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Nothing. - Nothing? - Nothing.
Nov. 13th, 2003 05:09 pmSo, on Tuesday we had the second half of the King Lear lecture. Because, as you may have noticed last week, I love King Lear, I'll elaborate on it, and therefore, this may well contain major spoilers for the play. (Actually, this reminds me of that web comic, "Gandalf returns?! You spoiled me!" - "The book's been in print for 50 years - I can hardly spoil you! That's like saying that Hamlet dies!" - "Hamlet dies?!" - "I suggest you spend some quality time in a library.")
That said.
Jackson-sensei was true to his word and told us what made King Lear so great, and so controversial. (There was, for example, a 17th century revision of the play by some Nahum Tate who removed the Fool and gave the play a happy ending.) Probably that won't make sense unless you know what's happening, so here be spoilers (I REALLY feel stupid warning people of Shakespeare-spoilers!): There we have King Lear (surprise), who has three daughters - Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. He's growing old, and he decides to divide his land among his daughters according to their love for him. So he asks them to proclaim their love, and while Goneril and Regan flatter the old king, Cordelia, the youngest, refuses to flatter him, saying that it should be self-explanatory, "according to our bond" (which, in Elizabethan times, makes sense, since both the daughter's love for her father and the subject's love for its king is considered natural and all). Lear is angry and banishes Cordelia along with Kent who dared to speak up against this decision. The only person in the play who dares to contradict the King openly yet is the Fool. The two older daughters get their realms, and of course, they're not true to their father, but plot against him.
There also is the Earl of Glocester who has two sons, one legitimate and one bastard, honors the latter one more (I think) and ends up blinded by him; I'm not sure about that part of the story anymore, though. Anyway, Lear is betrayed by his daughters and goes mad, which is shown in some very impressing scenes during a storm and whatnot. Eventually he realizes that those who said what he wanted to hear served him worse than those who told him what was necessary to hear. Glocester tries to commit suicide, but since he doesn't see, instead of jumping off a cliff, he just jumps down a little step and survives. He also meets Lear, who, at his most desperate point, is saved by Cordelia who has brought an army from France against her evil sisters. Their armies fight, and Cordelia is overthrown; she ends up in prison with Lear, who talks about a harmonious and acceptably happy future in prison together; but it doesn't come to this: Cordelia is, at her sisters' command, hanged by a soldier; Lear dies as well. The End.
The problem with the play is: There's no comic relief at all - even the Fool is, as Lear says, "a bitter fool", and the few jokes are only there to heighten the pain threshold and increase the tension instead of relieving the pain. There's no happy end, no justification - good, wonderful, heroic Cordelia dies a rather shameful death while Edmund, Glocester's bad bastard son, is granted a glorious warrior's death - and there are merely questions, no answers - at least from the Elizabethan point of view. For us today, who don't necessarily expect there to be a god and a reward for life's deeds after death, that's just fine, but it was a play that shattered a world view, and an expectaion: Once the play was over, that was it. Not even a happy ending, which was the least that could be expected. No promise of salvation, or rectification; eventually, it is a play about the possibility that there simply is no point in life. It is full of reversals and contradictions, like the wise fool, and the funny fact that Glocester was blind as long as he had eyesight, and sees once he's blinded. If anything, it goes to show that virtue is its own reward, that one cannot expect there to be more, some heavenly reward. The greatness lies in the point that there really are only open questions, without answers. "Have you no more to add?" - "Nothing." - "Nothing?" - "Nothing." - "Nothing will come out of nothing."
Onward from this, in the evening we saw Matrix: Revolutions again. I'll try to write this as unspoilerific as possible, but probably it won't be, so you may not want to read it if you didn't see the movie yet.
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seefuchs said that what annoyed her most was the fact that The Matrix and The Matrix: Reloaded posed a whole lot of questions, and you'd expect they'd be answered in part 3, which, for the most part, they aren't. There are no allusions as to what is to happen now, whether men and machines will get on, maybe even work together, or whether all is going to relapse back into war. You just don't get to know. You are, metaphorically speaking, on the blank of the map, "Here Be Dragons." This leaves the whole world open for wild speculations, endless RPGs and even more fanfics. The Wachowski brothers sort of created a universe, said "eä" and then left the audience to do something about it. Which is something that I can accept, even like. Others can't, which is just as fine. The world, and our expectations, have been shattered, and we don't quite to know what to do. Of course, something leaning so heavily on mythology and philosophy and Buddhist ideas should have made you guess that there's nothing to expect. The solution is nothing, or there is none, which is pretty much the same thing. Unless you do exactly what ancient Greek playwrights did: You have Deus ex Machina, the God (out) of the Machine, enter the scene and have it all sorted out in a way that doesn't answer anything, may not even make sense, but it still works. (The drama class in school performed "God" by Woody Allen in grade 12, in which the Deus ex Machina actor dies just before his entrance, so everything is a total mess. "Nothing! - "Nothing?" - "The end! Nothing! It's a catastrophe!") If anything, it goes to show that decisions are dangerous, especially when we don't understand them, and that what we want to see is not necessarily what we get to see. Either you cope with that or you don't. It doesn't matter, it's just a movie.
But I liked it. Very much. And if you didn't, watashi ni wa kankai no nai koto desu.
A propos "just a movie": The Cyberpunk seminar is really interesting, but there's this one guy we call the robot (tetsujin! Haha!), who is really aggressive and penetrant and just a pain in the rear end. Today, while we were discussing the point of leaving one's body behind and existing only as a mind in the matrix (the Count Zero-matrix, not the Matrix-Matrix), he suddenly talked in his weirdly measured, aggressive way that we could not talk about it since we all lacked that experience. He said we couldn't talk about death and disembodiment since none of us had ever experienced either. We can't judge the characters because we don't live in their world. Well, d'uh. We can still talk about the scientific background, or just have our own wild ideas and hypotheses, can't we? Someone lost his patience and just said "We're talking about a goddamn book, for heaven's sake!" Right he was.
Which goes to show nothing. Nothing? Nothing.
- - -
( Nichts. - Nichts? - Nichts. )
- - -
That said.
Jackson-sensei was true to his word and told us what made King Lear so great, and so controversial. (There was, for example, a 17th century revision of the play by some Nahum Tate who removed the Fool and gave the play a happy ending.) Probably that won't make sense unless you know what's happening, so here be spoilers (I REALLY feel stupid warning people of Shakespeare-spoilers!): There we have King Lear (surprise), who has three daughters - Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. He's growing old, and he decides to divide his land among his daughters according to their love for him. So he asks them to proclaim their love, and while Goneril and Regan flatter the old king, Cordelia, the youngest, refuses to flatter him, saying that it should be self-explanatory, "according to our bond" (which, in Elizabethan times, makes sense, since both the daughter's love for her father and the subject's love for its king is considered natural and all). Lear is angry and banishes Cordelia along with Kent who dared to speak up against this decision. The only person in the play who dares to contradict the King openly yet is the Fool. The two older daughters get their realms, and of course, they're not true to their father, but plot against him.
There also is the Earl of Glocester who has two sons, one legitimate and one bastard, honors the latter one more (I think) and ends up blinded by him; I'm not sure about that part of the story anymore, though. Anyway, Lear is betrayed by his daughters and goes mad, which is shown in some very impressing scenes during a storm and whatnot. Eventually he realizes that those who said what he wanted to hear served him worse than those who told him what was necessary to hear. Glocester tries to commit suicide, but since he doesn't see, instead of jumping off a cliff, he just jumps down a little step and survives. He also meets Lear, who, at his most desperate point, is saved by Cordelia who has brought an army from France against her evil sisters. Their armies fight, and Cordelia is overthrown; she ends up in prison with Lear, who talks about a harmonious and acceptably happy future in prison together; but it doesn't come to this: Cordelia is, at her sisters' command, hanged by a soldier; Lear dies as well. The End.
The problem with the play is: There's no comic relief at all - even the Fool is, as Lear says, "a bitter fool", and the few jokes are only there to heighten the pain threshold and increase the tension instead of relieving the pain. There's no happy end, no justification - good, wonderful, heroic Cordelia dies a rather shameful death while Edmund, Glocester's bad bastard son, is granted a glorious warrior's death - and there are merely questions, no answers - at least from the Elizabethan point of view. For us today, who don't necessarily expect there to be a god and a reward for life's deeds after death, that's just fine, but it was a play that shattered a world view, and an expectaion: Once the play was over, that was it. Not even a happy ending, which was the least that could be expected. No promise of salvation, or rectification; eventually, it is a play about the possibility that there simply is no point in life. It is full of reversals and contradictions, like the wise fool, and the funny fact that Glocester was blind as long as he had eyesight, and sees once he's blinded. If anything, it goes to show that virtue is its own reward, that one cannot expect there to be more, some heavenly reward. The greatness lies in the point that there really are only open questions, without answers. "Have you no more to add?" - "Nothing." - "Nothing?" - "Nothing." - "Nothing will come out of nothing."
Onward from this, in the evening we saw Matrix: Revolutions again. I'll try to write this as unspoilerific as possible, but probably it won't be, so you may not want to read it if you didn't see the movie yet.
seefuchs said that what annoyed her most was the fact that The Matrix and The Matrix: Reloaded posed a whole lot of questions, and you'd expect they'd be answered in part 3, which, for the most part, they aren't. There are no allusions as to what is to happen now, whether men and machines will get on, maybe even work together, or whether all is going to relapse back into war. You just don't get to know. You are, metaphorically speaking, on the blank of the map, "Here Be Dragons." This leaves the whole world open for wild speculations, endless RPGs and even more fanfics. The Wachowski brothers sort of created a universe, said "eä" and then left the audience to do something about it. Which is something that I can accept, even like. Others can't, which is just as fine. The world, and our expectations, have been shattered, and we don't quite to know what to do. Of course, something leaning so heavily on mythology and philosophy and Buddhist ideas should have made you guess that there's nothing to expect. The solution is nothing, or there is none, which is pretty much the same thing. Unless you do exactly what ancient Greek playwrights did: You have Deus ex Machina, the God (out) of the Machine, enter the scene and have it all sorted out in a way that doesn't answer anything, may not even make sense, but it still works. (The drama class in school performed "God" by Woody Allen in grade 12, in which the Deus ex Machina actor dies just before his entrance, so everything is a total mess. "Nothing! - "Nothing?" - "The end! Nothing! It's a catastrophe!") If anything, it goes to show that decisions are dangerous, especially when we don't understand them, and that what we want to see is not necessarily what we get to see. Either you cope with that or you don't. It doesn't matter, it's just a movie. But I liked it. Very much. And if you didn't, watashi ni wa kankai no nai koto desu.
A propos "just a movie": The Cyberpunk seminar is really interesting, but there's this one guy we call the robot (tetsujin! Haha!), who is really aggressive and penetrant and just a pain in the rear end. Today, while we were discussing the point of leaving one's body behind and existing only as a mind in the matrix (the Count Zero-matrix, not the Matrix-Matrix), he suddenly talked in his weirdly measured, aggressive way that we could not talk about it since we all lacked that experience. He said we couldn't talk about death and disembodiment since none of us had ever experienced either. We can't judge the characters because we don't live in their world. Well, d'uh. We can still talk about the scientific background, or just have our own wild ideas and hypotheses, can't we? Someone lost his patience and just said "We're talking about a goddamn book, for heaven's sake!" Right he was.
Which goes to show nothing. Nothing? Nothing.
- - -
( Nichts. - Nichts? - Nichts. )
- - -
