not
Borges

Beckett's 'Not I' and the Mouth of God

do not cite your sources.

Perhaps her earliest memory is of waiting in the backseat of a car, this bizarre feeling of the seatbelt against her chest, coupled with the setting of the stationary vehicle, creating a dissonance that she could bring no words to, particularly since she had such few words in her vocabulary, but she felt it viscerally; it was a feeling she would retrofit with a semiosis of her dysphoria, which she would attempt to express insufficiently through the mononymous feeling of “Milky”

Her parents of course would have just as much of an idea of what this meant as she did then, putting it down to some benign childhood quirk to be waved away with endearment. Rather obvious maternal symbology aside, she remembers feeling an opacity running through her veins, so deeply that on contemplating right now she can sense the feeling’s texture, still.

Her personal experience of the experience of a work of art, both as practitioner and observer (as always, inextricably), could be loosely described as a constellation of nodes of meaning, occurring in the space of duration, connected by the circuitry of memory. Simply, on encountering a resonant piece, she feels an electrical surge that brings said work into corresponding alignment with all the other nodes of meanings she has collected throughout her life’s experience, that connect to it, and bring it into focus of ‘How This Moves Her Personally’, (i.e. ‘What This Means To Her’).  What Something Means is simply an amalgam of what all other things have meant; be it art/experience of ‘I’, or not ‘I’  (the longer she lives, the more she struggles to find anything falling into this latter distinction).

Back to the car, the waiting, besides this strange, murky and opaque embodied emotional sense, she remembers feeling a similarly electric excitement, for her mother to return from wherever it was she would regularly be (this particularity of the memory eludes her) to bring back an envelope of smarties she would get for her in one of those candy dispensers. Something about the lack of branded packaging, the knowledge that, even if she hadn’t been able to perform the ritual of inserting the (Twenty pence? Fifty pence?) coin, rotating the mechanism, and holding the envelope’s blue lining open to welcome the chocolate, knowing that the ritual had been performed, in order to obtain this sacrament, was enough to imbue the sugar lining with a sweetness she’d not tasted, hasn’t tasted since.

Along with the sweets she was allowed a can of her favourite drink at the time, green apple flavoured Tango, which she termed ‘Apple Mouth’ due to its placement of a bright green mouth, interestingly disembodied and plastered on the aluminium, against a stark black background.

She wonders if what contributes to “Not I”’s staging having such an intense impact on her has to do with this memory in the back seat of a car, waiting, or if a deeper resonance lies in the archetypal sign of The Mouth, removed from its native face. Either way, the two mouths feel connected, to her. These experiences of hers are kissing across the time she's been living, breathing and talking, and that’s what she wishes to speak on, speak through, through words, now. She supposes she could speak on the Western Mythological Canon’s first act of consumption being an Apple, that the Mouth (of the first Woman, specifically) was supposedly the cause of the fall of all of us, but those words they feel empty now, so perhaps those words needn’t be spoken. Especially not while The Mouth is so full.

“Not I” is just, truly, a masterpiece. Much could be said about Mouth as a character, what she (and she is, ostensibly She) went through, but she believes this is beside the ‘point’ of Not I, if Beckett’s intent in writing it has any relevance in itself, which he would likely say, probably without words, with a decisively vague movement of his hands and face, that it doesn’t. And while she is biased, the fact that “She” explicitly refers to herself in third person, that the piece is written as a third person reflection of the Self that negates the first person pronoun, narration of the “I” by ‘not I’, and thus allows for her to gender herself, does feel relevant. Much could be said about this one, titular quality’s reflection on the (specifically Feminine) experience of the ‘crone’ archetype Beckett is documented to have been exploring, and how all of this is spoken, quite literally, through a Mouth, with no other features of which to speak, not even a name, only: “Mouth”. Much could be said about the feminist implications of being reduced to a mouth, perhaps even what Freud might think of her early fascination with the mouth (the one on that can of soda, and the one on her own face), on the echoes of that into her struggle with addiction to smoking, and other things. Much could be spoken about the mouth, much of which Beckett has left unsaid, maybe not even taken to his grave, because he didn’t in fact have these words to speak— these were only speakable by Mouth.

The work is, by design, a blinding disagreement with audience- a “no” from and to the Self (not aye). It uses words to portray the interfacing with a…merciful God? Imagine! So so beyond words, yes, imagine, nothing but a sound, as close to perfectly, so necessarily insufficiently… all of God’s dizzying manifestations, so so beyond words, couldn’t make a sound (a Scream).

No other piece of stage writing moves her like this, no sound of any kind, her whole body, the ever aging human body as merely the mouth of some inexplicably punishing God.

So, who or what is Mouth? To her, the semiotic revelation, all over in a second, that “Not I” brought about for her, when it connected at light speed to that early backseat memory, was that Mouth is the experience of human life: feminine, of course, but perhaps a (yes, decisively vague, imagine) femininity beyond gender, rather the receptive quality of Being Human that we all share. What Mouth evokes in her, forces her to confront in that dark and blacked out opacity, is the buzzing, yes, the buzzing of the human Mind, as its own node formed of a series of nodes in this collective scream of perception. The asking ourselves, each other, what is it we are being punished for? Who is punishing us? And why has she not been given sufficient words to express this, to argue with it, fight back, to stop it? Whatever keeps happening to her as she ages, walks around supermarkets, wanders around a field looking for cowslips, whatever it is that has happened so brutally that her Mind cannot stop screaming, interrupting her own thoughts, forcing its way in the dark through this Mouth That She Is and I Am Not, whatever it is doesn’t matter— it is a punishment to be reduced to a mouth, as so many women are by default and for myriad, dehumanising reasons, but the realest human punishment is that

I have been given a Mouth at all.

That I have been cursed with this longing for the words to express this very suffering, when the language I use this Mouth to conjure is by its nature, impossible to carry the weight of this pain, and impossible for any ear, and certainly, not eye, to understand.