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Thursday, 07 May 2009
A brief note on Oedipus at Colonus from 2007, and a quote from
Arthur Schopenhauer, posted in 2006, below.
Though he has watched a decent age pass by,
A man will sometimes still desire the world.
I swear I see no wisdom in that man.
The endless hours pile up a drift of pain
More unrelieved each day; and as for pleasure,
When he is sunken in excessive age,
You will not see his pleasure anywhere.
The last attendant is the same for all,
Old men and young alike, as in its season
Man's heritage of underworld appears:
There being then no epithalamion,
No music and no dance. Death is the finish.
Not to be born surpasses thought and speech.
The second best is to have seen the light
And then to go back quickly whence we came. ...
The tragedian's urge is to the pointless description of the light that
the
chorus of Oedipus at Colonus mentions, its expression through
himself. The
anatomization of that light is what the artist senselessly is compelled to
express (the soul's work), in Beckett's formulation of the artist's
activity ("The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with
which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no
desire to express, together with the obligation to express"): as Pozzo
insists, "They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant,
then it's night once more." It is ironic that the Art of Theatre, then, is
pursued in small dark rooms: not a Brechtian showing of the apparatus, but
a demonstration of the difficulty of seeing clearly. In pursuit of that
clarity the stage is ruthlessly stripped to its own devices: no
commingling with television or film allowable. Given the difficulty of the
artist's work, it's only fair not to burden him with media not his
own.
Tragedy never loses sight of the dark: it is presupposed, the terror
of
existence upon which a human-made beauty is imposed. This is a
difficult,
sensuous beauty: it is not mere cosmetic prettiness (this is for
melodrama). This imposition requires a rejection of Schopenhauer's
Quietism: it is a call for action, not resignation. A transgression
against the condition of man's illness, a finding of strength after the
experience of profound, bitter recognition. And a movement, that
expression, towards the awakening of possibilities within a world which
would thrust and confine all experience into collective culture's own
crude mold – a mold first created to deny the catastrophic
realization
experienced at Colonus, and validate its own illusory status as the only
truth.
If I am asked where the most intimate knowledge of that inner
essence
of the world, of that thing in itself which I have called the will to
live, is to be found, or where that essence enters most clearly into
our
consciousness, or where it achieves the purest revelation of itself, then
I must point to ecstasy in the act of copulation. That is it! That
is the
true essence and core of all things, the aim and purpose of all
existence.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Manuscript Remains, Volume 4
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