A Black Smudge

I've got three flashlights here, a blue one, a green one, and a red one, and as you can see here, [he holds a sheet of paper into the intersecting area] when their beams all combine, you get white light. And if you take a piece of paper with a slit in it, and you block those beams, you can decompose that white light into back into its constituent parts: red, green, and blue. Now, this is something really cool - if you take something that casts a shadow, it's actually going to cast three: a cyan, a magenta, and a yellow shadow. If I allow each of those shadows to pass over the slit, you're going to see that they block out only their complementary color.

“Not all writing is cursed, but surely all of it is haunted. Literature is a catacomb of past readers, past writers, past books. Traces of those who are responsible for creation linger among the words on a page; Shakespeare can’t hear us, but we can still hear him (and don’t ghosts wander through those estate houses upon the moors unaware that they’ve died?). […] Of all of the forms of expression that humanity has worked with—painting, music, sculpture—literature is the eeriest. Poetry and fiction are both incantation and conjuration, the spinning of specters and the invoking of ghosts; it is very literally listening to somebody who isn’t there, and might not have been for a long while. All writing is occult, because it’s the creation of something from ether, and magic is simply a way of acknowledging that—a linguistic practice, an attitude, a critical method more than a body of spells. We should be disquieted by literature; we should be unnerved.”

“We’re trying to get somewhere with the problem of the extreme brevity of Cordelia’s role in King Lear, which is less than ninety lines. Nobody believes this until you count them. Or the great silences in literature, characters who come on and say nothing — from Aeschylus to Dostoyevsky — or say only a few words. Or the idiot at the end of Boris Godunov: he sings two notes which go through the whole of the world in their despair and horror. And students have been responding, you’ve been responding, you know the stuff by heart, it fills you, and you leave, you walk down the street, and you see a headline: ‘A Million Dead in Rwanda.’ It isn’t only that you are numb to the constant horrors of our century, it’s that they don’t even enter your imagination.”

The issue of likeability is one that I came up against often since, but never so clearly with Helena. Seldom does anybody ask whether they like Hamlet, Henry V, or King Lear, but somehow the heroine has to be sympathetic, palatable, likeable. It is definitely easier for a woman to be liked if she is pretty, gentle, and unassuming than if she is intense, ambitious, and complicated like Helena.

On the other hand, it is interesting that George Bernard Shaw preferred Helena to any other Shakespeare heroine, and having studied the part in depth and played it in repertoire over a period of two years, I feel certain that Shakespeare was basically on her side. Every decent, wise character in the play approves of her, and her only detractors are Parolles, a known cheat, and Bertram, an immature snobbish boy. 

And bodies, whether living or dead, decay continuously. Our topmost layer of skin is dead. Our hair is dead. Bacteria, fungus, and germs thrive in just about every nook and cranny they can find. The smell of body odor is, in fact, the smell of these bacteria feasting on fatty compounds secreted by our sweat glands. And yet, bodies are sexy, not in spite of the fact that we are decaying but exactly, I think, because we are.