In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the strange hobgoblin, Robin Goodfellow, seems to embody an ancient remnant of the old fairy faith of the British Isles. Also known as ‘Puck’, the character is often refered to in the script as ‘Robin Goodfellow’, perhaps for the same reason that fairies as a whole were often called ‘the good neighbours’ by those folk who believed in them most strongly. One never wanted to refer to them directly, for fear of drawing their attentions, and one never wished to insult them, even inadvertently, because they were as often magically powerful as they were tempramentally capricious.
Various ideas survive about the good neighbours themselves, and there is some imprecision about their relative immortality, although Shakespeare’s fairies in Dream distinguish themselves most readily from the ranks of other characters in the play, all of whom are ‘mortal’. Puck’s darker perspective on the matter of mortality has been touched on in this blog previously, but this close to Halloween, it might be worth remembering Robin’s unusual monologue:
ROBIN
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.388-407
Now the hungry lion roars
And the wolf behowls the moon,
Whilst the heavy ploughman snores,
All with weary task fordone.
Now the wasted brands do glow,
Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud,
Puts the wretch that lies in woe
In remembrance of a shroud.
Now it is the time of night
That the graves all gaping wide,
Every one lets forth his sprite,
In the churchway paths to glide.
And we fairies, that do run
By the triple Hecate’s team
From the presence of the sun,
Following darkness like a dream,
Now are frolic. Not a mouse
Shall disturb this hallowed house.
I am sent with broom before
To sweep the dust behind the door.
This monologue speaks to much of human fading, and academic opinions vary about Puck’s sweeping, and there is a well known academic article that speaks to the incongruousness, or not, of Puck’s apparent domesticity.* Yet, when we look at the sweeping through the lens of the speech itself, it may be that what is swept is as interesting, or even more interesting than the activity of sweeping it. Dust. Following the tenor of Puck’s words, dust suggests the earthly remnant of the dead themselves. It is the substance that they (we) eventually become.
Maybe what everything becomes. Dried, pressed, flowers certainly, the memories of affection, but also cars and edifices, and all the testaments of human influence on the world. Certainly the Bible contains enough mention of it, starting with the curse on Adam as he and Eve are expelled from Paradise:
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
Genesis 3:19
Is Puck removing the specter, the reminder, of death from a doorway to a house about to host a wedding? In the annals of human ritual, weddings seem to look especially to the future, to the idea of promise and increase, marking the establishment of new households, speaking of union and generative potential. It may be that Puck’s sweeping marks not just a ritual purification, but a ritual safeguard, something done to temporarily banish death’s presence at a wedding celebration which is itself an affirmation of ongoing life in spite of death elsewhere and elsewhen.
We seek to assuage death at such times, to soften the awareness of perpetual decay.
Still, it seems that people romanticise it. Becoming a ghost. There’s something about old haunted places that appeals to some less lighted corner of the psyche. Children are often entranced by ghost stories. They may be one of the only things about my childhood that I really remember.
Like most processes, becoming a ghost, being a ghost, is probably much less like what people think it might be like. Winding sheets and moonlight, curtains blowing across darkened hallways. Strange lights moving in the night.
That’s what Puck seems to conjure.
Funny thing, remberance. What would ghosts remember? Would recall be like sleeping? Awareness in tatters. Fragments of knowing, doing, being. Flotsam and jetsam turned in. . . In what? Some kind of tide we cannot name.
Not that ghosts probably get out much either. Not like in the tales. Not rising and wandering at night, no gathering at fervid crossroads or flung like autumn leaves through restless air beneath the moon. More like dust and long silence. Night and silence, if you will, except that night isn’t really part of it. Neither is day, to be fair. For these delineations fade as well, and vagueness sits in the throne of all attention and remembrance.
Not like dozing. More like awareness plotted as points on graph, and not as though one remembers in betweens. At least I shouldn’t think so. There might be tea, for example, but there might also be long queues and one might never quite remember how one came to be there. Just waiting. Then sipping. Sometimes, there might be others at a table. Sometimes someone might speak. Sometimes not.
Each awareness brings a new sense that perhaps some long time has passed. Years or even centuries unremembered, tumbled into an unseen abyss of time. Not like living days, or weeks, or years, but more like periodically and momentarily observing them as they move past. No sharpness, no peculiar definition to experience, which becomes more like a waking kind of sleep.
Recollection of being adored once too. Or perhaps adoring someone else. If that’s even how that works. Recall that there was this ‘feeling’ that seemed big, huge even. Like a giant troll beneath a mountain, blocking the way so that we must find other ways to go.
Would one remember fragrance? Orchids? Roses? Would we recall our mother’s roses? Great banks of them spilling over fences and walls at some place that I think we might have been? Would we recall the lilacs that our father planted when we were small?
Perhaps memory becomes a watercolour, spilled across the tumbled stems of wonder. And fragrance like something sweet and lost, marvelous and aching, just out of reach and our expression. Talk of planting this or that near or upon a grave. Rosemary for rememberance. Roses for sweetness. Tenderness and growth as a living placeholder for what lives no more.
Fading from the world can be easy even when we are alive. Lose family, love, health, or a career track. We remember what they might have said, what we might have done, left isolated in some place where we feel we don’t belong. Cut off from friends, colleagues, cherished surroundings, feelings of home. Lose life’s anchors and the meaning may quickly slip away. This can prompt a glance, a gaze, a looking towards the dead. Sometimes a yearning for anticipated peace.
But what do the dead remember? What do they recall? If anything, is it merely a gradual breaking down of memory? Is it like life in that even faces may fade, as fires burn low? Do the layers of existence gradually erode down to a scent of dust. Hair, skin, the human texture and fragrance, all gone like last year’s roses?
As for walking in the night, one wonders how the dead would walk, or would they merely glide? It would seem that the dead would have no need to go anywhere. Coffin or jar, dust or ashes, it hardly matters. No need to stretch long irrelevant legs or stride forth against shadowed parts of days. Owls might call the dead, but might the dead not hear them as readily as we do from our living rooms? No. It would seem unlikely that the dead might be summoned forth by story devices like fairies or witches. Unlikely to be called from any vasty deep. Merely at rest forever.
Is that what being a ghost might be? Fragments of recorded lives. Memory flowers dried in absent time.
We all know stories of the ghosts who have unfinished business. Vengeful spectres rising from the mists of their wrongs, facing those who wronged them. Murdered subjects of despotic rulers. The murdered wife’s skull screaming at a certain hour every night. Footsteps on the staircase at 8 o’clock, treading to the thirteenth stair. Brown Lady of Raynam Hall, perhaps actually Lady Dorothy Walpole, kept from her children after an alleged adultery. Her phantom was supposedly captured by photographers for Country Life in one of the most celebrated ghost photographs of all time:
Yet, for the most part, we usually hope for some sort of remembrance. Even strive for it. That we will remember the dead, that they will know that we remember them, and that they might remember us somehow. Perhaps not as individuals. Maybe as beautiful points of light. Some of them brighter or with colours, but all brilliant, which might be a better remembrance in any case.
Do the dead really await anything? Or are they simply dead, perhaps in some restful sense that may be difficult for us, from here, to understand? Near us? Far from us? Perhaps not nearly so sad.
Still, I can’t help but hope that someone might plant roses on my grave. Or perhaps peonies, which my mother loved. White. The kind that grow into huge and rambling tumbles. Not for me. For those who might come after. Even if they only pause a moment to admire.
For me, I expect little and I hope for less, albeit I do hope that there might be tea.
*Wall, Wendy. “Why Does Puck Sweep?: Fairylore, Merry Wives, and Social Struggle.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no. 1 (spring 2001): 67-106.