the endless enigma

I never accepted the revised numbering of Star Wars. For me, the first three, as they came out, will always be the Trilogy. (--And you know, those versions have since gotten pretty hard to revisit. How 1984)...!) Likewise, i prefer the Blade Runner i first saw in the theater, not the "director's cut" (1992). When they put together a more linear (& presumably more authentic) Metropolis (2001)--i still liked the old one, though it didn't make that much sense... And now, as i have discovered, they're fucking with Hamlet.

I mean, it's one thing to issue a better translation of Remembrance of Things Past (Kilmartin, 1981). Even though i'm never going to read it (i read the old one while riding cross-country on a Greyhound bus--& long maintained that's the only way to do so), if i were younger & about to embark on such an adventure, why would i want to bother with anything but the best possible representation of the original? I remember when they decided that they would issue a new edition of Ulysses (Gabler, 1984), correcting many typos that had crept into it during the printing process (i mean, would you want to proofread James Joyce?): even though that one itself seems to have become controversial (if Wikipedia is any indicator). I figured Joyce with typos is--just another run through the author's mania, except this time by the hand of chance. They say the 1990 (et seq) Pevear & Volokhonsky translations of Dostoevsky are way better; this actually tempts me. (I'm not a refusenik on everything.)

It was a good thing to restore Emily Dickinson's dashes (1955). I'm not sure (do i have to be?) about sprucing up the Sistine Chapel (1994). I definitely didn't need the "original On the Road scroll" (2008) or the "Little Review Ulysses" (2015). But i do detect a pattern--perhaps it's just that so many people are living today, & running out of original things to do: they start prying into the monuments of the past. They start tampering, perfecting, going after the uttermost authenticity.

Some things become altered permanently. (Can we really go back to a pre-2014 Marion Zimmer Bradley?) Others, well, there'll always be retro. I found out about the recent Shakespeare controversies only because my wife went back to school & was required to buy the whole Norton Shakespeare. It boasted three different versions of Lear. --Not long after that, naturally, the two Hamlets made their separated debut.

I can see their reasoning. What we had for over a hundred years was a Franken-hybrid, that "Shakespeare never wrote and no audience in his time saw performed." I'm not down on the whole task of manuscript-scholarship. But in our collective imagination (just as with the original Star Wars trilogy), something happened--& it can't un-happen. Our connection to the past was imperfect, but our response wasn't wrong.

The ever-more-phildickian path our culture has embarked upon, tearing up the road as it goes, asks of us not to remember where we have passed. Like Facebook, it gets harder & harder to just find out what happened yesterday. Recent scholarship on the Tao te Ching has even suggested that "Lao Tzu" never existed (Allegro, anyone?). I'm sure there's some kind of Phantom-Time-Hypothesis apocalypse brewing even as i write: certainly a lot of Sixties revisionism--almost entirely undertaken out of reactionary zeal--has blurred the meaning of that Cultural Revolution forever for those who never knew it. Our own time, so full of partisan strife, doubtless will be revised by the winners--if there are any.

And the Cheshire Cat smile of disappeared-Lao Tzu grins its immortal enigma.

(via)