The old cliché about our lives being journeys remains true. Travels. Travails. Losing, finding, and then losing again. Bourne to sea on a rotten carcass of a boat, not rigg’d,/ Nor tackle, sail, nor mast, but are there rats? Big fish beneath the waves? Leviathans swimming half a league? What kind of journey do we have? What kind of journey do we seek?
What country, friends, is this? Each turn, each day, each moment the spinning wheel spins anew, in thunder, lightning, or in rain. We run upon a Möbius strip, threatened with the speed of turning, changing, staying the same. Aching to stay on high ground while the surface undulates beneath us, threatening to plunge us off the edge, into the waves. Into the abyss. Mariners always risk entering wet.
What do we do? Why am I reading this? How can it possibly help me navigate anything? Shakespeare? Literature? Writing? Expression? My own life? What’s in it for me? How do I get where I think I want to go?
Sometimes we seem to be heroes in the sun. Miraculous in powers and decision. Feeding the very air around us with our bright souls, our sinews strung to sing heavenward even as we simply move. Our movements dances, great mornings of infinite and intersecting worlds. We recognize moments of great pith and moment. Face that launched a thousand ships? The rage of Achilles? How easily the current turns awry. Beauty and rage may motivate us or lose us. Sometimes, often, both. Some days we sing and sing until we weep and still the world remains a stone; stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless. We cannot turn the beacon’s eye inside such rain. We cannot see through the beauty of thickly falling snow, or ragingly inclement weather.
Still, it is all right in the end, because we have different ways of seeing. Different ways of understanding. Perspective and understanding, and expression. That’s the point. There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Zhuangzi may have said it best: Don’t listen with your ears, listen with your mind. No, don’t listen with your mind, listen with your qi. Listening stops with the ears, the mind stops with recognition, but qi is empty and waits on all things. The Dao gathers in emptiness alone. Emptiness is the fasting of the mind. (This is Robert Eno’s translation, by the way, should anyone wish to read more.)
Great understanding is broad, small understanding is picky.
Great words overflowing, small words haggling.
Asleep the bodily soul goes roaming, awake it opens through our form.
Reading this takes time, and we are oh so busy. We glance at the top of the page and think we see. We think we understand. Yet, I encourage readers to stick with this. Draw from it, yes, but also see what it brings up in you. Some of these posts will be more about the journey of our lives. Some will be more about specific points in literature or drama. All will be relevant. But I fear they may not yield well to skimming because, like Shakespeare (and I do not claim to be anything like Shakespeare), this is more of a process than a single how to prescription on the electronic page. This is as much about what we might bring of ourselves to the writing, as what the writing brings to us. Should that sound too metaphysical, too out there, too “woo woo”, or just too nebulous, then there are plenty of blogs that purport to offer answers, methods, quick and easy ways.
What country is this? This is the country of many ways (as Chad Hansen might claim) that combine into a greater Way. It is the way across the waves, the way into and out of ourselves, ways to approach life’s journeys. Yes, it is also about ways to approach literature, Shakespeare, drama, philosophy, performance, and writing. Mostly, it is about ways into ourselves. The way to find things. The way home.