nah, yeh

Some stuff I need to record here and get out of my head.

Two quotes by Edward Bond (playwright),

"If you want to escape violence, you don't say 'violence is wrong,' you alter the conditions that create violence."

"Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future. People who do not want writers to write about violence want to stop them writing about us and our time. It would be immoral not to write about violence."

It is unfortunate and very sad that someone should have to commit suicide to have their voice heard. Unfortunate but it would appear, for Sarah Kane, necessary. Sarah was a playwright whose work contained scenes of violence, cruelty, mental anguish and psychological distress, some of which appear to be drawn from her own life. Her early work was misinterpreted and seen as brutal and disgusting. There is speculation that she intended her final play to be produced posthumously and indeed after writing it, at barely 28 she tried to commit suicide, was then taken to hospital, where it seems she did manage to hang herself with her own shoelaces. Following her death, her work has been taken more seriously.

Sarah suggested,

"that society is chronically insane and that in order to function in this insanity one needs to deaden one’s capacity to feel and perceive, to switch off a part of the mind, or ... 'to embrace beautiful lies' "

Edward Bond illustrated this type of chronic insanity,

"We live rational daily lives but our societies make grotesque weapons, economically destroy their environment, make some rich and others poor, some powerful and others impotent and in these and other ways are flagrantly unjust."

In Sarah's play, 4:48 psychosis,

"one of the voices in the play experiences just over an hour of sanity every morning from 4.48am. At all other times, they claim, they cannot touch their essential self: 'When it has passed, I shall be gone again, a fragmented puppet, a grotesque fool.' It is, however, when they regard themselves as insane and grotesque that they are regarded as sane by others ... This raises one of the key questions highlighted in the play: who defines what is and is not sane and according to what criteria?"

I guess I'm trying to express something here but I ain't sure what it is yet.

I'm reading a book at the moment, about the difficulties people sometimes have with expression and communication. It's about a group of people, unable to make themselves understood, some through physical disability, some through psychological inability. But in a way it's also about how we all to some extent, are sealed within our own minds.

It's a curious challenge this, the ability to express the true essence of our thought, the ability or inability to make someone else understand.