Stones

While searching cyberspace for Beckett resources, I stumbled across these two videos.

The first is just for fun I suppose. It's a video called Pitch 'n' Putt with Joyce 'n' Beckett. I suppose the most accurate way to describe it is by saying it's what would happen if Joyce and Beckett went golfing together.

The second is a video of the passage Dr. Sexson quoted in class. It's called Store of Sucking Stones. The actor plays the role of Molloy at the seaside. I watched this video for the first time before class the other day, and to be truthful, it held no great interest for me other than illustrating how the dilemma of numbers and cycles of different stones would play out with actual stones. After hearing the passage again in class, however, I had an epiphane.

The process of taking out stones and putting them in other pockets in a certain order creates a cycle similar to the cycle of literature and of life. We have the kenosis on one hand, an emptying out, and a plurosis on the other hand, a process of becoming full again. The cycles are inexorably linked to one another. "And if in the cycles taken together utter confusion was bound to reign, at least within each cycle taken separately I could be easy in mind, at least as easy as one can be, in a proceeding of this kind" (Molloy 73). Molloy's dilemma then, is how to go about this filling up and emptying out. He wants the process to be orderly and to follow reason, yet he wants variety, a sense of chaos. But even in this, he is torn because he desperately wants these things and wants to want nothing. Yet even in the face of this personal crisis he realizes the unimportance of it all and loses the desire even to solve it. Once he has his great epiphane of how to proceed, the stones themselves are unimportant, even his being a part in that cycle (the act of even having a stone to suck) seems irrelevant. I'm still thinking through this idea of the cycle and of what each individual stone would then mean to the whole....

Suffice it to say, when before Beckett and I were not on very good terms, I am now starting to find some revelation in his writing. His works and I can now be in the same room together....without threat of physical violence. =)