Isn't there anyone on the air?

Beckett at 100

«Today is the day we have been waiting for, even though it is better not to wait, because always what you get is less than what you hoped. 100 years since Samuel Beckett's birth. (Yes yes, they shall all now scream, "Birth was the death of him.")

"I once knew a madman who thought the end of the world had come. He was a painter--and engraver. I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and see him, in the asylum. I'd take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look! There! All that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness!

(Pause.)

He'd snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes." (Endgame)

The thing is, Beckett makes me laugh. That's why I've stuck with him. Yes, there's bleakness and dreariness and the-world-is-awful and all that, but before there is that there is laughter. A sad laughter, yes, but that just makes it more meaningful and complex.

Before the laughter, there is language. That's what caused my first crush. It was "Happy Days", and yes they were -- high school, my head blown off. It took me forever to read the play. People were allowed to write like this? ("Embedded up to her waist in exact center of mound, WINNIE.") I couldn't make head or tail or kneecap of it. I wanted to know more. Who gave insane people pens to write with? Who published them? From the library, I took a copy of Waiting for Godot. I don't remember making much of it, but I do remember reading it entranced. Something in the rhythms.

"ESTRAGON:
Let's hang ourselves immediately!
VLADIMIR:
From a bough?
(They go towards the tree.)
I wouldn't trust it.
ESTRAGON:
We can always try.
VLADIMIR:
Go ahead.
ESTRAGON:
After you.
VLADIMIR:
No no, you first.
ESTRAGON:
Why me?
VLADIMIR:
You're lighter than I am.
ESTRAGON:
Just so!
VLADIMIR:
I don't understand.
ESTRAGON:
Use your intelligence, can't you?
(Vladimir uses his intelligence.)
VLADIMIR: (finally).
I remain in the dark."

I couldn't stop. I read all the plays. They fit in one book and feel like a shelf. I haven't stopped reading. Now I have a case.

Eventually, I discovered the prose. Where? How? I don't remember. It took me a while. I still haven't finished Watt, fun as it is. With the prose, I tend to like it shorter -- the sublime How It Is and Texts for Nothing are particular favorites.

"Intent on these horizons I do not feel myfatiguee it is manifest none the less passage more laborious from one side to the other one semi-side prolongation of intermediate procumbency multiplication of mute imprecations

sudden quasi-certitude that another inch and I fall headlong into a ravine or dash myself against a wall though nothing I know only too well to be hoped for in that quarter this tears me from my reverie I've arrived"
(How It Is)

Closest to my heart, though, is Endgame, perhaps because I once directed it (with high school students! Yes, I'm insane! But it turned out well, despite the odds.) and so I have lived with that text most closely. I find myself using phrases from it suddenly in everyday moments ("We'd need a proper wheel-chair. With big wheels. Bicycle wheels!"). It's an interesting enough play to read, but it's when you're in the midst of a production of it that the wonder of Beckett becomes most apparent, because the words become, somehow, living things -- not so much fragments shored against the ruins, but the magnificence of the ruins themselves, the words adorning the death of everything, an apotheosis in words, the last things left, the only things we can still apprehend after the speaker or writer is gone.

"I open the door of the cell and go. I am so bowed I only see my feet, if I open my eyes, and between my legs a little trail of black dust. I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit."
(Endgame)»

Published in The Mumpsimus - 13 April 2006