cn: allusion to suicide, God/blasphemy

It sometimes struck him how self-servingly suicidal is the dull tendency people have to trap themselves by misinterpretation. What in God’s name is the need to make blasphemy out of every single self-evident fact? As any black sheep in a white-coloured herd, he had been tacitly told over and over again, at every appropriate occasion, that it was obviously impossible for everyone else to be wrong so that he could be right – never mind Plato’s imagination, guys, for the man was obviously losing his wits when he wrote all that gibberish about the cave and the shadows on the wall. And what about the radio? Could there be a collective illusion that hum was speech? Off course not! Fucking blockheads! Maybe what happens is that we are caught up in the Weird Sister’s spell, that “fair is foul and foul is fair”. Saint Anthony might have something to say about that; after all he was the man who ended up preaching to the fish. Maybe he should try that as well. Who knows, it might even work. But never mind Saint Anthony and his damned fish! He hadn’t spent his time so far reciting poetry to a doornail because he wanted to.

Passionate recitation directed at a wooden dumbness: what was the use of it? As Plato realised in one of his few down-to-earth conclusions, there is no explaining things to people who can’t hear you, all the more so if their deafness is self-ordained. Even colourful Shakespeare becomes worthless when kicked at the flat face of an ox. He thought it logical to infer, then, that meaning dies when there is no one there to get it across to. This thought was surprisingly terrifying. There is a catastrophic loss of balance in being led to consider that meaning might be just an illusion. The thought that he might be just another voice doomed to echo in the desert, that

            Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,

            That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

            And then is heard no more: it is a tale

            Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

            Signifying nothing.

 

was like a cold blade piercing him to the deepest recesses of his being…He was slipping into the quicksand. He shivered, then he shook his head yet once more to surface from the room at Dunsinane Castle, where Macbeth was caught in the spider’s web as he mused on the tricks of a tomorrow slyly creeping to a time that had always been out of his reach.

It was then he looked at his watch. Five o’clock. The f-word. Macbeth.

To be continued…

Tomás Ferreira (Get Real. culture editor)

This series, entitled “A Horse!” will be in 8 parts. This is part 3/8.