A DialogDavid Rush |
2016-10-26
[2016-09-14 09:19 Vladigon] so what’s getting you down?
[09:20 Estremir] I’m just so annoyed with people and this incessant need for gratification and ’rightness’
[09:22 Vladigon] so I had this dream on the weekend I got the tattoo...have you heard Plato’s allegory of the cave?
[09:23 Estremir] no to tell
[09:25 Vladigon] ah well Plato isn’t all that relevant - I just blame him for every philosophical cave image since antiquity - but anyway for reasons that would take too long to explain I ended up entering this cave with a number of friends.
After crawling and bumphing and oomphing through the tunnels a bit it opened up into this room where there were literally hundreds of people - many of whom I knew - banging on the cave wall with rocks
[09:26 Estremir] that’s interesting as we are about to enter the season of the hearth
[09:27 Vladigon] they were convinced that if they managed to break enough chunks of rock out of the wall that they’d somehow have what they wanted and could get out of the cave. But here’s the thing - the cave walls were also covered in chicken wire to keep the rocks in!
[09:28 Estremir] oohhh
[09:28 Vladigon] now as allegories go, this is pretty lame so far and the symbols could be any desiderata, but we moved on from there because I mean really, who wants to just bang rocks on rocks?
[09:28 Estremir] when I dream into it, it’s more about how we created boundaries for ourselves we create the boundaries, then we can’t get out
[09:29 Vladigon] so we went on a little further and the cave passage opened up on to the backstage area of a gorgeous amphitheatre With a grand dance being enacted. Light! Action! and I just collapsed laughing at the silliness of the whole thing. I mean banging rocks? when you could just skip the whole damn thing and play on the greatest stage ever? in fact I woke up laughing at it
[09:30 Estremir] but isn’t that life? we struggle like a mother fucker over stupid shit to realise, why did we make it such an issue
[09:31 Vladigon] exactly. and people love to bang on the rocks of righteous as they try to accumulate little bits that they can claim as their own just so that they can feel like they deserve a place on stage
but fuck it, you might as well just get on the stage. It’s not like there’s any gatekeeper or anything
Obviously I owe both an apology as well as a deep debt of gratitude to Samuel Beckett and his amazing play Waiting for Godot. It is well worth taking the time to read (Part 1 Part 2), even if you clicked through to the Wikipedia summary - it certainly has left a deep impression on down through the decades. In any case, the above discussion really happened on Facebook, although the names have been changed to protect the innocent.
So on the night referred to as “the weekend I got the tattoo” (2016-08-05 to be precise) I actually recorded myself relating this dream. It was still so clear that I fell into a semi-trance while speaking it. There’s a fair few extra details from what made it into the discussion between Estremir and Vladigon above. You can listen to it.
This document was translated from LATEX by HEVEA.