Granted, we tire of hearing about death, writing about death, especially when genesis may be, for the most part, much more interesting. The countryside is already filled with enough ghosts, wandering, starving. Black ribbons on a beehive, black spot in our palm. The owls tell us every night where we are going.
Yet, not all can be only harbinger to winter, even when that will also melt away, leaving the stage to other seasons. And even winter has some its own hints of growth, its own secret sleepings. Secret summer sky safely sequestered far from the margins of stone like water and iron road, under the frozen moon’s steel gaze.
Then there is spring, fostering randy thoughts. Bawdy thoughts. Even naughty thoughts, although ‘naughty’ depends largely on perspective. Georges Bataille tells us, “We must not forget, however, that outside of Christianity the religious and sacred nature of eroticism is shown in the full light of day, sacredness dominating shame.”*
And, truth be told, sex and death are, arguably, two peas in one proverbial pod of human perception, of human experience. Bataille assures us that man’s “erotic urges terrify him”, and we deeply suspect that this may be at least partly because the ‘petit mort’, the little death of orgasm brings oblivion, destroying the individual, albeit momentarily, in its wake.
This threat of vanishing completely may make sex terrifying, but seems that the subject of sex may have had as much shock value (and audience draw) in Shakespeare’s day as it does in our own. This post’s title words are from Hamlet, and if we put them in context, we find Hamlet being rude to Ophelia, while on the verge of watching a little play about a death:
Ham. Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
(Hamlet 3.2.110-9)
Oph. No, my lord.
Ham. I mean, my head upon your lap.
Oph. Ay, my lord.
Ham. Do you think I meant country matters?
Oph. I think nothing, my lord.
Ham. That’s a fair thought to lie between a maid’s legs.
Oph. What is, my lord?
Ham. Nothing.
Ophelia’s evasive attempt (all she may be able to do under the circumstances) at thinking nothing appears to backfire. Hamlet’s undercurrent of incandescent rage ignites and he misogynistically redoubles her words back at her. I can hear some readers thinking. “Undercurrent of incandescent rage? In Hamlet? Really? Well, you wouldn’t have to play it like that.” Some may think not.
Yet, Hamlet remains a play rooted in vengeance, part of the early modern theatrical genre of plays depicting revenge and retribution. Of course, this stems from much older traditional ideas of violence and reprisal that have followed us through human history, spanning cultural and geographical boundaries. In the early 18th century, forty seven samurai, left metaphorically homeless after their master is unjustly forced to commit seppuku (ritual suicide), wander the countryside, becoming rōnin, seeking to avenge their daimyo. The account of Chushingura remains a suspenseful read, the rōnin plotting their revenge for an entire year before carrying it out, in spite of the prohibition against their act. Their tireless loyalty to their master remains the stuff of legend, relating loosely to the history of actual samurai retained by Asano Takumi-no-Kami Naganori, who died in 1701.
Revenge stories remain with us, of course, part of the cultural vernacular that is often woven into action films, spy thrillers, and the ubiquitous western:
General revenge motifs aside, such plays, films, and even television series tend to be about a kind of righteous anger. A standoff–with some variant of good (or potentially redeemable) against the bad. Yet, does Ophelia really do anything to warrant Hamlet’s targeting? Not that the audience sees, and any argument to the contrary seems thin. No matter how angry Hamlet may be that Ophelia’s father and Claudius force her to spy on him, such manipulations lie beyond her will. She is often held up as a character example of a woman oppressed by the men around her. The particular barbs that Hamlet flings at Ophelia serve in a secondary way to heighten the angry tone of the revenge play, but they also pointedly betray his sexual fascination with her, and her responses are often perceived as self defense, parrying his words and then attempting to mark them as levity in order to preserve herself.
Some suggest that this may be a way that the Hamlet and Ophelia may relate to each other, which seems monstrous to many, in spite of the fact that Hamlet itself sometimes seems to be a catalogue of oddity in human relationships, parading the peculiarities of human contact before us in a grotesque pageant. Perhaps the society of Elsinore had been intended to reflect historical court personalities in a roundabout way–the play’s misogyny reflecting a casual culture of abuse that appears not to have changed in centuries (if it ever has at all). The bits of song that Ophelia later sings in madness suggest, either literally or metaphorically, that Hamlet may have ‘grabbed by her country matters’, and perhaps others have have done so too. It certainly could be played that way.
That Hamlet’s father’s death unhinges the prince’s secret contemplation of the future, causing him to rebel against life, embracing death and sneering at anything that might hint at generation or renewal does not excuse his behaviour. Yet, it is as though death infects him as he makes contact with his father’s ghost. This taints his very being, spoiling life, soul, and love in the process. As Hamlet says:
So, oft it chances in particular men
(Hamlet 1.4.23-36)
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty
(Since nature cannot choose his origin),
By their o’ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit, that too much o’erleavens
The form of plausive manners–that these men,
Being Nature’s livery or Fortune’s star,
His virtues else, be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault.
Initially, Hamlet ruminates about corruption until his father’s ghost brings death onto the stage, and murder into his son’s thinking. Yet, here we are, back to the subject of death again, and if the erotic or the sexual may lead us here so quickly, then how can we separate them? How can we conceive of the sexual apart from death when the early modern slang for orgasm was “dying”. Perhaps we cannot. At least not completely. Bataille argues that “The final aim of ertocism is fusion, all barriers gone”*, and he points out that, in order to reach this borderless state, the erotic first passes through a state of objectification.
Gustave Courbet’s famous painting “L’Origine du Monde in the Musée d’Orsay suggests this. A simple Google search of the painting’s name will bring you to the image which my server support service has asked that I not post here. (Yes, I asked about famous painting images, but the default in the United States seems to sustain a particular strain of Puritan moral standard, often at some expense to the free speech/expression to which so much lip service is often paid.) The title, “The Origin of the World, offers us the vulva depicted in Courbet’s painting as the source of the world, the generative font of the universe (which from a human perspective, in many senses, it is).
As much as he publicly affronts Ophelia, Hamlet seems to confront the very idea of this source as much as he does Ophelia’s character. Having figuratively joined death, having sworn to follow the ghost, Hamlet is compelled to reject the living world. He turns away from the mundus, from the great globe itself, from the sphere of the cosmos, and from any life or wellspring that might bring renewal or regeneration. Hamlet’s quest focuses on destruction and obliteration, so he must turn away from Ophelia, and (when the ghost orders him to do so) from his mother as well. The origin of the world is no longer his terrain, and that his rejection of it becomes violent marks his further commitment to his destructive path.
Love and sexual attraction are not always this way, of course, but they can often be so. So much pain and suffering is wrapped up in love, in that part of human experience that encompasses connection, for that is where our weakness lies. We become vulnerable to others when we connect with them (even as enemies) because in any connection we acknowledge another’s power over us, however small that power may be. We become participants with them and in them. We become intimate, promiscuous even, with some portion of their experience as it becomes mutual with our own. Even in momentary recognition of another in the street involves the loss of some small fragment of the independent self. For a fraction of a second, “I” becomes “we”, with this taking as many forms as there are kinds of human relations. Naturally, the potential loss of the individual may be amplified in cases of emotional or sexual relationships, as it tends to intensify increasingly over prolonged periods of time.
Issues of vulnerability and privacy, the risk of loss of individuation, may make the idea of sexual relations seem like a vehicle on the edge of careening out of control. Here is an audio clip of Wilson Pickett’s famous version of Mack Rice’s song:
In both the song and Hamlet’s dialogue, a male figure speaks in a way that objectifies female sexuality and genitalia, and men often tend to pursue sexual gratification in terms of objectification. The dialogue at the beginning of this post seems to have much more to do with Hamlet’s mustang than with anything else. As Ophelia sings in her madness:
Young men will do ’t, if they come to ’t.
(Hamlet 4.5.60-6)
By Cock, they are to blame.
Quoth she, “Before you tumbled me,
You promised me to wed.”
He answers,
“So would I ha’ done, by yonder sun,
An thou hadst not come to my bed.”
At some point, a critical work on criticism itself might be in order because it is striking how finicky academics may be, even sometimes glossing “country matters” as being a term for ‘sexual relations’. It may be, but Hamlet’s meaning is clearer here. He jests at c(o)unt-ry matters, at ladies’ laps, making some ado about the “No-thing” that might be located there (nothing or no-thing being an early modern slang term for the vagina that serves as an off colour pun in the title of another of Shakespeare’s well known plays).
Yet, it may be that language fails us too, as we move figuratively from boardroom to bedroom, our language becomes intimate with both arousal and derision. In her book, The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, Emma Rees notes, “I end The Vagina by pleading for ‘a word for it’ and, since language is how we interact with the world, it’s language that we need in order to effect change.”** Ophelia’s lament voices the common complaint, that the maiden seeks marriage while the man seeks only what he has objectified. Men may only want one thing, or they may want more. Very telling that, in Ophelia’s newly dug grave, Hamlet grapples with Laertes about love, saying “I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers/Could not with all their quantity of love/Make up my sum.” (H 4.5.264-6)*** Love remains a mystery here too, pointedly abiding on death’s margins, but love may also be distinct from sexual attraction, no matter how intertwined they may be in many cases.
Sexual desire seems less complicated, and even when following a ghost’s prescription leading to death (whether the revenger’s, the object of his revenge, or both), desire may suddenly appear before us. It may loom in the landscape of our consciousness, perhaps occupying a seat at a play that we have designed as a moral trap for our dissolute uncle. Our unruly minds may be full of actors and murder in one moment, and preoccupied with country matters in the next. John Wellington Wells may never really “melt [our] rich uncle in wax”****–or, at least, not the way we think he will. Requests for love philtre always seem to be getting in the way. Such is life.
Batailles may be correct that love itself stems from some kind of initial erotic spark or impulse–however sublimated that may be. Yet, to be fair, there are many kinds of love, and the asexual person will tend to need as much affection and companionship as Mustang Sally. Human affection and attraction has so many permutations that they would be difficult to catalogue. Petrarch’s glimpse of Laura in that Avignon church in the early 1300s may have ignited not only a never consummated passion, but also perhaps the humanist way of thinking. It seems to have precipitated a turning in the ship of human thought.
Even when driven by desire, lovers have often been star crossed, their mustangs parked or sidelined while they walk in the rain. The 12th century history of Abelard and Heloise, who were forced apart after Heloise became pregnant, is hardly unique. The Persian poet Nizami’s epic, The Story of Layla & Majnun,***** tells of 7th century lovers parted after their initial connection had been made. Much as their story encompasses great pain and even madness, there is a kind of reconciliation in the way that the lovers come to embody a completeness, becoming a greater whole even in their separateness and their individual solitude. Majnun’s final words become a prayer to his maker, but also to Layla. “You, my love. . .”, he says in the end. In this last breath, the Maker is combined with ‘my love’, in a way that makes them seem undifferentiated. After that utterance, there is nothing more to say. His words mark his full fusion, as breath, God, and his love become one unified expression of the universe in a single moment.
Many of the world’s great religious traditions, especially those in the Far East, acknowledge the essential generative aspects of the feminine. The Taoist text, the Tao Te Ching, is often attributed to a mysterious elder sage called Laozi (the old one), who is often thought to have lived around the 6th century bce, if he lived at all. Nevertheless, here is a translation of what is generally accepted to be chapter 6 from that text:
The life-force of the valley never dies–
This is called the dark female.
The gateway of the dark female–
This is called the root of the world.
Wispy and delicate, it only seems to be there,
Yet its productivity is bottomless.******
We may all be mystics, capable of such luminous leaps, but the frequent, common tragedies of human life do not always allow us enough room to make transcendent leaps. Like Hamlet, like Ophelia, we feel angry, hurt, and bewildered when people leave us. When beset by tragedy, or confronted by loss in any of its guises, we mourn in ways that, however small, are often transformative in some way too.
Even if we remain behind for a time, like Rengetsu,******* death hounds us into the very hollows of our lives. Yet, even in her retreat from the noisy dust of samsara, in her seclusion from the human world, Rengetsu meditates on regeneration:
Spring Wind
Eternal spring wind,
I know you won’t be too rough,
On the delicate
Branches and buds,
Of the weeping willow.
Weaving. Precarious new life, buds and branches, stemming from the still weeping willow against the fabric of the perennial wind. This senses the fabric of which we all are a part. Our origin, Hamlet and Ophelia’s nothing, the fair thought brings us here, where life continues to bud and branch in a constant remaking of itself.
Fertility, in thought, in love, in life, may become a struggle, but however violently we may strive against it, it remains an essential element of being for many of us. Even Hamlet, as much as he strives against it, speaks of the sexual with Ophelia when he sees her. Of all the fruit on the tree of life, our own sexuality often seems to be, for many people, the most compelling. As the well known poem by the great Vietnamese poetess, Hồ Xuân Hương (1772-1822) says:
My body is like the jackfruit on the branch:
“Jackfruit” by Hồ Xuân Hương********
My skin is coarse, my meat is thick.
Kind sir, if you love me, pierce me with your stick.
Caress me and sap will slicken your hands.
We tend to quicken at such thoughts, even involuntarily, and this may be part of a grander design. For as either the Bible or western novelist Louis L’Amour might remind us, it may well be better to be quick than dead, although the two states are never so far apart.
*Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death & Sensuality. Translated by Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986, p. 134 then p. 129.
**Rees, Emma L. E. The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History. New York: Bloomsbury Academic an Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017, Loc 163.
***There is some variance in this stage direction. Harold Jenkins notes about “grappling with him” that “Q1 has the direction ‘Hamle leapes in after Leartes’. This and the Elegy on Burbage (‘Of have I seen him leap into the grave’) are evidence of what was done in performance. But Granville-Barker (Prefaces, iii.162-3n.) argues that the action requires Laertes, the aggressor, to come out of the grave rather than Hamlet to leap in. Moreover, attendants must be able to part them. Neither the text nore the pattern of the action assists those who would find here a symbolic burial and resurrection.” Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Harold Jenkins. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomson, 2005, p. 391, note 252.
****From the operetta, The Sorcerer. Sullivan, Arthur, and W. S. Gilbert. The Authentic Gilbert and Sullivan Songbook: 92 Unabridged Selections from All 14 Operas, Reproduced from Early Vocal Scores. Compiled by Malcolm Binney and Peter Lavender. Edited by James Spero. New York: Dover Publications, 1977.
*****Nizami. The Story of Layla & Majnun. Translated by Rudolph Gelpke, Zia Inayat Khan, and Omid Safi. New Lebanon, NY: Omega Publications, 2011.
******Laozi. Daodejing “Making This Life Significant”: A Philosophical Translation. Translated by Roger L. Ames and David Undefined Hall. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003, p. 85. The original text:
谷神不死，是謂玄牝。
玄牝之門，是謂天地根。
綿綿若存，用之不勤。
From the section most often designated Chapter 6, please note that “dark” in this case does not have the same kinds of connotations that it might have in a text written in English. Rather, it suggests a kind of dark that might help define the light by its presence, something participatory instead of negative or exclusive.
*******The Rengetsu, was Otagaki Nobu (1791-1875). Having outlived two husbands, three children, she took orders as a Buddhist nun at the age of 33. By the time she was 45, her two other children and her beloved adoptive father had also died. Her luminous poetry reminds us of the ways in which even terrible tragedies may be transformed into beauty. This translation of “Spring Wind” is from: Rengetsu. Lotus Moon: The Poetry of Rengetsu. Translated by John Stevens. Buffalo: White Pine Press, 2015.
********Hồ, Xuân Hương. Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hồ Xuân Hương. Translated by John Balaban. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2000, p. 37