Mark Darrah's Blog - Posts Tagged "madness"
A Streetcar Named La Mancha
"Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them, so with their stolen booty we can begin to enrich ourselves. This is noble, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth."
"What giants?" asked Sancho Panza.
"The ones you can see over there," answered his master, "with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long."
"Now look, your grace," said Sancho, "what you see over there aren't giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone."
"Obviously," replied Don Quijote, "you don't know much about adventures.”
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Blanche DuBois breaks my heart every time.
Damn you, Tennessee Williams. Curse you, A Streetcar Named Desire. What a tremendous play!
After losing Belle Reve, her family home and former plantation, Blanche arrives at the ramshackle French Quarter apartment of her sister and her mulish husband, Stanley Kowalski. Blanche seeks to calm her nerves and has taken leave from her high school teaching position. The crowded apartment becomes for Blanche another antebellum mansion and Blanche tries to live there as a refined Southern belle.
Stanley resents the intruder in his home and suspects Blanche has squandered the family inheritance. You see, they have this thing in Louisiana called "the Napoleonic Code," and his wife's loss would be his loss. In the meantime, Blanche falls in love with Mitch, a gentle and upright man who is one of Stanley's poker playing buddies, and he falls in love with her, thinking he could proudly take her home to meet his mother.
Blanche has a troubling secret. Stanley learns her truth, confronts Blanche, and then shares his discovery with Mitch. Crushed by what he has found out, Mitch insists on seeing her in the light. He's just being realistic, he insists.
To which, Blanche speaks these words, "I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And if that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!"
Blanche may be mad.
When Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra wrote Part I of Don Quixote, Alonso Quixano had gone mad from reading so many tales of chivalry his brain had dried out. With Sancho Panza, his page, Quixano goes out in search of adventure and declares himself to be Don Quixote of LaMancha, a knight-errant. He battles windmills, recognizes a herd of sheep as an approaching army, and calls a barber's basin the golden helmet of Mambrino, a fictional Moorish king.
Cervantes intended Don Quixote to be a satiric takedown of the tales of chivalry. Instead, Cervantes discovered he had written what may have been the first bestseller in Western literature. His readers so loved the mad knight-errant, Cervantes resurrected the story and published Part II of the novel ten years later.
While Blanche DuBois is a tragic character and Don Quixote is a comedic one, they believed the same thing. It is what makes Blanche heart-breaking and Quixote endearing.
“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!” Cervantes wrote for his mad knight-errant.
I write personal essays. The stories I tell are based on truth. Blanche DuBois and Don Quixote saw the truth, too, they just added different dimensions.
If we really want to see reality with added dimensions, maybe it would behoove each of us -- writers and readers alike -- to strive to be as the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha was described: "...a crazy sane man and an insane one on the verge of sanity."
Mark Darrah
Author of A Catalogue of Common People
January 11, 2016
"What giants?" asked Sancho Panza.
"The ones you can see over there," answered his master, "with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long."
"Now look, your grace," said Sancho, "what you see over there aren't giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone."
"Obviously," replied Don Quijote, "you don't know much about adventures.”
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Blanche DuBois breaks my heart every time.
Damn you, Tennessee Williams. Curse you, A Streetcar Named Desire. What a tremendous play!
After losing Belle Reve, her family home and former plantation, Blanche arrives at the ramshackle French Quarter apartment of her sister and her mulish husband, Stanley Kowalski. Blanche seeks to calm her nerves and has taken leave from her high school teaching position. The crowded apartment becomes for Blanche another antebellum mansion and Blanche tries to live there as a refined Southern belle.
Stanley resents the intruder in his home and suspects Blanche has squandered the family inheritance. You see, they have this thing in Louisiana called "the Napoleonic Code," and his wife's loss would be his loss. In the meantime, Blanche falls in love with Mitch, a gentle and upright man who is one of Stanley's poker playing buddies, and he falls in love with her, thinking he could proudly take her home to meet his mother.
Blanche has a troubling secret. Stanley learns her truth, confronts Blanche, and then shares his discovery with Mitch. Crushed by what he has found out, Mitch insists on seeing her in the light. He's just being realistic, he insists.
To which, Blanche speaks these words, "I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And if that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!"
Blanche may be mad.
When Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra wrote Part I of Don Quixote, Alonso Quixano had gone mad from reading so many tales of chivalry his brain had dried out. With Sancho Panza, his page, Quixano goes out in search of adventure and declares himself to be Don Quixote of LaMancha, a knight-errant. He battles windmills, recognizes a herd of sheep as an approaching army, and calls a barber's basin the golden helmet of Mambrino, a fictional Moorish king.
Cervantes intended Don Quixote to be a satiric takedown of the tales of chivalry. Instead, Cervantes discovered he had written what may have been the first bestseller in Western literature. His readers so loved the mad knight-errant, Cervantes resurrected the story and published Part II of the novel ten years later.
While Blanche DuBois is a tragic character and Don Quixote is a comedic one, they believed the same thing. It is what makes Blanche heart-breaking and Quixote endearing.
“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!” Cervantes wrote for his mad knight-errant.
I write personal essays. The stories I tell are based on truth. Blanche DuBois and Don Quixote saw the truth, too, they just added different dimensions.
If we really want to see reality with added dimensions, maybe it would behoove each of us -- writers and readers alike -- to strive to be as the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha was described: "...a crazy sane man and an insane one on the verge of sanity."
Mark Darrah
Author of A Catalogue of Common People
January 11, 2016
