Apnea and True Illusion: Breath(less) in Beckett

Preface

Years ago I published a book called Blooded Thought, the title of which came out of a line by the poet Wallace Stevens: "An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought."¹ Actually, some of that blood rushed to the head when I was first directing Beckett's plays - in San Francisco, more than half a century ago - and would often speak to the actors in a Beckettian way, my words inseparable from his words, as a way of thinking through or by means of what it is that he thought. I've written several essays in the past in which I thought thus, and there are passages here in which I'll be doing the same. If, then, I sometimes indicate quotations and sometimes (or mostly)don't - though I think you'll know when he's speaking - it's because I'm trying to convey, in the moment, what he thought, as I think it. I should say that one of the things confirmed by Beckett every time I read him is that it's precisely where thought escapes me, at the selvage or circuitous limit of thought, that it may, tautologically, turn back upon itself, which is what keeps it going, to be thought all over again - this time, to begin with, in even more personal terms.

That may be due, in part, to my working on an autobiography in which I'm just about to come to my first meeting with Beckett, whom I knew for many years. It also accounts for my title, though here, the opening and shutting on me, as in the shifting spotlights of Play, picks up on a psychic condition known long ago by Beckett, affecting much of his life and pervading all he has written - not perhaps the sort of thing you want to remember in celebration, but then, remembering Beckett, how could you forget?

The epigraph that follows is from Waiting for Godot.

Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries.

Waiting for Godot (58)

And, even now, unrelieved by his winning a Nobel Prize, some of us still hear them - although sometimes we're not sure whose cries they are.

Some years ago, that time, I was having a late lunch with my son Dick and his partner Jane - fair food, good conversation - when I had a vague sense of their staring at me and looking puzzled at each other, as I kept on talking of I know not what, just talking and talking, with no sense of what I was talking about - or for that matter, who I was, at what turned out to be some logorrhoea of incoherence or a regressively aging "dehiscence," a word used by Beckett for coherence gone to pieces, but otherwise made familiar through the Oedipal fractures in the mirror stage of Lacan, with its drama of a specular ego, and the mirage of identity, still haunting the personal pronoun, I, not I, as we'll certainly see in Beckett, brought on by some primal discord, and subsequent paranoia, at "a real specific prematurity of birth. . . . "² When they took me to the emergency room, babbling into a murmur, "infant languors in the end sheets," as in one of the Texts for Nothing,³ as if falling out of a dream, it was diagnosed as a transient ischemic attack, or momentary stroke; yet since I was not unable to talk, speech not blurred or impeded, but rather accelerated, as from the Mouth of Not I, ". . . but the brain still . . . still . . . in a way,"⁴ it was more like a kind of psychogenic amnesia, what they call a "fugue state," or dissociative identity disorder. If there was anything polyphonic in what I was saying, or somehow contrapuntal - "From the word go. The word begone."⁵ - I have no idea, but from what I later heard from Dick and Jane, relieved when I came to myself, not I, my self, whatever that may be, "Thought...