Mark Ravenhill writes "As storytellers today, we're drawn to what's wrong with the world. But what if it were possible to create complex, significant work that explored the possibility of a kind of paradise?"
I'm not usually stuck for words, or even thoughts, but I feel like I'm a student again faced with an exam question that means nothing. I don't mean Ravenhill's question means nothing, it is among the most important we could ask. But we are not so good at imagining paradises. Which are enclosed gardens, scented trees with flowers and fruits like jewels, paths and fountains and singing birds, bulbuls or nightingales, and dancing boys or girls, but even those who came closest to creating such paradises, in Asia in the huge efflorescence of wealth in the millennium between
Seven and Seventeen Hundred, Harun el Rashid, Shah Jahan, theirs were only intimations of paradise, of a perfect - what? something between contentment and ecstasy maybe, somewhere around bliss. Though bliss sounds a bit unengaged, stupefied. Surely some action is required. Drugs, dancing, falling in love are
the nearest we get to whatever it is - in a garden, preferably, scented trees with flowers and fruit like jewels &c. But always, in almost every moment of life, there are intrusions and interruptions, and the demands of the world. Shah Jahan suffered from terrible constipation; the Abode of Bliss, like the Duchy of Cornwall, helped pay for itself by the sale of roses and musk mallow. That's maybe as close as we could get to any but the most transient paradise. And unluckily we do not have Shah Jahan's resources.
Anyway, Mark Ravenhill isn't talking about life, he's talking about stories, human-created paradises in the skull, and he's asking where we can find them, if we can find them. I thought in the empty space (but I meant vacuum energy*) of the opposites of things that don't have actual opposites - like `criminal` or `hypermarket` or `beggar` (to be one, not to see one). But I'm not sure there are such places, or that they can be put into words.
*Vacuum energy, as I understand it, is the irreducible energy of empty space at about the Planck scale, from which all things that you could call things come.
¡Amigo de Amazon!
9 years ago
2 comments:
who wants to read about paradise? that story would have no plot whatsoever. As Forster has written "the king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died and the queen died of grief is a plot." We want plots!
You can always count on a serpent to come up with a plot. But I'm not fair to Ravenhill. His piece starts off with a description of the bad bits of LA (open wounds, rotting limbs, collapsing teeth) before he wonders whether paradise is possible, and even then it's "a complex Eden, where we can really discover rich truths about ourselves. A place as multi-faceted as Shakespeare's Forest of Arden", which clearly is nothing like a paradise - Arcadia and Eden are not the same places at all.
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