Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis

So good. So sad. So powerful.

I am sure that I will sound sick when I say this, but this was one of the best things this term. So good and powerful. I don’t feel pity for her, as Kane is dead, but I think that this piece is a great bit of work. Her emotions are raw and real. Even though she is stuck in this moment, and her life will be ended by herself shortly after I still believe that it applies to all of us. I know that I have felt levels of pain and sadness that is the premise of this play, of course I was not stuck in this state.

I also think that this play was not written for us, yes it is a play, yes of course it is meant to be performed. But I honestly think she could give a shit less what we think about it. These are her words and feels, this was a way that she engaged the world. So if one is repulsed by this, or hates it, or loves it-fine. It was for her by her. Of course that is how I see it. Even I can’t avoid having a response to it, I just try to keep it separate, in some way, from what this play really is.

I have a few favorite lines from this play as well:

“Okay let’s do it, let’s do the drugs, let’s do the chemical lobotomy, let’s shut down the higher functions of my brain and perhaps I’ll be a bit more fucking capable of living”(Kane 221).

I love phrase “chemical lobotomy,” so powerful and acuate.

“I cannot touch my essential self,”(Kane 229).

I have felt this very same thing, but reading it, make it have a more powerful feel, it adds to my emotion, and in some way allows catharsis.

BEST LINE OF THE PLAY

“It is myself I have never met, whose face is is pasted on the underside of my mind…”(Kane 245).

This use of pronouns to create a paradoxical separation of self is just fucking amazing. The false self that is some how glues to the bottom of her mind is a powerful image that make me repeat that line over and over in an attempt to understand more of it, to feel it. I still can’t stop saying it.

I think Sarh Kane is amazing. I am sad for her passing, as I like her no bull shit way of writing plays. No pretty superfluous  words, just raw imagery and emotion.

I also remebered a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet that reminds me of this:

“His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God, God!

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on ’t, ah fie! ‘Tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely. That it should come to this.”