Queen Mab

Queen Mab 2:00 ~ 3:35
Mercutio: O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider’s web,
The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,
Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,
Her waggoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love;
O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on court’sies straight,
O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O’er ladies’ lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are:
Sometime she gallops o’er a courtier’s nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig’s tail
Tickling a parson’s nose as a’ lies asleep,
Then dreams, he of another benefice:
Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled much misfortune bodes:
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage:
This is she–

Romeo: Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!
Thou talk’st of nothing.

[commencement speech] Tony Kushner @Purchase College

Award-Winning Playwright Tony Kushner Addresses Purchase Graduates at 36th Commencement May 16

Date Released: 5/19/2008

Below are the remarks delivered by award-winning playwright Tony Kushner at Purchase College’s 36th Commencement on May 16.

This business of receiving an honorary degree, this transaction, perhaps I ought to say, goes basically like this: someone or some group here at SUNY Purchase has decided to honor me for my writing and speaking, and several decades of hard working psychotherapists stand behind me imploring me not to question too extensively the wisdom of that decision,  and my parents who taught me how to behave in public stand behind me imploring me to at least have the good taste and graciousness not to question the decision publically; and in exchange for the honor, I appear onstage, most often to accept diploma and hood and shake hands and wave, or occasionally, as is the case today, to say a few words.  Whether silent or speaking, I’m decoration, I’m here to help adorn, decorate, make more festive this most festive occasion.

I love participating in commencements because, well, I’m a pretty depressed person, I read the newspaper every day and so of course I’m depressed, who isn’t depressed nowadays, everyone is depressed, you are depressed, or you ought to be, not today, of course, when you are celebrating, but usually you are depressed, your pet has probably gotten a contact depression just sitting next to you while you read the newspaper; I’m depressed and most of the time, when I’m not in rehearsal or, you know, as we say in Hollywood, taking a meeting or doing lunch, I have to sit alone with myself, all alone with myself staring at a blank page or the ghastly white glare of an empty laptop screen, wondering how it’s possible that at a mere 51 years of age any trace of talent or intelligence or moxie I once possessed could so abruptly, so unceremoniously, have departed, leaving not a trace behind; depressed and lonely, I attend graduations, looking to mooch off the day’s celebratory spirits, the bright sexy seductive promise of a future of change, novelty, discovery, progress — even on a rainy day like today, the radiance attendant upon real accomplishment, the bacchic non-Euclidean ecstasy of liberation – joy, in other words, sheer lovely human joy, rises up to turn stormclouds and rainfall into rococo chariots transporting Divinity and the promise of pennies from heaven.

I come to mooch off your joy, not to dampen it.  The price of my admission, since I haven’t done the work you’ve had to do to be here, is that I must speak to you; that’s the deal, that’s how I can get in at the banquet table of your joy.  It’s sometimes a complicated deal:  a hard assignment.  I began speaking at commencements in the mid-1990s, during the Clinton Interruption of the Reagan Counter-Revolution, and I have continued speaking at commencements, at shorter and greater lengths, throughout the resumption of the Reagan Era, through these past eight years, these long, long, long years of an administration whose every action outflanks one’s wildest satirical impulses and surpasses even the most hyperbolically alarmist imagination.  I am, as I mentioned, depressed, but my depression these days isn’t the depression I was born with, not my birthright depression, it’s a new kind of depression, it’s like the depression you get when you put a lab rat in a cage and he learns that if he pushes one button he gets corn and if he pushes another button he gets malt, and he’s happy when suddenly, Oh No, he pushes one button and he gets shocked, but that’s OK, the other button still dispenses malt, until oh no, now THAT button shocks him, maybe he’ll try the corn button, maybe that button will now –OW!  No, that shocks too! Oh no!  Try the malt butt – OW!  Oh NO!  Try the – OW!  The rat gets depressed.  I am the rat’s poor earth-born companion and fellow mortal.  Ow!  I feel his pain.  I know it well.  It isn’t depression; call it by its correct name: it’s terror.  The world, which once seemed a flowing fountain of corn and malt, now stands revealed as the cage it actually is, a prisonhouse of no good possibilities and a future we cannot see but which will bring, we guess, more shocks, further fear, further terror.  Ow! The subprime mortgage collapse!  Ow! The bloody, criminal miasma in Iraq!  Ow!  Global warming! Ow! The cyclone and the junta in Burma!  Ow! Ow!  The earthquake and the lack of construction standards in China!  Ow!  The President of the Unites States stands before the Knesset and deliberately – to the extent that anything this President does truly merits the adverbial form of the word “deliberation” – and deliberately confuses appeasement and diplomacy!  Ow!

The conundrum of the speaker at a banquet table of joy laid out in a prisonhouse cage of terror: Everyone who speaks at a commencement ceremony is a threat to the festive spirit, everyone who opens his or her mouth near a live mic at commencement may well prove to be the buzzkill.  That’s how menaced, that’s how fragile our joy is.

But maybe that’s what graduation day is intended to teach us, maybe that’s The Point: We gather together to celebrate, among other things, the proximity, the disquietingly vital intimacy of Terror and Joy.

I mean let’s face it, you’re not entirely joyful, are you?  No!  You’re anxious, too.  You’re Free!  But free to do what?  The Future awaits!  But what will it bring?!  Are those grey skies outside a canopy concealing a delightful surprise, or… are they a portent of future disaster!?!?

Perhaps I’m kidding myself, perhaps I come not to mooch off your joy, but to seek out kindred souls, souls similar to mine, souls brimfull of PANIC!!!

But if under your joy is panic, I believe that under that panic, that terror, is more joy, a deeper, truer, stronger joy: hope, desire, expectation that the stormclouds will deliver not discouragement and disillusion but some bright sexy God, or some unanticipated goodness, to Earth.

And so yesterday as I sat at my desk facing the horror of my empty laptop screen, my head filled with newsprint terrors, wondering how I was going to speak to you, what it was I would say, the phone rings, and it’s my husband, informing me that all of a sudden it has become unconstitutional in the state of California to deny same-sex couples the right to marry!  Joy!  These glad tidings are followed by the fear that homophobes in the Fall will manage to adulterate the California State Constitution’s beautiful echo of the simple moral majesty of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution’s promise of equal treatment under the law.   That fear’s followed by hope, my husband reminding me that a likely heavy big-D Democratic turnout, far greater in number than the Republican turnout in the primaries, in November will favor the defeat of the homophobes’ plans; which hope is followed by the depressing news that neither candidate for the Democratic nomination is going to openly disavow the separate-but-equal discriminatory treatment implicit in any exclusion of LGBT citizens from the legally-sanctioned estate of marriage; followed by the news that Governor Schwarzenegger, who’s a Republican, sort of, is going make a break with his party and not support the homophobes, and so on…

My point is: Joy and Terror follow fast upon the heels of one another, and this is how the world’s set spinning, and the trick is not to give up pushing those buttons.  Don’t be afraid to push buttons, food or electroshock buttons or other people’s buttons, DON’T BE AFRAID!  Keep hoping, keep hungering, for corn and malt, or, if neither corn nor malt but only nasty shocks are forthcoming…

Start to look around you, start to fight for a way out of the cage.

Thank you for inviting me to share this gloomy, glorious, scary day with you.  Thank you for this lovely honor, which means a lot to me.  And a million billion mazels to you all, to your parents and teachers.

Make us proud: We’ve been waiting for you!

[premise] be good to your daughter

전철 입구 근처에서 맛난 냄새가 났고 고개를 돌려보니 벤치에서 라면을 먹고 있는 사람을 보았다. 이 때 나는 냄새 자체를 맛난다고 느꼈던 것일까 아니면 익숙한 냄새…아! 이건 라면이니 맛있는 냄새구나! 라고 연관지어 느꼈던 것일까?

익숙해진다는 것은 편안하며 안심할 수 있기 때문에 기분 좋은 현상이다. 하지만, 익숙해진 대상 자체가 불쾌할 경우 – 노골적 폭력 또는 강압이 아닌, 마치 부엌에 죽은 쥐처럼 볼 수는 없되, 냄새는 나는 경우 – 문제가 꼬이기 시작한다. 좋은 것 – 환경, 아버지, 음식 – 이 자신에게 익숙한 경우 지속적으로 흡사한 것을 찾아 나서겠지만 자신에게 익숙한 것이 싫은 경우 이와 전혀 다른 새로운 것을 과도하게 찾아 헤맨다. 이는 내가 무엇을 좋아하는지 알 수 없는 환멸, 혼란까지 이른다. 어릴 때 잘못된 경험으로 인하여 좋아하는 것과 익숙함 사이에서 구분할 수 없게 된다. 내 자신을 의심하게 된다.

하지만 싫어한다는 것은 이해하지 못함이다. 명의는 짜증내는 밉상 환자가 달갑지 않을 수 있지만 그들의 아픔을 이해하기 때문에 환자들을 미워하지 않는다. 이 사실을 아직 모르기 때문에 – 젊어서 일찍이 명의 되기는 어렵다 – 끊임없이 충돌하게 된다.

from 지식e채널: 아버지 30%가 주중 5일동안 자녀보는 시간 2시간 미만 (이유는 31.7%가 주 60시간 노동). 44%가 아버지로부터 가장 바라는 것이 재력이며 아버지 생활비 부담률 95.8%로서 세계 1위. 대한민국 4,50대 사망률 세계 1위. 아버지가 받은 초라한 성적표는 56점. 아버지 50.8%가 “자녀가 고민 생길 경우 가장 먼저 나와 의논한다” 하지만 자녀들의 응답은 4%뿐. 아버지는 딸이 자신 닮은 사위 찾기 원한다면 얼마나 기쁠까? 아버지의 89%가 이를 바라는 반면, 딸의 11%만이 이를 바란다.

요즘 과외하는 아이조차 말한다 – 아빠가 싫다고, 아빠랑 밥 먹기 불편하다고. 아빠는 이미 익숙해진 밉상의 대상이다. 문제는 거기에서 그치지 않고 끊임없이 아버지와 비슷한 것에 대한 she suffers through disillusionment, at a loss of role model어디서 뒤틀린 것일까? 어디까지가 몰이해, 어디까지가 증오일까?