So with governments, so with academics. We are being controlled. Somewhere they sold imagination to the highest bidder and replaced it with literary theory. Some have reclaimed, made imaginative literary theory (Barker being one of these) but not many. What is the writing of university essays but the retelling of convention, the replaying of other's ideas and the construction of shallow symbols for life itself? Symbols of intelligence mean nothing and without imagination WE ARE LOST.

(And so it is strange that I use Rabey’s quote to back up my argument when his quote forms the title of this essay which I have problems with being energised by. But that title is his reaction and so valid and this is my reaction to his reaction and so perhaps less valid (and perhaps more so). Soon I will be reacting to Barker alone and so will lose some of these contradictions. Though to be true to Barker perhaps there ought to be contradiction. He understands theory:

...but theory is also rage,temper,nightmare and the suicide note, never really the measured judgment of objective minds, never simply a proposition but always an offensive or defensive act, the parrying of blows, the elaboration of an annihilation. (Barker 1997:9)

Clarity
Meaning
Logic
And consistency

None of it
None

I honour you too much
To paste you with what you already know
(Barker 1997:40)

And so for unity’s sake the question asking for a reaction to and analysis of the above quote would have been more appropriate. But for disunity's sake it isn't and so in disunity's name I sign my life away.

HYPOTHETICAL PRODUCTIONS

A seeming contradiction in an essay that argues imagination: I cannot imagine a hypothetical production. Or rather I can see many and none and they change and shift. My hypothetical production would be of no worth. If I were to produce the play then I would form views in my mind of the direction of the wind. But in realising the play, in submerging my mind with others and burning them together in the fire, the wind would grow, change direction and perhaps stop altogether. My reaction to the play would make the play change with my own subconscious and the play would change my subconscious. I may read a passage and see the stage, see the actors, hear the words and it all seems to lead to one place. In that moment. But then the next moment I see it all quite differently or I don’t see it at all. One moment there is vast fornication, anger and scorn at the destruction of an age where politics might once have lived, then the next I see school children playing British Bulldog in the playground. It is not that I cannot link theory and practice, it is just that the link is already there. If my theories are confused and disunified then the practice must follow the same path.

A REACTION TO THE CASTLE (Body and soul, gut and feet, word and voice, the pain of jealousy, the pain of understanding, confusion and all that rot.

A child alone and unwashed moving from person to person, becoming them and fooling them. To run from the catastrophe into another catastrophe. To create catastrophe in the attempt of healing.

Politics is dead. God is dead. The dead are dead. Sex is death (the hanging dead between her legs). Sex is redemption and retribution. Sex is all and nothing. Death is nothing. Change is death. The audience watches and acts itself. There are no answers only questions (or are questions answers) and where is the black and white. Here are the children of Thatcher and Samson. The eyes of Blair-tainted Youth cry and are opened and are shut and are dead. In the sex the youth might loose his head.

The Castle: A Triumph (staged 1985) springs from the epigraph ‘What is Politics but absence/ of Desire’, the terms of which may be illuminated by Proud’s definitions in A Passion in Six Days: ‘the art of politics is to persuade others to accept you at your own evaluation - the art of freedom is to persistently demolish your own evaluation’. (Rabey 1989:154)

The body. Blood. Soul. It eats us away. It elevates us. It levels us as equals and sets us apart. It links us to animals and links us to God. It moves us and controls us and falls apart. In the body we can find destruction and salvation. In desire we can find heroism. “In Shit I Find Peace......” (Barker 1990:241)

We cover the body with words so it cannot speak. We control our words with codes of practice so that they cannot express:

....the two or three words we are so often exercised about are among the most highly charged in the vocabulary. Because of the responsibility of drama to emotional truth, these words cannot simply be abolished. The bland question so often put to writers, ‘do you really need those words?’ rings with false innocence. The hidden meaning of this question is ‘Do you really need those feelings?’ and attempts to restrict vocabulary are invariably attempts to restrict emotion. (Barker 1997:30)

Everyday we are controlled and control. The power of words is the power of danger. A word changes meaning over night. A word makes one person cry and another laugh. The power of words is the power of ambiguity. Powerful words speak of powerful images. The body, desire, politics they all have powerful words and these words are in some strange ways all the same and the opposite. The body: Power, weakness, desire, repulsion, the government, the masses, the man, the woman, the end.

It is not for nothing that the word ‘cunt’ operates both as the most extreme notion of abuse and also the furtherest reach of desire, and not only in male speech, and in attempting to eliminate the word the thing itself is eliminated, since nothing can stand for it. Since what cannot be expressed cannot exist dramatically, the attempt to abolish the word becomes an attack on the body itself - a veiled attempt to remove the body from dramatic space.(Barker 1997:30)

Our bodies are nothing till words give them form and words are nothing when they have nothing to articulate. When the word is spoken we see the thing, when we see the thing we hear the word.

I would suggest that the aim of the language censor is to return the body to the biology class where eroticism is displaced and desire corrupted into a squalid fetishism. (Barker 1997:30)

We fear the words and we fear the body. Our primary emotions are fear and desire and they fight against each other and contradict and compliment. The Castle is a cauldron of bubbling desire and fear, where people fight and fuck and scream and cum and search and hide and moan.

(The essay hasn’t finished yet.)