Hope you're felling better by now, Alison.
But you must realize, that that little playlet below will certainly get
you excommunicated from every one of their little churches...; on that
one ting they will agree.... <g>
Doug
On 26-Mar-05, at 10:45 AM, Alison Croggon wrote:
>
> As for soul - I've always rather liked that Foucault definition, that
> a soul
> is the marks and traces left by various authorities across a human
> psyche.
> I used this idea for a monologue once, a character called Ruth, in a
> play
> which also quoted lots of Rilke:
>
> "They went away and then they came back and then they went away again
> and
> then they came back. Policemen with wings like bats. An old man with
> the
> face of a baby. The busdriver with a hacksaw. Children with teeth
> like
> dogs. I knew what they looked like even though I never saw them. I
> only
> heard them.
>
> "They laughed at me. All of them.
>
> "They took my soul and they drew all over it with their claws.
> Crisscross
> crisscross. Teachers. Mum. The babies. The police. The judges.
> Crisscross crisscross. The doctors. Dad. The lawyers. The
> newspapers.
> The social workers. The nurses. The schoolkids. Crisscross
> crisscross.
> And that was my soul. This poor ragged thing what everybody walked
> across
> and tore and wrote on. They wrote everything on it. Everything. It
> got so
> I couldn’t even read my own name. But then I remembered. I
> remembered at
> last.
>
> "I went down to the river to look into the water but I didn’t see
> nothing.
> All the drowned girls came out and stood on the banks. They stood
> there
> shivering and they said, come in, come in. But I didn’t. And they
> said,
> Ruth, come in. And I remembered my name, and I said, no. I said, no, I
> don’t want to. I remembered my name and I said no. And that’s when
> the
> trouble started."
>
> But now I really am rambling. And so to bed...
>
> Best
>
> A
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
He saw the dark as a ragged garment
spread out to air.
Through its rents and moth-holes
the silver light came pouring.
Denise Levertov
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