In My End is My Beginning

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May

Wrote Shakespeare and the result was an unending TV series and Catherine Zeta Jones. I fear that many people may read Shakespeare's line and imagine that there are rough winds during May shaking the buds. I'm pretty sure that that is not the case. The point of the line is that the flowers that were buds are being shaken by the rough winds of Autumn. Thus:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

There's something lovely about the end being seen in the beginning and the beginning being seen in the end. Auden wrote:

Time and beauty burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral.

Which does approximately the same thing. As Pozzo says in Waiting for Godot:

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. 


Which Vladimir elaborates thus:

Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens) But habit is a great deadener.

Thus, in writing, we can all be tomorrow's corpses and yesterday's babies, trees are overgrown seeds, buildings rubble, and champagne is grapes and urine. Rhetorically the trick is called prolepsis, or at least that's when you refer to something by its future state (You're a dead man). I don't know if the backward looking trope has a name.

The point is that words can do what dull reality cannot. They can see the beginning and the end simultaneously. Centuries collapse in clauses. As Bob Dylan put it:

I waited for you on the running boards, 
Near the cypress trees, while the springtime turned
Slowly into Autumn.

The Music of Abuse

As the Inky Fool continues to shuffle unconvincingly through the outskirts of relevance, something should perhaps be made of Nick Clegg's love of Samuel Beckett, which is odd as I previously pointed out that Samuel appeared to working for the Tories. Anyway, it's reason enough for a little look at this loving exchange:

Estragon: That's the idea, let's abuse each other.
They turn, move apart, turn again and face each other.
Vladimir: Moron!
Estragon: Vermin!
Vladimir: Abortion!
Estragon: Morpion!
Vladimir: Sewer-rat!
Estragon: Curate!
Vladimir: Cretin!
Estragon: (with finality). Crritic!
Vladimir: Oh!
He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.

The thing about Waiting For Godot is that nobody comes, nobody goes, and the whole play has to survive on the beauty of the writing, the music of the exchanges. Here, for example, all the insults are related by sound. It's almost like one of those puzzles where you get from one word to another by changing a letter at a time: fool pool poll pole pope. This is quite obvious is the curate cretin critic group but also lingers subtly in the on-in ortion-orpion or-ewer rat-rate.

So the poor curate is only thrown in as a bridge from sewer-rat to cretin. At least I imagine that that's the reason. Cretin derives from the word Christian. This was not because Christians were considered stupid, but because the dribbling and insane, the window-lickers and the chronically bewildered were nonetheless fellow Christians, in the same way we would insist that they are human beings too. So often was our common Christianity stressed that the term became abusive. All words for mental illness, however clinical or kind, grow up to be insults.

The harmony of words must also be the reason morpions get a mention. A morpion is a pubic louse*. If you didn't know that, don't worry. It's the French for pubic louse. This could make sense. You see Beckett originally wrote the play in French and called it En Attendant Godot. He then rewrote it a couple of years later in English. The exchange above was not in the original. It was added to the English version; hence, presumably, the reference to crritic.

By the rules of the game, if Estragon had said pubic louse, Vladimir would have had to reply with public house and that wouldn't have worked at all. The game is not easy: here's an attempt of my own:

You: Inky!

Me: Donkey!

You: Dunce!

Me: Bouncer!

You: Butcher!
Me: Belcher!
You: Felcher!
Me: Filth!
You: Fool!








*As an utterly unlinguistic aside: pubic lice and head lice are different species. This is not true of apes which, covered in hair, have but one form of louse wandering all over their bodies. By studying the genomes of the head louse and morpion one can work out how long the species have been diverging for and therefore how long ago humans became hairless. I forget the figure, but adore the methodology.

P.S. The picture at the top right may have inspired the whole play.

Parataxis

Compare and contrast:

Be your own boss. Sack your MP. Choose your own school. Own your own home. Veto high council tax rises. Vote for your police commissioner. Save your local post office. See how government spends your money. So many things to do. So little time in which to do them. The country wants change and I want to get started.
   - Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable

I know it well. I must know it well, it's a lie. I can't stir, I haven't stirred, I launch the voice. I hear a voice, there is nowhere but here, there are not two places. Thare are not two prisons, it's my parlour, it's a parlour, where I wait for nothing
    - David Cameron launching the Tory Manifesto

I can't help thinking that David Cameron's speechwriter is overly influenced by Samuel Beckett, just as I am convinced that John Prescott has read too much Joyce. The technique of a series of main clauses slung together with no ands, buts, thens or therefores is called parataxis. St John the Evangelist was rather fond of the device as well. Beckett is usually considered the great paratactic master, but flicking through The Unnameable I couldn't find an example as extended as Mr Cameron's. So Beckett has been outbecketted.

A busy day in CCHQ

First Lines

First lines are overrated things. There's a lovely character in Camus' The Plague who's trying to write a novel but is so obsessed with getting the opening line right that he dies (of plague) without having finished the first page.

Imagine a joke writer who begins by saying "An Irishman a rabbi and a flamingo walk into a bar" and then paces about his room trying to think of a punchline. Mickey Spillane, a pulp writer, put it best:

The biggest part of the joke is the punch line, so the biggest part of a book should be the punch line, the ending. People don't read a book to get to the middle, they read a book to get to the end and hope that the ending justifies all the time they spent reading it. So what I do is, I get my ending and, knowing what my ending is going to be, then I write to the end and have the fun of knowing where I'm going but not how I'm going to get there.

Once you have decided that Othello kills his wife and then himself, the rest of the play is getting to that point by the most efficient and convincing route.

Yet first lines can be fun, and fun is more important than importance. Here are my two favourites that I doubt you know.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
   - Murphy by Samuel Beckett

I was an infinitely hot and dense dot.
   - My Cousin My Gastroenterologist by Mark Leyner

You are invited, dear reader, to post the best first line that I haven't heard of in the comments below. But no universally acknowledged truths called Ishmael striking thirteen.

Oh, and: An Irishman, a rabbi and a flamingo walk into a bar and the barman asks "Is this some kind of bloody joke?"