Seeing into Nothingness -- this is the true seeing, the eternal
            seeing.
            -- Shen-Hui
            When, after the approximately ten minutes of static, nearly
            motionless monologue which comprises Ohio Impromptu,(1) we hear R
            pronounce "Nothing is left to tell," it is quite apparent that in
            this, one of Samuel Beckett's last plays, the author has taken yet
            another step toward the zero point of "lessness" (to use his own
            term) to which he had been striving in his late works.(2) In
            previous plays like Footfalls, we can see a "winding down" of motion
            and interaction as May and V begin with dialogue and fairly
            consistent movement, only to (d)evolve into monologue, then silence
            and stillness in the final blank tableau. In Ohio Impromptu,
            however, the play as a totality apparently eliminates nearly all
            motion and interaction between characters. Two characters, owning
            only the titles L and R, simply sit, R reading a story from a "worn
            volume" of two other, implicitly related characters who eventually
            sit and read from a 11 worn volume" themselves. In this quiet,
            "Noh-like" play,(3) the only motion and interaction we see for most
            of the play are L's knocks on the table at which they sit, which
            cause R to repeat the last sentence from the book he reads.
            We seem far here from the easier comprehensibility of Beckett's
            earlier, more physically active and representational plays like
            Waiting for Godot, yet Ohio Impromptu's internal narrative and
            physical representation are each remarkably straightforward (akin to
            the immediate context of, say, Catastrophe). We hear a story of a
            man who tries, but fails, to escape the memory of his lost love by
            moving to what seems fairly obviously to be the right bank of the
            Seine river in Paris;(4) after a time, he is successfully comforted
            by one sent from his Beloved, who comes to him at night and reads
            him a narrative from a "worn volume." We see two men sitting at a
            "white deal table" with a "Black wide-brimmed hat" resting at its
            center, R reading from a book, L apparently listening (285). Why
            then the frustrating strangeness of the play? Quite simply because
            of slippage: slippage between what we see on stage and what we hear
            in R's narrative, slippage between the categories "play" and
            "fiction," slippage between past and future, and so on.
            Language, for example, slips between the expected (or read) and
            unexpected (or spontaneous): once, on reading the odd,
            quintessentially Beckettian sentence, "After so long a lapse that as
            if never been," R pauses, and then exclaims, "Yes" (286). As has
            been noted, this word is almost the only qualitative match to the
            title word, "impromptu," as it seems the only spontaneous event in
            R's speech. It is the "sudden appearance of the unanticipated"(5)
            which throws the movement of the play off to a distant point.
            Moreover, even the static nature of the play itself is disrupted:
            ... [T]he visual image constitutes a[n apparently] stable point of
            reference throughout the performance, but its essentially static
            nature is
            undermined, firstly by the gestures, which introduce a dynamic
            element
            into the stage image, and which may radically affect, even challenge
            our
            interpretation of it, and also by the continual modification or
            [iterative]
            re-view of the scenic image in light of the text.(6)
            Image is effectively destabilized by action, and both are
            destabilized by the repeated words and images generated by the
            narrative read. Like the protagonist of the narrative who walks out
            to the Isle of Swans over and over seeking "some measure of relief"
            (285), the text replays words and "events," constantly affecting and
            altering the "reality" we see before us. In Ohio Impromptu, as with
            other of Beckett's late plays, there is no straightforward way to
            assign all our sensory information into any single set of
            complementary referents: Ohio Impromptu is multi-vocal (or, in
            Mikhail Bakhtin's word, polyvalent); its elements are in continuous
            flux, combining harmoniously and dissonantly as they rub against one
            another.
            The nature and unique structure of the play is crucial to the way in
            which Ohio Impromptu creates and destabilizes meaning; this is
            certainly a play on the edges of drama, of size, and of
            comprehension, where Beckett disrupts dramatic convention through
            the nearly static, minimalized actions on stage. Although we as
            audience feel the multiplicity and ambiguity of who and what is
            happening on stage and are thrust into a quandary about how it is
            related to what we hear, the import of the singular structure and
            content of this play may not be apparent immediately. To begin
            delving into the effect of the play as a whole -- both for
            characters and audience -- let us work from the end of the play,
            beginning with the inner relationship of the characters on stage and
            in the narrative.
            After reading of characters matching L's and R's descriptions who
            are "[B]uried in who knows what profounds of mind. Of mindlessness,"
            the pair on stage seems to mirror the narrative pair, as they are
            also "turned to stone" in a stare which calls to mind the
            death-birth image so common to Beckett's plays (288). At this point
            we see in the stage characters both the advent of unconsciousness
            and the possibility of a new state of consciousness (heralded in
            part by the simultaneity of their "lower[ing] their right hands to
            [the] table") in the final words of the "sad tale" and final tableau
            of the play (288). In these "stone" stares, which both the story and
            stage pair share, there is obviously an element of "mindlessness" --
            an escape from conscious consciousness -- yet at the same time, some
            vague notion that the characters are indeed very aware; only at a
            different level than would normally constitute awareness. If there
            is reason to believe that these characters disrupt the flow of our
            conventional understanding of consciousness and reality, moving on
            to something else, then what is this something else? What state of
            mind are these pairs of characters moving toward, and where do their
            minds go if they are no longer utilizing the normative mode of
            consciousness where events are separated and linguistic signs
            indicate unique conceptual signifiers?
            Though Beckett eschewed any knowledge of Oriental mysticism, there
            are striking parallels between the final moment of Ohio Impromptu
            and the experience which Zen mystics call Satori or enlightenment;
            and there are striking parallels between the play as a whole and the
            Zen koan, a short, riddle-like device used by Zen masters in China,
            Japan, and other far-eastern countries to lead their followers to
            enlightenment. The koan, a brief, paradoxical, sometimes humorous
            statement, often couched in a small story, which can be used to
            "awaken" the struggling student, bears many similarities to the four
            page "playlet" about two pairs of men who take solace in the ritual
            reading of a (their?) story. Further, as Yasunari Takahashi notes,
            Beckett started writing plays at the point in the history of the
            Western theater where all realistic conventions of drama, including
            the assumptions that the theater has nothing to do with the sacred,
            broke down, and it seems to be that, in his ruthless effort to strip
            the theater of everything that is not absolutely necessary, he has
            arrived somewhere close to where Zeami [the founder of Noh] started
            six hundred years ago. In both Zeami's and Becketts theater, nothing
            happens (everything has already happened), but someone does come out
            of an unknown "sacred" country that Beckett [,in] ... Ohio
            Impromptu, calls the "profounds of mind." That "someone" is at once
            "the other" and one's deepest self, that "country" is at once
            "unknown" and half remembered.(7)
            Given these encouraging similarities, let us further examine the
            interplay of Ohio Impromptu and the Zen koan -- two disparate, yet
            fascinatingly intertwined methods of existential inquiry -- in order
            to see what new layers of Beckett's work we may uncover.
            We begin by noting that the Zen koan potentiates a paradigm shift
            between our common, dualistic mode of thought and a more visceral
            "pre-reflective" mode of interacting with the world. If we regard
            Ohio Impromptu in this light, we see that, via destabilization on a
            multitude of levels, the play not only potentiates, but comes as
            close to realizing this shift in thought as is probably possible on
            stage. The play is, on many levels, a Zen koan read, meditated on,
            and finally identified with and through. This device, used
            especially by the Rinzai school to force the Great Doubt and Great
            Death -- a period of crisis in which the rational mind loses its
            primacy and a less reflective, more direct mode of being takes its
            place -- can, if meditated on with all of one's being, produce an
            intense "state of thought without thinking, of consciousness beyond
            thought"(8) -- in other words "[p]rofounds of mind. Of mindlessness"
            (288) -- which leads to the state of Satori, or Nirvana. Like a
            koan, the brief, paradoxical, sometimes humorous narrative and stage
            "frame" of meditative ritual reading which constitutes Ohio
            Impromptu presents us with many seemingly contradictory concepts and
            juxtapositions that cannot be systematically resolved, necessitating
            the shift in vision to what T.P. Kasulis calls the
            "without-causal"(9) state arising from the Great Death of the
            ego[-consciousness].(10)
            If the "sad tale" which R relates -- indeed the very act of
            repeatedly reading the sad tale -- moves characters (and audience)
            to a position in which our normal mode of rational thought is no
            longer valid, then the final reading of the tale which we witness is
            the culminating point. Here, a period of months or years of
            practice, suffering, and the gradual build up of enlightenment are
            intensified and foreshortened as the former ego-centered paradigm is
            cast off in favor of the "without-context" of Satori. This quiet,
            still, yet intensely suffering period is what we see before us on
            stage. As with Zen practice, this critical moment is brought on by
            intensity of repetition, on both large and small scales. For Zen,
            repetition is the key to perfecting any act, be it zazen (sitting in
            the lotus position and concentrating on Mujo -- no mind, or
            no-thing), martial arts, or even breathing. Perfection comes through
            repetition,(11) and only then can enlightenment come. Attempting to
            achieve Mujo (or "without mind") purposefully(12) requires endless
            repetitive practice, as any form of striving for, or desiring the
            enlightened state will invariably call the ego (or active conscious
            mind) into play, which will create a state of wanting or waiting for
            "something" to happen, destroying the subject's chance of finding a
            consciousness beyond consciousness.
            Finally, after "revolving it all" in an endless series of ritual
            mental iterations (analogous to May's physical pacing in Footfalls),
            the student ceases to wait for something to happen while sitting in
            zazen.
            No longer sitting to be enlightened, one merely sits to sit. Feeling
            almost dead in any case, no longer protecting any part of the self,
            the disciple sits with abandonment, totally unconcerned with the
            consequences. At this point, the Great Doubt may arise: a
            still-point of terrible tension in which one gives oneself up to the
            feeling of nowhere to go.(13)
            At this point, scales of time and space cease to exist in a
            logically connected, contiguous sense. And once this state comes to
            pass, the Great Death can occur, allowing enlightenment to fill the
            void. It is only through repetition of "right action," and
            especially of zazen, that one can purposely attain the state of
            Satori, or Nirvana. There is no great mystery, then, why Zen monks
            spend their entire lives repeating the zazen meditation and
            question-answer periods many hours a day: to achieve the new vision
            of the world which enlightenment affords, any cost is deemed
            acceptable.
            As far as Ohio Impromptu is concerned, the Zen practice of ritual
            repetition can help to explain the ostensibly repeated reading of
            the "sad tale," as well as R's repetition of certain pieces of the
            narrative on L's command: the two (or four, if we include the
            narrative pair) are involved in the process of zazen; they sit in
            meditative poses and ask questions of each other (via the knocks).
            This iterative patterning of reading, knocks, and repeated text will
            "grind text, wear down the book in the center of the deal table ...,
            softening meaning - until ... [the] mind reawakens to true
            mindlessness"(14) -- a re-visioning of the patterning of reality
            which takes "the mind out of a rationalistic habit of thought into
            true mindlessness."(15) The characters are working toward
            enlightenment -- escape from the suffering of the singular "I" --
            and use the repeated zazen ritual of reading and mulling over
            "their" koan to achieve -- or better yet, be -- this state.
            At this point, we might be inclined to try to figure out "who is
            who" in Ohio Impromptu: as with many of Beckett's other plays, a
            pair is present -- and in this case one exists in the narrative as
            well. Is one a "Zen master," the other a student? This is not a
            simple issue, as this pair of pairs is in constant flux, the
            relationship(s) changing as identity shifts and recombines from
            moment to moment. To simplify matters, then, we will momentarily
            dissect the play into pieces, each populated by a pair of characters
            or a doubled event. Though this effectively kills the organic unity
            of the play, our discourse is, of necessity, still trapped within
            the normative logical framework and thus a distillation of arbitrary
            parts is at least momentarily necessary.(16)
            If we first consider the play's internal narrative (the "sad tale")
            as a koan in itself, then it follows that either of the stage
            characters reading this koan -- L or R -- can be master or student.
            The next logical question is, of course, which is which? Apparently
            L is the student, as he listens to R's reading, yet other
            possibilities are also viable: perhaps R is the student, as L forces
            him to read and re-read a text which he, as Mary A. Doll puts it,
            "seems at a loss to comprehend";(17) perhaps both are students,
            reading the printed words of some unidentified master -- possibly
            (and recursively) themselves -- in an attempt to understand it.
            Within the narrative, the apparently distinct reader and
            listener/protagonist are also mingled in a dynamic pairing as they
            grow "to be as one" during their repeated ritual of reading (another
            koan?). They, we are told, find a state of "mindlessness" together.
            Reflecting this internal event, L and R apparently also come to an
            understanding of the narrative's koan by the end of the piece, as
            they replay what has happened within the story when they themselves
            turn "to stone." Although the characters L and R, reader and
            listener, are in flux, there is good evidence that their relational
            pairing approaches the new vision of "without context" which is
            Nirvana. As opposed to most if not all of Beckett's other drama, the
            final tableau we witness is a "visual realisation of intimacy and
            communion longed for, but never achieved in Berceuse [Rockaby -- or
            other plays]," a "closure" which "can . . . only be achieved in the
            formless state of being/non-being beyond temporal existence."(18)
            The dynamic interplay of the pairs L and R, narrator and listener,
            narrative and stage, as well as the destabilization of our "normal"
            paradigm to make way for a new, discontinuous visioning of the
            world, can be explicated to a remarkable extent by the play's
            powerful image of the (Seine) river dividing about the Isle of
            Swans.
            From its single window he could see the downstream extremity of the
            Isle
            of Swans . . . . Day after day he could be seen slowly pacing the
            islet.
            Hour after hour. In his long black coat no matter what the weather
            and old world Latin Quarter hat.
            At the tip he would always pause to dwell on the receding stream.
            How in joyous eddies its two arms conflowed and flowed united on.
            (285-6)
            Apart from the nice complication of the issue of perception (who
            sees whom?), we here have, metaphorically, a third element -- the
            Isle of Swans -- which destabilizes the pair of arms which is the
            river, forcing them into an apparent doubleness; yet here also is
            the image of reunification as the river reclaims its wholeness via
            the revisioning of itself on the "downstream" tip of the isle. This
            same type of image is utilized by David Loy to describe Buddhism's
            rejection of conceptual absolutism: "Buddhism denies that there is
            any rock [or island dividing the current], asserting that there is
            only a flux. The rock is a thought-construction [, a destabilizing
            force,] and the sense-of-self might better be compared to a bubble
            which flows like the water because it is part of the water [of
            change] . . . ."(19)
            Once we lock on to the implications and importance of this
            analogy/identity, the dynamic flux of characters and actions takes
            on a richer, more positive aspect. L and R, and the pair in the
            internal narrative by association, are "[a]s alike . . . as
            possible," not only "in appearance," but also in the way they sit
            and their sharing of the single "[b]lack wide-brimmed hat" between
            them (285). Whether these pairs are taken to represent the halves of
            the divided river, left and right, two aspects of a brain (as in
            Endgame), listener and reader (or speaker, as in Not I), "real" and
            "projected," psychotherapist and patient, mother and child (Molloy,
            Footfalls, and others), just two pairs of unrelated characters, or
            all of the above and more,(20) L and R (and the narrative pair) are
            twinned -- at the same time definitely two ones and a single whole.
            The destabilizing "trace" of the Isle of Swans -- and the
            destabilizing force of memories of the protagonist's ubiquitously
            absent, potentiated Beloved -- necessitates a revisioning of the
            pair in terms of their relational "without-context": they are beyond
            the categorical distinctions of two or one, ". . . identity and
            difference . . . ,"(21) even L or R, as they "conflow" around
            distinctions and "flow united on." While the play appears to be
            comprised of simple, static halves or doubles with no gray areas,
            these distinctions are effectively destabilized like the river
            around the Isle, signs and referents turbulently dividing and
            mingling like the interpenetrating halves of the white-on-black,
            black-on-white field of the Yin-Yang symbol.(22)
            L and R are thus one and not-one; they are beyond the pigeon-holed
            distinction of one or the other. Likewise, the relationship between
            L and R and the characters in the internal narrative cannot be
            categorized: L is and is not the listener in the story; R is and is
            not the reader; L is and is not the reader, R is and is not the
            listener. Yet what, presented in this light, seems to make Ohio
            Impromptu frustratingly complex, appears much simpler if one can
            achieve the enlightened state spoken of by Zen philosophers: there
            is no need for any one of the possible distinctions and connections
            between L and R and listener and reader to be any truer than the
            others: they are all true, while at the same time none of them is
            true. By making this assertion, we are taking the Buddhist "middle
            way," which "means not setting up any opposition between subject
            [me] and object [you]"(23) -- not making a distinction because that
            would belittle, or even destroy the vastness and simplicity of the
            koan that is Ohio Impromptu.
            One of the reasons that L and R originally perceive themselves (or
            are perceived) as different is because they have not yet found their
            original faces, their (original) enlightened selves. From the
            internal narrative (and assuming a congruence between what's going
            on stage and in the narrative), we are told that since the
            listener's separation from his Beloved (the owner of "the dear
            name"), he has been subject to "his old terror of the night" (286-7)
            -- he, like Vladimir, Estragon, and many another Beckettian
            character, is a conscious, wanting, and waiting "I" who suffers from
            desire: desire to perceive and be perceived; desire for "another
            living soul"(24) With whom to interact and from whom hopefully to
            find relief. This other (more exactly, the messenger of this other),
            is perceived as someone separate, a distinct and therefore
            unknowable other. According to Zen philosophy, however, it is only
            because the listener maintains a causal, historically influenced
            frame of reference that he perceives the reader as separate, or even
            feels the anguish of separation and waiting/ longing for his
            Beloved. The listener is both correct and incorrect when he claims
            that "Nothing he had ever done alone could ever be undone. By him
            alone" (286). So long as he maintains a distinction between self and
            other, he is correct: nothing can be undone by him alone. If,
            however, he changes his vision to that of the marginalized frame of
            reference -- the without-context of Zen -- he will perceive all
            around him without the need for self-reifying categories like
            "alone," and will therefore be released from everything he ever did
            alone (in the old frame of reference).
            From the new frame of reference, what plagues the listener (and thus
            L and/ or R) is not the loss of his Beloved one but the loss of his
            true nature -- his prereflective consciousness beyond consciousness
            -- or equally, his inability to return to the state of
            without-subjectivity. However, this changes during the play: though
            the listener (and L, R, and us along with him) initially regards the
            messenger as a completely separate entity, as the play progresses we
            are told that "[w]ith never a word exchanged they grew to be as one"
            (287); through the repeated ritual of reading the story/koan, the
            two lose their distinctness, slowly merging into a single "one."
            What occurs at the end of the narrative, then, is a final "mindless"
            union of the two into a whole -- not a whole where there are no
            longer protagonist and reader (for that would be to make an absolute
            distinction) but a dynamic one in which the two are
            "without-separation." In other words, the two are still individual,
            but their categorical individuality has been destabilized by the
            koan that is the play. Via this radically decentering force, they
            subsume their egos, their "I-ness," or their subjectivity; they are
            able to pass beyond individual consciousness to a state which
            precedes reflective consciousness, and in which the conceptual
            distinction between self and other cannot be made. They are
            therefore two-in-one and one-in-two.
            If we next expand the study beyond the confines of the internal
            narrative, the relationship of L and R to the listener and the
            reader can be described in similar manner. At first, what goes on on
            stage and what is taking place in the narrative appear to have
            nothing in common, but as the play progresses, these two individual
            entities as well conflow, growing to be as one. The narrative passes
            through the present moment on stage to its future, and stage and
            story achieve a dynamic, intersecting relational cohesion (though
            they are never simply identical). Similarly, the L and R pair also
            becomes one-in-two as they merge with the characters of the internal
            narrative and with each other. What is left is both utterly complex
            and "absurdly simple":(25) all the possible pairings of characters,
            relationships, and actions become a moving montage which, if we drew
            connecting lines between possibly linked characters, would have the
            complexity of a spider's web; yet if we step back from the
            perplexing picture, we can look at the "spider's web" of the play as
            a simple and beautiful whole. And, to carry the web analogy one step
            further, the whole is composed of indispensable and individual
            parts, yet each part is nothing without the whole to give it shape
            and function. Through their repeated ritual readings, the characters
            have learned a new way of being themselves and their world: "When
            the senses reawaken, words fill and flow, becoming so much more than
            the things signified."(26) And once this "reawakening" takes place,
            the world becomes "green again with wonder."(27) Without the need to
            connect causally any two points of time or space, each moment falls
            like the millet grains of Zeno's heap with which Hamm is so taken in
            Endgame,(28) but now each grain is self-sufficient, creating a heap
            of "being-time"(29) all its own.
            The divided arms of distinction are radically destabilized in the
            staging of the play as well. For example, the stage directions
            require darkness on the bulk of the stage surrounding the white of
            the deal table -- a clear case of light and/separated-from dark --
            yet the Latin Quarter hat lying at the center of the table puts a
            black blot at the center of the light table; similarly, the table
            reflects white light inside the circle of darkness of the stage.
            Light flows around the dark hat, darkness flows around the pool of
            light "midstage," like islands within rivers within islands. Dark
            interpenetrates light which interpenetrates dark in a
            scale-invariant fashion. As with his use of white and black in Ill
            Seen Ill Said, in Ohio Impromptu Beckett seems to use apparently
            simple divisions only to point out the impossibility of determining
            where one half stops and the other starts. In Ill Seen Ill Said,
            Beckett writes, "Nothing left but black sky. White earth. Or
            inversely."(30) First, we are given a simple division between black
            and white; then Beckett pulls the rug out from under us, so to
            speak, as he unequivocally states that the division could be just as
            easily the other way around.
            Additionally, the apparently static physicality of the staging is
            destabilized. From first to last, there are only table, hat, book,
            chairs, and two men, "[a]s alike . . . as possible"; nothing moves
            much, the staging not at all. As opposed to Beckett's other late
            plays, the table is even positioned "midstage," allowing an apparent
            centrality that has been missing in recent works. But this
            apparently stable image is in fact no such thing: the table may be
            midstage, the "[b]lack, wide-brimmed hat at center of table," but L
            and R are both "audience right" (285). The image, then, is weighted
            to the right, and an implicit rotational motion is potentiated:
            Viewed from above, the hat resting at the table's center acts as a
            pivot point around which the table seems destined to rotate because
            of the mass -- both physical and dramatic -- situated at the right
            end of the table. Within the stasis of the staging is then a
            physical and emotional decentering -- an implicit motion which
            destabilizes any centrality in the staging of the play. The radical
            relativity of Zen tells us that the table, like the still Isle in
            the river, must of necessity be destabilized, as it is only "a
            thought-construction": there can be "no rock at rest relative to the
            water,"(31) since there is no causal connection to provide stability
            from one moment of being-time to another. Stasis and stability (and
            movement, for that matter) are results merely of our vision of what
            occurs, not what necessarily is.
            Apparently, then, even in the static, stable staging of Ohio
            Impromptu, none of the distinctions which on first viewing seem so
            clean and easy are, on a closer look, valid. Light and dark
            intermingle, forming a simple whole which contains both; motion and
            stillness interpenetrate. Order, distinction, and stability give way
            to the richer, chaotic patternings of visceral reality. From our
            causal point of view these interfering(32) images present a complex,
            daunting problem. If, on the other hand, we are willing to shift our
            vision to the radical relativity of Zen, we can apprehend in a
            pre-reflective manner that which is before us: a moment of
            experience which simply is. "The one is a predicament, the other
            not."(33)
            In addition, there are many more layers at work within the play,
            further eroding any stable, centered meaning. The duality of past
            and future are destabilized, as what occurs in the narrative being
            read -- which is ostensibly the narrative of the two before us --
            crosses over from relating events past to relating the impossible:
            what will take place next in stage reality. Our common notions about
            how past and future are divided and interrelate is fragmented by the
            immediacy of the stage present. Intimately related to this is the
            relationship between genres: in Ohio Impromptu, drama is fiction and
            fiction drama, the two combining in a form which defies
            pigeonholing, yet is compelling in its uniqueness.
            Furthermore, in addition to the iterative nature of L's and R's
            (re)reading, there are other ways in which the apparent linearity of
            the play is destabilized, most notably, the tidal ebb and flow of
            language, movement, lighting -- and of course, reading as well. Even
            language itself, as a spoken, visceral element of drama, is
            destabilized, approaching a level of effacement and reduction which
            might carry it out to the still, silent point of "Nothing is left to
            tell." "One of the important ways in which this is attempted is by a
            return to the repetitive and auto-citational devices of the
            fiction."(34) In other words, in deconstructive fashion, the
            immediacy of the spoken word is eroded by the iterative
            self-referentiality of the words being spoken. The pair on stage ".
            . . quote themselves . . . ,"(35) their present linguistic moment
            intermeshing with past (and future) language and reality.
            If we move from these temporal and spatial dimensions to another, we
            can also see that narrative, stage characters, stage set, and
            lighting also function to destabilize each other. If, for example,
            we look at the interplay between text and stage context, we find the
            two are open to an infinite Derridean rereading of themselves in a
            cyclic, creative manner.
            The stage image can be seen as a metaphor for self-creation: the
            creator creates himself through the narrative, or is created by it
            (the self being as much a Action as the fictional self) in a process
            of scissiparity (schizogenesis) presented on stage: a dramatic
            concretisation of the play between creator and created . . . .(36)
            Here, as well, our common ways of conception are shorted-out via the
            iterative interpenetration of levels of text and con-text with one
            another.
            If we are not yet exhausted by the multitude of layers functioning
            simultaneously in Ohio Impromptu and will allow a momentary look
            outside the immediate context of the play itself, we unearth yet
            more layers of information which intersect the play tangentially.
            First, as H. Porter Abbott has pointed out, the play is partially a
            humorous send-up of the conference that commissioned the work.
            It is hard not to entertain the idea that a dramatic piece
            consisting entirely of two ancient white-haired men, "As alike in
            appearance as possible," poring over a text, was intended to cast
            back an image, however refracted, of the audience for which it was
            composed -- scholars whose professional life is spent poring over
            texts and reading them to each other.(37)
            Those who read and reread texts for a living, watch two who read and
            reread texts for life. The cycle of refractions, which this level of
            information exhibits destabilizes the distinction between audience
            and stage (a relationship with which we will have further dealings
            later) in a backhanded ironic manner.
            Further destabilizing the distinction between fact/biography and
            fiction, the Isle of Swans, which figures so prominently in the
            play, is a real island in the Seine river.(38) Thus, the narrative
            as told could actually take place in our reality. We could (as I
            have done) walk out to the downstream tip of the Isle and, beneath a
            replica of the Statue of Liberty (a further fixed-point conflation
            -- this time of old and new worlds), contemplate the Seine, "How in
            joyous eddies its two arms conflowed and flowed united on" (286).
            Biography and reality could effectively trade places with stage, as
            the narrative subsumes reality within its fictional confines. Fact
            and fiction lose meaning but gain vast informational surprise in
            their commingling.
            The vast number of mutually intersecting and interfering layers
            which constitute Ohio Impromptu are simply too difficult to
            understand from a rational point of view. We must instead see the
            play not as a series of distinct signs and images but as a dynamic
            system of relationships which, while altering all of its double and
            triple parts in a dense, impenetrable flux, is stable as a system, a
            system beyond logic and causality, the system of Mu,(39) or
            No-thing-ness into which L and R (etc.) apparently enter during the
            play's final moment. Presence and absence, stage and narrative, and
            so on, are abandoned as viable constructs, and ". . . if being or
            lack of being cannot be figured, at least some shape or pattern,
            however faint, can be traced against the void."(40)
            If Ohio Impromptu is primarily systemic and relational, then the
            images with which we have been dealing reveal that these
            relationships are the "without-context" of self-reflecting and
            refracting images with no stable "thing" to reflect. In other words,
            the play can be described in terms of a specific koan:(41) "What do
            two facing mirrors reflect?" Without a subject (or object) between
            them, the mirrors can only reflect each other -- but what image
            would that produce? If we choose an element of the play that most
            readily reveals this vision, the final image of L and R facing each
            other in "profounds of mind. Of mindlessness" must certainly jump
            Out (288). These two men, "As alike in appearance as possible . . .
            , raise their heads and look at each other. Unblinking.
            Expressionless" (285, 288). In their "stone" stare, these two lose
            subjectivity ". . . thus blindly mirroring each other"(42) across a
            relational context of "without-self" This final tableau is at once
            (again pairs being destabilized) the "mirror koan" and its
            resolution, as the two become the koan, losing any sense of
            subjectivity in their "stone" stares. Because of their subjective
            absence, the myriad signifiers cycling around the empty "hole" at
            the center of the play(43) tear themselves apart under their own
            conceptual weight. With subjectivity and causality dispersed, all
            distinctions, all dualities -- all conceptual frameworks -- die,
            fading away into the "without-relationship" that exists between all
            the elements within and without Ohio Impromptu, and which only can
            be pre-reflective reality. Thus the characters, the set, the "sad
            tale" (287) -- all the elements which we have broken apart -- no
            longer exist, as the play in its entirety is "properly" born into
            the "without-perception" and "without-presence" of No-thing.(44)
            Though we have by now spent the bulk of our time with L and R and
            the reader and listener in the narrative, we must return to the
            beginnings of this inquiry once again: there is another, very
            important level at which the play functions as koan: it is an
            existential riddle for the playgoer as well. The ultimate forum for
            Ohio Impromptu must be those who view its performance; and here as
            well, the little play functions as koan. Via the fluid multiplicity
            of images at work in Ohio Impromptu, Beckett skillfully pulls us
            into the world and language of the characters until we ourselves
            begin to feel like L and R on stage: confused and agonized,
            listening intently to try to find relief from the vast levels of
            signification which assault our senses in the few words and fewer
            actions we observe. As noted above, our sense of logic is assaulted
            on many levels, one of the most shocking of which is the temporal
            destabilization of past, present, and future by the intersection of
            the narrative with stage time. Here again we are frustrated in an
            attempt to pile the "millet grains" of the play -- as Hamm would put
            it -- into a heap of meaning; yet here again it is only our need to
            connect together these self-sufficient, dynamically interacting
            moments of "being-time" which creates a problem. If we allow each
            moment to fall where it may, a pattern of discontinuity appears
            which releases us from the logical death of the play.
            As with its internal elements, the structure of the play as a whole
            is similar to that of a traditional koan: a short, sometimes
            humorous riddle "with no rational entrance or exit." The upshot of
            these brief stories is usually a mental (and/or physical) blow which
            we are told finally jars the student out of the old, causal frame of
            mind and "enlightens" her (and us as well, if we devote ourselves
            unreservedly to the problem the master presents). And the answer for
            us to the "mirror koan" of Ohio Impromptu is the same as Joshu's
            answer to the question put to him, and L's and R's answer to theirs:
            Mu, or no-thing. In order to understand the answer (or answers) to a
            koan, one must cease thinking in the old yes-or-no way.
            In form and content, then, Ohio Impromptu destabilizes any logical,
            meaningful (as opposed to informational) cohesion. "Generated out of
            a friction among texts, genres, and writing processes, the work has
            no center at all and no rational entrance or exit."(45) As audience
            members, then, we must join the characters in the state of Great
            Doubt, iterating the play over and over again in a silent "expanse
            of ice"(46) as our need for, and ability to hold on to, a
            categorical consciousness drops away. To solve the dilemma of
            understanding, which the play causes, we must participate in the
            shock of the Great Death, changing the paradigm from which we view
            Ohio Impromptu, and all Beckett's plays: we must see the play
            relationally instead of "meaningfully": we must become the koan
            which is Beckett's drama, apprehending the mingling layers in a
            state which comes before logic and distinction. Thus Ohio Impromptu
            is its own riddle and its own answer:(47) in order to fully
            understand it, we must cease looking into the play, trying to
            "break" its code; we must look within ourselves and try to see the
            play, and therefore the world, differently.
            Why, then, we might ask, is the play even necessary? If we are to
            look within ourselves to find the play's meaning, then why do we
            need Ohio Impromptu at all? The answer is that the play, like a
            koan, is "a piece of brick to knock at a gate,"(48) and just as when
            L and R attain their "true nature" they no longer need the text from
            which they are reading, once the audience achieves this state of
            Satori, once "the gate is opened[d the brick is useless and is
            thrown away."(49) The play, like the elements within it, is yet
            another indicator, a signpost showing us the path (the Tao, or way)
            to escape Beckett's vision of the terrifying world of ourselves.
            Thus,
            If we do not take perceptions as signs of named things, the most
            fundamental and problematic dualism of all -- that between my
            fragile sense of being and the nothingness that threatens it -- is
            conflated; if we do not need to fixate ourselves, if we can "let go"
            of ourselves, we unfind ourselves "in" the dreamlike world... , and
            plunge into the horizontality of moving and light surfaces where
            there are no objects, only an incessant shifting of masks; where
            there is no security and also no need for security, because
            everything that can be lost has been, including oneself. Especially
            oneself.(50)
            Thus the (non)actions of L. and R, listener and reader, light and
            dark, birth and death -- in fact all of the destabilized dualities
            of Beckett's plays -- are eventually redirected toward us, the
            audience. Across the void between ourselves and the stage, it is we
            who must learn to see correctly, ceasing to value those elements
            conserved in the old style -- linearity, logic, division --
            apprehending instead the scale-invariance and radically relational
            without-context within which "we" function.
            In order to succeed with the audience, Ohio Impromptu must turn
            inward in us, becoming, in effect, the drama of the Great Death
            within each of the audience members as the egoistic, logical,
            controlling Self struggles against the impossibility of what it
            perceives on stage and in the narrative, finally "shorting-out" as
            recursive words, sentences, actions, and staging float beyond their
            denotative space into that of a connotative flux. In the interplay
            between Zen and Beckett's plays, we have discovered how both of
            these systems, making use of pairs that are destabilized by a third
            element, decenters the entrenched order of bipolar vision, replacing
            it with a vision of reality that is not based on meaning and
            concepts, but rather on experiencing each moment of reality in
            holistic fashion. For both Ohio Impromptu and Zen, a progressive
            movement from the old style, normative paradigm to this new one
            occurs via a series of iterations of supposedly fringe elements of
            reality -- the "without-context" of Mu, discontinuous yet repetitive
            characters, language, and action -- which first lays bare the
            paradoxical nature of the causal paradigm, then allows for a
            cathartic moment -- the Great Death -- in whose potential space this
            new vision of the world takes form.
            In the miniature world of Ohio Impromptu, the compression of levels
            of imagery, the koan-like nature of the internal narrative and the
            play itself, and the "conflowing" nature of the characters
            themselves allows a complete break with the old paradigm, "relief"
            flowing from the erasure of subjectivity into the relational context
            of Mu, or no-thing. In the final moments of the play nothing exists,
            but everything is in the plenary void of self-sufficient existence.
            In Ohio Impromptu, Beckett moves beyond his earlier expression of
            the logical paradox of existence, presenting a koan which allows us
            to join the characters in achieving a state of pre-reflective
            "without-consciousness."
            Once we gain the vision of this new paradigm, we are free to absorb
            the information of the plays in a pre-reflective state wherein
            fragments are universal and vice versa; we learn to make
            "without-sense" of the plays by seeing, "not some thing different,
            but in a different way."(51) Or, as Schopenhauer, who was heavily
            influenced by contact with Buddhism, describes the profound,
            mind-numbing experience of witnessing a great work of art,
            "aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists ... in the fact that,
            when we enter the state of pure contemplation [when logic and
            linearity are destabilized and association begins], we are raised
            for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares; we
            are, so to speak rid of ourselves."(52) Only when we are "rid of
            ourselves," can R's final words, "Nothing is left to tell," begin to
            make sense in a different way: it is only after we and the
            characters (and Beckett) have struggled through the play together
            and discovered Mu shin -- the state of no mind, or "consciousness
            beyond thought" -- that we can understand No-thing the "positive
            nothingness of nonbeing,"(53) as the path to the play's (and our)
            enlightenment.
            NOTES
            (1) Samuel Beckett, Ohio Impromptu in Collected Shorter Plays (New
            York, 1984), 288. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in
            the text.
            (2) For use in this term, see Samuel Beckett's short story,
            "Lessnesg".
            (3) Yasunari Takahashi, "The Theatre of Mind -- Samuel Beckett and
            the Noh," Encounter, 58 (April, 1982), 66-73. Reprinted in Critical
            Thought Series: Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett, ed. Lance St.
            John Butler (Brookfield, VT, 1993), 260. Takahashi has noted that
            one is reminded, by Beckett's minimization and abstraction, of
            Japanese Noh theater, which reduces to essential movements and
            energy states a vast range of human emotion and action. In this form
            of theater, "nothing happens, everything has already happened ...
            but someone emerges out of an unknown country." As with Beckett,
            stillness and memory (often in third-person) are primary dramatic
            "actions."
            (4) See Pierre Astier, "Beckett's Ohio Impromptu: A View from the
            Isle of Swans," Modern Drama, 25 (September 1982), 336-8.
            (5) H. Porter Abbott, "Reading as Theatre: Understanding
            Defamiliarization in Beckett's Art," Modern Drama, 34:1 (March
            1991), 15.
            (6) Audrey McMullan, "The Space of Play in L'Impromptu d'Ohio,"
            Modern Drama, 30:1 (March 1987), 24.
            (7) Yasunari Takahashi, "Qu'est-ce qui arrive? Some Structural
            Comparisons of Beckett's Plays and the Noh," in Samuel Beckett:
            Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Morris Beja, S.E. Gontarski, and Pierre
            Astier (Columbus, 1983), 106.
            (8) Taisen Deshimaru, Questions to a Zen Master (New York, 1985),
            10.
            (9) Kasulis very carefully lays the groundwork for this terminology
            in Zen Action/ Zen Person (Honolulu, 1981). The basis of the
            technical terminology, "without-x," is to avoid the trap of
            dualistic conceptualization. In Kasulis's primary example, that of
            thinking, there seem to be two states of mind -- thinking and
            not-thinking -- yet the negative term indicates a causal relation
            between itself and thinking (a denial of the state of thinking),
            which requires an objectification of the term thinking, and then an
            application of its opposite. Thus, these two terms, like the
            illusory pairings in Ohio Impromptu, are not in reality the primary
            center of thinking (or not-thinking). The state of
            "without-thinking" is an a-priori, non-reflective state of being
            which gives rise both to thinking and not-thinking, and thus
            "without-thinking" is a true "middle way": it is the normally hidden
            trunk of the thinking "tree" which gives rise to the two (apparently
            bipolar) "branches" of thought and not-thought. For a more complete
            treatment of this important terminology (which is beyond the scope
            of this article), please see Kasulis's book, especially chapters 1,
            2, and 6.
            (10) Ibid., 115. An important Western parallel to this Zen
            re-visioning of the universe is the Husserlian (and post-Husserlian)
            theory of phenomenology. In "`Still living flesh': Beckett,
            Merleau-Ponty, and the Phenomenological Body," Theatre Journal 45:4
            (December 1993), 443-60, Stanton Gainer has recently attempted to
            revitalize the use of this "out of favor" philosophy for the study
            of Beckett's drama, citing the problem of "scriptocentrism" which
            generally pertains to textual (structural or deconstructive) studies
            of Beckett's plays. In opposition to a linguistic study which is
            based on dissecting pieces of dramatic texts to show how they fit
            within a conceptual framework, "Phenomenology is the study of
            givenness of the world as it is lived rather than the world as it is
            objectified, abstracted, and conceptualized" (448), and this is true
            whether the world is ours or the one we see on stage.
            (11) Taisen Deshimaru, The Zen Way to the Martial Arts (New York,
            1982), 49.
            (12) One can achieve this state of enlightenment accidentally -- in
            cases of a pre-reflective response to an intense aesthetic
            experience, or an emergency situation, for example -- as it is "the
            return to the normal human condition" (Deshimaru, The Zen Way 55).
            (13) Kasulis, 113-14. See note 10.
            (14) Mary Doll, Beckett and Myth: An Archetypal Approach (Syracuse,
            1988), 52.
            (15) Mary Doll, "Rites of Story: The Old Man at Play," in Myth and
            Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett, ed. Katherine H. Burkman
            (Rutherford, NJ, 1987), 73. In this article, Doll notes the
            similarities between the koan and Beckett's later plays.
            (16) Suzuki has an appropriately metaphorical warning for such
            overzealous conceptualization: "Let the intellect alone, it has its
            usefulness in its proper sphere, but let it not interfere with the
            flowing of the life-stream ... . The fact of flowing must under no
            circumstances be arrested or meddled with; for the moment your hands
            are dipped into it, its transparency is disturbed, it ceases to
            reflect your image which you have had from the very beginning and
            will continue to have to the end of time." Like the river in R's
            narrative, we should be content to experience life's "joyous
            eddies." Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism: First
            Series (New York, 1949), 19.
            (17) Doll, 50. See note 14.
            (18) McMullan, 31. See note 6.
            (19) David Loy, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy (New
            Haven, CT, 1988), 218.
            (20) Most, if not all of these hypotheses have been circulating
            throughout the critical literature for years.
            (21) McMullan, 28. See note 6.
            (220 The Yin-Yang, an ancient Oriental symbol, operates like the
            river-Isle image: it indicates at once the duality of the universe
            (the separate black and white halves of the circle) and its ultimate
            unity (the white and black dots on the opposite-colored fields, and
            the fact that the black and white halves are contained within a
            single circle). Concepts which our western culture has taught as
            distinct, separate entities, even down to simple matters like Hot
            and Cold, are in reality both two and one: two in the sense that
            they are not, in our usual frame of reference, conceptualized as
            "the same," and from a causal framework, it is generally easier to
            think of them as separate or polar opposites, and one in the sense
            that it is only our mental activity -- our consciousness -- which
            separates them. As Kasulis puts it, the Zen master's teachings are
            usually aimed at making explicit "the relativity of all
            conceptualizations -- even those which constitute the doctrines of
            the Buddhist tradition itself" (Kasulis 13). Under this radical
            relativity, even Buddhism's own teachings ultimately must be
            secondary to immediate experience -- a point which we will find is
            also important to Ohio Impromptu.
            (23) Deshimaru, 4. See note 8.
            (24) Samuel Beckett, Rockaby, in The Collected Shorter Plays of
            Samuel Beckett (New York, 1984), 278.
            (25) A Westerner, D.E. Harding, who "found" Zen through an
            accidental encounter with the enlightened state, speaks in words
            which sound as if they could have come from the "worn volume" when
            he describes his experience: "What... happened was something
            absurdly simple... . For once, words really failed me. I forgot my
            name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or
            mine.... It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new,
            mindless, innocent of all memories" (D.E. Harding, On Having No
            Head: Zen and the Re-Discovery of the Obvious (Boston, 1986), 1-2.
            In other words, he found himself free from the mental grid within
            which we normally try to force the ever changing world, and became
            one with everything as his "I-ness" dropped away. As Harding puts
            it, he was still himself, but he was no longer himSelf. What seems a
            complex paradox to the logical, conscious mind, is, as Harding says,
            "absurdly simple" when the forebrain stops trying to figure it out.
            The listener and the reader are two and they are one; it is that
            complex -- and that simple.
            (26) Doll, 50. See note 14.
            (27) Houston Smith, Introduction to D.E. Harding, On Having No Head:
            Zen and the Re-Discovery of the Obvious (Boston, 1986), vii.
            (28) The paradox which Hamm refers to is actually a conflation of
            two Greek paradoxes: one in which, logically, one can never create a
            "heap" of sand grains by adding on at a time to the pile; the other,
            Zeno's paradox of the millet grains, states that, as one cannot hear
            one millet grain fall, then logically one cannot hear bushels of
            millet grains as they fall.
            (29) Loy, 222. See note 19.
            (30) Samuel Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said (New York, 1981), 31.
            (31) Loy, Nonduality, 218.
            (32) I use this term here in its technical sense: the interplay,
            constructive and destructive ("positive" and "negative"), between
            differing wave forms. An example would be ripples in a pond, which
            can merge to create larger waves or "cancel" each other, creating
            nodes of stillness.
            (33) Samuel Beckett, "There Dialogues with Georges Duthuit,"
            Transition 49:5 (December 1949), 102.
            (34) Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (New
            York, 1988), 126.
            (35) Ibid., 126.
            (36) McMullan, 29. See note 6.
            (37) Abbott, 8. See note 5.
            (38) Actually it is/was two: an older island upstream, which became
            part of the Port du Gros-Caillou, and a newer, man-made Allee des
            Cygnes. In this image, then, any simple linearity of past and
            present is effaced (see Astier 336-7).
            (39) This is the "punch-line" of the famous koan in which Joshu
            responds to the question, "does a dog have Buddha-nature?" with a
            strident "Mu!" For further commentary on this koan see Paul Reps,
            ed. and trans., Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and
            Pre-Zen Writings (Garden City, NY, 1975), 89-90.
            (40) Anna McMullan, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett's Later Drama
            (New York, 1993), 102-3.
            (41) As far as I know, this is not a canonical koan, but it
            certainly destabilizes the sense of the self-in-reality, and thus
            seems to me a pretty good approximation.
            (42) Astier, 338. See note 4.
            (43) Elizabeth Klaver, "Samuel Beckett's Ohio Impromptu, Quad, and
            What Where: How it is in the Matrix of Text and Television,"
            Contemporary Literature 32 (Fall 1991), 373.
            (44) As an aside, we might note that this image of birth so
            important to Beckett's work is refracted in the physical image of
            the Isle mid-river, adding yet another level on which the play
            operates. Like a child being infinitely born, the Isle is poised
            forever to be set in motion down the flowing river around it.
            (45) Klaver, 372. See note 43.
            (46) Kasulis, 114. See note 9.
            (47) Since "...there are many right answers and there are also
            none... .For the koan itself is the answer." Reps, 86. See note 39.
            (48) Reps, 88. See note 39.
            (49) Ibid., 88. Note how this reiterates Zen's rejection of absolute
            authority or dogma, as noted by Kasulis above.
            (50) David Loy, "The Deconstruction of Buddhism," in Derrida and
            Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward & Toby Foshay (Albany, 1992),
            250.
            (51) Smith, vii. See note 39.
            (52) Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol.
            I, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York, 1969), 390.
            (53) Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, Revised Updated
            Edition (New York, 1969), 58.