One of Shakespeare's more dismal plays shown on television last night. A real shocker of emotional betrayal but yet magnificent verse in drama. Madness of one sort or another, turmoil of family treachery and very disturbed mental health.
Lock-down has nothing to compare with this tension and broken families. Yet there is a kind of redemption at the play's core and hope for all of us.
"O do not make me mad."
What many are experiencing right now Cateran. Hope you’re well and thank you. Xxxx😘
Just listening to Anthony Hopkins voice ,regardless of the setting or context makes me the calmest person alive in a sea of madnes. 
Yes ski, and we are in danger of drowning in the social and political lunacies perpetuated by those with a vested interest in making us comply, namely the state and government agencies.
No doubt those that wish to control us will use the current situation to the best of their advantage and i would expect nothing less.Unfortunately i don't anticipate a new more caring society to emerge from the ashes so i shall quietly go about my business as usual and observe from a distance.
It’s beginning to make me nervous. I met a friend today at the back of a quiet Tesco carpark, two empty bays between the cars, so we could exchange carrier bags full of books. We then spent twenty minutes having a chat/shout. It made my day, first friend I’ve seen in a month. I had decided that if questioned I would say this was an essential journey because it was to acquire nourishment for the mind which is as important as the body. Then I thought b****y hell why do I need to explain myself to anyone?
Some might explain your reticence to excuse your behaviour on a natural, almost built-in biological defiance of collective madness which seems to oblige us to become anti-herd in our individuality. Authority is forcing us teenieleek to become furtive in what are purely human traits of solidarity and collective exchanges, always looking over our shoulder as if we were being observed indulging in cultural deviancy by doing what is natural and which makes us human.
King Lear has this sort of message to us all, as a drama . Shakespeare in his inimitable fashion reveals to us the "madness" of cutting ourselves off from others and from our true self and authentic family relationships, which is what this pandemic is doing to us, as well as killing us.
Are we getting close to solipsism or a sort of reverse version? Do I only exist if I am in other people’s minds? My electronic interactions with other people have become much more important in the last few weeks. I become anxious if someone takes a couple of days to reply. Is this because I need their responses to reassure me that I exist?
Haha enough......this way madness lies.
How very interesting teenieleek. A Cartesian moment. I like your cogito thinking allied with our technology. It ought to prove something as we are so enmeshed by communication. I really do like your thesis, the solipsism, and Lear's predicament in madness. Your sense of yourself is a private and interior thing but you need other peoples' validation that you actually exist. This, to you, comes through others responding to your electronic communication with them, and your subsequent anxiety that, as with Descartes, you are in being. Shakespeare wrestled with these existential truths through his dramas (back to Hamlet). Our devices and desires never meant more than right now, during lockdown. Technology is part of that disorientation which we experience being cut off from other people. Or, was Sartre correct to posit that "Hell is other people."? Lear seems to think so.
What is interesting to me is that he wrote the play during his own lockdown during the plague of 1605/6. Just think what we could do during our lockdown I hear you say?
Very well observed hallentine47. Shakespeare would have fed his experiences of what at the time was a shocker into the metaphor of King Lear. Aimless and horrible deaths bordering on Jacobean depictions of his other dramas of his late years. The blasted heath is more than a metaphor for storm damage, as is today's events in care homes, devastation of an alarming sort in such a compressed stage (so to speak), which destabilises Lear mentally.
"Will anyone tell me who I am?"
Well said and thank you for your response.
A friend of mine said he was going to open a book shop specialising in German philosophical texts. I said it wasn’t a good idea, too much of a Nietzsche market.
Very droll teenieleek. Mind you, German philosophy has an over-the-top reputation with the likes of the Aryan superman nonsense. Rather unfortunate when one thinks of Kant and his calm rationalism.
Enjoy this one! Lion King bloopers!
In memory of Richard Cornish - King of the Cocktails
Another Autumn Painting....
And now for something completely different!
