That’s the conceit, that if we put on costumes put on masks remember our lines and make up, it’ll mean something, something more than a group of costumed men reciting the word’s of dead men. It’s just how characters without character become great if for a moment, Alain may at his best be an interesting Iago, but strove to be a Lear who needn’t lose it, nor his fool, to tell such liars where off precisely to fuck. And I guess he was, I’d give him that more Edward though and his bastard’s revolt, to be sincere, to be a real boy, a director like Pinocchio had he made Gepetto what cruelty there would have been. And it’s easier, isn’t it? To play Mme. De Guermants or Albertine, because it mean something, somehow. Because they meant something to so many, and through osmosis this makes us mean something, at best, if not to ourselves but someone. So we say the things they say and wear their clothes, what do those without talent do but play some better written part?
In the 1001 and One Nights there is a dervish, a magical device. Put it on and you become whatever you want to be. If I put on that dervish, I’d rather turn into myself, without some complex or another, without needing to be a character, but be a character without the need for meaning or purpose, but with some form of happiness, artificial or not. It might mean nothing, but it meant something to me. Not much, but not much is better than nothing. To say it best, but poorly:
Why dally then? To me no word of thine
Is pleasant: God forbid it e’er should please;
Nor am I more acceptable to thee.
And yet how otherwise had I achieved
A name so glorious as by burying
A brother? so my townsmen all would say,
Where they not gagged by terror, Manifold
A king’s prerogatives, and not the least
That all his acts and all his words are law.
No hallowed ground for Antigone, for me. There is no such place, but at least it’s quiet, in the end.
brandon the writer | author & staff writer for sir swag 