13 april 06 - Samuel Beckett

Greetings,

Howdy doody a bunch of letters dreaded to be threaded as word pearls reveal appeal soft light vapor clouds feeling compressed between warm and cool air dancing around emerald forest mountains, caressing their invisable formless form in a Chinese watercolor painting filled with delicate brushstrokes?

Where less is more...the gulf between our desires and the language in which they find expression. The absurdity of human existance.

Samuel Beckett's 100th year anniversary, April 13, 1906.

"Personally, of course, I regret everything."
"Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."
"We are all born mad. Some remain so." - Waiting for Godot
"The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle." - Molloy
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." - Worstward Ho

So, we went to lunch (after the initial blog post) and opened our writing/sketch book at random to page 98 and wa-la! discovered 4 jottings on Beckett - fragmentary personalities in the unconscious stimulated his sense of characterization (Jung)...Wilfred Bion's "Grid System" - group therapy and schematic structure of his writings...Beckett took his sense of structure, synthesis and abstraction from chess...alienation, untruth, justify unhappiness...existential and the futilty to desire a state of paradise.

"Endgame" by Beckett. Commentary by Andrew Hugill, 1992.

"Chess is habit-forming and played to the exclusion of all activity: a kind of custom and excision. In this it parallels the work of these two masters of the art of silence.

Most commentators remark that the play, with its few characters, references to past struggles and sense of weariness, resembles a chess endgame. A few mention Duchamp and Halberstadt's book, others ignore chess altogether. The precise character of the position, in which Black cannot win but only delay, is never discussed, perhaps because of its rarity. Duchamp commented:

"The endgames in which it works would interest no chess player...even the chess champions don't read the book, since the problem it poses only comes up once in a lifetime. They're end-game problems of possible games but so rare as to be nearly Utopian."

(From the NYT - 26 March 06)...The most elaborate and upbeat theory came from Ms. Paula Vogel, director of the M.F.A. playwriting program at Brown University who declared that "Beckett enabled women to become playwrights."

"I wonder what would've happened had Beckett existed as a colleague, or a contemporary, or even as a forerunner to Virginia Woolf," Ms. Vogel said. "What would've happened if she had seen the ability to dramatize stasis, where drama was no longer about the conflict of men in action, but was instead a conflict of perspectives? I think Virginia Woolf would've become a playwright.

"The huge gift that Beckett gave to theater, to women playwrights in particular, is our notion of dramaturgy: a non-Aristotelian, nonapocalyptic sense of time, sheer chronicity that stretches to eternity."

Samuel Beckett