On May 5, 2008, at 12:50 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hell, I don't dispense with the rest of the play. I'm talking about my
a.e.'s. I get no a.e. during the rest of the play. In those Friel
plays, the
whole
first acts were without a.e.'s for me. However, the first acts were
necessary
to set up the impact of the a.e.. But note: after the single moment
of a.e.
in the two plays, I had no further a.e.'s in either play. And plays
can have
marvelously constructed set ups -- and yet no a.e. The set up is quite
distinguishable from the a.e.
This strikes me as highly reductionist, or asymptotic: trying to
pinpoint a moment when the a.e. explodes into your awareness. Perhaps
it was there all along, waiting until a ripeness that could only occur
once the seeds, planted at an earlier moment and growing as the story
unfolded, then erupt into the pleasure of the a.e.--which is when you
realize you've had an aesthetic thing happen to you.
I cannot extricate a moment or scene from a play and say that's where
the a.e. occurs, except only technically. The a.e. is the moment when
the rush is felt, but I can recall it building in other, previous
scenes. And that is why watching or reading a story over again hardly
loses its impact (except, as I noted before, the heuristic impetus),
and for me rereading or re-viewing replaces the cheap "quickie" of the
action-suspense with the long, slow amorousness of letting the plot
build to the crescendo of the a.e. moment. (TMI alert: personal
analogy follows: This is why the first occasion of making love to
another person is filled with the ravenous rush of hormonal force, but
the fiftieth or two-hundredth is filled with the languorous delight in
expectations, of waiting the that moment and savoring what lead up to
it, and its denouement.)
Moreover, in the ex-temporal arts, one rarely feels an a.e. for a
particular region of a painting or sculpture (although one might
really reeeeeallly like certain isolated parts). Solipsistically
generalizing from my own experience, I don't look at spot A and region
B in a painting and then quickly scan across all that paint stuff--as
if it's so much stagecraft that merely facilitates the actor's
crossing--to get to the next juicy part. It's all at once, it's a
"Eureka" moment all over: "Wow, will you look at that painting."
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
