Horner's Corner

Samuel Beckett

(13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989)

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How It Was – A memoir of Samuel Beckett

Anne Atik

pdf here

Fathoms from Anywhere

A Samuel Beckett Centenary Exhibition

“I don’t find solitude agonizing, on the contrary. Holes in paper open and take me fathoms from anywhere.”

- Samuel Beckett

The last sentence of The Unnamable

Samuel Beckett

parsed and punctuated by Colin Greenlaw

And so on, the old rigmarole. It can’t be I. Or it’s because I pay no heed: it’s such an old habit, I do it without heeding. Or as if I were somewhere else.

There I am far again, there I am absentee again: it’s his turn now, he who neither speaks nor listens, who has neither body nor soul. It’s something else he has: he must have something, he must be somewhere. He is made of silence (there’s a pretty analysis), he’s in the silence. He’s the one to be sought, the one to be, the one to be spoken of, the one to speak. But he can’t speak: then I could stop, I’d be he, I’d be the silence, I’d be back in the silence, we’d be reunited, his story the story to be told.

But he has no story, he hasn’t been in story? It’s not certain: he’s in his own story, unimaginable, unspeakable. That doesn’t matter: the attempt must be made, in the old stories incomprehensibly mine, to find his. It must be there somewhere. It must have been mine, before being his. I’ll recognize it, in the end I’ll recognize it: the story of the silence that he never left, that I should never have left, that I may never find again, that I may find again. Then it will be he, it will be I, it will be the place: the silence, the end, the beginning, the beginning again – how can I say it? That’s all words, they’re all I have – and not many of them: the words fail, the voice fails. So be it. I know that well. It will be the silence, full of murmurs, distant cries. The usual silence, spent listening, spent waiting, waiting for the voice….(more)

via ::: wood s lot ::: “the fitful tracing of a portal”.

Philip Zimbardo from his preface to a new edition of Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority

Situationist

A few words about how I view this body of research. First, it is the most representative and generalizable research in social psychology or social sciences due to his large sample size, systematic variations, use of a diverse body of ordinary people from two small towns—New Haven and Bridgeport, Connecticut—and detailed presentation of methodological features. Further, its replications across many cultures and time periods reveal its robust effectiveness.

As the most significant demonstration of the power of social situations to influence human behavior, Milgram’s experiments are at the core of the situationist view of behavioral determinants. It is a study of the failure of most people to resist unjust authority when commands no longer make sense given the seemingly reasonable stated intentions of the just authority who began the study. It makes sense that psychological researchers would care about the judicious use of punishment as a means to improve learning and memory. However, it makes no sense to continue to administer increasingly painful shocks to one’s learner after he insists on quitting, complains of a heart condition, and then, after 330 volts, stops responding at all. How could you be helping improve his memory when he was unconscious or worse? The most minimal exercise of critical thinking at that stage in the series should have resulted in virtually everyone refusing to go on, disobeying this now heartlessly unjust authority. To the contrary, most who had gone that far were trapped in what Milgram calls the “agentic state.”

These ordinary adults were reduced to mindless obedient school children who do not know how to exit from a most unpleasant situation until teacher gives them permission to do so. At that critical juncture when their shocks might have caused a serious medical problem, did any of them simply get out of their chairs and go into the next room to check on the victim? Before answering, consider the next question, which I posed directly to Stanley Milgram: “After the final 450 volt switch was thrown, how many of the participant-teachers spontaneously got out of their seats and went to inquire about the condition of their learner?” Milgram’s answer: “Not one, not ever!” So there is a continuity into adulthood of that grade-school mentality of obedience to those primitive rules of doing nothing until the teacher-authority allows it, permits it, and orders it.

My research on situational power (the Stanford Prison Experiment) complements that of Milgram in several ways. They are the bookends of situationism: his representing direct power of authority on individuals, mine representing institutional indirect power over all those within its power domain….

More: see -

::: wood s lot ::: “the fitful tracing of a portal”.

The birds sang in the wet trees
And as I listened to them it was a hundred years from now
And I was dead and someone else was listening to them.
But I was glad I had recorded for him
The melancholy.

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967)

Below: Statue of Patrick Kavanagh, Grand Canal, Dublin (April 2009)

Celebrating National Poetry Month – The New York Review of Books.

Et in Arcadia Ego

By W.H. Auden

Who, now, seeing Her so
Happily married,
Housewife, helpmate to Man,

Can imagine the screeching
Virago, the Amazon,
Earth Mother was?

Her jungle growths
Are abated,
Her exorbitant monsters abashed,

Her soil mumbled,
Where crops, aligned precisely,
Will soon be orient:

Levant or couchant,
Well-daunted thoroughbreds
Graze on mead and pasture,

A church clock subdivides the day,
Up the lane at sundown
Geese podge home.

As for Him:
What has happened to the Brute
Epics and nightmares tell of?

No bishops pursue
Their archdeacons with axes,
In the crumbling lair

Of a robber baron
Sightseers picnic
Who carry no daggers.

I well might think myself
A humanist,
Could I manage not to see

How the autobahn
Thwarts the landscape
In godless Roman arrogance,

The farmer’s children
Tiptoe past the shed
Where the gelding knife is kept.

American Civil Liberties Union : Office of Legal Counsel Memos.

If you haven’t seen these already, over at the ACLU, memos from the Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department (sounds Orwellian in this context) authorizing and blessing torture.  “[F]earsome word-and-thought-defying,” as someone once said of another bureaucrat’s complicity in crimes (Arendt about Eichmann, if you were wondering).