In As You Like It, Duke Senior, whose throne has been usurped by his brother, takes refuge in the forest:
DUKE SENIOR
Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference; as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
‘This is no flattery; these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.’
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
I would not change it. (AYLI, 2.1.548-65)
As a chief representative of benevolence in a play full of characters that represent various perspectives, Duke Senior naturally sees good reflected in his surroundings. Yet, there is also much precedent for this idea of the forest (and Nature) as wise and benevolent counsellor. An ancient belief, of Meskwaki people among others, holds that the souls of the ancestors inhabit trees, and so we are constantly surrounded by our knowing ancestors, the dead murmuring and whispering to us over the medium of moving air.
Trees have long been seen as a kind of bridge, a symbol of connection between the earthly realm and the celestial. Reaching into the heavens, and with roots extending unseen beneath the surface of the earth, trees stand between our mortal existence and worlds adjacent to and beyond it. Yggdrasil may be the most well known example, stretching through the nine worlds of the old Norse cosmology. A great ash tree, that touches all of existence, Yggdrasil’s three roots drink from three wells of three different worlds: Hvergelmir (the source of all waters), Mimisbrunnr (the source of wisdom), and Urôrbrunnr (the spring of fate).
Each of these provisions flows variously into our lives, governing and shaping them. Water makes life possible. Wisdom is the salt of life, seasoning our existence and sometimes healing wounds into scars even as the knowledge of our faults makes those wounds more painful. Odin only gains his “all seeing” status by sacrificing himself to himself–hanging himself upon Yggdrasil for nine days and nights and giving up his own eye, so that he might see further, more deeply and broadly into existence–paying a high price for his more comprehensive understanding. The stream of fate remains largely inaccessible to human kind, meandering behind life and experience whilst appearing to dictate its circumstances and direction.
For all their differences, these springs offer up kinds of language to us. Whether it be life, wisdom, or fate, the mythical sources give us various bases for knowing our own existence and experience. Yet, as with anything, these seemingly sacred foundations of cosmology may be perverted.
Known for its particularly brutal violence, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (that may have been a collaborative work, perhaps with George Peele) speaks profoundly to the perversion of language on several levels. Envisioning two disparate camps, the play represents a power struggle. On one side, the family of the Roman general, Titus, collectively seems to take language in literal terms, with words mostly representing the concrete things that they describe. The words “hand”, “tongue”, “head”, and so on (words for body parts being repeated almost endlessly within the text of the play) tend to mean just what they describe, the actual parts of the body that they indicate.
Opposing them throughout the play are Tamora, Queen of the Goths (who are enemy to the Romans), her lover, Aaron, and her sons. They seem to see language much more as a fluid tool, as a malleable rhetorical process that is most useful for eliciting given responses, situations, or effects. Aaron and Tamora largely use language to persuade or convince others to feel or act in certain ways, and they shape reality and the body politic to their own ends accordingly.
One of the great villains of the canon, Aaron shows a particular mastery of language and its understanding, frequently employing it like a dark ritual to impose his will on the others around him. In his exchange with Titus’s eldest son, Lucius, towards the end of the play, Aaron as much as admits that language–and religion that he sees as largely composed of it–means little or nothing to him, but that he can wield it because it belief still means something to others:
LUCIUS
Who should I swear by? thou believest no god:
That granted, how canst thou believe an oath?
AARON
What if I do not? as, indeed, I do not;
Yet, for I know thou art religious
And hast a thing within thee called conscience,
With twenty popish tricks and ceremonies,
Which I have seen thee careful to observe,
Therefore I urge thy oath; for that I know
An idiot holds his bauble for a god
And keeps the oath which by that god he swears,
To that I’ll urge him: therefore thou shalt vow
By that same god, what god soe’er it be,
That thou adorest and hast in reverence,
To save my boy, to nourish and bring him up;
Or else I will discover nought to thee. (TA, 5.1.2206-20)
After Lucius swears to let Aaron’s son live, Aaron details his villainy in graphic fashion:
LUCIUS
Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?
AARON
Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,—
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men’s cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg’d up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends’ doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
‘Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.’
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more. (5.1.2258-79)
The climax of this litany of evils lies not so much in plotting and executing ills, as in the terrible rhetorical power that he exercises, even lending tongues to the silent dead so that they may speak grief’s terrible perpetuation to their dear ones. Such a force would be difficult to overcome, and a kind of caution is carefully woven into the text here–the caution against not only those who plan evil, or do evil, but against those who speak evil, or who incite or counterfeit the frame, to make it seem as though others speak or act wickedly.
These days, we don’t have to look far for awful examples of Aaron’s exercise. Power, misguided and misplaced, too often becomes a mouthpiece–maligning other groups and speaking untruths and half truths to the gullible in order to persuade them that things that are less than true are somehow fact. Like Titus and his family, words are more literal to them. For example, stating that climate change scientists have a “political agenda” negates their findings, in spite of the fact that true scientists spend so much of their lives in meticulous attempts to avoid any bias in their conclusions so that they might offer the best kind of guidance to the world. To deny their findings, especially in dire situations, seems especially foolish because the outcome lies between two alternatives: the considerable expense of making some massive economic and behavioral choices now versus the much greater expense of the end of the human world as we know it.
Yet, perhaps it is worth it to keep the coal burning, to keep the lights on until that last moment when the earth again sinks into the primordial, overheated swamps where humankind will be at a distinct disadvantage, if survival is possible at all. Perhaps we should cut down all the forests and use the land for crops and livestock while we descend to the hell of an overheated earth in a handcart of our own making. These modest proposals aside, what we all really want is for our children, our grandchildren, and all the descendents of others to live in comfortable harmony, happy and safe in their surroundings.
Aside from the few villains like Shakespeare’s Aaron, most of us wish for peace, happiness, and contentment in the future. There is really no contest between Duke Senior’s vision and Aaron’s. The pleasant and livable, for the vast majority of us, remains a much more compelling prospect. Yet, to maintain that vision, and to ratify and solidify it, it remains up to us to continue parse the rhetoric that we hear everyday. We must sort what others tell us, from where we actually wish to go, and what we want the world to be. Once we use our reasonable faculties to discern the truest course, the course most likely to realize the world we desire, then we must follow that regardless of what other voices, even those in positions of power, may say to us.
The Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy (which may have been conceived somewhere between 1200 and 1500 c.e.) famously says that any decisions we make now–usually, but not exclusively, in relation to energy, natural resources, and conservation–should take into account the effects of those decisions on the next seven generations. This bears repeating; urging us to think seven generations ahead in what we do. This can make decisions more difficult, but the alternative, the quick and easy way, leads to falling down amongst dark stones, never to rise again.
Thinking for ourselves remains the key to the future. It appears best for us to listen to the wise, but to not necessarily buy their wisdom wholesale, no matter what their authority may seem to be, and do not fear to speak openly and honestly to wrongs when we see them, but do not create open opposition in the street. Rebellion may be a personal affair until such time as circumstances may come to demand open insurrection. As the Countess tells us in the opening of All’s Well That Ends Well:
Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use, and keep thy friend
Under thy own life’s key: be cheque’d for silence,
But never tax’d for speech. (AW, 1.1.61-5)
For this week, and in the future, it might be wise to bear these words in mind. So, like the Countess, I bid you farewell and wish you all the best for this coming week:
What heaven more will,
That thee may furnish and my prayers pluck down,
Fall on thy head! (1.1.65-7)