Underscores become Bullets: From Beckett's "The Unnamable"
- I'll sham dead now, whom they couldn't bring to life, and my monster's carapace will rot off me. But it's entirely a matter of voices, no other metaphor is appropriate. They've blown me up with their voices, like a balloon, and even as I collapse it's them I hear
- I won't say it, I can't say it, I have no language but theirs, . . .
- This is the kind of language I can almost understand, these the kind of clear and simple notions on which it is possible for me to build, I ask for no other spiritual nourishment. A turnip, I know roughly what a turnip is like, a carrot too, particularly the Flakkee, or Colmar Red
- the soul being notoriously immune from deterioration and dismemberment
- I have to puke my heart out too, spew it up whole along with the rest of the vomit, it's then at last I'll look as if I mean what I'm saying, it won't be just idle words
- The galley-man, bound for the Pillars of Hercules, who drops his sweep under cover of night and crawls between the thwarts, towards the rising sun, unseen by the guard, praying for storm
- Pupil Mahood, repeat after me, Man is a higher mammal
- But it's time I gave this solitary a name, nothing doing without proper names. I therefore baptise him Worm
- I can hear him yet, faithful, begging me to still this dead tongue of the living
- That the impossible should be asked of me, good, what else could be asked of me? But the absurd! Of me whom they have reduced to reason
- I've swallowed three hooks and am still hungry
- the setting sun whose last rays, raking the street from end to end, lend to my cenotaph and interminable shadow, astraddle of the gutter and the sidewalk
- And often I went on looking without flinching until, ceasing to be, I ceased to see
Comments
"Samuel Beckett"
Grove Press
First Evergreen
Black Cat Edition (1970)