Acts of defiance

Still thinking about The Master Builder and how Solness defies his surpressing, righteous god in the end, acts of defiance keep creeping up in my mind and how wonderful and miraculous those were.

I very fondly do remember the vernissage of photographs by Allen Ginsberg at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf in 1998 - shortly before my exam exhibition. His last private secretary was present , whose name I've regretfully forgotten, but there is one story he told that has been sticking in my mind ever since. Following  the fatwa against Salman Rushdie both Ginsberg and his secretary were riding in a taxi in New York and realising that the driver was a Muslim Ginsberg tried to discuss this fatwa with the driver. The conclusion Ginsberg drew was that: "If there was a god like this ( ie one that would sustain this verdict) I would shit on his head". The secretary remembered feeling very awkward at this moment but obviously the driver did not speak enough English to understand Ginsberg.

Another great act of defiance - and this time also one drawn from a play - is Posthumus challeging the gods in the prison scene (Act V, Scene IV) from Cymbeline, definitely one of my favourites. Yet Shakespeare does not leave it at this but makes Posthumus realise the very, very hard way that it was not the gods who were wrong or wronging him but Posthumus' concept of them and the - all too human - revenge he commissioned driven by his mistrust - in fact to go even a step further it was already the wager he put on Imogen's fidelity.

Most probably Edmund Husserl, as far as I understand him, is right in warning us against all concepts that would not allow a doubt, for those surely are dogmatic and eventually wrong, dangerous and inhuman.