard to determine if the event ever happened. “She went by the peaceful name of Ruth I think, but I can’t say for certain. Perhaps the name was Edith.” He is confident enough to describe her name as ‘peaceful’, but for all his confidence he lacks all conviction by the end of the thought. How peculiar, indeed.

The coup de grâce all of grotesquery and humor, ambiguity and honesty, must be the next sentence. And I quote, “She had a hole between her legs, oh not the bunghole I had always imagined, but a slit, and in this I put, or rather she put, my so-called virile member, not without difficulty, and I toiled and moiled until I discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop.” The heinousness of such words is enough to make a weak stomach sick, but the hilarity of how he came to finish is contradicting towards all notions of love that you almost have sympathy for such a derelict. For one line to bring the reader from sickness to sympathy is really quite remarkable.

This whole event seems to be included to make the reader reevaluate, or reconsider their evaluation of what it means to love and make love. Beckett seems to be commenting on the disconnect between words, the actions they elicit and their ultimate meanings. He uses the example of ‘making love’ as the ‘toiling and moiling’ as ‘coitus’. Perhaps another example along the same lines would be ‘sleeping together’ as ‘humping’ as ‘coitus’. The disconnect is between what the words actually mean and their implication; ‘sleeping together’ assumedly means next to one another, but implies on top of one another. When Ruth or Edith, or possibly some hobo with a mop on his head, tells him ‘[they] are making love’ he literally believes it to be ‘love’, not the desperate humping that it is in reality.

Here are a few more quotations that I couldn’t possibly leave out of this post, that also incorporate the severe disconnect Molloy has between signifier and signified.

-“She bent over the couch, because of her rheumatism, and in I went from behind… It seemed all right to me, for I had seen dogs, and I was astonished when she confided that you could go about it differently.”

- “Perhaps she put me in her rectum. A matter of complete indifference to me, I needn’t tell you. But is it true love, in the rectum? That’s what bothers me sometimes. Have I never known true love, after all?”   (The evidence to support Molloy’s complete ignorance into the world of love is laid out bare in these lines.)

- “We met in a rubbish dump, unlike any other, and yet they are all alike, rubbish dumps. I don’t know what she was doing there. I was limply poking about in the garbage saying probably, for at that age I must still have been capable of general ideas, This is life. She had no time to lose, I had nothing to lose, I would have made love with a goat, to know what love was.”

- “She gave me money after each session, to me who would have consented to know love, and probe it to the bottom, without charge. But she was an idealist.”

…Beckett, you are one sick genius. 

More Pricks than Kicks

More Pricks than Kicks.

The life of Belaqua - a potential, if not, possibly escaped mental patient, whose fornications range unilaterally, exclusively, amongst Dublin’s most schizophrenic female class (from Alba to Ruby, from Lucy to Thelma to Smeraldina) – encompasses all of the bizarrely relatable passages that comprise ‘More Pricks than Kicks’. The individual chapters are vignette-like in that they follow the oddest moments of Belaqua’s life that fit part to whole in the scheme of pinning down the characteristics that (often, if not always) form his character. That is not to say that I think Beckett has intended ‘More Pricks than Kicks’ to be a character study, but more so as an illustration of the ‘everyman’ of the environment that he has encountered in Dublin; a pastiche of social, cultural idiosyncrasies in attitudes and habits of Dubliners, and moreover Westerners. In addition, it acts also as a critique on other texts that have attempted to do this in the past that have been perhaps a little to narrow in their scope. (The scope of MPtK is wide and high, to say the least) What comes to mind is Goethe’s, The Sorrows of Young Werther and even in the chapter of Smeraldina’s letter Goethe is even mentioned. What's more, is that it's distinct from every other chapter, and even mimics the style of The Sorrows of Young Werther. While the form of ‘S. of Y. Werther’ is entirely epistolary, I imagine this novella as an encapsulation of what Werther's life might actually have been like, and not a self-account of how he interpreted his own life… The numbers of allusions are numerous and there even seem to be, what I will call, slant allusions: those that seem to give the impression of a hint or allusion but remains ambiguous and not entirely accurate. A good example of this would be the name of ‘Hermione Nautzsche’, in the ‘What a Misfortune’ chapter, which brings to mind, ‘Nietzsche’, a definitive influence on Beckett. There is even reference to one of his central ideas of the Ubermensche, which seems to imply that Nietzschean philosophy was on his mind when writing the novella, though he does not reference any specific doctrine there of. In stead it seems that he, if anything, applies some of the doctrine into practice – giving it a home. I do not think that it is a far stretch to suggest that Belaqua shares qualities with Nietzsche’s ‘last man’ archetype, though it is never announced… but more analysis is required for to gain any authority.

As a final thought I would like to comment on the incredibly modern register of Beckett’s diction: essentially slang. Many a time I came across a phrase or a saying that mimic’s (but I guess precedes) “what the kids are saying these days”. A short list: “But his little enjambment joke was pretty hot” (is that not Paris Hilton?), “Slip out quick”… there are many more but I had not marked them all. The point is, it shows that Beckett was ahead of his time in many ways. Another being his constant entering into the text: reminding the reader of what had happened in previous chapters. This is a metaphysical conceit in literature that was nearly abandoned in Modernist text and then revived in Post Modernism. Much in the same fashion it seems that Beckett skipped a few movements and found his own that strongly resembles whatever it is that goes on these days.

In all, I do not really know how to explain this text or even know how to begin to elucidate my reactions to it, because there are so many things to consider, to question and to ruminate on. And like every other text of his we have read, at the risk of sounding lazy and repetitive, it seems a large feature of his writing is to cultivate this nebulous confusion about what is and isn’t important in life and literature. To create order in chaos, by paradoxically setting them as equals

Westward Ho

Worstward Ho,

it seems, can be summarized, if at all (and feebly, admittedly) by:

“The void. How try say? How try fail? No try no fail. Say only-“

The text is riddled with longing, incompletion, and immobility, through fragments of thought. There does not seem to be one concrete formation of a thought even by the end of the piece, rather it acts more of a summary of thought in general – exploring the parameters of thought itself, which seem to be unending. I know it sounds clumsy, or ‘missaid’ as an analysis, but it would almost seem that any analysis of such a unorthodox text as this, must be at least ‘missaid’ if not completely irrational in its explanation in order to garner some sort of truth. 

            The initial quote above I take to be somewhat of a thesis statement of the piece. It seems as though through the rest of the text he is trying to (im)properly define ‘the void’ which I think shares many properties with the inner workings of the mind. Though the void cannot be properly defined as the mind. I think that by this quote Beckett is trying to say that perhaps in setting out on the task to define what the void is (which could be any facet of reality or unreality, or any space/non-space in-between) the person is setting off into an exercise in futility. So Beckett’s attempt to define the void is instead a show of how the void cannot be defined. As he says, ‘no try no fail’ which is to say that ‘to try is to fail’. Than, ‘Say only-‘ it is after this, in the next paragraph, that he gives us a subject: “First the bones”. But I do not think that these are related matters, only that they should seem to be related matters. “Say only-“ is the end… it is the realization that there is nothing that can be said, or anything to be said of importance that can contribute to such an indiscernible idea. Though there is always something to succeed it – an idea such as the void – though related, they may not be.

            But the idea is getting away from me. Moving on to another of the same on a previous page. “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” This quote seems to me a relative of the previous. They both try to illustrate the same concept. But it is not in this that I wish to find meaning or relation. It is what succeeds it that I find to be relative to the beginning quote. This too, is succeeded by a subject, without any transition the text moves on to a subject with no introduction. “First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the other.” This is Beckett’s trial. He ‘try’s’ just by enlightening us to a subject, a form. Which is ‘where it begins’ but what exactly is ‘it’ that has begun… well, that I believe to be one aspect of the void in which he is (failing) to describe. In failing to begin though, as he is indecisive as to where he plans on beginning (either body or place {or both}) he discovers a way to formulate the parameters of the void…without even addressing it. By not addressing the thing that cannot be addressed Beckett has formulated a discourse that in fact betters the readers understanding on exactly that which cannot be defined or addressed without failure… and succeeds?

Gnome

To avoid repetition and expound on the same rough idea that I shared in class… and more honestly, to save myself from reliving ‘Not I’ too many more times, I have decided to recognize another, shorter, funnier, more relatable Beckett piece for my inaugural Blog. I have chosen ‘Gnome’. I like this poem more and more with every read. Apparently Beckett was, like myself, suspicious (to put it politely) as to the notion of ‘higher learning’. I have even read elsewhere online that Beckett once presented to many prestigious French intellectuals a phony ‘learned paper’ by a Frenchmen that he had fabricated entirely: purely for the sport of mocking pedantry. (What a guy!)

I can’t help but to think about a wonderful quote that my buddy had pulled out earlier this day while we were conversing about our own collegiate suspicions. To quote Mr. Twain, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Wise words. And to quote Mr. Beckett, “that was a true saying.” Back to the poem, “Spend the years of learning squandering,” - check. Though I very seriously doubt that Beckett would give the advise of frittering away your days doing nothing. To some, in this 21^st century of ours, this line could be severely misconstrued, possibly as: ‘Spend the years of learning… in a dark room playing Call of Duty’. This is not the type of squandering that I imagine was meant in the poem. It's back to the point Mr. Twain made: school is not the only place to enhance your education. It’s the whole street/book smart binary. Higher learning, which translates almost exclusively as ‘University’, is the time in many-a lives that exposes the young to a world out from under the protective wings of parental control. It is consequently at this time that the young man or women should learn the ways of the world, and burying face to page is, as I believe Beckett to suggest, antagonistic to the perhaps more important experiential learning.

Another thing to cross my attention is the multiple ways of reading the poem due to the lack of punctuation; one of the benefits of minimalism. The line breaks indicate the end of a thought but if read continuously another fascinating reading (especially in the third and fourth lines) can be found. “Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning.” In this the more obvious reading is that the world is literally turning on axis (politely) as heavenly bodies tend to do. When the line breaks are missing, however, it seems that the world – as in the people that occupy it – are the ones that are turning (as in straying) from the loutishness of learning. This suggests that people are straying from learning (but which kind?), becoming ignorant to some sort of education that one must have the ‘courage’ to wander through…