Saying thank you
Woven into the Red Room King Lear conversation, James Whyle wrote that Lear's "thank you" is the most important line in the play. "Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir." Then a plea to look, then Lear dies.
http://www.redroom.com/blog/matthew-biberman/it-raineth-every-day-a-brid...
Whyle writes that this Thank You is Lear's redemption, an observation that seems true to me and deep. As I wrote in that same thread: perhaps redemption isn't always accompanied by soaring.
I sometimes joke that the only rule given to my daughter growing up was that she had to write thank you notes before she could play with or wear any present. That probably isn't completely true, but saying thank you is high on my list of what it is to be a mensh, a person, a human being. Belle Yang has wondered in some of her posts if we're spending too much time praising each other in our comments -- an interesting point, but I think some of this praise is simply saying thank you.
I also joke about "thank you" with the teaching artists I work with at WritersCorps because I bring in so many cards to meetings for us to sign in gratitude to someone for something, and I write so many thank you emails to each of them. It is funny in a way, how important saying thank you is to me. And yet I also notice how thank you is part of a solid base for relationships between our teaching artists and staff at their sites, between me and each teaching artistand site rep ; I notice how far thank you takes us as human beings working together.
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Belle Yang says:
THANK YOU
Judith.
Can you help me with my "Lear: Is it redemption enough?"
Judith Tannenbaum says:
thanks for the thanks, and
Belle, you wrote in one of your posts, comments or emails that you must be solipsistic because (as I understood your thought) you begin to understand a situation when you can bring a similar experience of your own to bear on the subject. I know I tend to examine general statements and questions in the light of what I've experienced and witnessed. I haven't suffered as Lear or Job or who knows how many Iraqi mothers, but from what I know about suffering and loss in my own life, what James Whyle writes seems very accurate. The expereince is less enlightenment or redemption -- those big words and concepts -- and more a very humble feeling, gratitude for the tiniest beauty and sweetness. Finding within me , even in the midst of my own suffering, a desire to extend -- that thank you -- to another is "enough," in that moment. I suppose "enough in the moment" is one definition of enlightenment though my experience is a lot smaller than enlightenment.
I've learned the most on this subject from the men I know in prison, most of whom have caused great harm and suffered great harm. For the men I know best, becoming conscious (of all this harm and of what it means to be a conscious human being) appears to be a necessary first step. And this consciousness seems -- again, in the men I know -- to lead to various kinds of responsibility (for the harm they've caused, for making their life a good life, for each other, etc). I've heard some of these men talk about how all this -- consciousness, let's call it -- is "enough" in a spirtual way. But since most of these men are serving life sentences, and because those sentences are so often the consequence of political (negative human) machinations, that spiritual "enough" isn't totally "enough."
Steve Hauk says:
Sometimes the simplest lines in Shakespeare
have the most power, such as that ``thank you,'' and in ``Richard II'' the fact that Richard II is being shaved using ``puddle water'' before he is to be murdered. It is amazingly moving. It's not always so much what Shakespeare or other great writers write, but where they write it. In both ``Lear'' and ``Richard II'' the simple words resonate because they come just before the deaths of the protagonists.
Judith Tannenbaum says:
simplest lines
Steve: Working this afternoon typing up handwritten pages by Spoon Jackson -- former Quentin student, serving Life Without - with whom I'm writing a two-person memoir (which we recently found out will be published by the wonderful New Village Press: very happy about that!) and this subject of "simplest lines" is very much on my mind. Much of what he writes about is inherently intense, and it's so easy to over-write the telling. The simplest lines are the ones that convey the most.