songs of experience

On Friday, I shelled out some serious babysitting dough in order to attend an afternoon seminar at the UNC graduate English department. The name of the talk by Richard Begam (U Wisconsin at Madison) was ‘Beckett’s Kinetic Aesthetics.’ I have long been a Samuel Beckett fan (though I don’t claim to understand him) and I thought this topic sounded particularly interesting. Post-modernist/new historicist academic elite have spent the last umpteen years deconstructing literature by reducing it to the mere expression of two primal human urges (sex and hunger). In speaking of kinetics, I was hoping Professor Begam would bring a third possibly more necessary need to the dissecting table … the basic, human desire for movement.

But, alas, he did not. It was more of the same body talk … with a lot of show-offy “Look at me!” blow-hard questions afterward … however, I did discover something noteworthy (blog-worthy?) as I was reading around in the Beckett section of my Norton anthology afterward:

“Beckett’s work is always stripped, severe, grotesquely comic, and haunted by the theme of nonexistence. He seeks to represent the mind purified down to its last bitter, almost unbearably pure negation - and kept alive simply by the force of that negation.

Fastened to a dying animal, as Yeats said, the mind of a Beckett character seeks constantly to reassure itself of its own existence by developing a brilliant, sterile dialectic of its own. They [the characters] have stories to tell, and as long as they can keep talking, can keep some sort of empty verbal game going, they need not despair of their being.”

Ouch. Is this why we’re all blogging … to keep some sort of empty verbal game going?

Like Fat Charlie, sometimes I want to quit this game.

I read some more in Norton:

“But any sort of comfort or security beyond the absolute minimum eludes them. They take no action [except to hit the "publish" button]*, they preach no doctrine [aside from a doctine of one], they know nothing save their own ignorance [sad, but true], they are kicked and cuffed by society, they stink, they sulk, they snarl at their own disgusting condition [poor, poor bloggers]. And yet [don't you just love the AND YETS!?!] in some dark way, they represent mankind, ‘without the courage to end or the strength to go on’ - as the Beckett narrator of The End describes himself. In clinging to hopelessness as their one hope, they bear witness, as more comfortable folk could not, to the essential holiness of existence.”

*the brackets are mine