Friday, August 17, 2012

Crave

...an excerpt from...
Crave
by Sarah Kane
(1998)

C  She is currently having some kind of nervous breakdown and wishes she'd been born black, male and more attractive.

B  I give myself.

C  Or just more attractive.

B  I give my heart.

C  Or just different.

M  But that's not really giving.

C  Just someone fucking else.

A  Fragile and choking.

C  She ceases to continue with the day to day farce of getting through the next few hours in an attempt to ward off the fact that she doesn't know how to get through the next forty years.

A  I love you still,

B  Against my will.

C  She's talking about herself in the third person because the idea of being who she is, of acknowledging that she is herself, is more than her pride can take.

B  With a fucking vengeance.

C  She's sick to the fucking gills of herself and wishes wishes wishes that something would happen to make life begin.

A  I'm a much nicer person since I had an affair.

C  You can only kill yourself if you're not already dead.

M  Guilt does that.

A  Because now I know that betrayal means nothing.

To be forgotten

...an excerpt from...
The Rings of Saturn
by W.G. Sebald
(1995)

Much as in this continuous process of consuming and being consumed, nothing endures, in Thomas Browne's view.  On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation.  For the history of every individual, of every social order, indeed of the whole world, does not describe an ever-widening, more and more wonderful arc, but rather follows a course which, once the meridian is reached, leads without fail down into the dark.  Knowledge of that descent into the dark, for Browne, is inseparable from his belief in the day of resurrection, when, as in a theatre, the last revolutions are ended and the actors appear once more on stage, to complete and make up the catastrophe of this great piece.  As a doctor, who saw disease growing and raging in bodies, he understood mortality better than the flowering of life.  To him it seems a miracle that we should last so much as a single day.  There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time.  The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us.  Hour upon hour is added to the sum.  Time itself grows old.  Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow.  Not even those who have found a place amidst the heavenly constellations have perpetuated their names:  Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osiris in the Dog Star.  Indeed, old families last not three oaks.  To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace?  The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.