Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play, Waiting for Godot<\/i>, was voted the most significant play of the twentieth century. Over the years, I have read the play several times, but I had never seen a production. With my mind full of reflections, considerations and dreams relating to the Sixth Extinction, my Ragnar<\/i>\u00f6k <\/i>poem, <\/i>as well as the contemporary geo-political climate, I decided to watch the play.<\/p>\n
I do not wish to add to the endless commentary and critique of this work,[1]<\/a> but I do recommend that you watch this play. A good version of it is available at: <\/p>\n https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Wifcyo64n-w<\/p>\n Try to forget analyzing, interpreting, or even understanding the play. None of that is the point of absurdist art in any event. Instead, attend to what rises up spontaneously<\/i> in you: thoughts, feelings, memories, images, emotions, impulses, dreams. The play is psychoactive, and that<\/i> is the point.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n I must admit that my favorite genre of art and literature is absurdist in nature, as well as its many related and ancillary forms. <\/p>\n By what I have said already, you can presume that I do not favor traditional analysis (of any sort), but I do favor focusing on what is engendered spontaneously on an individual<\/i> basis. Like a dream, such responses may appear \u201cabsurd.\u201d This, of course, is why they take a back seat to more \u201crational\u201d approaches. What faces us in the coming \u201ccollapse of everything\u201d (the fact <\/i>of collapse) is not absurd.[3]<\/a> But I must admit to my haunting sense that the conscious collective responses<\/i> to the collapse can be considered absurd at almost all levels and in all directions.<\/p>\n Rather than falling into nihilism, or paralyses of one sort or another, I experience the abundance of absurdity at the present time as an opportunity to develop a more radical individual<\/i> effort in response. So what does one do<\/i> from this perspective?<\/p>\n Waiting for Godot<\/i> is, without doubt, expressing a demand<\/i> for what Keats called \u201cnegative capability.\u201d[4]<\/a> Instead, almost all contemporary commentary and critique expresses that \u201cirritable reaching after fact and reason.\u201d Underlying this irritability is fear, <\/i>and most especially the fear of the \u201cunknown.\u201d Most people have the same response to a dream\u2014preferring to embrace the known (interpretations, analyses, understandings) rather than stay with<\/i> the tensions of uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts until these tensions give birth<\/i> spontaneously and autonomously to something hitherto unknown\u2014most particularly, the future.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n Thus, one thing \u201cto do\u201d while waiting<\/i>, is to perfect the art of negative capability, to learn to dwell<\/i> there, whether one is confronting a dream, political turmoil, or ecological disaster.[6]<\/a> Heidegger, more than anyone, has given us a veritable instruction manual in achieving dwelling amid the din of conflicting \u201cchoruses of certainty\u201d[7]<\/a> ripping at the very fabric of culture and civilization.[8]<\/a><\/p>\n The first necessity in developing the art of negative capability is to \u201ctake time.\u201d One must go slowly, withdraw from the frenzy, and tend to what is \u201cpresented\u201d from the interior. Immersion in the fast and frenzied distractions of collectivity destroys the possibility of dwelling. <\/p>\n Another help in achieving dwelling is to simplify<\/i>. We are all doing too much, have too many things to deal with, our plates are too full, our information diet too seductive, our feelings of responsibility too heavy. In my lectures in 1982, which became the book Psyche Speaks<\/i> in 1987, I wrote the following:<\/p>\n The phrase \u201cI have no time\u201d in its various forms has become so common, such a carrier in all aspects of our life, it is perhaps time that we began to listen to what we are literally saying: we have no time<\/i>. We live under the triple burden of speed, surface, and survival. We are so busy surviving the pressures of modern life that we haven\u2019t the time to go beneath the surface, and we speed from one thing or person to another. Recall again what Wordsworth said when he saw this coming: \u201cThe world is too much with us.\u201d [9]<\/a><\/p>\n I wrote that paragraph thirty-four years ago! Before the Internet, before smart phones, before everything and everyone was \u201cconnected.\u201d All this connectedness has not<\/i> increased the reality of eros<\/i> in our time. Even more so now, it is the absence and poverty of eros that is so striking in almost all departments of the human enterprise. It is well to remember the mythological stories (as stories): Chaos is mother of Eros in one version, Poverty is mother of Eros in another. As I said in those lectures, the ubiquity of chaos and poverty gives us some basis for expectation<\/i> of seeing the birth of Eros in our time, as \u00c6 called for in his Pilgrim of Eternity, as Merezhovsky called for in his Third Testament of the Holy Ghost, as Freud called for Eros to come battle with Thanatos, as Jung called for in the Coming Guest. <\/p>\n As one simplifies, one also turns more local<\/i>. Less dependence on the far-away leads as well to more human-to-human contact as distinct from virtual <\/i>contact. This is turn leads to small<\/i> as distinct from the many<\/i> and big<\/i>. Facebook is not a substitute for face-to-face, nor book-in-hand. As dwelling with negative capability increases with taking time, being-with locally, simplifying, manifesting what comes from such dwelling becomes ever more possible. What is born from negative capability is creative<\/i> in ways not imagined before. This is partly true because deep dwelling in the spirit of negative capability gives one access<\/i> to the deeper portals of imagination. This becomes the true immunization against viral mimetics which are serving the robotization of humans and maximizing malignant narcissism. These powerful factors increase inequality and must eventually lead to an inevitable conflict with those more immersed in \u201crealities\u201d of poverty, exclusion and devaluation. <\/p>\n The monetization<\/i> of robotizing humans, the malignant narcissism that increasingly underlies celebrity and advertising, and the centrifugal pull on everyone to participate, sets the stage for its own collapse, its own demise. To substitute these things for a meaningful life is absurd. <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> There is a veritable industry of commentary and critique in relation to this play: hundreds of books, thousands of articles, and untold numbers of performances. <\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Having psychoactive experience is crucial but not complete in itself. One must also act<\/i> in relation to such experience, no matter how absurd such experiences may seem. I\u2019ll go into this further in a subsequent post.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> I will be using \u201cabsurd\u201d in varying senses. To value the absurd, in art, literature, and dreams, for example, does not commit one to absurdist, existentialist or nihilistic philosophies of existence. Facts as such cannot be ignored, although how they are related<\/i> to and used can be misguided, limited, or even absurd. Even though facts cannot be ignored, they often are, and this too leads to phenomena that are absurd. To judge relation to fact as absurd in the pejorative sense, does not contradict finding value in something absurd when that absurdity opens the way to deeper and especially psychic depth. Even things judged <\/i>absurd in the pejorative sense may be setting the conditions<\/i> for the emergence of something of far greater value.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Keats, in a letter to his brother, had written: \u201cAt once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously\u2014I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.\u201d <\/p>\n [5]<\/a> One of the best treatments of Waiting for Godot<\/i> in relation to negative capability, is to be found in Chapter 21, \u201cThe Implied Critic\u2019s Decision Style,\u201d in Reuven Tsur\u2019s Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics. <\/i>Sussex Academic Press, 2008. This chapter is a republication of his earlier article, \u201cTwo Critical Attitudes: Quest for Certitude and Negative Capability.\u201d He proposes an \u201caxis\u201d with negative capability as one pole and factualism as the other.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Even when critics allow for negative capability, they tend to ignore the birth potential of this state of tension and its implied individual<\/i> birth in the reader or member of the audience. There remains a striving for collective factualism which undermines the value of \u201cthe absurd.\u201d<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> I use this phrase to highlight a feature of the present day, where it seems doubt<\/i> has been banished and one must express only certainty. This feature is always at the forefront in times of religious<\/i> war, threat to government hegemony, and threat to economic privilege. <\/p>\n
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