Hey there. Yes, you. Time to come along. No matter where we’re going just yet. Trust me. Please. Just follow me.
We’ll just head down this little stairway. No. Not the hallway. Not through that other door. Not into that hallway. Someone pontificates just there. The world of politics. Policy. It will make you ill. (Maybe not right away, but it will. Trust me. You’ll turn white, then green, then. . . well, best not to go that way.)
Just down these steps here to the back of this blog post. Careful, mind you, they are narrow, and the stone is old and rutted with the passage of time. The best places to step aren’t always easy for the feet to find. No matter. You’re doing fine. Just watch that railing. It’s old and wooden and sometimes bits splinter out into the words you’re reading. Also, the rail runs out about a third of the way down. For the remainder of the descent, you’ll have to trust your balance.
I might be tempted to digress here just to say how lovely you look. Oh, I know that everyone tends to look that way by torchlight. Firelight is kind, isn’t it? That’s why candlelight so often accompany romantic dinners. Even makes me look good, you say? Thank you. Makes me wonder why we ever really switched to electric. Still, you are, working your way patiently down these steps, looking even more gorgeously yourself no matter what the light is.
Shakespeare? We’re getting there. Or something early modern. I’ve heard there’s a chamber off to the side of one of these hallways down here that has some kind of pentagram etched into the floor. Gives one a different impression of what candle light might do perhaps. Mephistopheles for a poker game? A game of drawing matchsticks? But never mind!
Complaints? Well, not so many down here. Still, I’ve had ’em. What you might call “specific comments” turn out to be, in the blog universe, kinds of complaints. Critical comments, if you like. In this case, someone tacked a note onto/into the front door with a bare bodkin. Oh, it wasn’t any ninety five theses or anything like that. No disputation with the vasty deep. No Echo echo seeking Narcissus. Just a word or two that sometimes there might be just a wee bit too much Shakespeare in my posts. Not that this can’t be fun, mind you, but it may not be so much fun for what the early modernists call the muggles. Good lord! I hear you exclaim, Are you equating Shakespeare and early modern drama and poetry to some kind of sorcery?!? No. And, yes.
Not, as I said at the beginning of this blog road, that I harken much to comments, but it is good to be mindful. And do be mindful here–that brackish looking pool at the base of that ste– Ew. Terribly sorry about that. Well, I’m relatively certain that it won’t stain permanently. It is just a blog, after all. Just so awfully sorry about the smell.
That’s the thing about listening too closely to fucking comments, if you’ll pardon the expression. They tend to leave standing pools, filled with the most noxious, poisonous, stagnant– Well, they can lead us astray, and I’m enormously capable of putting my own foot into it without them, thank you.
Still, now that we’re here (and that smell isn’t quite so bad down here as it was back there) where would I throw a bit of Shakespeare in, while we’re climbing down the stairs? Perhaps something about light while we’re down here in the smelly dark? Something “Like to the lark at break of day arising/ From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate”? Something along those lines?
Well, I have not the tongue. Oh, I know, but that was Shakespeare, not me. But don’t let that stop you. I’m willing to stand here for as long as it takes for you to have your way with a raft of early modern lines. Please, feel free. Just pause here at the end of this line and recite something you like. I’ll just wait here.
Feel better? I hope so. I have only these ideas, you see, pictures of, say, roses left a little too long by the edge of the gate. Images of stone walls ranging along old cottage gardens, crooked as a lawyer’s soul, and trying just as hard to stand nobly in the sun. Flowers–roses–heap up, banking against those walls, rioting color, squeezing summer into the erotic folds of their opening blossoms. Roses. Thorns beneath green leaves. Color in the mind’s eye.
We see such things along the way. Now, just a moment here, and we’ll pause and give this door a push. Seems to be a bit stuck. Just lend your lovely shoulder here, can you? Lean against this door, into it. Break the locks of prison gates. Well, no. It’s unlocked. Just a bit like that Tin man from another world. Needs a bit of oil.
Still, there it goes. Door unstuck and we freely tumble forth into the secret garden that must be nearer the deep inside of this blog. And what lies within? A bit of grassy, overgrown– Ah, but the grass is long and green and soft looking. And there is sunlight here, and the vines must bear fruit, or did once when they’d been pruned.
And that’s where we are sometimes. Soft places in the sun. No Castle of Otranto with secret skeletons in caskets. No bodies rolled in rugs in the attic. No Melmoth the Wanderer, with some mysterious ancestor living forever, trying to get us to take up his end of some wicked bargain he struck long ago. No. None of that (even as much as these ideas may have influenced Shakespearean image and production through the years, with the later gothic influence on Hamlet less easy to deny).
No. It is not bitter cold here. Not even the glorious summer of this son of York. Instead, it is simply summer. Soft and warm. Deep along the burgeoning vineyard hills, and not so far from the sea. The only reason that I brought you here, brought you along, is because I like it here, and I wanted to share it with you. Not that it’s really ready yet. Those grapes are only just beginning to form along the crooked reaches at the margin of the leaves. But we can feel it. Sunlight filling the infant grapes with sugar even now. Water swelling them, preparing to partner with the sun in ripening them.
We’ll have other journeys, of course. If you stick with me. But once in a while, we have to rest, to have a day like this. Without so much heaviness, Without much Shakespeare. Being like little fishes swimming forth into this happiness that lies along the way. Sometimes, or really most of the time, that’s enough. Just being. To be or not to be? Don’t even ask. Just being is enough. Just walking along the way so free and easy. With friends. That is happiness.
Even if we mix our classical philosophers once in while, isn’t that a bit like strawberry rhubarb pie? A bit like wine? A bit like summer? Please do come along if you wish. Does the soul good, whatever that might mean. Communication. Thoughts. Listening to the little creek. It will speak to us too. Who knows where we’ll go next or what we might be doing?