Samuel Beckett’s way is a road of ‘diminishing possibilities’. He finds fewer and fewer subjects to talk about and is finally left amazed by the fact that he is ‘still alive’ and can prove it only by continuing to spew forth language. His way is a spiral turning in, going ever deeper into the heart of a contradiction, into the black hole of thought and reflection and self-reference. And it is astonishing what resonance he can find there.
I prefer to ‘include’ everything, the entire world in its ever-increasing fertility, in its mycelium of connections. If a thing is in the world, it must connect to every other thing. I follow the way of ever-increasing, ever-multiplying possibilities. The work and the world (and all anti-worlds, as well, including Beckett’s) are not separate; somehow everything points to and speaks of everything else. It is delicious chaos held together by a soft silk thread. Order shooting through the world in spasms of radiance.
The mycelium of inclusion is not Beckett’s no-time no-place, nor is it Joyce’s City of Dublin on a specific date – it is everywhere connected and all times at once, it is the rain forest reflected in a bassoon, it ‘includes’ and resonates with openness, it is so crowded with the world that it demands vast infusions of space to allow it room to dance, to tremble. It is not merely the spiral unwinding outward but a soft explosion of the always-new, the always-being-born. It disregards subtraction and lusts after nth powers. It grows and takes in the darkness and illuminates it. And ultimately it embraces irony, because all this richness, this feast of life, is empty, and includes emptiness, and feasts on emptiness even as it feasts on the world.