Has time fled? Well, not quite. There were times when I thought it had stopped, that life would be the same every day. Those were the hard times.
I like motion. I like how time works on me.
It is fine to plod along. We all do that to some degree, dragging our tails behind. Some days are more gloomy than others, but it’s OK as long as I have faith that they will pass.
Jeanne Lupton and I talk about tragedy and comedy. Tragedy is egocentric, focusing on the misery of oneself. Whereas comedy allows us to see situations in a larger context. We have to be able to laugh, most importantly, at ourselves. For me, it does take some fifty odd years to get it.
Ah, the real question is what you will learn at 56. Good morning and HAPPY BIRTHDAY. But I don’t agree with you and Jeannie about tragedy and comedy. Doesn’t “King Lear” connect us to a larger life? Aren’t Woody Allen’s comedies totally egocentric? Both these deep modes push us towards an unselving of the ego. Tears are as illuminating as laughter.
As the great English actor Edmund Keane is supposed to have famously quipped on his death bed, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Happy Birthday dearest Clara!
Jack, your point is well taken. We are talking about our own ego’s tragic view of ourselves. “King Lear”‘s tragedy is generated from his own egocentric self. If he had regarded his question on love and his children’s answers with a comedic view there would be a different story. Woody Allen’s egocentric comedies reflect his ability to laugh at himself, which is inspiring and courageous.
To differ a little further: You’re correct in saying that Lear generates his problem–yet the events that follow go far beyond the realm of his ego or, really, anything his egocentric behavior has “caused.” By the time the play is over, we feel not his egotism but his deep grief and compassion: “Never, never, never, never, never”–which is what the great value of the play is. Woody Allen’s comedies are as much defensive–pushing himself in our collective faces–as they are self-critical. He does create laughs out of a sort of self-criticism (more a “schtick” than self-criticism) but they are at the service of a fundamental drive to place himself square in our consciousness and not let go. His self-criticism isn’t all that serious–did he ever make comedy out of his relationship with that young woman?–but his insistence that we look at him is. I think that what you’re enunciating here is one of the great mistaken themes of the bourgeoisie: DON’T TAKE YOURSELF TOO SERIOUSLY. And, behind that theme, is the notion that YOU shouldn’t be too ambitious for yourself, shouldn’t try to improve yourself, shouldn’t think thoughts that might question things. (That would be “pretentious.”) It’s the bourgeoisie insisting on its power over us, holding us back, not letting us grow. It seems to me that you should laugh at yourself when it’s appropriate to laugh at yourself–and there are always plenty of opportunities for that–but that you should take yourself seriously when it’s appropriate to do that. There are lots of things to laugh at–but there is much material for tears. And, as Hopkins knew, when we weep for others, we weep for ourselves too: “It is the grief man was born for: / It is Margaret you mourn for.”
Poets write about three themes: Death, Love & Power. Tragedy’s theme is most often death & it’s revelation. Lear, “Look. There.” He dies happy thinking Cordelia alive. Hamlet sees the undiscovered country and reports, “The rest is silence.” Macbeth, discovering his folly knows he can’t be other than he has been, declares, “Yet I will try the last.” And none of them are Shakespeare. And Oedipus’ curse is to see with god eyes after his symbolic death. Comedy’s theme is love, and it is formally derived, plot driven to reconcile and restore the social fabric that has been sundered. Both are symbolized by masks of Janus, and they are spoken through these masks. And power? Death trumps it. Death trumps everything. Maybe it’s a synonym for love.
Masks! Woody Allen is not a person (Allan Konigsberg), anymore than Groucho was Arthur Marx or the tramp was Charles Spencer Chaplin. Masks! It’s all about the masks: Art is short for artifice!
The Mask
I.
They used an art to fashion a mask from the living face,
to turn your skin into a sallow that looked like leather,
to cut away your eyes and mouth, to make a mask
not unlike the mask Desdemona would wear to ascertain
the purity of sin.
They made a mask yet I knew you in the spaces where
your grey eyes were, and where voice lingered in the space
that wryly curls where well met were your wild lips;
a yellow mask, not something stupid like a stinging cupid:
It was a truer thing than words, but a lesser thing than you.
II.
Tragedy is not one face, a mask with ill met
lips that curl and fractured eyes that seem to drip.
Tragedy has a face like yours, a voice like yours,
so hot it burns the unprepared like Bibles burn,
beneath the skin like phosphorous.
Tragedy has a mouth like mine; at times it smiles
as it sells lies, spits words in wounds like iodine.
Tragedy lost its nose and lips and was suspended
by its eyelids, neck wrung like a pigeon, clipped
upon a string as the ill omen.
Tragedy blazes from our masks bright enough
to unmask our catastrophes, the monuments
our words erect before the eyes gone wide with fear
after the mouth incarnadine pronounces the terror
at the heart of thinking meat.
There are as many faces upon tragedy
as there are possibilities of pain.