The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: King Lear

  • The Weight and Whey of Words

    I was browsing through an old paperback of essays on Samuel Beckett (not to mention the why), and landed on this, about the weight of words, found in A. J. Leventhal’s essay titled “The Beckett Hero,” here discussing Beckett’s names:

    “If the names are not adventitious (and Beckett weighs all his words) it means that we are asked to think of this play, not as an isolated piece of inaction in a corner of France, or if you like Ireland, but as a cosmic state, a world condition in which all humanity is involved” (49).

    What does it mean to weigh a word? Do words have weight? They certainly do in a metaphorical sense. A person whose words are said to carry weight is listened to; whether their opinions are respected or not is a different question, as we hear tell of windy speakers, windbags, by which is meant a person whose talk is full of hot air. Pompous. 

    Air has weight, expressed in pressure. Does wind have weight? In Shakespeare’s play “King Lear,” we find the weight and pressure of wind and words mixing in the storm:

    “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
    You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
    Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
    You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
    Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
    Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
    Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
    Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once,
    That make ingrateful man!” (King Lear, Act 3, Scene 2)

    Another example of a windy word passage appears to be Beckett’s poem titled “Whoroscope,” judging from John Fletcher’s reading in the same collection of critical essays, this one titled “The Private Pain and the Whey of Words”:

    “The fact is that this ‘poem’ is little more than prose monologue chopped into lines of unequal length. No rhythmical pattern can be discerned and the vocabulary is of studied colloquialism. Lame puns like ‘prostisciutto’ (i.e. ‘ham’ / ‘harlot’) and ‘Jesuitasters’ attempt to imitate Joyce. In spite of its wit, the whole poem gives a frivolous impression; genuine poetic richness is lacking, for paradox, esotericism, and verbal pyrotechnics take its place” (25).

    Fletcher has already told us, setting the stage, that Beckett’s poem “won the prize (ten pounds), was printed in 300 copies, and led to Beckett’s being invited to contribute to an anthology of poems which Henry Crowder set to music, also published by Nancy Cunard at the Hours Press in 1930.” Beckett had knocked the poem out in one sitting, Fletcher discloses, to enter the contest, which asked for a poem “on the subject of Time.” Continues Fletcher in his critique of the poem: “The poem is not very interesting and certainly seems to have little to do with time.” One wonders now how much one of those original 300 copies might fetch at auction. 100 copies were signed.

    Where have we heard whey before? 

    “Little Miss Muffet
    Sat on a tuffet,
    Eating her curds and whey;
    There came a big spider,
    Who sat down beside her
    And frightened Miss Muffet away.”

    Clear enough, except what’s a “tuffet”?

    Fletcher makes much of Beckett’s feud with nothing. He tells us Beckett stopped writing poetry in 1949, and quotes from Beckett’s “Three Dialogues” of the same year:

    “The ‘Three Dialogues’ grant the artist the honor only ‘to fail as no other dare fail,’ failure being ‘his world and the shrink from it desertion, art, and craft, good housekeeping, living.’ We shall see, indeed, that in his poetry as in his other writings Beckett has never shirked the fact ‘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.’”

    “Nothing will come of nothing,” King Lear says, reflecting Shakespeare’s own struggle with nothing. “Speak again.”

    ~~~

    “Samuel Becket: A Collection of Critical Essays,” Edited by Martin Esslin, Prentice-Hall, A Spectrum Book, 1965. Includes “The Beckett Hero” by A. J. Leventhal, a lecture at Trinity College June 1963, and “The Private Pain and the Whey of Words” by John Fletcher, a lecture given at Durham U England November 1964.

  • Between Train and Town

    There’s nothing to fear
    said the son of King Lear
    but the mode of being
    sidesteps what’s seen.

    The trains towned being
    the question put to citizenry
    between the time this train
    pulls out and the next.

    To inquire after acquire
    after all who will refuse
    walked in the waste of time
    like a gerund absent his ing.

    This is but a stub
    no answer here
    but yore context
    cud be helpful.

    One forages
    another forges
    both rant and run
    day in night out.

    The question from above
    having to do with what to do
    between trains
    nothing to be done

    but eat drink and be merry
    avoid dairy in your dotage
    save the food for the hungry
    water for the thirsty

    words for the wise work
    for the restless wagon
    for the weary to do
    and see in Petty France.

  • Whether Weather, or Not

    One thing might be certain as we embark onboard ship 2021, there should be weather. Notice the qualification, for there are times when the weather seems to disappear. These are the days we sit out, barefoot, open, a grassy hill overlooking the houses and farther in the city, where the cars are the size of ants and behave accordingly, one on the tail of another. Whether or not we enjoy the weather seems to be a matter of taste. An old friend called on Thanksgiving to say hello. The weather here Thanksgiving week was cold but calm and mostly dry, highs in the low 40’s, lows in the high 20’s. In the afternoon, we put a couple of cafe umbrellas over the deck. The plan was to set out dips and chips and cut fresh vegetables, drink a beer or two, and grill some goose (aka chicken), and eat on the deck, three in our party, masked and distanced, at separate tables. Jacketed and hatted with blankets to drape over one’s legs. A small outdoor heater provided a psychologically friendly red hot burner, but its heat dissipated quickly and wasn’t of much practical use. Still, there it was, in the center of things, and we took turns moving up to it to warm our hands and seats over the fire, as it were. Meantime, down on the southern coast, winds over 100 miles per hour blasted away at Cape Blanco. I briefly described out situation, our predicament, over the phone to above said old friend, and asked for a description of his plans for Thanksgiving. He said it was too cold in their location to eat outside. What’s the temperature, I asked. 65, he replied. Degrees, or age? I wondered. Now, here, we are in the throes of a wet January winter, the temperature mild, highs in the 40’s, the rain coming as it does off the Pacific, moving inland over the valleys, pushing colder air to the east of us. But the point of this little post isn’t to sound like a weather report. Still, the weather is with us, and we ignore it at our peril. Better to go out into it, walk unsteadily the tipsy decks of ship 2021, the better to say, if we survive the storms, we lived them, and did not cower, though we did mask up, even if we might sound like our favorite Shakespearean Dad:

    “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
    You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
    Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
    You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
    Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
    Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
    Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
    Crack nature’s moulds, an germens spill at once,
    That make ingrateful man!”

  • A New Lear; or, Daughter Dissed

    We waited last week in an anon umbra for the expectant promise over at Literary Rejections on Display, an entertaining and informative site we visit periodically to check up on the latest trends in rejection slips and attitudes of those on the receiving end. Apparently, Writer Rejected, the hospitable host of LROD, had landed a paper airplane safely somewhere, an acceptance.

    “What Wasn’t Passed On” (New York Times, Dec. 8, 2011) is a familial, personal essay about a daughter who is disinherited by her father. We were reminded, of course, of the mad dad mother of them all, King Lear, and we posted our congratulations to the now somewhat less mysterious WR in a non-puckish comment, for the tone had grown serious, and we also realized a larger context of the personal theme, for the whole country has by now disinherited an entire generation of its young, and it appears to be headed toward disinheriting a generation of its old as well.

    Yet we were also reminded of Faulkner’s Isaac McCaslin, who, in Faulkner’s “The Bear” (see Go Down, Moses), rejects his inheritance, insisting that no one can truly own the land, for the land inevitably has a complex history of giving and taking, of laying claims and laying hands.

    “Nothing will come of nothing,” Lear tells his daughter, and Blake’s road of excess may indeed lead to a palace of wisdom, but what’s a palace emptied of its children and its old people? Where’s a fool when you need one? For maybe something does come from nothing, for “God bless the child that’s got his own.”