more on Mamet

Finished Mamet's booklength essay "3 Uses of the Knife" last night.

Stunned by it. He describes that the basic structure of narrative -- the 3-act play; "boy finds girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl"; the build-up, the middle movement, the crescendo and eventual (inevitable) resolution of a symphony -- are all reflective of how our mind is wired to see events progress, how our lifespan unfolds in our innate philosophical consciousness.

And that in True artistic drama, there is no resolution. Our lives are Manichean in the constant struggle, or see-saw, between our light and our dark. Maybe a moment of peace at the end of the drama, but that is only because that imaginary struggle has ended and we can take a breath. But the walk through the troubled and troubling universe goes on. Because no matter what we want, no matter how we want the relief of resolution, we know in those moments of biting sun-bright clarity that that is not the way Life, the universe, truly works.


Sorry to say, but Mamet here has stirred me more than a decade's worth of President Ikeda's essays and speeches.


Mamet describes religion as relaxing into an appeasement of the Manichean dichotomy, of letting the mind settle into a crevice riven into the middle of the landscape.

Ikeda talks from the perspective of purity; Mamet talks from the place right here, the middle of the city, his people the middle of the last century's full-on hatred and murder. But I need some of that right now. I need to move away from the cleanness, the unattainable imaginary purity of religiosity. The addiction of it. I need to admit, and admit with my life, my actions, the bitter and the sweet grisly grunginess of real life as a human.