This actually might explain a lot

Apparently, Beckett regularly played chess with Marcel Duchamp, of artistic urinal fame:

Indeed.

Also, whenever I hear the word "urinal" I think of that George Bush joke where he and Laura get invited to a tour of the White House before his inauguration and he asks Clinton if he can use his bathroom and Bush is shocked to see a solid gold urinal and he tells Laura all about it and then later Laura tells Hillary at lunch how impressed George was with the gold urinal. Then, later that night, Bill and Hillary are getting ready for bed and she turns to him and says, "Well I found out who peed in your saxophone." Hee.

In other news, I have been reading so many different things lately they are jumbled in my brain and I cannot untangle them.

Virginia Woolf writes, in Jacob's Room, that a body is harnessed to a brain.

Yes. I can't get it out of my head. Harnessed. Shackled. Fettered to our bodies that begin degenerating from the moment we are born...

You know, she might have been a depressed, crazy feminist, but she sure had her moments. I also just read A Room of One's Own and funnily enough her best bits come when she is not drawing the distinctions between men and women. She says:

Life for both sexes--and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement--is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle.

Fo' sheazy, Virgie. Fo' sheazy. Hooray for the human condition.

And this somehow relates to everything else and love above all.

In the speech presenting Beckett with the Nobel Prize, it was said that:

(It is) in Beckett's pessimism...(that) houses a love of mankind that grows in understanding as it plumbs further into the depths of abhorrence, a despair that has to reach the utmost bounds of suffering to discover that compassion has no bounds. From that position, in the realms of annihilation, rises the writing of Samuel Beckett like a miserere from all mankind, its muffled minor key sounding liberation to the oppressed, and comfort to those in need.

I think it is not just Beckett. We all house a love of mankind and maybe that love breeds our desperation but it is still essential. He, I think, had an incredible desire to know humanity as well as a profound difficulty containing the sharpness of understanding fully human pain, and maybe from this inability to conjoin the two ideas arose his great ambivalence towards love. But it is really just a groping for some kind of clarity and in that reaching for sense there emerges an incredible sort of desperation. Compassion in Beckett really does know no bounds, as this speech suggests, and I think that boundless and infinite swell is the love in his poems and maybe it was all too much for him to grasp at once and that's why these labels get so easily attached to his name and work--misanthrope, pessimist, cynic, etc.

Anyways. I dunno. Beckett. One crazy bitch. For real.

And I have no answers but he might because he wrote:

my peace is there in the receding mist
when I may cease from treading these long shifting thresholds
and live the space of a door
that opens and shuts

And somehow all these things converge but I do not know how but if he knew anything then maybe he was right and in the receding mist there might be peace, for us.