RosettaBooks

Which brings me to my final, most important What If.

Here’s how my theory goes. We writers are up to the following:

We build tensions toward laughter, then give permission, and laughter comes.

We build tensions toward sorrow, and at last say cry, and hope to see our audience in tears.

We build tensions toward violence, light the fuse, and run.

We build the strange tensions of love, where so many of the other tensions mix to be modified and transcended, and allow that fruition in the mind of the audience.

We build tensions, especially today, toward sickness and then, if we are good enough, talented enough, observant enough, allow our audiences to be sick.

Each tension seeks its own proper end, release, and relaxation.

No tension, it follows, aesthetically as well as practically, must be built which remains unreleased. Without this, any art ends incomplete, halfway to its goal. And in real life, as we know, the failure to relax a particular tension can lead to madness.

For, please understand, if you poison me, I must be sick. It seems to me that many people writing the sick film, the sick novel, the sick play, have forgotten that poison can destroy minds even as it can destroy flesh. Most poison bottles have emetic recipes stamped on the labels.

othing could be further from true creativity. Nothing could be more destructive than the two attitudes above.

Why?

Because both are a form of lying.

Nothing fails then. All goes on. Work is done. If good, you learn from it. If bad, you learn even more. Work done and behind you is a lesson to be studied. There is no failure unless one stops. Not to work is to cease, tighten up, become nervous and therefore destructive of the creative process.

WORK· RELAXATION· DON’T THINK, Once separated out. Now, all three together in a process. For if one works, one finally relaxes and stops thinking. True creation occurs then and only then.

Drunk with life, that is, and not knowing where off to next.

‘if one burdens a powerless people, lacking external means of power and fighting for its very survival, with a bloated programme of gestures and illusions, totally devoid of reality—then a terrible caricature is being created.’

On 28 September 1944 Churchill announced in the House of Commons that a Jewish Brigade Group would be set up, to be trained and armed by Britain as a front-line military unit. Five days later, on October 3, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who was then in Berlin, wrote to the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, proposing the establishment of ‘an Arab-Islamic army in Germany’. The German government, Haj Amin added, ‘should declare its readiness to train and arm such an army. Thus it would level a severe blow against the British plan and increase the number of fighters for a greater Germany.’