23. This is the Time to Write
One of my linguistic lyceum students phoned me last Friday and asked “Are you free tomorrow?” “Tomorrow… tomorrow…’ I started sounding like Macbeth’s Shakespeare. “Tomorrow is Saturday…”
“We have to do King Lear…”
“You have to…” That’s more or less the level Shakespeare has descended to with common mortals, I thought.
She was quite down in the mouth and I of course nodded in sympathy recalling my own days on scratched technical college desks studying the same thing- it was boring. But what could I do?
“Make it exciting!” she said.
“I’ll see what energy, let alone excitement, I have to put in my tuition,” I said, “but don’t expect miracles- King Lear is King Lear…
I don’t know whether it was King Lear that put me in a mood or what but anyway I haven’t felt at all sociable of late in spite of the sun in all its splendour trying to entice me out and show myself with a smasher of a smile and greet all living creatures with an uplifted spirit. So I grooved away and scowled at all and sundries should they dare an attempt to fraternize- even the weeds- especially the weeds I warned that they should mind their own business and look the other way. What a lot of dandelions! What useless creatures!
But when floors have been washed, weeds picked, deck chairs and hammocks set out and having conceded yourself a decent night’s sleep you wake up all fresh and ready to go- you know that’s the time to write. When you are and you feel at your best and are even capable of scorning those deck chairs and hammocks waiting in idleness- that’s the time to write because you have to be fit and in top shape to write. Writing is an art, a job, not a substitution for the psychiatric couch.
But feeling in shape goes with every job. If you feel your best, you give your best. I prefer many times over a shop assistant (are there anymore of those around) with a smile rather than one with a growl. And would you not subject yourself to listen to someone who has a bounce in his voice rather than to one whom like Italy’s present Prime Minister, Prodi, drawls with a complete absence of tonality in his diction? I’m not suggesting that the said P.M. is in a state of perennial depression; some people are born totally uninteresting and consequently believe public speaking and writing is hardly a vehicle suitable for their expression. But if a writer has already confronted himself and has decided that he really is a writer above and beyond anything else: and by confronting himself (naturally also intending herself), I refer to the trials, tests and endurance of all the withdrawal systems that writing inflicts upon its absence; then that writer should be fit and at his best when writing. After all if a writer writes words to be put before the eyes, of even only one other, to read, should that writer not present the best for that reader to read? If a writer is concerned with whining and moaning about his own state of malcontent is it fair to inflict it on others? Ah! But then no nastiness would ever be written and we all know people ‘love’ sinners more than saints.
So did Shakespeare! He wallowed in evilness, brought it to the forefront, placed it centre stage, right under the lime-light. And even though he was no longer a youngster and probably depressed when he wrote King Lear, he still had his wits about him to prevent him from writing something that is imposed, an infliction, (though reading Lear for the first time one would hardly think so), upon his reader or in his case, spectator.
Even though my students say they ‘have to’ study King Lear and one does not have to be particularly susceptible to perceive the groaning lament of an imposition, I am still not convinced that with all the awesome distress, pain upon pain that Shakespeare thrusts out from the stage that he intended the play to be an infliction upon his spectators at the time and those of future generations. In spite that as the play goes on, the burden of putting up with it gets heavier and heavier, it seems to me that the play does not spring from a wallowing of self-pity and personal discontent on Shakespeare’s unconscious which he wanted to purge himself from but rather on a calculated reflection of what takes places when goodness is absent. By making evil centre stage one cannot help feel intense regret of what could have been if the better part of man had not been overcome by the worse. This regret is drawn out of our consciousness by the revulsion the acts of the protagonists make us endure, like a boil ready to burst. And because of it, we hate the play, we don’t like it, it’s revolting, it’s heavy, it’s claustrophobic because there is no where we can escape to except further into the dungeon of dreariness and misery that only humans are capable of inflicting upon themselves.
But Shakespeare didn’t write it for therapy, he wrote it because he was a dramatist- hence the greatness. We write because we are writers but rarely find greatness, hence the difference.
“We have to do King Lear…”
“You have to…” That’s more or less the level Shakespeare has descended to with common mortals, I thought.
She was quite down in the mouth and I of course nodded in sympathy recalling my own days on scratched technical college desks studying the same thing- it was boring. But what could I do?
“Make it exciting!” she said.
“I’ll see what energy, let alone excitement, I have to put in my tuition,” I said, “but don’t expect miracles- King Lear is King Lear…
I don’t know whether it was King Lear that put me in a mood or what but anyway I haven’t felt at all sociable of late in spite of the sun in all its splendour trying to entice me out and show myself with a smasher of a smile and greet all living creatures with an uplifted spirit. So I grooved away and scowled at all and sundries should they dare an attempt to fraternize- even the weeds- especially the weeds I warned that they should mind their own business and look the other way. What a lot of dandelions! What useless creatures!
But when floors have been washed, weeds picked, deck chairs and hammocks set out and having conceded yourself a decent night’s sleep you wake up all fresh and ready to go- you know that’s the time to write. When you are and you feel at your best and are even capable of scorning those deck chairs and hammocks waiting in idleness- that’s the time to write because you have to be fit and in top shape to write. Writing is an art, a job, not a substitution for the psychiatric couch.
But feeling in shape goes with every job. If you feel your best, you give your best. I prefer many times over a shop assistant (are there anymore of those around) with a smile rather than one with a growl. And would you not subject yourself to listen to someone who has a bounce in his voice rather than to one whom like Italy’s present Prime Minister, Prodi, drawls with a complete absence of tonality in his diction? I’m not suggesting that the said P.M. is in a state of perennial depression; some people are born totally uninteresting and consequently believe public speaking and writing is hardly a vehicle suitable for their expression. But if a writer has already confronted himself and has decided that he really is a writer above and beyond anything else: and by confronting himself (naturally also intending herself), I refer to the trials, tests and endurance of all the withdrawal systems that writing inflicts upon its absence; then that writer should be fit and at his best when writing. After all if a writer writes words to be put before the eyes, of even only one other, to read, should that writer not present the best for that reader to read? If a writer is concerned with whining and moaning about his own state of malcontent is it fair to inflict it on others? Ah! But then no nastiness would ever be written and we all know people ‘love’ sinners more than saints.
So did Shakespeare! He wallowed in evilness, brought it to the forefront, placed it centre stage, right under the lime-light. And even though he was no longer a youngster and probably depressed when he wrote King Lear, he still had his wits about him to prevent him from writing something that is imposed, an infliction, (though reading Lear for the first time one would hardly think so), upon his reader or in his case, spectator.
Even though my students say they ‘have to’ study King Lear and one does not have to be particularly susceptible to perceive the groaning lament of an imposition, I am still not convinced that with all the awesome distress, pain upon pain that Shakespeare thrusts out from the stage that he intended the play to be an infliction upon his spectators at the time and those of future generations. In spite that as the play goes on, the burden of putting up with it gets heavier and heavier, it seems to me that the play does not spring from a wallowing of self-pity and personal discontent on Shakespeare’s unconscious which he wanted to purge himself from but rather on a calculated reflection of what takes places when goodness is absent. By making evil centre stage one cannot help feel intense regret of what could have been if the better part of man had not been overcome by the worse. This regret is drawn out of our consciousness by the revulsion the acts of the protagonists make us endure, like a boil ready to burst. And because of it, we hate the play, we don’t like it, it’s revolting, it’s heavy, it’s claustrophobic because there is no where we can escape to except further into the dungeon of dreariness and misery that only humans are capable of inflicting upon themselves.
But Shakespeare didn’t write it for therapy, he wrote it because he was a dramatist- hence the greatness. We write because we are writers but rarely find greatness, hence the difference.
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