The Dog and Jerry
"Don't you see? A person has to have some way of dealing with SOMETHING. If not with people...SOMETHING. With a bed, with a cockroach, with a mirror...with a[...] You see how hard it is to find things?[...] with a wisp of smoke...with God, who I'm told, turned his back on the whole thing some time ago...with...some day, with people. People...And[...], where ever better in this humiliating excuse for a jail, where better to communicate one single simple-minded idea than in an entrance hall? Where? It would be a START! Where better to make a beginning...to understand and just possibly be understood...a beginning of an understanding, than with...A DOG. Just that; a dog."
This passage from Edward Albee's Zoo Story explains pointedly the crux of every human attempt.
As soon as I awoke, I held my breath but remembered the yoga teacher crying out, "BreathE". An intake of breath, even this, must be remembered. It has been four years since I wrote on this here blog and the fear of having (yet again) nothing to say engulfs me and I have a hard time breathing. So I borrow from a text that I recently read which points out the poignancy of human endeavor, as I belabor an inhalation. It turns out that even breathing--the very act of life, a seeming solitary venture, is not so solitary after all. Gulping in air is itself an act of communing with the elements, a need that binds us to something outside of ourselves and frees us from ourselves. All things are instruments for an essay to some " beginning of an understanding."
And yet, the attempt at any expression faces the enormous possibility for misunderstanding and bespeaks the fear of any person who ventures to open the shutters of his ideas to light. With the complexity of interpretation and the resulting possibility of confusion, however, cries out what Albee surmises as the beginnings of love, for, "I have learned that neither kindness nor cruelty by themselves," Jerry says, "independent of each other, creates any effect beyond themselves;[...]the two combined, together, at the same time, are the teaching emotion...We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other...If we can so misunderstand, well then, why have we invented the word love in the first place?" Precisely the point and the convolution of this need to express with the quagmire we face. IF we can so understand, there won't be the need to attempt to understand for it would be so easy. The effort to speak and to listen are the preemptive acts to confusion. And yet, even in failing to assume full clarity, only compassion could soften the mire of the inevitalbe limits of our understanding. The invention of love is how we survive the pains of our failed communion. For in spite of it, we keep trying to cross a ruptured bridge in our desire to reach each other.
Tomorrow, a student will come to me asking, "how do I make this Albee thing come alive?" I sit on my desk now pondering the same thing...(oh boy?!) forgetting and remembering to breathe.
This passage from Edward Albee's Zoo Story explains pointedly the crux of every human attempt.
As soon as I awoke, I held my breath but remembered the yoga teacher crying out, "BreathE". An intake of breath, even this, must be remembered. It has been four years since I wrote on this here blog and the fear of having (yet again) nothing to say engulfs me and I have a hard time breathing. So I borrow from a text that I recently read which points out the poignancy of human endeavor, as I belabor an inhalation. It turns out that even breathing--the very act of life, a seeming solitary venture, is not so solitary after all. Gulping in air is itself an act of communing with the elements, a need that binds us to something outside of ourselves and frees us from ourselves. All things are instruments for an essay to some " beginning of an understanding."
And yet, the attempt at any expression faces the enormous possibility for misunderstanding and bespeaks the fear of any person who ventures to open the shutters of his ideas to light. With the complexity of interpretation and the resulting possibility of confusion, however, cries out what Albee surmises as the beginnings of love, for, "I have learned that neither kindness nor cruelty by themselves," Jerry says, "independent of each other, creates any effect beyond themselves;[...]the two combined, together, at the same time, are the teaching emotion...We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other...If we can so misunderstand, well then, why have we invented the word love in the first place?" Precisely the point and the convolution of this need to express with the quagmire we face. IF we can so understand, there won't be the need to attempt to understand for it would be so easy. The effort to speak and to listen are the preemptive acts to confusion. And yet, even in failing to assume full clarity, only compassion could soften the mire of the inevitalbe limits of our understanding. The invention of love is how we survive the pains of our failed communion. For in spite of it, we keep trying to cross a ruptured bridge in our desire to reach each other.
Tomorrow, a student will come to me asking, "how do I make this Albee thing come alive?" I sit on my desk now pondering the same thing...(oh boy?!) forgetting and remembering to breathe.
posted by rocelyn at 6:04 AM
<< Home