**Beckett: TEXT 5 of Texts for Nothing. The Life and Experience of Inner-I, by Pamela Dickson**

Text 5. The Inn, In the Village

Here, the mood, the question, the concern, this evening: what are the consequences for a life – for the life of one like I – if the world of phenomena, the embodied I, is illusion, mere appearance, mere representation (of a mind)? Or perhaps to put it like this: what is the experience of and what might be the sense of guilt in failing to believe in a world, failing to believe in a body, failing to believe in words reporting on (all lies) a world, saying none of it, world, body, words, exist? Countless ancient and modern religious and philosophic texts grapple with the idea that the world is an illusion, say Schopenhauer’s idea of world as representation (see also post on Schopenhauer in Beckett’s The Unnamable), or the Buddhist’s idea of Maya. Here, in Text 5, I – this inner-I that I call I – is less concerned about the other, about the life of I that is above and embodied as a separate being, that I call the other. (Here, I looks at the body, the hand “A little creepy crawly it ventures out an instant, then goes back in again, the things one has to listen to, I say it as I hear it.” (119)) Here, too, the words, the voices, try to convince I that he is among the living, as in The Unnamable, i.e., that I is in fact the other; here I is arguing, hearing the case. But I is not born so as to begin to die; to be among the living he would be able to die, he would be among the dying. To a graveyard//My journey has brought me.//I’ll turn in here, I thought to myself. O unmerciful inn,//You nonetheless turn me away? In Text 5, I looks inward, at his experience of illusion, and he tries to find himself, inside a head perhaps?

I is at vigil, dutifully making a record: “the vigil is in vain, [the voices, words tell him] that I’d be better advised to take a little turn, the way you manoeuvre a tin soldier.” (118) And: “The first thing would be to believe I’m there, if I could do that I’d lap up the rest, there’d be none more credulous than me, if I were there.” (119) It would be so simple, if I – I call him I – could believe that that other existed, that embodied man, the whole world would come in too, but without belief? – then where, who? what?

I is tired of all of this, his predicament, the hopelessness of it. “It’s a game, it’s getting to be a game, I’m going to rise and go, if it’s not me it will be someone, a phantom…” (120) I’m tired enough to collapse. But to do that, to go and mingle with air and earth, I would, in fact, only be even more “in exile.” (120)

The Text is structured (by I or the words) as a criminal trial. I or the words say that I is “in the dock.” This brings to mind Schopenhauer’s idea of life as guilt, a debt to work off. As discussed in a post on I’s pensum in The Unnamable, and in a post on The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, by Machado de assis, Schopenhauer describes life as a debt to pay off, a crime. One gets through life “like bonded labour to pay off a debt.” WWR, Volume II (583)

In Text 5, here, I looks “inside the head, to try and see inside, to look for me there, to look for someone there…” (117) He’s in the dark “where I will in vain to see there can’t be any willing.” (117) There is willing even here – I exists as a willing creature, willing to see “there can’t be any willing,” willing still. I is an individual, the art of the Texts is a universal expression of an experience. I is not Schopenhauer’s artist, say Proust, without will in the moment of contemplation of a thing, and, as Schopenhauer says, losing all individuation in the moment, not being an individual man. No, I is an individual, in spite of everything, in spite of nothing. But I is not the embodied individual narrowly serving the will, caring for narrow interests, desires, survival. I is the willing individual looking on, attempting to illuminate himself and the world, a “form of life” in itself (see Text 6). In Beckett’s art, I illuminates the individual and world in a new light.

In this phantom world, inside this “imaginary head,” (120) I says he must have “noted many a story with them [sky and earth] as setting… Between them where the hero stands a great gulf is fixed, while all about they [sky and earth] flow together more and more, till they meet, so that he finds himself as it were under glass, and yet with no limits to his movements in all directions…” (118, 119) I creates those others between earth and sky.

I says – “[T]his evening I’m the scribe. This evening, it’s always evening, always spoken of as evening… it’s to make me think night is at hand, bringer of rest.” No rest for I, no end to his journey, never to reach anywhere, a light, the light, for instance. Oh then now, only onwards “I’m tired of it, I’d be tired of it, if I were me.” (120) And “another evening, all happens at evening, but it will be the same night, it too has its evenings, its mornings and its evenings… it’s to make me think day is at hand, disperser of phantoms.” (120) No light of day will disperse phantoms. Bark me away, you watchful dogs,//Don’t let me rest in the hour of sleeping!//I’m at an end with all dreams – //Why should I linger among the sleepers?

Beckett: TEXT 4 of Texts for Nothing, by Pamela Dickson

Text 4. On the River

This is an intimate text, a present moment between I and himself, dense, hardly any air or space between them. As with most of the Texts, there are two separate beings, I and he; one has to read the Text as if I and he are separate beings.

As an initial matter, I (alone) is both father and son: “Yes, I was my father and I was my son, I asked myself questions and answered as best I could, I had it told to me evening after evening, the same old story I knew by heart and couldn’t believe….” (Text 1, 103). At the beginning of Text 4 I asks himself: “Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be….” (114) I gives a kind of unanswered-answer at the end of the text.

He, the other, is writing about I, but I is writing this Text: he, the embodied other, the one who is “living and bewildered,” is thinking, trying to find I, “yes, living, say what he may.” I insists that he will never find I: “I’m not in his head, nowhere in his old body, and yet I’m there, for him I’m there, with him, hence all the confusion.” (114) My heart, in this river//Do you now recognize your image?//Under its crust does it//Swell to bursting in the same way?

He and not I, I says (but the voices are not I’s either), is the one who “tells his story every five minutes, saying it is not his.” (115) I complains: he wants to foist a story on me, he doesn’t even dignify me with the third person, like his other figments, Molloy or Malone. “That’s how he speaks, this evening, how he has me speak, how he speaks to himself, how I speak, there is only me, this evening, here, on earth…” (115)

But I relents. The other, the man above, is a mere figment of I’s (i.e., because, besides the rest, it may be he, the other, is mere figment or appearance), and words not I’s not his. “What am I doing, talking, having my figments talk, it can only be me.” (116) I half-admits to having a life: “There’s my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don’t say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.” (116) Life is a dream, but it is compulsory, and if he, on the one hand, is mere appearance, I is ever more phantom like.

And yet, I is also somehow this other, or has access to the body, is by necessity adhered to the other – the one who comes and goes on earth – even if I stays here, “to breathe is all that is required, there is no obligation to ramble, or receive company, you may even believe yourself dead… what more liberal regimen could be imagined….” (116) These words a failed resistance to or failed justification for words about the exhausting “obligations!” above, Text 3 (112).

I says, “Yes, there are moments, like this moment, when I seem almost restored to the feasible.” I is almost a whole man, above, below. And, as stated in Annotations, perhaps I is also almost restored to the feasible in art, close to being able to write about “a man” as a whole, as the man is able to do in Winter’s Journey. But then “it goes, all goes, and I’m far again….” (116) The text ends ambiguously as if in answer to the questions of the first sentence, “That’s where I’d go, if I could go, that’s who I’d be, if I could be.” I sense I does not care to be above, I would rather be here, far, if I has to be anywhere, and I does. (Why are they always trying to foist a life, a man, on me, on I?)

Beckett’s Texts for Nothing: TEXT 3. I like a Ghost goes on in the Dark, by Pamela Dickson

Text 3. Dream of Spring

“[T]his time it’s I must go.” (110) No return, no going on. And yet, there is going to be a departure, it’s just words, it’s a journey, an imaginary story forward, future-looking (above) not an imaginary memory backward (above) as in Text 2. I must go, and a man with body must come, but fails to come in this story, this mere story. My eyes woke up;//It was cold and dark

The words, voices, say there’s going to be a story. First, build a body, with “a cluther of limbs and organs” (109) “then back here, this inextricable place far from the days” (110). Again, the possibility or impossibility of adventure and return, a mere phantom story and return to here. Words build a body, feet, hands, skull. “I’ll wait for you here, no, I’m alone, I alone am, this time it’s I must go.” (110) I will build a man, he will be a man. He’ll have a nanny, no responsibility, “if only it could be like that.” (110) I dreamt of love returned. I must use words, or the voices speak, “it’s time to go, to say so anyway.”

I wonders: “What matter how you describe yourself, here or elsewhere, fixed or mobile, without form or oblong like man, in the dark or the light of the heavens, I don’t know, it seems to matter….” (110, 111) It matters: there is a great difference between I here (here, without form, in the dark) and He there (mobile, oblong like man, under the light of the heavens) – if I and He are two sides of the same “being.” I and He live different lives, have different characters, if they are one body, a similar but not the same nothingness, man above mere appearance, moving about with arms and legs and motives, I below phantom-like, closer to reality perhaps or to nothing, but here, unseen, beyond what is or can be visible. The Mock Suns. I’d be better off in the dark.

And again, as in Text 2, I cannot go back above: “And if I went back to where all went out and on from there, no, that would lead nowhere, never led anywhere, the memory of it has gone out too, a great flame and then blackness, a great spasm and then no more weight or traversable space.” (111) There led nowhere, the memory of it gone too; there a great flame (light), and then, here, after I recognized himself, blackness; there a great spasm (of motion) and then here, no weight or space (no experience of body, time, space).

“I’ll speak now of the future, I’ll speak in the future, as when I used to say, in the night, to myself….” (111) I or the voices invent a bare embodied I above and a “crony,” a friend, but no, a crony would “prevent discouragement from sapping my foundations.” This crony, by his encouragements, would distract I who otherwise, as invented man above, might be able to concentrate on his own no-horizons, “which might have enabled me to throw them under a lorry.” (112) But the obligations! of living a life, to call this living, no escape, even if one just stands in line at the bar to make a bet day after day. One has to always be somewhere above, doing something.

No, back to here, see “what’s happening here, where there’s no one, where nothing happens, get something to happen here, someone to be here….” (112) Story versus here, just words, voices. Wouldn’t it be nice – to have a head and the two legs, to “set out from Duggan’s door, on a spring morning of rain and shine, not knowing if you’ll ever get to evening, what’s wrong with that?” (113) “It would be so easy. To be bedded in that flesh or in another… what’s wrong with that? I don’t know, I’m here, that’s all I know, and that it’s still not me, it’s of that the best has to be made. There is no flesh anywhere, nor any way to die…. Here, nothing will happen here, no one will be here…. Departures, stories, they are not for tomorrow.” (113) And when the cocks crowed//My heart woke up;//Now I sit here alone//And think about my dream.

“And the voices, wherever they come from, have no life in them” – no body, no past, no future, a no-man’s land, as opposed to I, I here, if bare, having nothing to do with words, behind words.

Beckett: TEXT 2 of Texts for Nothing. I’s Ghost-Journey goes on, by Pamela Dickson.

Text 2. Backwards Glance

I is here. But above: “ABOVE IS THE LIGHT, the elements, a kind of light, sufficient to see by, the living find their ways….” (105) Above is there, not here – “The things too must still be there, a little more worn…. Here you are under a different glass, not long habitable either….” (105)

I has come to know himself as here, recognizes himself as here before this journey in Texts for Nothing, before The Unnamable (i.e., this is not a journey to here, I is here with nowhere to go) – “Go then, no, better stay, for where would you go, now that you know? Back above? There are limits. Back in that kind of light…. Seek, by the excessive light of night, a demand commensurate with the offer….” (105) I laments: “To have suffered under that miserable light, what a blunder. It let nothing show…. And now here, what now here, one enormous second, as in Paradise….” (106) The sun, the moon, the stars: they are all too bright, revealing nothing. Past it in the depths of night,//Even in the dark//I had to close my eyes. Here it is as if all dark, no experience of time or space.

Here, in Texts for Nothing as in The Unnamable, it seems to I that there are no others, no things, in “this place,” only I. Others, including the other I is adhered to, are above in the light. “And the absence of others, does that count for so little? Pah others, that’s nothing, others never inconvenienced anyone, and there must be a few here too, other others, invisible, mute, what does it matter.” (106) The lack of the experience or knowledge of others here – it might be like this: a kind of illumination in darkness, a wilderness, a vast, no image of self, no image of others, no image of people; individuation is blurred, nearer to nonexistence. And yet I is here, individuated to an extent, experiencing this vast dark in bewilderment as here, and not there.

I has memories, useless, of little help, of others, of stories, words, his only spoils, nighttime images, daytime images, winter images. If he went above, if he tried to “seek” above again “by the excessive light of night,” what could he possibly hope to find? – see Mother Calvet again, creaming off the garbage with her dog. “She wavered through the night, a kind of trident in her hand….” (105) Above, if he were “to go” back above: “And beauty, strength, intelligence, the latest, daily, action, poetry, all one price for one and all.” (106) No, he cannot return: “If only it could be wiped from knowledge. To have suffered under that miserable light, what a blunder. It let nothing show.” (106)

Still, I blends with I here and I above; he is one who once believed he lived above in the light and who now understands he lives here. He speaks to himself in the third person, the impersonal self. As to others: “It’s true you hid from them, hugged their walls, you miss that here, you miss the derivatives, here it’s pure ache, pah you were saying that above and you a living mustard-plaster.” (106) No, it’s all just words, “Utter, there’s nothing else, utter, void yourself of them, here as always, nothing else.” (106)

There are differences between here and there. He has a memory of Mr. Joly in the belfry on a Sunday. “Here at least none of that, no talk of a creator and nothing very definite in the way of a creation.” (107)

I has a last memory. Of Piers from Langland’s 14^th century Piers The Ploughman, but as noted in Annotations, blended with the Red Cross Knight of the first line of Canto I of Spencer’s The Faerie Queene (1596), pricking his oxen o’er the plan, he raised his eyes to the sky. The night was black, soon snow. The night, even winter night, is bright, is still an excessive light. There is a kind of imaginary return: Piers’ return, but also I’s return to the “place” of Text 1, the den, the sea thundering from afar beneath the snow. “It was none the less the return, to what no matter, the return, unscathed, always a matter for wonder.” (107) An experience above, perhaps Piers’: “opposite the lamplit window. A glow, red, afar, at night, in winter, that’s worth having, that must have been worth having.” (107, 108) He is an outsider, in winter, looking in. Show him a bright, warm house,//And a beloved soul within.//Only delusion is the prize for me!

“A far memory….” (108) And above, a kind of longing in spite of the hopelessness, in spite of no-return possible: “How one hoped above, on and off. With what diversity.” (108) Last Hope

No Return, paltry spoils. Beckett’s story, The Calmative, inverts the old tale of the medieval knights: take the adventure and return as hero. In The Calmative, the man is (possibly) dying in bed – in horror of those assassins who will kill him (i.e., ordinary life). The “adventure” is a story in skull, a story he tells himself, an absurd headlong journey at night, to a walled city, to the sea where he encounters a boy with a goat, he finds “love” – a kiss with a disgusting man – he has spoils, memories, words said, sights, the phial the man gave him. Horses are “carcasses of the gutted horses hanging from hooks.” There is the story of Breem or Bream, a boy’s heroic journey in the sea and his return. In The Calmative, the true return is to the tragic sorrows of being alone in a terrifying death bed. Text for Nothing plays with the idea of the knights’ tale. In Text 2 there is “no return” to there, above. I lived above before recognizing himself as here, always been here. He has spoils from above: bits of memory, sights, words read, images. But these are paltry spoils. Where is he to go? he can’t return there, if he has a small hopeless longing. No, it was worse there. In Text 1 the knight’s horse is: I feels his body is like an “old hack floundered in the street, struggling no more.” (100) In Text 1, the story of Joe Breem or Breen “a knife between his teeth, did what was to be done and came back.” (103)

No return to the cave, after one’s journey, as in Plato’s Republic, to live in the city and teach and share what one knows. No return, like Jesus from the wilderness of the desert to the city to teach the crowds. No return, no going back to Ireland, Beckett’s homeland, “the city in its haze.” (Text 1 101 and The Calmative “there was never any city but the one”) No return above, no heroic return.

Beckett’s Texts for Nothing: TITLE and TEXT 1. I Goes On in a Ghost-like Journey, by Pamela Dickson

Glaucon asks Socrates: “So, tell us then, in what way the power of dialectical discussion works, into what kinds it is divided, and what roads it follows. I mean, it is these, it seems, that would lead us at last to that place which is a rest from the road, so to speak, for the one who reaches it, and an end of his journey.” (Republic, translated by Reeves, Book 7, 532d5) But for I in Texts for Nothing: no end to the journey, no rest from the road, no “place which is a rest from the road.”

Texts for Nothing. Winter’s Journey

Texts for Nothing, this most beautiful and pure text, is (I believe) — in addition to the myriad and complex references and/or resonances to other texts or art forms (including his own works) — “embedded in” and/or an inversion of Schubert’s Winterreise – Winter Journey.

In the annotations to Texts for Nothing, it states that the “title [Texts for Nothing] derives from the musical term, measure pour rien, a silent measure at the outset of a performance, ‘adapted from the phrase conductors use for that ghost measure which sets the orchestra’s tempo’….” See Samuel Beckett, Texts pour rien / Texts for Nothing, Annotations, Edition de Chris Ackerley et Llewellyn Brown (LA REVUE des lettres modernes 2018-7) (“Annotations”). The Texts of Texts for Nothing, are, I believe, a reflection and mirror – or like ghost measures – to the songs of Winter Journey. In Winter Journey, a man journeys “above” in a world, still able to believe in the life of a man, in himself as embodied man, still able to believe in love, in God, in the existence of things, trees, a world, in spite of loneliness and loss. But I – the I of Texts for Nothing – has lost the world, I cannot believe in the world’s existence, in the “reality” of phenomena, in the “reality” of body or words, let alone a God. The “I” in Texts for Nothing inverts the winter journey into a journey-less journey in pure darkness. The evolved “I” of The Unnamable sings a woeful song of a ghost-like journey that is going nowhere, that goes nowhere is nowhere.

My thoughts, comments, focus on the ghost-like journey of I in Texts for Nothing. I add references to Winter Journey in italics, to note possible mirroring to the song.

Note: to better understand the posts on Texts for Nothing, it is best to read some if not all of the posts on Beckett’s The Unnamable first.

Text 1. Good Night

I sadly gives in: he doesn’t rail against being “adhered” to a body, a head (i.e., against being “gathered together for life” with the other, such as Mahood or Beckett) as he rails and denies in The Unnamable. I is still a separate being (i.e., character) distinct from the body, the head, the named creature (i.e., there are two, I and man, say Beckett or Mahood, this latter ‘man’ I call “other”). As noted, understanding the distinctness of I as a separate character in full is fundamental to understanding The Unnamable, and this is true for the Texts. “[I am] away from the body, away from the head…. Ah yes, we seem to be more than one, all deaf, not even, gathered together for life.” (Pages 100-101, The Complete Short Prose, Edited and with an Introduction and Notes by S. E. Gontarski (1995).)

I is here (still). The “same voice[s], the same ideas,” the same questions. “How long have I been here, what a question, I’ve often wondered. And often I could answer, An hour, a month, a year, a century, depending on what I meant by here, and me, and being.” (101) Being: here or there, either way, how describe it? and here, how describe it? “I’m here, always have been, always shall be.” (103) Why do they ask about my sorrows?

I no longer rails against the idea of having “been born” – with the other or perhaps initially as the other (until I recognized himself as distinct). “To change, to see, no, there’s no more to see, I’ve seen it all, till my eyes are blear, nor to get away from harm, the harm is done, one day the harm was done, the day my feet dragged me out that must go their ways, that I let go their ways and drag me here, that’s what possessed me to come.” (102)

In sensation, the other is there, the body, the life, the one living life above, having to go and come and move on in a body, “it’s himself all right.” (102) “I’m up there and I’m down here, under my gaze, foundered, eyes closed, ear cupped against the sucking peat, we’re of one mind, all of one mind, always were, deep down, we’re fond of one another, we’re sorry for one another, but there it is, there’s nothing we can do for one another.” (102) I came a stranger, / I depart a stranger.

The long night of the gods. “Yes, it will be night, the mist will clear… the whole night sky open over the mountain, with its lights, including the Bears, to guide me once again on my way, let’s wait for night.” (102) The curlews “crying when the darkness gathers” (101) – a haunting song of night, as stated in Annotations, foreshadows death and as in Yeats, O’ curlew (He reproves the Curlew), accentuates a lost passion. I cannot choose the time / of my journey: / Must find my own way in this darkness. / A moon beam goes along / As my companion, / And on the white meadows / I look for tracks of deer. There is a hint of winter, but I is not in time or space, or doesn’t experience time or space, doesn’t know what time is, the idea of night and of winter is an abstraction or a metaphor: “like buried in snow” (102), “the cold is eating me… at least I presume so” (102); his father read the story to him of Joe Breem or Breen “all the long winter through.” (103)

I is the (resistant) story teller, still having to describe “the place,” and to use the right tense, but failing, “All mingles, times and tenses, at first I only had been here, now I’m here still, soon I won’t be here yet, toiling up the slope…” (102) He has “given myself up for dead all over the place… the same old questions, the same old mutterings, the same old stories, the same old questions and answers, no malice in me, hardly any….” (103) “Yes, to the end, always muttering, to lull me and keep me company” – as when his father took him on his knee and read him the one about Joe Breem or Breen. I is “my father and I was my son, I asked myself questions and answered as best I could, I had it told to me evening after evening, the same old story I knew by heart and couldn’t believe.” In many of the Texts, as we’ll see, I is his father and his son, I asking himself questions, telling himself the same old story, evening after evening. I and other, I here, other above: “we walked together, hand in hand, silent, sunk in our worlds, each in his worlds, the hands forgotten in each other.” (103)

Good night. “I’m holding myself in my arms…. Sleep now, as under that ancient lamp, all twined together, tired out with so much talking, so much listening, so much toil and play.” (104) I won’t disturb you in your dream, / It would be a shame to disturb your rest… Softly, softly the door closes!