There’s this old story. You’ve no doubt heard it, but it bears telling again:
A fox makes his way across the countryside when he comes to a vineyard where ripening grapes hang abundant on the vines. They look delicious, full, juicy, and glowing in the late sun.
Having travelled a long way without any food, the fox suddenly realises that he is famished. He licks his lips as the plump grapes beckon to him, but the grapes are too high, and try as he might, the fruit remains out of his reach.
The fox finally departs, still hungry, muttering to himself that the grapes are green and sour anyway, and that they aren’t worth the effort. The “sour grapes” myth has come to represent bitterness and disappointment–a rationalisation that something difficult or impossible to attain is probably undesirable or bad in any case.
Aphra Behn (1640-1689), one of the earliest English women writers to make a living from writing, wrote the following quatrain:
The fox who longed for grapes, beholds with pain
from Francis Barlow’s illustrated edition of Aesop’s fables (1687)
The tempting clusters were too high to gain;
Grieved in his heart he forced a careless smile,
And cried, ‘They’re sharp and hardly worth my while.‘
In typical fashion, the fable describes a bit more than just a fox’s experience trying to reach some fruit. As many critics have noted, the grapes themselves may either be sour or not (or somewhere in between), but after the fox fails to reach Schrödinger’s fruit, that fruit sours within his mind. The fox’s conception of the grapes sours as his experience sours, and the seeds of bitterness grow into sour grapes that hang on a vine within him–and these grapes remain sour. It becomes immaterial whether the actual grapes are sour or not because this particular bunch of grapes sour forever in the fox’s interior landscape. Further, once his worldly defeat prompts him to change his mind about the grapes’ desirability, he walks away from the vineyard still carrying a sourness that he has created inside himself. The smile that he forces is false, only assumed in order to mask his deep disappointment at being incapable of reaching the grapes.
The dual quality of the grapes, suggested by their potential, is interesting. Like the well known story of Schrödinger’s cat*, before the fox reaches the grapes, they exist in a state that is indeterminate, being both sweet and sour. Unlike in Schrödinger’s thought experiment, however, because the fox never reaches the grapes (no one looks inside the cat’s box to see whether it were actually alive or dead), the grapes remain both potentially sweet and sour to the outside observer, to the reader of the fable who remains outside of the fox’s immediate personal experience.
However, the fox also makes a kind of choice. “Grieved in his heart”, he subscribes to the idea that the grapes must be sour. So, although he can’t know how the grapes actually taste, they remain sour for him. Bending his reality, the fox banishes any remaining uncertainty within himself. Significantly, when disappointment enters his being, it not only sours his internal conception of grapes, but it sours a small part of him as well.
Yes, the fox’s forced perspective is a rationalisation, but life is full of those, isn’t it? Eating particular foods, working at particular sorts of things, being one way or another, all of these so often involve some element of rationalisation. We make decisions, but the decisions also make us. They define and shape us as we move on to perhaps become those who shun grapes as opposed to those who devour them.
As the Taoists might have told us, if you fill your bedroom with books, those books will steal increments of your soul as you sleep. If you read those books, they will also steal bits of your soul, but in slightly different ways. Anything with which we engage will simultaneously engage with us, making our observation or our participation mutual. Nietzsche wrote, “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby becomes a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”**
Because that in which we participate also participates in us. Here is lay Buddhist Wenxiang, who was born in China in 1210:***
Grief
–trans. Thomas Cleary
A million men gallop afar
into the dust of battle;
how many can keep the body
they had when they set out?
Who knows the number of generals
gone to war since ancient times?
All of them have become the spring
in the green grass of the borders.
Those who participate in war, in the dust of battle, eventually become the dust. They become the grass, and the seasons sweeping repeatedly over the borders, no longer conscious of those demarcations over which they offered up their human lives. The generals, in attempting to subdue the world, gallop across its surface. In the end, they participate so fully in that surface that the generals themselves disappear into the very dust across which they sped so earnestly.
In the opening scene of Thomas Middleton’s 1606 play, The Revenger’s Tragedy, Vindice enters carrying a skull. The skull is his wife, Gloriana’s, who was poisoned by the Duke nine years before the beginning of the play. Again, things that we carry with us become a part of our internal landscape. Imagine carrying your murdered wife’s skull with you for over nine years. Nine years. Carrying a skull. Plotting your revenge. It seems almost like an early modern precursor to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Death and war, riding the bereaved and the soldier (who may be the same person) side by side.
The skull has become an integral part of Vindice’s psychological landscape, so much so that it is arguably now a part of himself. His opening monologue offers explication:
Thee, when thou wert apparel’d in thy flesh,
The Revenger’s Tragedy 1.1.31-7****
The old duke poison’d,
Because thy purer part would not consent
Unto his palsy-lust, for old men lustful
Do show like young men angry, eager-violent,
Outbid like their limited performances.
Oh, ‘ware an old man hot and vicious!
In a play filled with especially loathsome characters, the terrible old Duke makes an appealing target for an audience whose descendents would be watching a cinematic action revenge movie four hundred years later. (And there are really so many of these):
Or, as we said, this is Vindice, who lost his wife, not Hamlet, who lost his father:
Revenge and razors. We can’t begin to measure the weight or significance of human loss. People carry loss with them variously throughout their lives, and for all his gruesome obsession, Vindice has been subject a past grief that has reshaped his world and his very being. Disappointments on such scale discourage us, sometimes leaving too much life still to live after our life has ended.
Then what of Shakespeare’s infamous villain, Iago, in the play Othello? He destroys the lives around him, fanning the fires of Othello’s insecurities and jealousy until they become a conflagration. In the opening scene, Iago tells Roderigo that, ” I follow [Othello] to serve my turn upon him” (O 1.1.41). He tells Roderigo that because Othello passed Iago over, giving Cassio a promotion in his stead, he will revenge himself upon the Moor. Iago later says, “I hate the Moor/ And it is thought abroad, that ‘twixt my sheets/ He has done my office” (O 1.3.385-7). Then, he immediately admits that he doesn’t know if this is true. Yet, these are his justifications for building and setting in motion his terribly destructive psychological machine.
That the Moor is racially different makes him the ultimate outsider, perhaps prone to self doubts that others might not have. Yet, Iago is an outsider too, with few real friends, distant even from his own wife, an aging ensign passed over for promotion.
In terms of the play, however, one of the most noted problems with Iago is that the reasons he gives for his destructive hatred of others seem to be wholly inadequate. Like that in a Victorian fairytale, the punishment he metes out to Othello seems disproportionate, brutal, and deadly in its finality. While deserving people are sometimes passed over for advancement, and while the slighted may seethe with resentment at their loss, seldom does it seem to merit prolonged psychological torture and murder. Iago’s purported grievance is not commensurate with his vengeance. He seems like a gunman at a festival or a public shooter in the United States, and we can’t help but wonder how Iago might have become this way.
If enough rain falls, we may become more like the rain. If hot sun beats down relentlessly, we may become gradually acclimated to the heat, and more susceptible to cold. Our surroundings may influence us to a degree, but still relatively few of us would begin to think seriously of gunning down strangers, mailing bombs in an attempt to kill distant recipients, or blowing up buildings full of unsuspecting strangers. These deliberations do not depend from the weather. These are not acts of precipitation. These seem much more like the results of the kind of slow poison that Iago pours into Othello’s ear throughout the play–the infection that eventually prompts Othello to murder his innocent wife, Desdemona, in their bed.
But where did Iago get this toxin with which he infects Othello? Where does such evil originate? Perhaps it is like the grain of sand that irritates the oyster. Once the sand is inside the mollusc’s shell, the animal famously secrets its nacre around the uncomfortable particle, smoothing its edges but also incrementally increasing its size so that the irritation increases as well. Eventually, layer upon layer, the grain of sand becomes a pearl–a wondrous sea gem, lustrous and vaguely luminescent.
Yet, the oyster is singular in its product. What galls humans seldom if ever produces the same kind of effect. People tend to store their poisons up, stacking their grievances like boxes in a dark warehouse, sometimes, too frequently, storing them like kegs of gunpowder, where they stand ready to ignite at the slightest spark.
There are hints that Iago may have been carrying poison inside him for a long period of time. His first line in the play opens with the curse “S’blood”, (an abbreviation for ‘God’s blood’) suggesting violence and a divine finality rolled into a single breath. The whole line is, “S’blood, but you’ll not hear me. If ever I did dream/ of such a matter, abhor me” (O 1.1.4-5). Although we don’t yet know what subject he’s discussing with Roderigo, already the line sounds like a lie. In fact, it sounds more than a little like the fox’s lie in Aesop’s fable. A overly cautious nonchalance seems to lurk beneath the syntax of “If ever I did dream”, and it chafes at credulity. The opening curse seems slightly too emphatic, perhaps a little too strongly stated for Iago’s protestation. Interestingly, the line also includes the core of “you’ll not hear me”, which prefigures Iago’s silence once the true extent of his villainy has been revealed at the end of the play.
Further, Iago seems more vexed with Othello’s choice for the lieutenant’s office–“a Florentine,/ A fellow almost damned in a fair wife/ That never set a squadron in the field/ Nor the division of a battle knows/ More than a spinster” (O 1.1.19-23). It is not Iago’s being “worth no worse a place” (10), but rather the man whom Othello has chosen in his stead that seems to bother him the most. If we listen carefully, we can hear the jealousy that infects Iago’s being. The same jealousy that blooms like toxic algae in the sea, to eventually inhabit the entire play. The jealousy that Iago plants in Othello’s mind has first been carefully cultivated inside Iago’s soul.
For in the end, the things we carry tend to be the traces of our lives. They might be termed scars, but they are unseen marks, most often left behind by some kind of wounding. A wound. A blessing (a word derived from the old English word for blood that was sprinkled on altars to consecrate them–offering God’s blood) . The words assume their older meanings, as over our lives we become the Fisher Kings and Queens, watching our childhood fields recede gradually from existence. In our mind’s eyes, we still see them, carpeted with the undulating pulses of fireflies in the growing dusk, ripples of light extending to the edges of the bygone woods. When we look behind us in the mirror, the great green walls of the Forest of Arden stand again for just a second. Then they are gone and we remember how quiet snow could be. Sound of birds at sunset.
Life repeatedly presents us with the strangeness of loss, the seeming madness of ongoing days in the face of emptiness:
It seems likely that Iago may enter the action of Othello already deeply wounded. Dripping his own blood on the altar of the play, swallowing his own poison like saliva, eating his own griefs as they eat him in return. His childhood birds have long since fled and blood itself has supplanted any god he might have had. His only trust lies in silence or prevarication. His only real remaining connection seems to be to audiences who are not of his own world, stretching across theatrical boundaries, reaching over barriers of art and fiction to reach observers whose very existence must seem to him like madness. His spirit, his being, has become a twist of cruel invention and he has become a poison unto himself.
Of course, he will die anyway, although not in our view. Desdemona and Emilia, the murdered wives, will haunt the audience enough, albeit perhaps Roderigo is a kind of murdered wife as well–a scarecrow murdered in the field before the gruesome feast. Trust breaks in all directions, and the brittle poison shatters in outward radiating cracks like Brabantio’s broken heart. Othello takes his own life and Iago alone is left to tell thee, except that he will not do so, having willed himself to perpetual silence. That’s the poison of swallowing our griefs, of keeping them too deeply within ourselves. We fall silent, stopping the language that Toni Morrison affirms “may be the measure of our lives.”
With language goes humanity, and this is the great tragedy in a world where literature becomes marginalised by profit motive. We stop studying poetry. We stop reading Shakespeare. We don’t produce or see it because there’s no real money in it. It matters not that, as Christopher Zoukis tells us, “Studying Shakespeare teaches complex language and literacy skills, critical thinking about human emotions and the consequences of choices, emotional intelligence, empathy, self-reflection and gives rise to the exploration of new ways of thinking.”***** Instead, we sacrifice our humanity for gain. We lose the ability to identify and participate in each other, and instead we begin to lament only lost sour grapes. We lose expression, and we lose meaning.
The voiceless reach out with violence in place of those words we no longer have. Our voices may become the voice of distrust, of prejudice, of weapons. Knives. Handguns. Assault rifles. Angry words of the frustrated and impotent turn blindly against our fellows. By the time we bang out those awful bloody cadences, true communication has long ago become impossible. Poison has eaten us whole and by participating only in that poison, we have become the poison that we may still believe we are somehow trying to prevent. Our own poison blinds us and we lose any ability to move forward in human ways. Only inhuman tools remain at hand–inhuman tools that we must moderate in order to save and support our collective humanity. In order to speak amongst ourselves.
How many more might choose a language beyond language to try to ease their pain? How many tomorrow? How many next week? How many children?
Then, how can we help? Only by taking the inhuman tools from our own bloodstained poisoned hands and sitting down to talk again. As painful as that may be, it will certainly be a better path than perpetuating and reinforcing the cup of poison in our hands, the one from which we all drink. We must set that cup down now. We must take up the cup of our common humanity before our own poison kills us all.
*In Erwin Schrödinger’s 1935 thought experiment about the cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor (e.g. Geiger counter) detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.
2*Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Aphorism 146.
3*Note that Genghis Khan invaded northern China in 1215, around the same time that the Magna Carta was signed in England. Wenxiang grew up amidst a terrifyingly shifting landscape of war and political uncertainty. Wenhsiang. Sleepless Nights: Verses for the Wakeful. Translated by Thomas F. Cleary. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995.
4*Kyd, Thomas, Anonymous, George Chapman, and Cyril Tourneur. Four Revenge Tragedies: The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, The Atheist’s Tragedy. Edited by Katharine Eisaman Maus. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008. Note that The Revenger’s Tragedy was previously attributed to Cyril Tourneur, but now is most frequently thought to have been written by Thomas Middleton. Katharine Maus’s collection designates the author as ‘anonymous’.
5*Christopher Zoukis’s article may be read here: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/prison-shakespeare-programs-have-dramatic-impact-on_b_58dc09d7e4b04ba4a5e25019
lost sour grapes…which we never possessed, i.e., romanticized past culture(s)
I love you, Johnny.
Thank you, Fancy!