Speed Walking in the Fiction of Samuel Beckett

 
The only necessity I know, said Mercier, is to get away from that hell as fast and as far as possible.
- Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier  

The road, hard and white, seared the tender pastures, rose and fell at the whims of hills and hollows. The town was not far.
- Samuel Beckett, Molloy

He is twenty-four years old. Proust has just died. I should have said fallen. Straightaway Beckett picks him up, the giant and his uneven cobble.
- Hélène Cixous, Zero's Neighbour: Sam Beckett

Both psychiatric disorders themselves and antipsychotic medications frequently cause akathisia, a movement disorder that triggers an intense, internal feeling of physical restlessness. People coping with akathisia often feel an overwhelming urge to move, rock, or pace. Pacing serves as a physical outlet or a way to try to escape a threatening or overwhelming environment (flight instinct). Sometimes the unwell person no longer knows what they are fleeing or where they might be heading without this is any way dampening the intense compulsion to nevertheless flee. Some people have a disorienting moving target of squiggly malignant shadows for a world. Walking, briskly or otherwise, can be a self-soothing behaviour to help one concentrate, organize thoughts, or manage pain/distress. In art, that which truly embraces the New must also decompose the self or dissolves it like an Alka-Seltzer®. For the Deleuze and Guattari who in their 1972 benchmark Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia adopt Samuel Beckett as a schizo lodestar in the early going and especially Molloy’s magic trick whereby in the novel named for him he turns himself into a walking “stone-sucking machine,” thus maximizing what Sterling Hayden’s Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper would call his purity of essence, the “sober truth that resides in delirium [is] that there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately consumption and a recording process, without any sort of mediation, and the recording process and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself.” A quiet walk cannot help but descend into one or another clamour of cacophony and commotion. Even with only my clothes, my keys, my wallet, and a disposable lighter, I am a studio production house. You know, just a little love story about an ambulatory boy and his machine. “One should never be too lackadaisical and fear a few hundred steps,” writes longterm Swiss mental patient Robert Walser in “Little Snow Landscape,” “get out of your lazybones bed early, stand up on your pins and walk out just a little way so the eye can gaze its fill and the heart, craving freedom, can breathe.”

Film (Samuel Beckett, Alan Schneider, 1965)

Speed Walking in the Fiction of Samuel Beckett
[the Sights and Sounds]

The clips that appear in my new video assemblage piece, which surfaces in the harbour in the wee moonlit hours as customary with musical accompaniment from myself (except as a band), come in order of first appearance from the following motion pictures of record:

FILM (Samuel Beckett, Alan Schneider, 1965)

ERASERHEAD (David Lynch, 1977)

SIMON OF THE DESERT (Luis Buñuel, 1965)

DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT (Jan Němec, 1964)

LE FOND DE L’AIR EST ROUGE (Chris Marker, 1977)

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

WHITE OF THE EYE (Donald Cammell, 1987)

SOUTHLAND TALES (Richard Kelly, 2006)

SPETTERS (Paul Verhoeven, 1980)

Yo La Tengo, "Demons"