Language

"Almost all great modern artists mean to do away with 'filler,' do away with whatever came from habit, whatever keeps them from getting directly and exclusively at the essential (the essential: the thing the artist himself, and only he, is able to say.)" (Kundera, Encounter)

"Metaphysical angst, he had learned, could be profoundly disquieting and depressing but it was seldom life-threatening, except for those few individuals who could not live with their awareness of the void and committed suicide. Many of the features of Beckett's later prose and plays arise directly from his experiences of radical uncertainty, disorientation, exile, hunger and need." (Knowlson, Damned to Fame)

After recovering from surgery to restore his sight Beckett and Suzanne went on a trip to Malta. He saw one thing which made the trip worth the trouble, St. John's Cathedral in Valletta. He wanted to see the famous signed Caravaggio: The Beheading of St. John the Baptist.

He sat in front of the painting for an hour. It was "a great painting, really tremendous." He began Not I shortly later.

Sit in front of the painting for an hour yourself. Make a relationship with it. Don't let me tell you how you connect. Take the opportunity to connect yourself. Ask, what is my relationship to this piece of work? I know the Baptist. I have sat among the words. I have studied the holy cards from my Grandmother's collection so fully I can recall each image instantaneously.

The Beheading of St. John the Baptist is unlike any painting of St. John the Baptist I've seen. When I first read that Not I was begun after the work titled The Beheading of St. John the Baptist I thought, of course, "one of the most strikingly innovative pieces of modern theatre, an illuminated mouth, set high in the darkness to stage left, spews out words at an astonishing pace, telling of a sad, lonely silent life." (Knowlson, Damned to Fame)

I think of this play all the time. The first production nearly destroyed the actress (Billie Whitelaw) who played Mouth. She couldn't withstand the language—the pace of it, the lack of logic, the voice, the inflection (he wanted none, just the words in an ordered but incomprehensible stream), the physical delivery. She almost gave up. After a breakdown she tried again.

What Beckett said about her, Mouth in Pas Moi: "And I heard 'her' saying what I wrote in Not I. I actually heard it."

When asked about the voice, he said to read The Unnamable. The voice is there already. "It issues from me, it fills me, it clamours against my walls, it is not mine, I can't stop it, I can't prevent it, from tearing me, racking me, assailing me. It is not mine, I have none, I have no voice and must speak, this is all I know." (Beckett, The Unnamable)

When I read his work I am lost in the flood of words. I let go of the shores of reason and give myself over to the current. He is a loving and gentle writer and never holds me under. Something—his cadence, his vision, his compassion—keeps my head above, providing me access to air, and then I lift myself from his world, his vocabulary. I feel soothed. He has, in not answering, answered. Perhaps this is the most you can say to the void, "I have no voice and must speak, this is all I know."