About suffering

Here’s a famous poem by W. H. Auden, with the landscape he describes, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, below it:

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

As Zhuangzi said, “The tip of an autumn hair is large and Mount Tai is small.” Hamlet’s perspective again says that “There’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” Perspective may make or unmake our experience. Disasters that loom monumentally before us, conflagrations in our lives, may be, to our neighbours, only a distant sound of closing windows. We may doze blissfully on a porch surrounded by blooming lilacs, ham sandwich half consumed, lemonade sweating on the small circle table, while next door someone buries in their cellar a body knocked down in a desperate quarrel of which we may remain forever unaware. Fires burn in Sweden or Australia, while in northern Arizona, stars turn like diamonds above a dark horizon and a waxing moon silvers the tips of shadowed pines. In politics, inflexible fascistic blowhards may rant and rave while children are abused in dark cages on some or other border, and still some MPs take their tea as usual in the midst of stretching afternoons. Next time, perhaps, a bit less cream cheese with the cucumber.

All the tempests of social media, emperors of ice cream, dog days and holidays of our childhoods become distance and memory. “Ou sont les neiges d’antan?”* The confluence brings to mind the peculiar qualities of memory itself. All that we carry with us, and all we leave behind us when we go, memory is also fallible, malleable, and subject to the corruption of the time through which it endures.

Both individually and collectively, we record things in order to remember them, and yet so many of the records of classical Greece and Rome were lost in the Middle Ages that we still wonder at the snippets of what we have. In some ways, Time is a great clothes dryer, and socks disappear within it, along with pieces of our cultural memory, sometimes vanishing into the “lost” state–that place from which nothing returns. (Or, once in a while, when enough time has passed to render the lost article useless by virtue of a vanished cultural milieu, it may surface again as a curious artifact.)

Still, memory has a strange way of mixing with experience sometimes. As T.S. Eliot notes in “The Wasteland”:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.**

Our memories offer unwittingly blended ideas of a perfect summer day, an afternoon or evening we remember so clearly, with people, events, and places now perhaps long gone. We long for these highpoints, or moments of joy or ecstasy like those we can recall. Yet that garden, those blossoms, and the profusion of green around them, the droning bees, the buzzing cicadas from the windblown trees, all these things have gone. Cicadas, crickets, bees, and blossoms will come again, and there may well be other days nearly as fine, but they will not be, cannot be, identical to that one exalted day that we walked with a loved one on the beach. That day, the particular day where the storm blew in and we sheltered from a sudden downpour beneath an overhanging hedge, perhaps stealing kisses with rain falling around us–that day is lost completely to us now except as memory.

Of course, part of the richness in life’s proverbial tapestry derives from these moments and their ephemerality, and our inner existence seems to touch on it constantly. Right now, for instance, there’s a ‘meme’ circulating in Shakespeare and early modern literature/drama circles on social media. It asks people to answer the following:

SHAKESPEARE PLAY I HATE:
SHAKESPEARE PLAY I THINK IS OVERRATED:
SHAKESPEARE PLAY I THINK IS UNDERRATED:
SHAKESPEARE PLAY I LOVE:
SHAKESPEARE PLAY I CHERISH:
SHAKESPEARE PLAY I COULD SEE AGAIN AND AGAIN:
SHAKESPEARE PLAY I STILL WANT TO DO:
SHAKESPEARE PLAY THAT MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH SHAKESPEARE:
SHAKESPEARE PLAY THAT CHANGED MY LIFE:
GUILTY PLEASURE:
SHAKESPEARE PLAY I SHOULD HAVE SEEN BUT HAVE NOT:

The person answers these (or early modern or other dramatic variants of this list) and their friends and colleagues gain the kind of insight that goes along the lines of: I had no idea! No idea that you liked or didn’t like that specific play! Of course, this touches on time too, and very obviously, with ideas like the play “that changed my life”, or the “play that made me fall in love” with Shakespeare. It is also interesting to this particular group of scholars as a social bridge between them, because the answers suggest those with whom they might be most aligned in terms of scholarly perspective.

I’m not going to fill in my own answers here, partly because of that first question. I really don’t hate any of the plays. I have favourites, naturally, but all of them teach me things and show me things, and I have seen some excellent productions of even those plays that I do not care to read or watch as much as others.

In some ways, I am as interested in this prompt list itself as I am in the answers people give, partly because the prompts ask for a reflective summary that would usually come from a long and deep familiarity with, and association with, Shakespeare’s plays. I am also interested in the way that we seem, collectively, to want to share; we want to tell others what we know, what we think, and how we feel. We want to communicate about our experience with Shakespeare, which partly suggests the communal spirit that lies at the heart of Shakespearean study and practice. The whole exercise suggests what social beings Shakespeareans (scholars and dramatic practitioners) may be.

When people note that they think that Taming of the Shrew, or Hamlet, or As You Like It is overrated (all responses I have seen), they are usually joined by a small chorus agreement in response. Yes, Hamlet may frequently be a palpable hit for theatre companies thinking of mounting a Shakespeare production, but the central character’s hesitation, and his inappropriately brutal treatment of Ophelia can also consign him to the rubbish heap of whiny failure in the back corridors of wannabe heroes. That his character’s inconsistencies resonate with a play that is itself full of such nonconformity seems beside the point. For example that Hamlet speaks of death as “The undiscovered country from whose bourn/ No traveler returns” seems distinctly odd when much of the crux of the play depends on Hamlet’s conversations with his father’s ghost. (Nope. No one ever comes back from the dead. What? Oh, yeah. Except for that guy! But except for Dad, no one.)

My own idea about Hamlet is that such character and circumstantial disconnects may be part of the play’s point. Not only is the time out of joint, but everything is out of joint. The potential for, or even the thought of any real internal consistency has been wiped away by a regicide that cracks Denmark’s very foundations–leaving the country silently grieving for her ruler as a kind of mute twin to Hamlet’s more strident antic disposition. Grief seems to be everywhere, and is everywhere ignored. The strange third person recounting of Ophelia’s death by Gertrude induces a subtle feeling of forced perspective, with more than a little suggestion of detachment. Time shifts, people shift, even the main character shifts as though we had been transported to a ghostly realm as soon as the strange fear grips us with “Who’s there?” at the beginning of the play.

Not that this opener isn’t a question of identity within the fabric of the drama (as is so often suggested), but it is also a question of foundation. Who is out there in this cold, dark world? Who’s on the throne? Who’s driving the car? Where are we headed and why am I in this handcart? We are surrounded by uncertainty. Are we on earth, in limbo, or in hell? “Why this is hell nor am I out of it” Mephistopheles tells us at the beginning of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, but only the devil seems to know the location with certainty. In Hamlet, the earth and all its attendant realms have become unsure, inconstant, and Hamlet (and everyone else) is left to grope through this strange new world–much in the way that the suffering that accompanies great grief in life may unhinge our world in such a way as to make it suddenly hang poorly in its frame, swing differently through the air, and how that world door may or may not finally close may be anyone’s guess.

This unhinging of the world is often reflected in the mind and soul such as those may be. Grief. Suffering. These can be, and often are, quiet and private antic dispositions. Still, they are no less cataclysmic for their subtlety. Persistent and relentless, the feelings pursue us like a father’s ghost–reminding us of our almost blunted purpose at odd times throughout our lives. We do not leave hell even when the exterior remains calm. Suffering is like coal seam fires beneath the earth, which are almost impossible to extinguish and, once burning, may burn for years. The ghost town of Centralia, Pennsylvania was emptied out by a coal seam fire which has been burning continuously beneath the town since 1962. Fires may erupt almost anywhere and buildings may suddenly be engulfed in flames that vanish again after said structure has burned to the ground.

Suffering has this strange quality too. In one sense, the individual suffering remains small in the life of the greater world, which hardly even seems to notice a man falling into the sea, or the internal, distracting ravages of loss or sorrow. Tiny houses on a ridge, distant, distant, high above a river or the sea in a classical Asian landscape drawn in ink. One of these burning might only trail a faint ink wash of smoke against an otherwise variable sky.

On the other hand, in our own homes/spirits/psyches, the fire may smoulder with such deep intensity that it gradually deforms the landscape, collapsing thought and emotion until that landscape transforms with deformation. Other effects may be telegraphed by sudden bouts of sobbing, or the adoption of previously uncharacteristic behaviour as the clearest reflection of the new and sudden violence in the mind. We are left with a strange, mismatched motley coat of character, or of being. The mind may lie quietly within a pall of dark smoke, only to burst forth at strange moments with tendrils of flame that reach out to scorch any and all within scope.

All the while, others pass us in the street, and we smile and nod and tip our hat. Or we do not. We answer, “fine” or “pretty well” when asked how we are doing. Or we do not. We head home as soon as we may safely do so, and we avoid the news as much as we can. If we’re lucky, it’s a little quieter there, perhaps cool and calm, and we may sit back, grateful, and momentarily at rest. Pieces fall out of our sky and we hardly notice. Perhaps we drink a beer, or have tea. Maybe there’s a leftover cucumber sandwich.

In the end, we are part of that mass of men and women described in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, leading “lives of quiet desperation.’ Quiet is the key word. We are legion: ships sailing calmly on, sky raining fire around us, earth beneath a relentlessly placid sun. We are ploughmen, we are cliffs and sky and wings of wax, softening beyond the edge of usefulness, almost drifting softly into the sea’s embrace. The day looking off towards the approaching invisible edge of evening, and the afternoon around us like subterranean fires that incessantly drive us to our own distraction. Suffering has so many colours, textures, variants, but even when seemingly carried with some modicum of what people collectively think of as dignity, marks a boundary–a border between the person that was and the person becoming.

Yes, in one sense that is life. But in another, deep suffering alters the inner topography. Where Hamlet’s journey began before he encountered his father’s ghost, the play is bounded with ghosts, certainly. At one end, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and at the other end Hamlet’s own. In the middle, Ophelia’s wraith comes to us as a body in funeral wrappings, present enough without standing, without making any pronouncements, as suffering may be always present. It need not be housed in a churchyard. Lying on a pantry shelf (this was my mother’s favourite recipe), or in a back room of our memory, the ghosts come calling, the fire keeps burning. We may turn away, but it never really turns away from us, even as the ship sails onward.

*François Villon, “Ballade des dames du temps jadis”. The poem’s title translates as “Ballad of the ladies of bygone times”, and the line above is almost always translated as “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”

**T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”, from I. The Burial of the Dead. Eliot dedicated The Wasteland to Ezra Pound, to whom he referred as “Il Miglior Fabbro” (the mightier maker or fabricator–albeit “fabbro” is most often translated as craftsman).