The speaker of this title is Romeo. His subject is. . .not Juliet. Instead, it’s Rosaline, with whom Romeo first fancies himself deeply in love at the beginning of the play. His friends think him ridiculous, and he is a bit, in that sweet way that lovers can be. But we can tell that he is born to be a lover, or at least we think that we can tell this, if only because he is initially so in love with the idea of being one.
Yet, for all we know of Romeo, he is a lover. Initially trying to stop the fight and end the violence. That his attempt backfires is another post.
Does the play confuse love and violence? Does it conflate them? Or is that a reflection of the world that we see? ‘Love’ and violence running together where a lucid mind says that love and violence are not the same. Love is not violence against another.
Hints of parties that one might not remember so clearly? All locked away under the back attic stairways in the minds of those in high offices or appointed to high courts? The crimes that either we, our communities, or our countries lock away have nothing to do with love. Crimes unreported. Or even worse, crimes reported and then ignored. Put behind some Halloween mask–perhaps a Christian soldier on a high shelf.
Difficult to imagine how it might feel to have one’s injustices publicly ignored. To be steam rollered in public by an entire segment of a legislature, by vapid, money grabbing politics. To be overrun by ignorance and short sighted foolishness. Most people are not mean, but many in power can be so. Too casually. Recklessly. Stupidly. Mean. Mean when mean becomes the institution. When bigotry becomes a twisted norm. When abuse can be overlooked, or even condoned, by the highest offices in the land. How does that feel?
I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall–I will do such things,–
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep
No, I’ll not weep:
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad! (King Lear 2.4.278-82)
Sadly, it isn’t even vengeance, but justice that is thwarted.
Oh, justice usually arrives in some form, but it may come far too late, or only in the distant dark of some final night when goblins come calling in place of angels. For heaven and hell tend to happen here on earth, in the furthest moments of oppressors’ lives, even if that is years on down the road. True justice comes in silence and in solitude, seldom choosing to populate the public times.
Shame on a people who, even tacitly, support such a culture, where people can be victims and their charges are trotted out and then publicly ignored or disavowed. We the people? Goblins tend to come for bystanders as well. More than shame, damnation. Funny word that. Damn nation. What might it tell us? Not to say that we might currently abide under the yoke of processes that are being re-engineered to silence us and to keep us underlings.
A productive nation needs wage slaves. So, the wily old coyote waves a flag–say Roe v. Wade–like a red handkerchief in a magic show. Gets the bull running. Bees buzzing. Meanwhile, labour unions are steadily eroded. Let them think it is about a right to this or that. Let them eat the cake of hot button issues. Let them not see unions, workers’ wages, workers’ rights, all going away. Politics filled the vacuum of calculation–how best to govern? Yet, it seems ever to devolve into a power money grab by concentrated wealth.
Speaking of the old smoke and mirrors, the ragged magic show, the ‘look over here, look over here’ of misdirection, let’s not forget the bone crunching drops in the stock markets worldwide. The timing seems remarkable, just before the midterm elections. October. The old stock market horror show. It might be enough to distract some people. To make them focus on other things. Forget to vote.
Lear’s fool would tell us that such things do not tend to end well, at least not for the underlings:
Winter’s not gone yet, if the wild-geese fly that way.
Fathers that wear rags
Do make their children blind;
But fathers that bear bags
Shall see their children kind.
Fortune, that arrant whore,
Ne’er turns the key to the poor. (King Lear 2.4.40-6)
The poor are ended. The middle classes will continue to erode, in spite of promises to the contrary. Slip slidin’ away, as Paul Simon put it. Promises like Lear’s daughters’ professions of love–merely crafted to engineer the outcome of a vote. “Make America great again”, or the U.K. “getting our independence back” with Brexit. Politics. The oldest confidence game. Voice of Satan talking up a storm, convincing people against their own interests. Not for a mere blog to advise people. To suggest that stupid is as stupid does. Yet, we can all be stupid where devils are concerned. They are all professionals while we are amateurs.
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart. (Merchant of Venice 1.3.96-9)
Now, moving deeper into autumn with winter yet to come. Goblins with ice rime on their chins and frost on their breath. Some little discontented voice posting in a blog? Who pays any attention to that? If any attention were to be paid at all, this blog might be ‘liked’ 25% less.
As for Romeo? Juliet? Rosaline? The single tree’s single identity gone into that of the double tree into which it has grown. Sacrificing oneself for love. The self ‘become a new and greater self’ out in the wider world. We believe there may be nobility in this.
But here and now the world, even as it catches fire, seems to fall away from love. Far away. The little balloon man, too far and wee for the whistle to be heard. Selling balloons that we will never see, or seeing the world through balloons filled with insubstance.
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on. (Othello 3.3.170-2)
Beware of jealousy. Beware of party lines. Sacrificing oneself into a political party? Two trunks as one? A distant group that ‘seems’ to espouse one’s interests. Or some of them, right or left? Better to watch one’s own back to think for oneself. Make up one’s own mind, rather than let parents, spouse, friends, coworkers, church members vote through you by proxy.
Do vote though, no matter how bleak the winter may be ahead. No matter how many stormtroopers may be amassing at the borders of our being. No matter what we may have to live through in the days ahead. Jackbooted goblins under the stairs, coming out into the open. Sharp teeth under the curve of sneering upturned lips, believing enough of the gullible people have been fooled. And perhaps they have, while others stand quietly, lambs led to slaughter, wringing hands. Something wicked, and no one selling lightning rods.
Initially, this week had wanted to look at sonnets, and there is plenty of both love and danger there, but that will be another time. In the meantime, voting doesn’t take much, and as much as my single voice ever appears in this, here it is:
I urge people to pay attention, and to vote.