Wednesday 4 August 2010

Taking after Beckett characters

I am a true Beckettian and that's by following Pozzo's remark about avoiding mixing with strangers as when Pozzo cautions Vladimir and Estragon against establishing friendships, by saying to them: "If we keep on talking like that, we will soon become friends." To this could be added Martha's remark in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where Martha says to the guests, Nick and Honey, "Never mix, never worry", meaning never mix your drinks so that you won't get sick, and never mix with people so that you won't get headaches. On the other hand, Tennessee Williams' Blanche in Streetcar Named Desire says at the end, "I always depended on the kindness of strangers." As you see, Sir, I am a man soaked, drenched and marinated in literature, and the result is that I drip of Iiterature. So please, dear all, put up with me because in my love of literature, I am like Othello who says that he "loved not wisely but too well." In the fullness of my letters, I am like Nietzsche's Zarathustra who feels that he is full of wisdom like a bee full of honey, and, like Shelley in "The Ode to the West Wind", who says, "I have fallen on thorns, I bleed", and like Lucky, I need someone to take my hat off my head so that, as Pozzo says, " there will be an end to [my] thinking", because I feel like Shakespeare's Richard III whispering to Clarence that he is "unsafe, Clarence, unsafe", and like the Monster who comes in the end to Frankenstein pleading, " Help me Frankenstein, help me," I ask all to please to listen to me as the Wedding Guest listened to Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. The rule--since time-honoured Aristotle said it--is that art imitates life, but there are times when, as in my case, life imitates art. In one of Beckett's novels, the protagonist keeps writing and posting letters, but he never gets any replies. I am like that Beckett protagonist in that my correspondence is mostly neglected, and how happy and proud am I to have my life imitate art, and Beckett art at that. Who that my look-alike Beckett protagonist is, memory is not serving

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