Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Archive

 

 

Volume 12 Number 3, December 2011

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ALL OR NOTHING

by Bruce Sarbit

at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival, 2011

 

when Harry Nelken plays Miguel de Unamuno

in his cell after eleven weeks, each week presented

with a document to sign in support of Franco

he performs in the good old way. He uses to the full

his voice to modulate and to enlarge, to whisper

and to shift characters when Unamuno quotes. His stances

and gestures are often histrionic, angular and bombastic

 - like the sculpture at Salamanca by Pablo Serrano –

forming the marriage of sensuality and Platonism

body and idea, that delivers flamenco, falangist

and anarchist, the allure of duende, life on the edge

 

 

Harry takes on Miguel’s difficulties and delivers

his resistance to barbarism, his faith that renewal cannot happen

through death (creative destruction is a murderous delusion)

though it could mean that you’ll have to die in the fight

against forces of Death,  hoping to be remembered while risking

death swallowing all your traces.  All that could be left is

a burning manuscript.  The odds may be on the side of darkness

yet life must be played for all or nothing unless you want to settle

for nothing and not play at all. 

 

Harry’s large Miguel gestures and big voice

calls to memory that, “If it is nothingness that awaits us

let us make an injustice of it; let us fight against destiny

even without hope of victory.”

 

- P.K. Brask