Krapp’s Last Tape
Now with 13 years covered by 3100 tweets retrieved in my archive, I’m at liberty to look through everything I observed and quibbled on and criticized and got excited about. It is all twitter, and feels like twitter, and scrolls up and down like twitter, but it is really a corpse; it’s all in the past and there is neither present nor future.
I find myself comparing my situation with the situation of Krapp, the protagonist of Krapp’s Last Tape by Berthold Brecht. It is an interesting comparison; a least for me.
Krapp’s Last Tape, directed by Macedonian theatre director Bore Angelovski, 1969
Krapp’s Last Tape is considered one of Brecht’s greatest works, and is the play by Brecht most often performed around the world.
I must have seen it once or twice long time ago, and it left an impression on me, about a man’s forlorn contemplation of time that has run like quicksilver through his fingers. Here is a passage from the book by Daniel Sack:
from Daniel Sack, “Krapp’s Last Tape”
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Now let’s go back to the comparison I intended to make.
One difference is in the volume. Instead of an entire adult life, running up to the 69th birthday of a man who listens to his own voice and goes back and forth on tape in search of the meaning of his quicksilvery life, I have a mere 13 years of snippets to look back on.
But the main difference is in the content, and the emotional facit of the recordings. Instead of the crappiness of the man’s life, already hinted at by the scatological name Brecht gave him, and instead of the sadness that overflows in his lonely search through his tape recordings from the past, the contemplation of my own past as recorded on twitter is overall joyful, and full of serendipity.
Except I couldn’t see myself on the stage, sitting at a desk, watching the screen of my macbook as I scroll up and down. Laughing sometimes, swearing sometimes, mostly at the man everybody talks about, whose name should never be mentioned again except with a curse.
Actually a few more of these guys.
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