Script for today:
Page 40
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On this page, the artist’s imagination should run wild, with all manner of allegorical figures representing the evils Donna enumerates in the captions. Pandora should appear as a tiny, terrified figure holding the jar in one corner of the page.
CAPTION: Out of the jar flew a vast army of darknesses and evils.
CAPTION: Disease and famine.
CAPTION: War and violence.
CAPTION: Hatred and greed.
CAPTION: Released by Pandora’s curiosity, they would afflict all mankind for all time.
CAPTION: Zeus thus gained his revenge. |
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A view inside the jar. A tiny spirit HOPE, in the form of a fairy — a nude female form with iridescent wings — is left, peering out.
HOPE: Please let me out, too. I am Hope. |
View of Pandora’s hand, having firmly put the lid back on the jar.
CAPTION: But Pandora sealed Hope back in the jar. |
View of Pandora, holding the jar, standing on a cliff. Black clouds boil in the sky behind her.
CAPTION:And why, Taylor, do you think that was? |
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Taylor sitting cross-legged, holding Donna in her lap.
TAYLOR: Because we need hope? Because only with hope can humanity survive all the other evils?
DONNA:No, Taylor. That is merely the conventional view… |
Same view as Panel 3, but pulled further back, making Pandora a tiny figure in a barren landscape.
CAPTION:Remember that Pandora sealed Hope in the jar, rather than letting it out. She had a good reason to.. |
Page 42
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Figure of a woman kneeling before a man. The man’s face is not visible (out of the top of the panel). The woman has a black eye.
CAPTION: Think of woman who returns to a violent cad over and over. What keeps her going, but the hope of his reform… |
View of a man, in a dark room. We see him from behind, lit from above. His face is down on a desk, with a letter with the tiny words “We regret to inform you…” visible on the page.
CAPTION:Think of a young man who is failing in his career, alone, despondent, yet soldiering on to new disappointments, because of hope the application will be successful… |
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View of an elderly person, lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by horrific-looking medical machines which she is hooked into.
CAPTION: What keeps a dying person in horrible pain living on in indignity. Hope… |
Donna looking up at Taylor, calmly. Taylor looks shocked.
DONNA: Hope is an evil, Taylor. A second-order evil, one might say. The evil that keeps us going on and on, so that we can find still more frustrations to endure and more ways to suffer. How much better it would be if we just gave it up. Lived in every moment as it comes until no more moments come and we return to the blessed calm of non-existence. That is is the message lurking in the myth… |
Okay, so I’ll admit I was in something of a dark place when I came up with this gloss on the Myth of Pandora that I am later able to write up as a speech given by Donna. It’s just how my mind works at moments of real disappointment. It’s not something I would endorse as a general proposition, but I can see how someone might get there.
Donna at least is proving you can get a pretty good education at a state university if you halfway try. She’s perhaps only twenty and already able to steal thoughts from this guy:
“Man kann unser Leben auffassen als eine unnützerweise störende Episode in der seligen Ruhe des Nichts,” is what I believe Donna is playing off in her speech.
Okay, so maybe Schopenhauer isn’t all that erotic. Or is he? He made a very pretty youth:
Just sayin’.
