There Is No Spoon

After perusing some of the class's recent blogs, I saw Jon's most recent post titled "Something on Nothing". This idea of nothingness in Shakespeare keeps resurfacing and the more I think about it, the more BLOODY BRILLIANT I find it. Shakespeare was a brilliant cynic, immortalizing his notion of nothingness not only in his individual plays but in his works as a whole. In the same way that the Bible is perceived as one literary work, though it is full of countless individual writings, so can the complete works of Shakespeare be viewed as one piece of literature. When viewed through this lens, Shakespeare becomes an almost God-like figure, a creator and destroyer of worlds. How many heroes have been born and killed at the whims of Shakespeare? How many villains?

To quote either James or Nathan, I'm not sure who gets the credit, time isn't linear, but circular. Just as a rock tossed in a pond creates ripples, bouncing from bank to bank, so does the creation of characters such as Hamlet, Othello, Iago, and Lear cause affectations through time. The fact that they have never existed in organic form merely makes their presence more powerful. Their fates are forever sealed on paper and the only key to their liberation lies in the decomposed brain of William Shakespeare... It doesn't matter if one takes value from the eternal suffering of King Lear or from the Disney High School Musical ending of Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare shows us that no matter how much torture, pleasure, sadness we endure, beneath it all will always be a void of nothingness. In that sense, Shakespeare shows us that the mere fact of harboring any emotion is a gift in itself. To feel pain is better than to feel nothing at all, is it not? Depends who you ask.

As I already mentioned in my presentation and previous blog, Samuel Beckett is another playwright who understood this sense of nothingness. Waiting for Godot is one of the most painfully existential plays in existence and captures this idea beautifully. Until reading Jon's blog I had no idea the most brilliant and rewarding production of Waiting for Godot was performed by muppets in a routine Sesame Street show. Here it is again for those who haven't seen Jon's blog already.


http://youtu.be/ksL_7WrhWOc


If only I had the patience and self-discipline to communicate all of the ideas 'Waiting for Elmo' creates. Here are a few.
- Elmo is not only an absent character, he represents an unrealized state of existence for the two muppets waiting for him. Once Elmo arrives to play with them, the two muppets know they'll have achieved this desired state.
- By perpetually waiting in a constant state of anticipation, the blue muppet and red muppet are oblivious to anything around them that could in fact have more worth than a play-date with Elmo.
- The tree's eventual loss of patience and abandonment of the muppets shows how blind they have been waiting for something that will never arrive. There was already so much around them, such as A TALKING TREE. I would much rather play with a talking tree than Elmo.
-With the tree's departure the audience of toddlers now realizes how silly the muppets have been waiting for nothing. They now understand that in essence, waiting for anything at all is, in a way, an existence of 'nothingness' because we have all already been provided with everything we need to be happy.

This realization leads me to another video I've stolen from a classmate. Nick Axeline showed this video for his final paper presentation in Bible as Literature way back in the year 2009 AD. I immediately became eternally attached to it.

http://youtu.be/ERbvKrH-GC4

Ultimately Shakespeare, Beckett, Buddhism and other wisemen are telling us the same message. There is no spoon. (please watch The Matrix in order to understand this reference)