Killing Children, and How You Can't Fix It

Exactly what is it about buried children, anyway? They occupy a rather unique and grisly cultural niche. Sam Shepard certainly did something fantastic with the idea, but he was already tapping into a well of feeling already in place on the subject. What are those feelings, and what does he do with them?

Most obvious is the idea of a child as both innocent and as the future. "A little child will lead them." "Suffer the children to come unto me." In the Judeo-Christian sense, children are not only the keys to human survival, but also vessels that need to be filled with wisdom for the virtuous continuation of humanity. Seen this way, to kill a child is to do worse than murder - it's to destroy the promise of the future. Which is certainly what happens in "Buried Child." Once the child is killed, everything starts going downhill. Dodge essentially completes the inevitable destruction of his family when he destroys the child.

That's why killing a child is so horrific. Its life is the future; it hasn't done anything wrong. Culturally, it's pure vicious unconcern for the future of humanity.

I found a song (called, fittingly enough, "My Buried Child") that reminds me so much of this play. And it too taps into that horror at the killing of a child. Here's the URL.

http://www.elyrics.net/read/s/swans-lyrics/my-buried-child-lyrics.html

(This one is a bit tricky. Go to the site. On the right side of the page there's a little audio player with a red "play" arrow. Click on the red play arrow, and it'll take you to another website that will play the song. I couldn't find it on YouTube or Google, otherwise it would be much easier. On the plus side, you get to read the lyrics.)

Same suffocating sense of a crime, impossible to make better. Same horror at their own actions. A child has been killed, and because of what a child means, it's unthinkable that anyone will ever come to terms with it. When the chance for human survival is gone, how can you come to terms with your inescapable extinction?

And no, I'm not going overboard with the adjectives. Here are some pictures that should prove that I'm not. They should also make it really hard to sleep.

Again, here's the warning: GRAPHIC IMAGES AHEAD.

Here they are.





I didn't look for any more. I thought those did the trick.

The helplessness is what gets me. The sheer inability to DO anything, to change their fate. The innocence idea, again. What does a child do to deserve this? How can you hold a child responsible enough to cause their death?

I think that's why the family in "Buried Child" is so shattered. Having caused the child's death, they now have to pay the price for destroying their own survival. It is required of them to self-destruct in punishment. It doesn't mean we can't feel for them - we do, unquestionably - but they can't get around the crime of killing the child. It's possibly the worst crime to commit in our societal mindset. And when it is done, a price must be paid.

Harold Pinter: The Man, The Mystery, The Speech Patterns

Ladies and gentlemen, I come before you today with a revelation:

Harold Pinter talked exactly like he wrote.

"...What? Are you crazy? Okay, Pinter's dialogue speaks fantastically, so much subtext to play with, so much subtext you can barely hear the text - but really? All those pauses, the fast-then-slow pacing of the lines, the deliberate delivery... That's a writing style. He didn't talk that way. No one talks that way."

Behold! Or rather, listen:



Part of the fun of this is how elegantly he squashes Charlie Rose's rather silly second question. But another part of it is the speech patterns. At first he's talking fast and matter-of-fact, sounding kind of like Lenny telling Ruth his intimidating stories. But then he starts to slow down and speak with deliberate pauses between words and thoughts. And those words and thoughts carry a lot more weight because of those pauses - that time spent thinking about them.

Here are two parts of a different interview he did on the BBC in 2006:



The first one starts off with a marvelously deadly understatement that I'm totally not going to spoil by talking about. But the fun kicks in when he and the interviewer establish a mini tug-of-war over who gets to speak. It's not a hostile thing at all - they're both very friendly and cordial, and they seem like they're having a great time. But there he is, speaking with those built-in pauses and taking the time to think about what he's saying, and I think it throws her off. She keeps cutting him off in this video (it kind of makes me want to smack her and say, "Let the man talk!"), and it takes her a while to get used to his speech patterns. And he doesn't give an inch - he doesn't hurry up, he doesn't make it any easier for her. She just has to figure it out and work with it.



The second one is a double whammy. He starts off talking about his performance of "Krapp's Last Tape," which is great fun. But the best part comes at around 3 minutes in, when the interviewer asks him if he can define what is stylistically "Pinteresque" about his plays. AND HE CAN'T! He freely (and endearingly) admits that he has no idea what a "Pinteresque" moment is. And I think it's because he wrote as he talked. You can hear the long pauses, the sudden rushes of words, the stories and maybe even the subtext. It was part of him, that style of speaking and writing - natural. And I'm starting to think that that's how you'd have to perform it - find a way to make it natural, because to him, that's what it was.

Where Are We, Exactly?

I've seen two of his plays now and read one of them, and I'm not sure what I think of Samuel Beckett. To a large extent, I at least prefer watching him to reading him - I hear things in performance that I don't catch in reading, and with Beckett, every word is important. Particularly because the plays of his that I've had experience with are so deliberately vague on detail. He presents you with characters (or character, in the case of Krapp) and turns them loose with almost no context in which to place them. We have to take them on their terms, not ours.

For instance - where do his plays happen?

...Well...about that...

There's no place we can pin down for them. All that we know about Vladimir and Estragon's location is that there's a tree. Krapp is presumably in a room in his house, but we have no idea about anything else surrounding him. The characters in "Endgame" can't leave their refuge, but why that is, or where else they might go if they could, is obscure.

Take this computer-graphic set design for "Waiting for Godot," for instance. (I happen to think it's crazy cool.)



Where is this? Nowhere - deliberately nowhere. You have the sundial on the ground, and the tree in the middle, and absolutely nothing around it. And for that play, it works. The "nowhere" location gives the play permission to be wild and fanciful. It lets it make no sense by any rules we recognize, but still wallop us a good one when we realize that there are PEOPLE trapped in this nowhere, trying to figure it out along with us.

I like this one too:



Not only is this nowhere, it's a cyclical nowhere. It's hard to imagine a place like this, of one or two absolutes and vagary on everything else.

Or for "Krapp's Last Tape" - how about this one?



Here, Krapp's not even really in a room. He's framed by the skeleton of a room - those beams all around him - set against complete black. At least Vladimir and Estragon have their tree. Krapp has nothing here, no line to anything recognizable as of our world. The lamp over his desk makes the stage look like a police interrogation cell. As befits the play, Krapp is completely alone.

And here's a pretty scary set for "Endgame":



They're not even enclosed here - the shelter's walls are low and falling down. The rest of the world is coming - but that rest of the world is still a complete mystery. The center doorway is dark, but the windows are bright white. Just what IS out there, if anything? What does it mean? What could it do?