Monday, September 24, 2012

"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. 

1 comment:

  1. Yeah, the entire trilogy seems, as you say, like an exercise in "stat[ing] one's existence better than... before." With each novel, Beckett boils away more and more order, and what remains resembles the pure chaos of a mind. I don't think we ever get true consciousness on the page, but what we do get is ever closer. Maybe when Beckett wrote "Try again. Fail Again. Fail better," he was thinking about "Molloy," "Malone Dies," and "The Unnamable."

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