Category: literature

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COUNTING STEPS

We’ve all played silly little games like not stepping on cracks while walking on a sidewalk.

The brilliance of Nobel-laureate Samuel Beckett is that he can turn something so common – in this case, counting steps – into an existential paralysis. Where do you start the count and where does it end?

But counting steps is really just a slapstick distraction. There is something on Beckett’s mind. We aren’t told what but the narrator doesn’t want to think about it. “Memories are killing,” he warns us.

But that’s another problem. We can’t think a thought telling us not to think a thought, that just makes us aware of what it is we don’t want to be aware of.

The solution? Instead of trying to block a thought, let it in. That makes it so commonplace we hardly notice it. 🙂

I am revisiting Beckett’s short prose and finding it just as delightfully absurd, funny, and profound as it was during my first encounter 60 years ago.

The following is a short reading/visualization of the opening paragraph of Samuel Beckett’s “The Expelled,” a story first published in Stories and Texts for Nothing (1954).

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Sonny’s Blues

Visualization and reading of an excerpt from James Baldwin’s 1957 short story, Sonny’s Blues.

The narrator, a black straight-laced algebra teacher in 1950s Harlem, listens to his younger brother – a blues pianist fresh out of prison and recovering from a heroin addiction – as he performs for the first time in a long time with a band in a Greenwich Village nightclub.

The older brother slowly comes to realize that it is through music that Sonny is able to turn his suffering into something worthwhile, although an ominous symbol at the end – a celebratory Scotch and milk sent up to the bandstand, described by the narrator as a “cup of trembling” (referencing the Lord’s wrath in Isaiah 51:17) – suggests that this moment of harmony is only temporary.

“And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.”

This short video highlights the narrator’s musings on the “awful relationship” between the musician and his instrument – who has to fill it, his instrument, “with the breath of life, his own.”

🙂 🙂 🙂