the noodling begins

To recap what we started digging into tonight...

One of the reasons why we felt like doing a performance-oriented final project was this funny "density" phenomenon that we first articulated while working on Brigid's monologues when Katie asked me if I saw all of the movements and moments we were tussling with in their specificity, ahead of time, like when writing that piece. The answer was yes and no, because even the speeches, words, moments I felt I had the clearest sense/picture of before having an actor read the lines seemed to expand exponentially once we started working on them together. Meaning there's more/different in the moment, or could be more/different in the moment, than one's neccesarily aware of when the words are encountered as this isolated, unchallenged voice in your head or on the page. So we're pretty well convinced that this is the best way to really get to know a play. Some of that discovery happens, I think, because of the inevitable "disagreements" between collaborators. On a super basic level, if we read something through, and A doesn't like a choice B makes, A has to figure out why that is. Having to articulate this for oneself or for the team can only lead to good things. Either A adjusts her original assumption about the moment, revises it, or comes to a superior awareness of what her first imagining of it was about. Has to become critical about her assumption once she's confronted with otherwises, so she's able to say why she saw it the way she saw it in the first place. Everything has to be negotiated. Nothing is taken for granted, "obvious," and left, hence, unaddressed, sometimes ununderstood.

Katie had been watching Billie's version (which she oughtn't do too much more of...) and talked about the relatively low percentage of words you can really hear, the things that really lift up. We worked plenty on this with Brigid's monologues, knowing that not everything can be of equal weight, at least if you want to give the audience a purchase, a way to latch on. Otherwise its like asking them to climb up a smooth, crevice-free cliff face. And the same principle applies, but with Beckett it's like the whole thing's done in pencil and some places are just shaded a touch darker than others.

When she read through tonight we asked about what felt like it wanted more shading, and about the "triumph" of the "fuck life" moment. The success achieved through failure, the ultimate and inevitable "failure." Last meeting we talked a little bit about being towards one's "ownmost nonrelational possibility not-to-be-bypassed" (give or take a few hyphens). Nonrelational because even while it's the great equalizer, it has to be yours and yours alone. No one can experience it for you. Ownmost for these individuating reasons and because, maybe in this scenario, its proximity forces you to retreat into and get to know all the contours of just yourself. Recognizing the ephemerality of this consciousness, the only thing that's been a constant so far. But not I don't think letting yourself extrapolate to the world outside. "The world" is always experienced as other, monolithic, impenetrable, if not hostile, and I think pretty static compared to the undulating contours of inwardness. This is the authentic, knowable reality.

Anyway, we were thinking about how failure and success and their association with human "connection" gets redefined by the end of Rockaby... how the always at least doubly mediated hypothetical experience of connecting with "another living soul" another pair of famished eyes one might see through windows, yours and theirs, is this kind of impossible dream/delusion that get's put to bed in this piece. The point she gets to when she's able to say "fuck life" and mean it, not going to get up tomorrow and be again, be again, has to become her own other to get there. We thought about the four sections, how we move from looking out for somebody else's eyes to being with ourself in the dark room with the shades drawn. In between there maybe being the moment of seeing herself reflected in the glass. Katie brought up experiencing yourself as other when you accidentally catch yourself in a mirror or hear your recorded voice (let's make sure to talk more there). Lacan and the "mirror stage," the beginning of understanding yourself as a discrete thing in a universe that doesn't have unmediated access to your inner life (which you experience as something much more fluid and inconsistent than that body that makes you look like a unity. Connection, communication as an approximation, a losing of things in translation, a compromise, a failure. Our Woman is weaning herself off of the illusion that connection with an other besides yourself is possible. Being one's own almost resolves the subject/object thing. With the hypothetical other creatures in other windows, you'd always be either seeing or being seen. Maybe you don't totally escape this with yourself, but the perceiver and the perceived are one and the same. And this lets you close the system. Which is peace, which is success here I think. I don't think death in Beckett is always death, literally. I think it's this imagined blissful closing of the system. Birth is the beginning of death. We forget sometimes and think that birth is the beginning of life, but life is the distraction. Heidegger is big on "authentic" v "inauthentic" modes of being, and "being-towards-death" is authenticity for him. I don't know if the woman's about to actually die. She does, I think, get to a place where she can give up this outward connection seeking impulse as the illusion/distraction it is and turn to resolute inwardness... which, like you said, Katie, is a little bit crazy or off, the way all of the syllabus playwrights' pictures of the world must be since they're so different. But I want to say it's crazy like Kierkegaard's madman with the "excess" of interiority like we talked about for Brigid, rather than the Gianna madman with the glass eyes and hair of carpet rags, right? Or maybe that's where the vaudeville humor in his other work comes from. Dunno. Let's talk about where she's at during/just before/just after the "more!" moments next time, more clearly sketch out what "happens" in each section.