Archive for Samuel Beckett

What would I do without this world – #PoetryDayIRL

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on April 28, 2022 by telescoper

what would I do without this world faceless incurious
where to be lasts but an instant where every instant
spills in the void the ignorance of having been
without this wave where in the end
body and shadow together are engulfed
what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die
the pantings the frenzies towards succour towards love
without this sky that soars
above its ballast dust

what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before
peering out of my deadlight looking for another
wandering like me eddying far from all the living
in a convulsive space
among the voices voiceless
that throng my hiddenness

by Samuel Beckett (1906-89)

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Lucia Joyce

Posted in History, Mental Health with tags , , on June 16, 2020 by telescoper

Lucia Joyce photographed by Berenice Abbott (date c.1925-1930)

On Sunday I listened to a programme on the radio about Lucia Joyce a celebrated dancer who just happened to be James Joyce’s daughter. Lucia was born in Trieste in 1907 and subsequently moved with him to Paris where she made a big impact in the field of modern dance. W.B. Yeats was an admirer and wanted to cast her in one of his `plays for dancers’.

Lucia’s early years were filled with artistic promise but shadows gathered around her and by the the middle of the 1930s she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was eventually taken away in a straitjacket and forcibly detained in a psychiatric clinic. She spent the rest of her life (until her death in 1982) in various institutions. The programme provides a fascinating insight into her creative early years but the latter part is desperately sad. One can’t escape the conclusion she did not deserve to be locked away the way she was (against her will) and the men in her life (her father, brother and very lovers, including Samuel Beckett) share a large part of the responsibility for her decline. Psychiatric institutions have a long history of being used to dispose of `inconvenient’ women.

Anyway, do listen to the programme which you can find here.

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