Our lives sometimes seem like paths through ever changing landscapes.
Clear days succeed storms. Rain and wind alternate with quiet, starlit nights. Gale lashed cypress. Gently swaying palm. Although life really isn’t so very long, it can seem interminable when we are in it.
When we find ourselves at odds, exhausted, spirit vexed, with our emotions in tatters, we may find ourselves transforming, dissolving, often back into the elements of which we are made, or transforming into something else entirely. Hamlet’s speech, from which the title line of this post has been taken, reflects his profound fatigue, his exasperation with his ongoing circumstances. His father suddenly dead, and his mother almost as suddenly married to an uncle he despises, has replaced his father with a loathed totem, a grotesque figurehead exercising authority over his mother, his kingdom of Denmark, and himself while life around him seems to go on in a kind of mockery of what it had been before his father died. The deeper wrong–that his uncle inhabits Hamlet’s father’s throne, which should by rights be Hamlets, festers out of sight, beneath the prince’s reddened vision of his mother walking, smiling, at his uncles side.
His own mother going to his uncle’s bed constitutes a remarkable betrayal as well. The mother charged by nature to nurture and protect him has abandoned him to lodge instead within the enemy camp. Her vague attempts at soothing seem inadequate not only in the effort, but also because they always end with falling night, when she retires with his uncle. Hamlet’s bitter rage and disappointment falls on deaf ears. His mental health disintegrates, his anger falling on deaf ears.
Yes, this is a familiar story. We know it, or its like, in life as well as we know it from the play.
O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,
Hamlet 1.2.133-64
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God, God,
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this:
But two months dead–nay, not so much, not two–
So excellent a king, that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and Earth,
Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on. And yet, within a month
–Let me not think on ’t; frailty, thy name is woman!–
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears–why she, even she
(O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer!)–married with my
uncle,
My father’s brother–but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules. Within a month,
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her gallèd eyes,
She married.–O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not, nor it cannot come to good.
But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.
Hamlet’s speech, his conception, is replete with fluidity. The world a walled garden possessed by weeds, his deceased father Hyperion, his mother Niobe, and himself, melting into dew, no more Hercules than his uncle is. His mother’s choices seem, to Hamlet, all animal, all beast that wants discourse of reason.
One of Hamlet’s first lines in the play, and the first uttered when he is alone, these lines reflect his bitter grief, articulated by frustrated anger at events. In performance, the tears may or may not be entirely internalised (in spite of the fact that acting coaches usually tell us that holding back tears on stage is more effective than crying–that it is better to maintain the unknown than to let Schrödinger’s cat out of the box entirely). However it may be performed, we see the urge towards the water, towards the dew, towards Niobe’s tears.*
Yes. We’ve been here already, visited Hamlet’s grief and rage in previous posts. Tell us something we don’t know. Tell more than the shrinking of boards at sea. Tell us more than the hunger or thirst attendant upon our own existence. Tell us more than merely how some people fight to see the world as fixed, fight to keep fluidity from being acknowledged, rage against the reed’s flexibility in the wind.
I come to be broken because of the nature of my attention
“everything goes but the poem” by Larry Kearney**
and the willingness of the picket fence.
People who experience the world from fearful perspectives often try to fence off change. Ward it off with symbols and incantations. Keep it away with garlic and a cross. Those threatened by ideas or perspectives which are different from what they see as ‘established’ often try to fix the universe in place–defining God or gods solely by particular hymns or scriptures as though the diving might be contained, prescribed, delineated. Moving a recognised capital to Jerusalem because a book says so, alternately ascribing or dismissing changes as the will of the divine. Truly believing reality to be set in particular rhythms and rhymes. Rosemarys and thymes. But what true chef ever simmered such a dish–measured in absolutes, sewn up with typefaces?
This denies a truth, and the very fluidity of our existence flies in the face of it. Rhythms change with light, winter melting into spring, absolutes becoming mere denials.
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
“Darkness” by George Gordon, Lord Byron
Perception, landscape, weather, gender, race, origin, and the whole host of experience attendant on our existence is not fixed. The only book in which it can be written is the unfolding book of existence itself. Even ‘law’ remains malleable, else why would we need barristers, courts, judges, legislative bodies, changing constitutions? Much as we uphold it, if our modern world operated according to the Code of Hammurabi (of 1754 bce) or even the Magna Carta (1215 ce) most of us would not recognise it.
Today, moreso than ever, struggles between the fixed and malleable camps threaten, literally, to tear our world apart. Those who are malleable seem to risk everything, their flexible standards uprooting everything we know. Yet, this is necessary. Because on the other hand, we have those world rulers promoting economic progress at all costs, even at the cost of the world itself (without which further economic progress and continued human existence, become impossible). Those who would always remain fixed, knocking on a table, ‘what’s real is real’ standing always firm and set about them, seem to be afraid of losing themselves. So they give up their entire world by holding onto it, by gripping too tightly to the past, by steering the ship of state so firmly against the horizon of the known that they fail to see the precipice that has formed beneath the sea ahead of them. Failing to listen. Falling off the end of the world.
They fear they will be like Antony looking at shifting clouds and proclaiming their unsettled nature:
ANTONY
Antony and Cleopatra 4.14.13-24
That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.
EROS
It does, my lord.
ANTONY
My good knave Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body. Here I am Antony,
Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave.
I made these wars for Egypt, and the Queen,
Whose heart I thought I had, for she had mine—
Which whilst it was mine had annexed unto ’t
A million more, now lost—she, Eros, has
Packed cards with Caesar and false-played my glory
Unto an enemy’s triumph.
Antony becomes water in water. Without the definition lent to him by Cleopatra’s love, his self dissolves as smaller water in greater water, losing the structure that made him Antony. One of the Triumvirate, one of the three rulers of the world, becomes immediately indistinct, his shape and substance failing, his entire being becoming an act of dissolution.
By fearing dissolution, white knuckling our grip upon the known, we miss the point. With our world rapidly dissolving away from us, or out from under us (which, we have little doubt now, it is also doing because of us, or because of our actions), the time has come for us to again assume the structure of our own myths that rest upon liminality as a source of creation. Like the will o the wisp, the fairies, or those “goddesses [who] create life by dancing”, so must we.*** The time has come for us to dance, to bend, to sway, to adopt our changing postures to the changing conditions of the world. In order to save it. Otherwise, we really do just walk away across the sand. The diminishing sand of our own existence.
Sunsets may be lovely, but few people wish to see their last.
For now, although we beg Eliot’s pardon, there is no more time.
And indeed there’ll be no time,
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There won’t be time, there won’t be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There’s only time to murder or create,
Small time to save the works and days of hands.****
Else it is gone. All of it. Water in water. The dancing at an end. Our whole existence and that of all of our descendents resolved into a dew.
“Nothing will come of nothing.” In this case, Lear is right. And there will be no time afterwards for us to speak again.
*After offending the gods, Niobe’s fourteen children were slaughtered, causing her to weep ceaselessly. Subsequently turned to stone (and usually associated with Mount Sipylus in Turkey, which formation resembles a female face) she weeps to this day. A formation of limestone, Mount Sipylus is known as the ‘weeping rock’ due to the water that seeps through its porous matrix.
**Kearney, Larry. Everything Goes but the Poem + Calliope. San Francisco: Listening Chamber, 2010.
***Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. The Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology, and the Origins of European Dance. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013, p.39.
****Liberally influenced by “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”, with apologies to T.S. Eliot.