AS YOU LIKE IT

MUSINGS, WRITING

“A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.” It is through such masterstrokes of incongruity displayed in plays such as “Twelfth Night” and films such as “Some Like it Hot” that the “fools” of life represent the “truths” of reality. Their aims of comedy an elusive blend of sense and nonsense, their joyous acceptance of life and love, their social satire, their low comedy characters who are always more than mere clowns, their poignant songs that are always more than mere embellishments, and their breathless cascades of wit. Coating truth with humor, society allows them to ask the radical questions. What are you? What would you? And its radical metaphor, natural perspective that is and is not, “What you will.” Comedies represent the cultural anxieties of a time played out on stage or film, the existence of conformism always imposing so much strain, fissures, paradoxes, and subversions. By Laws of Nature, by the rules of Religion, and the Customs of all civility, it is necessary that there be a distinct and special difference between Man and Women. Through their stories Shakespeare and Wilder disrupt this sexual difference with an almost peevish insistence, their humor pervading the tales’ meaning. The Playhouse enjoyed comedies in which boys played girls who pretend to be boys because they secretly love other boys and want, quite desperately in some cases to be loved as girls. The 1950s suspended between two polarities, on the brink of a sexual revolution. These “masquerades” derived not from the imperatives of biology, but instead from the demands of society. Rigidity would provoke recoil, and the excess of homogeneity and authority would elicit irrepressible yearnings for pleasure and freedom. We see this in Daphne’s dance with the millionaire, as by the end she is swept up by freedom into the pleasure of taking on the identity of a woman. After allowing her self to give in to desire Daphne’s character falls into the identity of a woman, still speaking with a woman’s voice to Joseph in private, still running in heels. Similarly Viola in the end of the “Twelfth Night” is still androgynous. Referred to by the Duke as “boy” she is left with an ambiguous gender and identity, just as Daphne is with the last line “nobody’s perfect.”

Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.

ernest tub

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

ADVICE, ALIVE TEXTS, ARTISTS, AUTHORS, FAMOUS AUTHORS, MUSINGS, PHOTOGRAPHY, QUOTES, WRITERS, WRITING

30/5/2014

LIVE JOURNAL, MUSINGS, Uncategorized

I can resign myself to anything on earth except dullness, and I do not want to be good. Good is my idea of what very measly people are, since they cannot be anything better. I wish to be hell on wheels, or dead. And the only serious complaint I have about settling down with someone is that it brings out the faint goodness in me, and has a tendency to soften and quiet the hell on wheels aspect, and finally I become bored with myself. Only a fool would prefer to be actively achingly dangerously unhappy, rather than bored: and I am that class of fool.

LIKE CLOCKWORK (experimental) I

ALIVE TEXTS, CLOCKWORK, FINE ART, MUSINGS, PHOTOGRAPHY, QUOTES, Uncategorized

imagethis is where it might start–
while my hair was still red and cut short

And we went on living in the city–
two small people

I never looked back.

Forever and forever and forever