Prose from Brian Barbeito

Image of a middle aged, light skinned man with reading glasses and overalls to the far left of a black and white photo. Unclear background.
Brown leaf with a few holes and a light dusting of snow. Branches and snow in the background.
Closeup of open seed pods on a plant on a snowy day.

In a vision I had a hat and a coat, warm pants and boots. But nothing was at all for what people think of as style or fashion. Everything was functional only, and it was in the days before trouble and such. Happy. I was between two hills, in a clearing, behind my house then. I know exactly where I was.

On one side, where I came from, were large homes, while on the other side were sullen grey brick buildings, seemingly with no joy. It was snowing thick and fast and it wasn’t too windy. My eyes were closed and sometimes opened and I looked up and tried to let the snow land in my eyes. I would sense when it did and it didn’t bother me. I was with my spirit and with the spirit and the nature world and air and snow was also a spirit. Spirit spirit spirit spirit spirit. I was alone. All alone, world-wise. I turned sometimes like a whirling dervish. I didn’t really have a focal point like ballerinas use I just rather saw everything and became dizzy and fell over.

The ground was softened by snow. There was nothing gold at all, but later, I thought of it as a golden place for it somehow felt golden. I was innocent. I had always been innocent. That was how I felt the gold. I turned from my side which I had landed on, to my back and stared around. Everything looked different and from that perspective one spot was not good and one spot was not bad. There were just things. The buildings and their balconies, the high brown framed rooftop. Trees to the side. The fence where the ravine began. Grey.

My own wooden fence that sat atop a series of railway ties that made a retaining wall. How was I there? And why? I heard a bird, and didn’t see anything, but then thought I saw something fly through the winter air out of the corner of my eye. The neighbour’s yard, completely different, with no fence or walls or anything at all. Which is ironic or something because the owner was a skilled and successful engineer.

His youngest son adopted me as a younger brother to him, in real life. Though from eight siblings, he had nobody after him. He taught me how to tie my shoelaces. Later, how to fight. And he taught me well because I could win against a few of the older kids. And how to skateboard. I wonder whatever happened to him. The ravine things like trees just grew there also. A manicured cultivated world in parts, and a feral earth in others. Nobody went past. I could hear no soul. I thought I heard angels singing but they were distant, in the inside somewhere in another world. It was nice. I was warm but then began to feel cold. I stood up. I was still okay but my head hurt a little bit. The sun had been somewhere and now it was getting dark, given to a sudden dusk. I felt a bit nervous for some reason. Cleaning the snow off myself, and adjusting my hat, I began to make steps towards home. 

Poetry from Mykyta Ryzhykh

***
gardens bloom without permission
but I think I should ask permission to love you

lonely space drowns in infinity
I dream of building a sand castle for you and me

water kills sand
I’m killing our loneliness

time grinds my dreams
after many years together we are still alone

***
the window
of autumn is burning
in my pupils

***
dot
tomb for text

***
expectation of victory
number 13 during lottery

***
how many faces
do people have
with their faces
torn off?

***
The mouse gnaws time
The train kisses silence

The night seems surprisingly calm
The siren of the air alarm has become a habit

***
pregnant with death
executioners with
the eyes of the night
give birth to silence

***
A gentle wind
Рlays with the leaves
Leaf has no choice

***
bird stuck in the clouds
feet drowned in puddles
time falls apart
in my eyes

***
the snow is back
the bird is looking for a home
among the old newspapers

***
spring thunder
in the belly of nature
nature is our mother

***
Unborn Jesus cries because
he will not be crucified

***
orange joy in the snow
small trees are shivering in the cold
small children die in a warm bed

***
he cut off his leg so that people would finally love him
but only field mice are capable of endless love (and then depending on the presence of the necessary hormones)

black cat plays with a dead mouse just for fun
a mouse’s half-eaten corpse is lying in the middle of the road

lipless pigeons kiss on a branch of a felled tree
anti-tank ditches devour the remains of legs

Poetry from Duane Vorhees

DON’T INTERRUPT

My tongue is trying mightily

to memorize your mouth.

Ny tongue is training hard

for your prestigious,

and demanding,

texts to come,

MY I

Moleculed into existence by hope’s heredity,

any I is a sum of its actions and its beliefs.

At first these were fostered by practice and authority,

and then in the youth they were constellationed by passion,

and then in a careful age constitutioned by reason.

This nowI lies striated by habit and destiny.

CHANGING HABITAT

That which is between us–

:is it a floor or a corridor?

:is a wall or an interval?

:is it concrete or a ghost?

The cityscape altered,

our promenades became barricades.

Every touch feels more like a cut.

Marathons may falter.

A dozen christenings, one thousand crypts.

All the tears we wept, the saints invoked, the promises broke.

The ends of beginnings.

FIRST NIGHT IN THAILAND

Giraffic

I lever through the sweat the noise the dirt the traffic

(knowing she smiles somewhere, all brown and gentle hills),

gnu-like

legs unsplay, crookback unscrews like new.

Under her softink waterfall her eyes a-beckon

somewhere, here, in Bangkok.

LEY LINE

Lids closed, fingers open:

With mind and palm along your body map

I’ll trace the truth of you,

Enlightenment needs no light,

This (any!) erotic journey

starts at the muscular center of fizzog expression:

I read your phrenology Braille,

the honest simplicity of your long high forehead.

My explorers find your wisdom,

mind’s eye between world’s myopia,

pause softly between your brows,

before plunging

down—

Forefinger sacrilegiously slaloms the Mimizuki,

j-curves under the septal cartilage,

lingers awhile (for your aromatic delight)

and balances across your fairy-tale philtrum

(the corridor chipped from your upper lip

by Night, the Angel of Conception,

that one, who offered a semen drop to god,

who chose a soul from Eden

to cradle in your mother’s womb,

–who’ll guide you to heaven when you’re done—

a nice bedtime story trades the nevers for the nows.

My whorls rest at Cupid’s Bow.

I nock my arrow for awhile

where tongues trade moistures, exchange heat for heat,

rituals of encouragement for the holy trek to come.

….

Refreshed, the phalangic pilgrimage resumes.

Tips skirt the lover’s chin well to keep from falling in,

then hook under the jaw’s overhang in freefall

hardly braked at all by the void deck

of Adam’s not-quite-absent apple

(the unswallowed remnant of your first man’s forbidden fruit?)

and advance down and down,

hesitating at the mammary gate

(moist by now with the seer’s perspiration)

but able to resist the curious alpining temptation

in the knowledge that the end is near,

the mountains can wait —

sometimes the summit is not the sum.

Down and down, quickly now,

no urge to contemplate the navel

if consecrating the bishopric is the goal.

The pope pops in to Cathedral’s portal,

enters stiff-necked, humbly exits.

The Tree of Life shakes from the roots.

….

All existence starts twice,

once with Mind, once with Life.

Landmarks come and landmarks go

but the path is marked by one straight line–

any perceptive fool can blindly find the way….

And yet the silk hegira road goes on

even farther, beyond the oasis spring

for those who wish to follow —

around the archaic curvature of Mother Earth,

that halves the buttocks’ apple

and turns the heart upside down,

and then up 33 stations of the spine,

–spine–the measure of stiffness in an arrow shaft,

–spine–the furniture that clasps the book together,

–spine–the hard stairway to the base of brain.

Poetry from Don Edwards

A Chicken Is An Egg

A chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg

First things first though as the circle arcs along

The days come and go bringing more of what has been

I think the light shows the way I should always go

But then the darkness comes and I know that I don’t know

Help me see the process before it falls below

Just beyond the horizon I believe it steady moves

Though I am left behind wondering what comes now

There’s always something special about a sunset

Reminiscent of the bright lit day it leaves again behind

Then it drifts into the night and shadow overcomes

I don’t see how to follow a guide that’s out of sight

I feel the loss of knowledge sunk by time’s constant flight

So I stumble slowly within the cold and now’s unsure night

When We Were Met

When we were met and the world was fine

Not a thing could hurt us

I was all yours and you forever mine

I discovered colors I had never seen

It all smelled of apple blooms

And I thought I knew everything

We walked together in hand along

We held each other close

We had become one with a love of our own

Then before us came distractions from our self

Temptingly unfamiliar feelings as familiarity set in

And before I could cry forgiveness you put me on a shelf

I asked my father to explain you to me

How I could want you so

Why you would walk away

Yet the sun keeps passing over my head

Against the blank blue sky

What I got was —

Where were you when I hung the stars

Where when I created the world and let it go

How can you even pretend to know

But tell me clean —

How a dream could take my soul

How it could then dissolve like a rainbow’s arc

Leaving me without reason or cause

Finding my self wandering through the hurt filled dark

I’ve got the horror — show me some love

I don’t need more lessons — show me how to love again

I give up on tomorrow

I don’t want to dream anymore

Take away this world of sorrow.

Just leave me alone

It is the last night before the final day

And all that has been given will be taken away

No hope can replace what’s gone to stay

I asked my father to explain you to me

How I could want you so

Why you would walk away

Yet the sun keeps passing over my head

Against the blank blue sky

What I got was —

Where were you when I hung the stars

Where when I created the world and let it go

How can you even pretend to know 

There are nights when the stars arrive

They cloud the domed dark heavens

And if you watch them slowly unwind their path

Sometimes one breaks loose

And flies across its way falling as it streaks

Like a doomed but sparkingly brilliant consequential light

Then gone

I asked my father to explain you to me

How I could want you so

Why you would walk away

Yet the sun keeps passing over my head

Against the blank blue sky

What I got was —

Where were you when I hung the stars

Where when I created the world and let it go

How can you even pretend to know

How can you even pretend to know

The First Ones Off

The first ones off the ship that night

Floated away to lives again

Those who deferred brave and selfless

Froze to death when the water came in

Those who were early to work that day

At desks when the planes crashed in

They’re the ones who suffered and died

Those wandering that way late only heard the pain

We’re taught to be strong and to do our part

Never shirk and always tell the truth

But reward isn’t promised to those who pull their weight

They’re the ones who are holding up the tent

So when enough of their brothers aren’t helping anymore

It all comes tumbling upon them crashing to the floor

She Bears The Touches

Like a new day she brightens the lobby air

All others pause in a Romantic pastiche

For some reason then she sees me and approaches

Though I’ve stopped as all the rest have

Then we are drinking in the lobby bar

Among the tired and swollen salesmen slouching

Hidden from their workphones talking sports and profits

Sidelong glances at her to tease their endless night

And we seem to be the one

The one between us

I have to leave tomorrow

But I don’t want to tell her

There can only be tonight

Unless she would leave her life for mine

And she bears the touches the many touches

The touches that leave their mark

Such beauty such grace tainted only by her life

Touches scar stunt and shape what is best

Until it fades and dies with time and experience

Oh such warmth found on a dark winter’s evening

She heats the bed like a drink of old brown whiskey

And slips across me like some delirious dream

As I respond with best guess touches of my own

When she kisses me her mouth is softy open

While she holds me down and under her stern need

And all I want is to see where this is going

Bright colors drift by and everything’s gone fuzzy

As we become the one

The one between us

I have to leave tomorrow

But I don’t want to tell her

There can only be tonight

Unless she would leave her life for mine

And she bears the touches the many touches

The touches that leave their mark

Such beauty such grace tainted only by her life

Touches scar stunt and shape what is best

Until it fades and dies with time and experience

She takes the night for her own and leaves me with the dawning

I can’t move to stop her as everything in me has drained away

She left me like the night falls slow then gone quickly

And I feel like something special’s happened

But I’m not sure how or why to find her

So I stay drinking in the lobby watching the door and waiting

Thinking we were to become the one

The one between us

I should have left today

But I don’t know how to tell her

There might only be tonight

Maybe she would leave her life for mine

But she bears the touches the many touches

The touches that leave their mark

Such beauty such grace tainted only by her life

Touches scar stunt and shape what is best

Until it fades and dies with time and experience

By Demens

I have signed away your soul and made you mine

As climbs the greedy moss upon the unexpecting tree

So stay and I will slowly take what you used to be

All of your joy — All of your happiness

I’ll extract all your dreams and memories as I steady grow

And encase them within my creeping quiet while you won’t even know

Nothing will I leave you

But for blank silence and shadow

Nothing to long for nor to move toward

While I make your body tingle constantly antic

As if the nerves only are alive

A buck scraping his antlers grunting in rut

A dog rubbing his nether across the carpet

Thoughtlessly frantic

Each touch will be your reason d’etre

And you’ll never sleep or even sit again

With declination you’ll forget to eat or wash or know until the end

As you wander blindfolded by me to the next sensation

Until you can no longer move

Your mind hidden from what surrounds you

Your body released on its own recognizance

To forage for touches and unimagined adventures

Neither aware nor remembered

This is the world I make for you

The horror that all is unrecognized

To be lost, displaced, and all is down

Then the wheelchair with you in the greasy gown

Finally fetal again clenched now a dumb dying child

Submerged within the last silence

Don Edwards lives and writes in Los Angeles.

Essay from Nurmurodova Gulsoda

On the Area Relationship Between a Triangle and the Triangle Formed by Its Medians

The study of triangle geometry has long captivated mathematicians due to its inherent elegance and the deep relationships between different properties of a triangle. One such intriguing relationship involves the comparison between the area of a triangle and the area of a triangle formed by its medians. This result has far-reaching implications in various mathematical fields and continues to provide insights into geometric transformations and their properties.

The Median Triangle: Definition and Significance

In any given triangle, a median is a line segment that joins a vertex to the midpoint of the opposite side. A triangle, by definition, has three medians, and these medians are concurrent at a point called the centroid. This centroid divides each median into two parts, with the segment connecting the vertex to the centroid being twice the length of the segment connecting the centroid to the midpoint of the opposite side.

When the three medians of a triangle are used as the sides of a new triangle, the resulting triangle is known as the median triangle. While this geometric construction is simple, its relationship with the area of the original triangle reveals deeper insights into the triangle’s structure and properties.

Area Relationship Between the Original Triangle and the Median Triangle

A fascinating result in triangle geometry reveals that the area of the triangle formed by the medians is exactly 75% of the area of the original triangle. In mathematical terms, if  represents the area of the original triangle and  represents the area of the triangle formed by the medians, the following relationship holds:

S/s=4/3

This formula indicates that the area of the original triangle is  times the area of the median triangle. This relationship arises from the geometric properties of the medians and their connection to the centroid.

Derivation of the Formula

To derive this area relationship, it is essential to recognize that the median triangle is similar to the original triangle. The medians divide the original triangle into smaller triangles, each of which is proportional to the original triangle. By applying principles of geometric similarity and proportionality, one can show that the area of the median triangle is  of the area of the original triangle.

The factor  comes from the scaling of the areas due to the centroid’s influence on the medians. The centroid acts as a point of balance, and it is through this balancing point that the areas of the two triangles are related in the manner described.

Applications and Importance

This area relationship has important applications in multiple areas of mathematics and physics. In geometry, it aids in understanding the properties of triangle transformations, while in optimization and design, it helps in problems where the centroid and medians play a role in determining structural properties.

Furthermore, this result enhances our understanding of how transformations, such as replacing the sides of a triangle with its medians, can affect area while preserving similarity. It also highlights the efficiency of using medians in various geometric calculations.

Conclusion

The relationship between the area of a triangle and the area of the triangle formed by its medians is a profound result in geometric analysis. The fact that the area of the median triangle is  times that of the original triangle demonstrates the deep interconnections within the geometry of triangles. This result not only contributes to theoretical mathematics but also has practical implications in various fields where geometric transformations are employed.

Written by Nurmurodova Gulzoda 

Excerpt from Peter J. Dellolio’s novel The Confession

Gray book cover for Peter J. Dellolio's The Confession. Two images, one of a gray lizard on a black background, and another of a door with a smiling face drawn on it, next to each other.

At the end I lived in rented rooms.  Desolate side streets.  No elevator.  Creaking steps.  Paint chips in the water glass.  Cockroaches in the bathtub.  Bed by the wall.  Dark convoluted mattress stains like an inkblot ghost.  No hot water.  Smell of old blood in the closet.  Home for a week, home for a month.  Then another city.  Another room.  Another name on the newspaper.  Another set of identification letters for the television stations.

If he was in the South, I traveled south.  When he ventured West, I followed west.  The moonlight shines behind his fingers as he picks up the knife.  The shadows unfold as I raise my hand.  I wipe my forehead.  I close my eyes.  

I feel the wounds.  I hear the screams.

Is this the room where the pregnant girl perspired during the hasty abortion that ruined the cheap bedspread?  Is this the closet where the old watchman hanged himself, unable to hear the sound of his own voice?  Maybe it is the place where the weary salesman raised the revolver to his temple.  At that moment, a child sitting in a train on the elevated platform just beyond the salesman’s window put into his mouth a hard candy shaped like a bullet.  Or could this be the last room for a killer?  A deranged man?  A monster unable to refrain from the dark urge, deliriously craving the final peace of his own destruction?  Every room has a death story.  Every room is another museum filled with the irremovable or unnoticed traces of someone’s fatal moments.

There was the vigorously applied razor blade left imbedded in the chunky soap bar.  Dark flakes of hemoglobin were scattered across the white rectangle.  They blew away as I raised the bathroom window with a bang.  Three greasy fingerprints on the dull grey fuse box panel prefaced an outline of feet scorched on the shabby wood floor.  Shards of a broken iodine bottle in the hallway leading to the toilet.  Soiled grasp marks on the matrix of jaundiced damp sewage pipes.  Nylons twisted into a noose lying like a coiled snake in a heap by the fire escape.  An iridescent scabrous square of rat poison in the center of the loop.  Crusts of rancid vomit in the Bible drawer. Maggots pinching through the Revelations.  

A symbolic image, no doubt.  The kind of thing that might appear in some controversial film about damnation, or the dissolution of religious belief.  Dearest father, I did not forget your lessons.  Everything I have seen throughout my life has been viewed within my own personal frame.  Without really knowing why, the importance of a thing always depended on its visual content.  I never understood the world, or its people, or its objects, unless I was making some kind of visual conclusion about the relationships between things.  I could never resist what I must call a supreme demand, from somewhere within my nature, to establish and construe elaborate connections between all that my senses digested.  It is as though my subconscious was engaged in some kind of esoteric archaeology, as though everything that could be depicted and suggested, especially all things that seemed destined to have a relationship, that somehow all this was already so, had been so, and now it was the duty of my mind’s divination to uncover what was, to reconstruct and display it, like a great structure or artifacts uncovered in a dig.  It was as though my imagination had inherited some kind of perverted obligation from the teachings of my father, or perhaps my imperfect soul had made it perverse.  Now I feel a great shame in all this, I can see the great reluctance that prevented me from true communion with others, yet I cannot deny the great understanding that depended on the power of the imagination, the interiority of consciousness, the relativity of perception and cognition. Did I unwittingly turn your wisdom into a comedy of errors, dear father?  Did I somehow turn your spiritual warnings about the dangers of illusion into a rationale for the processes of illusion?  I know you were genuine in your heart.  You never gave me a stone when I asked you for bread.  You never gave me a serpent when I asked you for a fish.  Somehow the light of my body depended upon an evil eye, the false camera eye that filled my body with light that is darkness.  

         Shotgun blast blood outline, contours like a hologram fixed upon the wall after the trigger was pulled.  Here the body remained too long, and there was too much heat, too little maid service.  Gas mask swinging on the knob of the cellar door, hollow eyes sunken deep like a desert bone animal face.  Cracked plastic tube of the hair blower in the empty stained fish tank once filled with water.  Eyelashes brittle next to the coral house on the bottom, evidence of a successful electrocution long ago.  Hysterical suicide confessions scrawled in lipstick across the large pages of the telephone book still in place atop the decrepit wooden stand by the lobby desk.  Stench of the manager’s fingers as he flips through the book in search of a clean page.  Monotony of his practiced gestures as he hands me the key, looks over the desk to be sure I have luggage, places the pen in the center of the decaying registration log, sits back on his stool, lighting another cigarette as he watches me ascend the stairs, wondering if I will become another suicide, another body carried out on the red rubber stretcher.  A large cockroach does not escape the trained assault of his shoe.  Its inner matter bursts with a gush as I turn the key to my room.  Slowly the bent dusty blades of a fan turn about.  The cockroach antennae twist a few times.  I shut the door.

Older light skinned man with a serious expression and a dark colored coat and gray sweater in front of a canvas of projected lights.
Peter J. Dellolio

The Confession is available here from Barnes and Noble.

Z.I. Mahmud Explores Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Four men in ordinary clothes, pants, bags, work jeans and vests, hold baggage and stand by a tree. One man is older and tied to the tree.

Meet Samuel Beckett With Richard Wilson 2015 Manufacturing Intellect Princeton University Library Playing the Spectator While Waiting For Godot, Kimberly Bohman-Kalaja, The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 68, No. 1-2 Winter 2007,
Princeton University Library Publishers.

Discuss the use of repetition and doubling as dramatic devices in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Or
Bring out the significance of the stage setting in Waiting for Godot or in Look Back in Anger.
Or
Discuss the theatre of the absurd and connect it to some of its social and philosophical antecedents.


That postmodernist Irish tragicomical Waiting For Godot is a poetic drama of the Anglo-Franco absurdist tradition that evades both the meaning of life and purpose and that of memory and
jurisdiction as envisioned by the vaudeville stock buffoon archetypal everyday humanity country bumpkins and fool-like jester tramps.

These protagonists Vladimir and Estragon’s histrionic
rhetorics “Yesterday’s evening it was black and bare. Now it’s covered in leaves” and “It must be the spring” respectively delineate the trajectory of stage directions behind the stage and
alleyways of a baffling generation of scholarly drama critics. Time is a patterning of memories in a narrative sequence as observable by these characters’ microcosmic natural world amidst blasted
heaths and ruined countryside. Representations of recurrent imageries associated with boots and hats, gastric inflammation, and pouches of belching bear resemblance to outfit wardrobe and food
crises prevalence of French resistance of the post world war epoch.


Emissary’s implication of Godot’s continual dismissal is lachrymose news to the readers of existentialism and nihilism. After all Pozzo’s declarative “Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time?” postulates that the natural world is a purgatory without a promissory note of salvation as envisioned by these tramplike vagabonds; they cannot reminisce on past memories and
are thus entwined within this gossamery of past and present spatiotemporality to be certain about who they are, where they are and why they are like rhetorical questions.

Estragon’s and Vladimir’s hanging upon the tree is a figurative trope of melodramatic hyperbolism that concerns finding meaning within a meaningless world. Lucky’s beastly burdensome stoicism [lifting of
sand bags every now and then and then dragging them down to relift them] subjective to Pozzo’s tyrannical regime upon the behest of mindless and purposeless errand is symbolic of power
dynamics concerning humanity’s enslavement to chasmic maze.

Lucky being deafened and Pozzo being blind incriminate subversion of power polity through the inversion of power dynamics, through banishment of colonial hegemony and thus proclaim emancipation to freedom by resistance and rebellion. That literature laureate absurdist and existentialist playwright Samuel Beckett crafts electrifying and spellbinding aural specks of allegorical enchantment in canonizing the fiction of absurdist poetic drama. After all, this is an allegory of the human condition for eternity as if we are cataclysmically falling with the rolling boulders from the cliff.

Fatalistically these tramp protagonists are eternalized for waiting and Beckett has transformed the destitution of mankind into exaltation through Lucky’s personae: “He’s Lucky to have no more expectations.” Furthermore, the polar binaries between the powerful Pozzo and the powerless Lucky, Estragon, and Vladimir insinuate extended metaphors of the Cold War, the French Resistance, and the Irish rebellious spirits of the nationalist freedom movement.


“Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something while we have a chance.” Vladimir’s speech is evoked in implication of salvaging the quagmire of Pozzo and Lucky’s funebrial crisis. Angst and pangst of existentialist crisis has been translated to the traumatic psyche of these priggish and prudential beings. However the stage directions of being stationary connotes their dwarfish dormancy and alienated stagnation. That the pointlessness of existence is implicated in salvation being awaited by external force and that self is incapable of self-knowledge. In cloak and dagger connotations of Estragon and Vladimir symbolically represents
ego and id while Pozzo and Lucky symbolically represents superego.

As a result these characters are alter egos or shadows or persona soul image of themselves weaved by the gossamery of existentialist crisis. In this context, Lucky is the shadow of the superego of the egocentric Pozzo whose emotion becomes repressed pouring forth of the unconscious state through monologue.


Estragon is feminized with sensitive, irrational and poetic traits while Vladimir is masculinized with rational, contemplative and intellectual traits. Godot is a political satirical idiom of modern popular culture symbolic of the gothic monsterish figure of loathsome whangdoodle as dracula macabre. Pathos of nothingness is a dire catharsis by the crucial existentialists’ plight engendering from being sublime to travesty within universalistic spatiotemporality by the indication of “A country road”. “A tree”. “Evening”.


Domineering colonizer master Pozzo with his whip and the subservient colonized subaltern Lucky’s servility in burdensome stoical endurance is the inversion of the amnesty between
Estragon and Vladimir despite these individualists’ nihilistic despair with insurmountable frustrations. Antiphrasis of stage directions hint to “They do not move” despite speech acts of voluntary action: “Let’s us go” furthermore metaphorically suggestive of philosophical
pessimism as embodied silence, stasis, absence and negation.

Becket’s poignant revelatory envisioning from Biblical allusions point out that “Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved; do not presume, one of the thieves was damned.” Although the tragicomedy lacks female reproductive machinery however, the tree is symbolic of that utopian hope in a world of futility.


Frugal and mundane existence in a characteristic bleak landscape in expectation and anticipation of the messianic Saviour Christ through the mediation of the emissarial convoy exhibit the maudlin encumbrance of these stock characters like vaudeville fools and country bumpkins in mainstream absurdist realism. “I’ll never forget this carrot. The more you eat, the worst it gets. I’ll get used to the muck as I go along.”

These dialects are philosophical prompts propounded by the childish, materialistic, feminist, poetic, melodramatic Estragon and rational intellectualist wimpy guffaw of Vladimir contrasting differences of their outlook in life. The essence of struggling and wriggling is both bogus and vague as contemplated by these speculative skeptical states of affairs. Godot might be a satirical human condition of both waiting and achievement throughout Christmas, birthday celebration, job prospect, love of the life, funeral anniversary and so forth.
Sadomasochism of Pozzo and Lucky are allegorically satirized by brevity of intertextual allusions that mirrors habitual distraction and interruption that embodies Didi and Gogo’s world of nihilistic pessimism, stasis and repetition, skepticism and ambiguity.

Their forlorn and obscuring of train of thoughts and chain of events, forgotten memories, obliviousness of dreams, discarding of dialogues and abandonment of suicide attempts are verily brought to the foray of this justification. Language has lost the essence of the core of communication by the farrago of charlatantry and buffoonery in Lucky’s monologue. Audiences would walk out by the off stage characters’ frustration and oppression after all in correspondence with the effect of defamiliarization. Lucky isolated island of retreat from dialogism critiques the purgatorial nightmare pestering into the
infested microcosmic existence of these slapstick vaudeville country bumpkins tramps. Lucky is the symbolic thinktank Beckettian institution which dismantles establishment of linguistic games
and sheds light on the furthering of ideas into the dialogic proximity.

After being traumatized and tortured by these existentialist characters, Lucky is doomed into thinking and functioning as
Pozzo’s porter.


Further References Youtube Podcasts and Documentary Films and Lecture Presentations
Seminary Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Professor Dr. Nick Mount, Department of English, University of Toronto The Meaning of Godot, Professor Dr. David Pattie, Department of Drama and Theatre, University of Birmingham Theatre and Language: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Professor Dr. Belinda Jack, Gresham Professor of Rhetoric, Gresham College, London, UK
Cambridge PhDcasts John Gallagher presents Any Wimbush’s Samuel Beckett and Quietism
Ian McKellen Discusses “Waiting For Godot” Staging Shakespeare