For the body to blossom into speech

[Text ID: Andrew Kozma.

Song of the insensible.

The world is an oyster, and I'm the grit. These are the boots my brother died in.

This city is a tongue, and I'm the bad taste. I'm the cicada inside the jaundiced pre-storm light.

Hello? You sent this to the wrong address. My brother is still alive. Still dead. Was brought back

with a lazarus shot and a slap to the face. I am the leaf litter, the headless roach.

I can walk between raindrops. I can be insensible. When visibility's poor, I am the blur on the horizon.

If my brother's dead, I am not alive. If I'm alive, my brother can't be dead.

No one owns the boots. The boots own no one. /End ID]

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZTdQuxw52/

but y'all. the way he said "brutus is an honourable man" - each and every time it changed just a little. it was the full condemnation Shakespeare wanted it to be. it started off slightly mock sincere. barely trying to cover the sarcasm. by the end...it wasn't a threat, it was a promise.

In addition, in the evolution of the English language in america, the south has retained many of the words, expressions, and cadences from the Renaissance/Elizabethan English spoken by the original British colonists.

One of the biggest examples of this is that the south still uses “O!”/“Oh!” In sentences, especially in multi-tone and multi-syllable varieties. We’ve lost that in other parts of the country (except in some specific pocket communities). But in the south on the whole? Still there. People in California or Chicago don’t generally say things like “why, oh why?” Or “oh bless your heart” or “Oh! Now why you gotta do a thing like that?!” But people from the south still do.

I teach, direct, and dramaturg Shakespeare for a living. When people are struggling with the “heightened” language, especially in “O” heavy plays like R&J and Hamlet, a frequent exercise I have them do is to run the scene once in a southern accent. You wouldn’t believe the way it opens them up and gives their contemporary brains an insight into ways to use that language without it being stiff and fake. Do the Balcony scene in a southern accent- you’ll never see it the same way again.

This guy is also doing two things that are absolutely spot-on for this speech:

First, he’s using the rhetorical figures Shakespeare gave him! The repetition of “ambition” and “Brutus is an honorable man”, the logos with which he presents his argument, the use of juxtaposition and antitheses (“poor have cried/caesar hath wept”, etc). You would not believe how many RADA/Carnegie/LAMDA/Yale trained actors blow past those, and how much of my career I spend pointing it out and making them put it back in.

Second, he’s playing the situation of the speech and character exactly right. This speech is hard not just because it’s famous, but because linguistically and rhetorically it’s a better speech than Brutus’ speech and in the context of the play, Brutus is the one who is considered a great orator. Brutus’ speech is fiery passion and grandstanding, working the crowd, etc. Anthony is not a man of speeches (“I am no orator, as Brutus is; But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man”) His toastmaster skills are not what Brutus’ are, but he speaks from his heart (his turn into verse in this scene from Brutus’ prose is brilliant) and lays out such a reasonable, logical argument that the people are moved anyway. I completely believe that in this guy’s performance. A plain, blunt, honest speaker. Exactly what Anthony should be.

by Nancy Eimers

And yes, it is a simple enough task we’ve taken on, though also vast: from dusk to dawn, from dawn to dusk, to praise, and not be blinded by the praising. To lie like a cat in hot sun, fur fully blazing, and dream the mouse; and to keep too the mouse’s patient, waking watch within the deep rooms of the house, where the leaf-flocked sunlight never reaches, but the earth still blooms.

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring. The light of autumn: you will not be spared.

The songs have changed; the unspeakable has entered them.

This is the light of autumn, not the light that says I am reborn.

Not the spring dawn: I strained, I suffered, I was delivered. This is the present, an allegory of waste.

So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate: the ideal burns in you like a fever. Or not like a fever, like a second heart.

The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful. They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind. They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly in anticipation of silence. The ear gets used to them. The eye gets used to disappearances.

You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.

A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind; it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.

How privileged you are, to be passionately clinging to what you love; the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Maestoso, doloroso:

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us. Surely it is a privilege to approach the end still believing in something.

That was the summer my best friend called me a faggot on the telephone, hung up, and vanished from the earth,

a normal occurance in this country where we change our lives with the swiftness of hysterical finality

of dividing cells. That month the rain refused to fall, and fire engines streaked back and forth crosstown

towards smoke-filled residential zones where people stood around outside, drank beer and watched their neighbors houses burn.

It was a bad time to be affected by nearly anything, especially anything as dangerous

as loving a man, if you happened to be a man yourself, ashamed and unable to explain how your feelings could be torn apart

by something ritual and understated as friendship between males. Probably I talked too loud that year

and thought an extra minute before I crossed my legs; probably I chose a girl I didn’t care about

and took her everywhere, knowing I would dump her in the fall as part of evening the score,

part of practicing the scorn it was clear I was going to need to get across this planet

of violent emotional addition and subtraction. Looking back, I can see that I came through

in the spastic, furtive, half-alive manner of accident survivors. Fuck anyone who says I could have done it

differently. Though now I find myself returning to the scene as if the pain I fled

were the only place that I had left to go; as if my love, whatever kind it was, or is, were still trapped beneath the wreckage

of that year, and I was one of those angry firemen having to go back into the burning house; climbing a ladder

And yes, it is a simple enough task we’ve taken on, though also vast: from dusk to dawn, from dawn to dusk, to praise, and not be blinded by the praising. To lie like a cat in hot sun, fur fully blazing, and dream the mouse; and to keep too the mouse’s patient, waking watch within the deep rooms of the house, where the leaf-flocked sunlight never reaches, but the earth still blooms.

the laundry cool and crisp and folded away again in the lavender closet--too late to find comfort enough in such small daily moments

of beauty, renewal, calm, too late to imagine people would rather be happy than suffering and inflicting suffering. We’re near the end,

but O before the end, as the sparrows wing each night to their secret nests in the elm’s green dome O let the last bus bring

love to lover, let the starveling dog turn the corner and lope suddenly miraculously, down its own street, home.