(Doing workbook entries out of order again.)
Another "out there" piece from Beckett, "Ping" is a string of words with somewhat arbitrary "sentence" endings that seems to describe one of Beckett's super-white bodies with long white hair and light blue eyes encased in a 3'x6' white box. The text is interspersed with the word "ping" at random (?) intervals.
At first I wondered if the ping was like a sonar ping, indicating something drawing nearer to or moving farther away from the subject of the text. It's possible, but if so, that something is not moving consistently toward the subject because the pings come slow, then fast, then slow, then about steady before coming fast again at the end.
Like the pings, many of the words or phrases repeat. I think it would be interesting to run a word frequency analysis on this. I suspect "white" is one of the most frequent words, definitely more frequent than "ping." Maybe later I'll see if I can find software to do the analysis. It would be nice if it looked for word clusters too. For example, the phrase "traces blurs light grey almost white," or variations of it, appear several times early in the text -- often enough that it jumped out at me.
"Traces blurs signs no meaning light grey almost white" (193) is one variation, and makes me question if Beckett used the repetition to focus on what was different. "Signs no meaning" seems to question language (a sign system) and linguistics (the study of language). Are signs without meaning really signs? Do they really have no meaning or is the meaning simply not known or not understood? Made me think of Orson Scott Card's categories framlings, utanlings, ramen and varelse for living things in Speaker for the Dead. Framlings and utanlings are categories of beings with whom one shares enough in common that communication is possible. Ramen and varelse are categories of beings who are either incapable of sentience or who are so alien that communication is impossible without some kind of transcendence or moving beyond one's world view.
"Ping" also made me wonder yet again about Beckett's fascination with pure-white bodies with long white hair and pale blue eyes. This figure appears several times in his stories -- here, "Imagination Dead Imagine," I'm pretty sure there was one in "The Lost Ones," and vestiges of the image in other stories and plays (for example, Nagg and Nell in Endgame). Is this an image of a ghost for him? Or is it something else?
The final sentence is also interesting. "Head haughty eyes white fixed front old ping last murmur one second perhaps not alone eye unlustrous black and white half closed long lashes imploring ping silence ping over." Early in the text the odd word, "unover" appears several times. In the last few lines (starting near the bottom of page 195 in our book), that changes to "over," ending with "silence ping over" as shown above. My thought is that somewhere in the text (I'd probably have to read it about 20 more times to figure out approximately where), there is a shift. This change from "unover" to "over" is obviously part of it, but there's a large chunk of text between the last appearance of one and the first appearance of the other. It is also probably worth noting that this final sentence introduces black, something that has not appeared before, though we're not sure where the black comes from (maybe the pupil of the eye?). While there have been murmurs before, this is the "last murmur." But I think the thing that jumps out is "perhaps not alone." What is Beckett getting at?
I guess one way to see this is as a metaphor for existential isolation. A 3'x6' space is about the minimum space required for an average, adult human. The body (Beckett persistently refrains from calling them a "person" in his texts) stands, boxed in, isolated, unable to connect outside the space. Isolated, as existentialism says everyone is. White surrounded by white, unable to sense anything because everything it can sense is one. Unable to sense, it is unable to be sensed, at least by others like it, so existence is in question (to be is to be perceived). Maybe the pings are the attempts by this isolated person/body to find proof of another in the surrounding space, a sonar cry hoping for a murmur of an echo. And the conclusion, "perhaps not alone," though there is no evidence that any of the pings returned any sign of anything outside.
I think Beckett, like Camus, may be hoping, maybe even praying, that he is not alone, that there is a reason for it all, even if he doesn't understand it and it makes no sense.
All I can say is, "I'm so glad I'm not an existentialist."
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