LIGHTS

Lights

What's it all about, Alfie?

Engineers at work on railroads and the meaning of life. We drift from the far away lights to a beach town romance to waking up to the concerns of daily life. The big questions of life are discussed, analyzed, and finally we end up where we started. Personally, I love this type of Chekhov story. It raises questions and discusses ideas you think you are the only one thinking about -- but then you realize they have been thought about for a long time and artists have tried to depict in their works for ages.

Kept thinking at the end that Ananyev had gone back and saved his Kisotchka. But Romanticim was displaced by Existentialism or Nihilism or Whatever some time ago and in the end we still deal with the fundamental questions of life the best way we can.


ALAN
Then it’s a mystery. Mystery is good. The problem with our world is we want answers for everything. But some things are mysterious and they should be left at that. That’s what makes great art. Like the Mona Lisa smile. If we knew why she’s smiling then it wouldn’t be such a great painting. 

KEITH
What’s the Mona Lisa got to do with anything? Somebody put the jacket in here. 

ALAN
All I’m saying is there are things that can’t be explained. Like take the sun for instance. Try to explain it to people: Yeah, there’s this giant burning thing a hundred times bigger than the Earth and if you stare at it for too long you’ll go blind -- 

KEITH
Don’t have to explain it. Sun’s there. All you got to do is look up. 

ALAN
But what I’m saying is what if someone didn’t know the sun existed and you had to explain its existence --

KEITH

But it does exist so I don’t have to explain shit.

ALAN

It’s not just the sun. It’s the whole universe. Like it doesn’t have a beginning. I mean you can’t go somewhere and buy a ticket to enter the universe, can you? And where does it end? Is there a billboard announcing two million miles more till the end better buy gas now? No! It doesn’t have an end, either. It just goes on forever and ever. 

KEITH 

Sort of like you --

ALAN

And why does anything actually exist at all? Why? You know if there was nothing -- that I could understand. It’s just nothing. Plain and simple. But from that nothing an urge to be something was born. Where did that come from? Nothing wasn’t happy being nothing so it decided to be something? How did nothing know something was possible? How did it go about creating something? Nothing had nothing to help it create something yet it not only created something -- it created the whole universe. And if nothing created something then was it ever really nothing? But what’s the alternative? That something has always existed -- that doesn’t make much more sense either -- how does something always exist? We’re surrounded by a totally unexplainable mystery so why should anything that happens anywhere anytime not also be a totally unexplainable mystery? 

KEITH

You see this knife.

              (KEITH grabs knife.)

It’s sharp. Press it against your skin. Cuts your skin. You bleed. Don’t stop bleeding. You die. 

ALAN

What’s that knife made of? I mean really made of. Millions . . . billions of atoms. What exactly is an atom? And what makes them come together to make that knife?

KEITH

Know what a knife does know what it don’t do. This knife starts flying around -- singing and dancing then we got something to talk about.

ALAN

But the atoms that make up your knife are going around doing their own version of singing and dancing. And if they stopped your knife would disappear and so would everything else.

KEITH

Even you? 

ALAN

Even me. 

KEITH

Then I’d call that a fair trade.

Shakespeare Macbeth

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Matthew Arnold Dover Beach

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Anton Chekhov Lights

"Yes, there's no understanding anything in this world!"
The sun began to rise. . . .

Samuel Beckett Waiting For Godot

ESTRAGON:

    Well? Shall we go?

VLADIMIR:

    Pull on your trousers.

 

ESTRAGON:

    What?

VLADIMIR:

    Pull on your trousers.

 

ESTRAGON:

    You want me to pull off my trousers?

 

VLADIMIR:

    Pull ON your trousers.

ESTRAGON:

    (realising his trousers are down). True.

He pulls up his trousers.

 

VLADIMIR:

   Well? Shall we go ?

ESTRAGON:

    Yes, let's go.

They do not move.

Popeye: [singing] 

I yam what I yam and I yam what I yam that I yam / And I got a lotta muscle and I only gots one eye / And I'll never hurt nobodys and I'll never tell a lie / Top to me bottom and me bottom to me top / That's the way it is 'til the day that I drop, what am I? / I yam what I yam."

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