Author: Shakespeare spectre

“Time means nothing to a ghost.”

Well, that’s not always strictly true. Sometimes life gets busy.

While we do not wish to set friends aside, even temporarily, sometimes we must do so in order to attend to other things. Still, the corridor remains, the long hallway of the familiar, punctuated by various doors and shadows. When we do walk it once again, it is like a field, different even while remaining the same.

Familiarity itself may not be a mytheme like a tree or a shadow, but in the vernacular, it is still a thing.

The familiar may be an old friend or even a group of friends, but it may also be much more than that. Friends tend to support one another as a wall does a vine.

But familiarity itself is a presence, a being–something which is ‘there’ even when intangible. Familiarity’s quality may vary widely. Things, places, people, and sets of circumstances may be endearing, charming, cozy, and also eerie, unsettling, and terrifying.

Friends generally seem to follow certain guidelines. Friends often forgive unintentional (and sometimes intentional) faults and trespasses. Friends connect on a level closer to the bedrock of shared experience and human warmth. They may see each other as beautiful. Even one who embodies a mountain of neuroses or character flaws may become wonderful through the lens of friendship. Connection may be a perfect blend of creation and relation, curious and ever moving.

Friendship’s familiarity allows room, making space for otherness in its inclusion. We rally beneath humanity’s unified flag. “She may be x, but she’s our x!”

Friends share discoveries and secrets. Here, Hamlet unexpectedly meets his old university friend, Horatio, at Elsinore:

HORATIO Hail to your Lordship.
HAMLET I am glad to see you well.
Horatio—or I do forget myself!
HORATIO 
The same, my lord, and your poor servant ever.
HAMLET 
Sir, my good friend. I’ll change that name with you.
And what make you from Wittenberg, Horatio?—
Marcellus?
MARCELLUS My good lord.
HAMLET 
I am very glad to see you. To Barnardo. Good
even, sir.—
But what, in faith, make you from Wittenberg?
HORATIO 
A truant disposition, good my lord.
HAMLET 
I would not hear your enemy say so,
Nor shall you do my ear that violence
To make it truster of your own report
Against yourself. I know you are no truant.
But what is your affair in Elsinore?
We’ll teach you to drink deep ere you depart.
HORATIO 
My lord, I came to see your father’s funeral.
HAMLET 
I prithee, do not mock me, fellow student.
I think it was to see my mother’s wedding.
HORATIO 
Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon.
HAMLET 
Thrift, thrift, Horatio. The funeral baked meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven
Or ever I had seen that day, Horatio!
My father—methinks I see my father.
HORATIO 
Where, my lord?
HAMLET In my mind’s eye, Horatio.
HORATIO 
I saw him once. He was a goodly king.
HAMLET 
He was a man. Take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.
HORATIO 
My lord, I think I saw him yesternight.
HAMLET Saw who?
HORATIO 
My lord, the King your father.
HAMLET The King my father?
HORATIO 
Season your admiration for a while
With an attent ear, till I may deliver
Upon the witness of these gentlemen
This marvel to you.
HAMLET For God’s love, let me hear!

Hamlet 1.2.165-205

Horatio has come with the guards to tell Hamlet about his father’s ghost walking the battlements at night. The dialogue walks us through greeting, support, disclosure, the undertone suggesting the kind of quiet familiarity shared by friends. Hamlet protests against Horatio’s description of himself as “truant”. Horatio quietly agrees with Hamlet’s assessment of his own mother’s hasty wedding following his father’s death. “Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon.” In friendship’s river, mutual regard flows through agreement and protective sentiment.

The dialogue builds to the revelations about Hamlet’s father while it also projects the ease between the two characters, reflecting the comfortable accord which so often exists between longtime friends.

Naturally, friends need not necessarily be ‘newsy’. Merely sitting in company, ‘being’ with each other may be enough. In friendship, familiarity may be marked by togetherness without expectation, without any need to fill voids with conversation. Such quiet community is part of human experience, often becoming central to the repository of our memories.

We sit on a bench surveying our surroundings. Hearing the birds. Seeing our own past.

Vast is the literature of memoir, which cannot help but veer into reminiscence. Frank Waters, the “Grandfather of Southwestern Literature” wrote his appropriately titled Of Time and Change about the Taos Art Colony. Many famous artists traveled to or through the area. People like Robinson Jeffers, Ansel Adams, H.D. Lawrence (who is buried on a mountainside outside of Taos), Willa Cather, and Aldous Huxley. Most haunting about Waters’ memoir, however, are his memories of his friends, Mabel Dodge Luhan and her fourth husband, Tony Luhan, and how they aged and changed as the Taos Colony times came to a close.

All of us who have been lucky enough to have friends know such moments. Sitting with friends, or sitting without them, and recalling them and others. Recalling what we did when and where and how it all was.

Shakespeare knew this too:

SHALLOW Ha, ’twas a merry night. And is Jane Nightwork
alive?
FALSTAFF She lives, Master Shallow.
SHALLOW She never could away with me.
FALSTAFF Never, never. She would always say she could
not abide Master Shallow.
SHALLOW By the Mass, I could anger her to th’ heart.
She was then a bona roba. Doth she hold her own
well?
FALSTAFF Old, old, Master Shallow.
SHALLOW Nay, she must be old. She cannot choose but
be old. Certain, she’s old, and had Robin Nightwork
by old Nightwork before I came to Clement’s Inn.
SILENCE That’s fifty-five year ago.
SHALLOW Ha, cousin Silence, that thou hadst seen that
that this knight and I have seen!—Ha, Sir John, said
I well?
FALSTAFF We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master
Shallow.
SHALLOW That we have, that we have, that we have. In
faith, Sir John, we have. Our watchword was “Hem,
boys.” Come, let’s to dinner, come, let’s to dinner.
Jesus, the days that we have seen! Come, come.

Henry IV, part 2, 3.2.204-26

Sometimes our old friends have become overfilled with themselves–the Zen teacup overflowing onto the saucer and then the floor. Still, we may indulge them, allowing them to speak on, whistling against the wind, to talk it out.

Old friends need not necessarily be human. Familiarity extends beyond the strictly human realm. Not only may objects be friends, but they may be amongst the most constant friends we have.

In many ways, objects may be more dependable than human friends. They may be more constant and more durable. The kettle never minds what kind of tea one makes. It never argues. It only sounds a whistle when the water’s ready.

Often, in human terms, the ‘auld lang syne’, the ‘old long since’, may be demons as much as angels. Lives are filled with vagaries and strangenesses. Annoying people. Inconstant. Traitors. Trespassers. The proud and sanctimonious. Why is pride the first sin? Because it defied the Lord in scripture? Or because the humans who deemed it so found it the most annoying sin of all. No one wants to listen to that guy who knows everything. (Take note you humans, and ye ghosts.)

Sometimes, like the great Ralph Stanley, one senses the inevitable lateness of the hour.

Death may be the greatest equalizer, the great peacemaker. The grave truly is a fine and private place, Mr. Marvell. Yet, death may also be, as Don Juan Matus supposedly said to Carlos Castañeda, “the only wise advisor that we have.”**

Perhaps fancy too. Sex going hand in hand along with death. The ever turning wheel of beginnings and endings.

Chloë No, it’s all because of sex.

Valentine Really?

Chloë That’s what I think. The universe is deterministic, all right, just like Newton said, I mean it’s trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t supposed to be in that part of the plan.

Valentine Ah. The attraction that Newton left out. All the way back to the apple in the garden.***

There are those times in life when we return to old friends, old lovers, or old acquaintance for any number of reasons. To say something previously left unsaid. Voice a grievance. Apologize. Make peace.

Hannah What does it mean?

Valentine Not what you’d like it to.

Hannah Why not?

Valentine Well, for one thing, she’d be famous.

Hannah No, she wouldn’t. She was dead before she had time to be famous . . .****

Time always catches us. Old death may suddenly turn on the lights on the brim of his hat and show us the empty house with cold wind blowing through it. Sometimes we return too late. We miss the nick of time. It eludes us, and we founder. Then we listen to what Hugh Laurie describes as “the minor key”–which is death itself.

We always tell ourselves that we will call. We will bump into them. We will drop a line, a text, an email. Tomorrow. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Well, you know the rest. We stand by the grave in solemn clothes while Hamlet jumps in. Ophelia has gone. Floated away, wreathed in blossoms singing snatches of old songs. In the end, Horatio alone is left to tell thee. Yet, even through time’s turn of the screw the familiar endures.

Strangely, oddly, peculiarly familiar. Familiarity wears any number of faces. It appears in any number of guises. It may arise in genuine friendships precipitated from an original enmity like the fox and the crow. They may be a familiarity of time, forged out of ancient recollection.

The title line for this post is misleading because it is incomplete. Spoken by Cardinal Pandolf in King John, the opening phrase suggests a dissolution, a complete disintegration of form, order, and (as Pandolf deliberately implies) meaning. The whole line underscores something else:

All form is formless, order orderless,
Save what is opposite to England’s love.
Therefore to arms! be champion of our church,
Or let the church, our mother, breathe her curse,
A mother’s curse, on her revolting son.
France, thou mayst hold a serpent by the tongue,
A chafed lion by the mortal paw,
A fasting tiger safer by the tooth,
Than keep in peace that hand which thou dost hold.

King John 3.1.178

Legate from the Pope, Pandolf represents the Pope’s spiritual authority, and at this moment in the play, he opens his speech with a vertiginous moment. Formless form. Orderless order. The words preceding the word “save” push us. Ideas that all form might actually be formless unbalance us on the lip of a precipice. Substance drops away and we are in danger of tumbling into the abyss of chaos and dissolution.

Pandolf voices a plasticity often associated with madness or psychedelic states. Forms melt and dissolve, potentially threatening to merge into each other. The language suggests the possibility of different emergent shapes or forms, derived from previously unconsidered associations. Shakespeare frequently uses such metaphorical mechanisms. When we have our footing, we know a hawk from a handsaw, we know that owls are not bakers’ daughters.

Still, Shakespeare’s language so frequently leads us elsewhere. Beckoned out of familiar parallel, we might be compared to a summer’s day. Or we may be led into the melting language of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the final act is bookended with the idea of dreams. The fifth act opens with the Duke’s doubts:

HIPPOLYTA 
’Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.
THESEUS 
More strange than true. I never may believe
These antique fables nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to
heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.1-18

And the act closes with Puck’s monologue where fairy melts into character melts into player:

ROBIN 
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this and all is mended:
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend.
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearnèd luck
Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long.
Else the Puck a liar call.
So good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

5.1.440-55

Visions become dreams become goodnight become applause.

Shifting reality. Psychedelic indeed.

Yet, an experience with which we all are at least somewhat familiar. As a more modern writer described it:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive….” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

Then if was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses.*

The fantastic shift from one reality to another. From day to night. Sky to bats to beer facilitated tans. Bear in mind that these are drug imbibing professionals. Please don’t try this at home.

Not that we need the drugs. We can simply set off, proclaiming a new reality, a new way of expression:

CITIZENS
children of the night,
bearers of the day torch: 
scorched and burned. 
BURN NOT.
the dam is broken. 
the curse is fled.
once muddied and still,
the river runs 
RED!

"ALL
those ships that never sailed
the ones with their seacocks open
that were scuttled in their stalls
TODAY
i bring them back
HUGE AND INTRANSITORY
and let them sail
FOREVER!"**

Same landscapes may differ depending on the perspective. As Tom Lehrer reminds us, a little hug becomes huge instantly if you just add silent “e”:

Cans become canes. Cubs become cubes. All very cozy. Transformation. Butterflies, yes. But transformation may also be terrifying. Hunter S. Thompson’s bats, and also wolves, as we can see from David Naughton’s portrayal of David Kessler’s first werewolf transformation:

That the wholesome might be quickly subsumed by the unholy or diseased is not new. Shakespeare’s general Coriolanus, who hates the plebeians, asks them “What’s the matter, you dissentious rogues,/ That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,/ Make yourselves scabs?” He sees the common people themselves almost as a disease, a kind of underlying lycanthropy of opinion which at the slightest agitation erupts into the scabrous.

Not only landscapes may vary from day:

into night:

But we may also forget ourselves, or even transform momentarily. Gary Snyder notes a moment when when the America of his own past seemed almost like a love to him again:

I WENT INTO THE MAVERICK BAR

I went into the Maverick Bar
In Farmington, New Mexico.
And drank double shots of bourbon
                                          backed with beer.
My long hair was tucked up under a cap
I'd left the earring in the car.

Two cowboys did horseplay
                                           by the pol tables,
A waitress asked us
                                            where you from?
a country-and-western band began to play
"We don't smoke Marijuana in Muskokie"
And with the next song
                                             a couple began to dance.

They held each other like in High School dances 
                                              in the fifties;
I recalled when I worked in the woods
                                              and the bars of Madras, Oregon.
That short-haired joy and roughness--
                                              America--your stupidity.
I could almost love you again.

We left--onto the freeway shoulders--
                                              under the tough old stars--
In the shadow of bluffs
                                              I came back to myself,
To the real work, to
                                              "What is to be done."***

For truth may be scraped up wherever we are standing. Wherever we are sitting. Drinking. Falling. We all become werewolves, bats, falling down the rabbit hole whole. We scratch ourselves, less good at Kerouacian “rolling under the stars”, and better and better at sex and violins.

SNL got it right, of course, and I could show more except corporate limitations on availability restrict such freedoms. The television show is owned. The material is owned. Performances are owned. As America has become better at violence, we have also become better (as has the world) at owning things. At transforming things, ideas, impulses, and human activity into territory. Fencing things off. Old ideas of “Don’t fence me in” be damned. The transformation has become one of fencing for dollars.

We sacrifice ourselves on the altars of Mammon, transforming corporations and our own acquisition into gods. These gods provide not just our fulfillment, but also our expression. We are what we drive, watch, eat. We are the mighty thought trains upon which we hitch a ride. Not what we build. Not what we paint. Not what we write. What we create.

We found our big rock candy mountain, but it now rots our teeth and our minds to paraphrase Kevin McCallister.

Watch the American shows on Netflix. Then watch the offerings from any other country. French. Korean. See a difference? Is America leading the pack? In what? Perhaps it’s just me.

In one sense, Cardinal Pandolf was right. When we fall away from the path of the true and righteous, we lose not only ourselves, but also the universe. We cannot gather rosebuds because our hands melt away from us. Our agency is lost to mindless dithering–to mere rhetorical allegiances. Dali’s memory clocks melt even as we rush to meet our impossible schedules, with our feet sticking to the streets as we try to run.

We sacrifice art and thought. We become John Wilkes Booth instead of Edwin, and our actor becomes an assassin. The fascist lords it over those who would oppose the fascist aims, inventing terms with which to brand them traitorous. “Antifa”, we hear in the streets, a term which seems to make the idea of standing against fascism a bad thing when the only thing that is truly bad is violins. Violin actions. Violin thoughts. Violin attitudes.

We pick our skins away becoming hollow reeds and empty vessels. Is someone stealing something from us? That’s what we’re told. And we argue about it, even coming to blows.

Nonetheless, storming the capitol is hardly an answer. If we stab Caesar, he may lie Pompey’s feet, but a new Caesar will come slouching out of the woods. The new monster will come out of the dark when we call for our pet dog to come in for the night. Something shambling from our past into our future. Sins of the fathers and mothers will be transported to the newly planted Rome.

The only salvation lies in creation, in easing the pain by affirming existence. The truth of human experience lies in the “am” of “I am”, in calling into being and letting be.

At the end of Turtle Island, Gary Snyder reminds us of how a poet is. He speaks of poets of earth, air, fire, water, and finally space and mind.

The Space Poet
Sleeps.
No end to the sky--
But his poems,
Like wild geese,
Fly off the edge.

A Mind Poet
Stays in the house.
The house is empty
And it has no walls.
The poem 
Is seen from all sides,
Everywhere,
At once.****

Hard to argue. Real change lies not in ownership, not in acquisition, but in perspective. These things make us comfortable, but it is understanding which makes life worth living. Drawing and living the dawn of our own directions makes us whole, and gives us back our lives. Whether we make films, write prose, paint, or play cricket or baseball, only the core of our own art makes us whole. When we follow that, the walls all disappear.

Then we dream the dream and become a summer’s day.

*Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: a Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. New York: Vintage, 1998, p.1.

**Williams, Saul Stacey. ,Said the Shotgun to the Head. New York etc.: Pockets Books, 2003, pp.2-3.

***Snyder, Gary. “I Went into the Maverick Bar.” Poem. In Turtle Island. New York: New Directions, 2008, p.9.

****”As for Poets.” Poem. Ibid, p.86.

We’re not talking about chess openings here, albeit those can be similar. Bobby Fischer described the chess opening of e5 for white (pawn to king four as it was described in older times) as “best by test”. On a Go board, black moves first, and the player usually takes positions on the corners as quickly as the player can. But here, we’re talking about literature. About stories. Poetry. Plays.

Shakespeare. Writers. Storytellers. Stories.

Sweet or foul, every story has an opening. Although time itself seems to be a cycle, when we record history, fictions, plays, poems, and even essays, all have a starting point, even if the starting point lies in the middle of thoughts or events. Beginnings set tone, establish character and situation, ask questions, and establish a sense of placement while pitching our perspective and our expectations forward into the coming tale.

Shakespeare’s tales begin variously, tending to lead us onward to realisation, transformation, or even transcendence, and this can happen slowly or quickly. Consider Sonnet 29:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

We begin with a life’s vintage gone sour, and for the first eight lines, we wonder at what went wrong–why we don’t have friends like others, why we don’t look like them or have their prospects. Disgraced in human society and beset with ill fortune, our life evidently looks bleak. There appears to be little light, little hope, and we feel very sorry for ourselves.

Then, in the middle of the sonnet at the ninth line, the word “Yet” appears like a lightning bolt. Suddenly, the world changes with a thought, with the thought of “thee”. How dedicated love changes everything in an instant! At the moment of thinking on this “thee”, the narrator’s state “[l]ike to the lark at break of day arising/From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate”. How marvelous to live in a state so gracious that “then I scorn to change my state with kings”!

So much of life lies in how we see things, and changing perspective may take more or less time depending on the circumstances. Sometimes, an opening may play with our expectations, misdirecting us a bit in order to increase the impact of what follows. Just as the nose upon opening a bottle of wine may hint at more or less mineral, fruit, or pepper in a wine, a story’s opening tends to suggest a direction. Where will the first mouthful take us? How will that be sustained as the company shares the bottle–or the story experience–ahead of us?

Shakespeare’s play, A Comedy of Errors, begins with a character who has been described as seeing himself in a tragedy when he is really in a comedy.

Entering with his jailer in scene presided over by the Duke of Ephesus, Egeon says:

EGEON 
Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall,
And by the doom of death end woes and all.

The Comedy of Errors 1.1.1-2.

This opening line is followed by several pages of Egeon’s monologue (interspersed with a few prompts by the interested Duke) about how his family was lost in a shipwreck, and how fortune has brought him to his doom. We can hardly blame Egeon for his perceptions though. He seems to have been on the wrong end of events for much of his life, and the play’s opening, which consists of several pages of exposition, initially makes things look bleak for him.

Yet, of course, unbeknownst to Egeon, his family lives. His twin sons, and their twin servants, are BOTH in Ephesus even as he speaks of being alone and friendless there. Shakespeare subsequently unfolds the old Plautus style Roman comedy devices of mistaken identities with his two sets of identical twins.

Egeon’s opening monologue has been described as a weak opening, but is it? In the long history of Egeon’s misfortune, a particular tone is established, and a particular kind of expectation as well. By setting the dramatic developments firmly in the past, the monologue seems to lull us into a kind of quietude. We sit or stand listening to the character catalogue his woes and a decided, even pronounced passivity sweeps over us. The effect sets us up for the ensuing comic antics like the rule of threes in telling jokes.

Three strings walk into a tavern. . . the first asks for a drink and is summarily refused. “We don’t serve your kind in here!” the surly barkeep snarls.

The second is rebuked as well. “Listen, no strings! We don’t serve strings in here!”

The third ties himself in a knot and unravels his top, then goes for a drink. The barkeep is in no mood for more of this, and his response is a growl. “Hey! Aren’t you a string!?”

The third string responds, “Nope. I’m a frayed knot.”

As the opening line suggests, the joke employs the classic humour pattern often called “the rule of threes”. The first two strings set up an expectation which the third shatters. Egeon’s long speech, which the Duke punctuates periodically with protests about how he cannot alter the law, or with requests for more information, becomes like the setup in a protracted joke. The woeful Egeon sees his own case as hopeless, and the Duke repeatedly says that, even though he is sympathetic, he is neither free nor inclined to fudge on the letter of the law. Egeon must produce the penalty fee or die.

The opening of Shakespeare’s Othello sets it up as a tragedy too. The initial exchange between Iago and Roderigo (whom he is manipulating) begins this way:

RODERIGO: Tush, never tell me! I take it much unkindly
That thou, Iago, who hast had my purse
As if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this.
IAGO: ’Sblood, but you’ll not hear me!
If ever I did dream of such a matter,
Abhor me.
RODERIGO: Thou toldst me thou didst hold him in thy hate.
IAGO: Despise me
If I do not.

Othello 1.1.1-9

Iago’s opening line begins with an expletive, and compounds a series of negatives to express the idea that Roderigo isn’t listening to him. This is characteristic of Iago, an accomplished parasite and mental predator who lives in a universe of the negative, and who expresses himself only in half truths.

When Orson Welles adapted Othello to film, he felt compelled to change it. He said:

A movie has to have a great opening. It must command attention. The opening of OTHELLO is written for an audience that is just getting quiet. Like all openings in a play, because you don’t want to ever open a play at the top of your bent. But a movie should open at the top of it’s bent, it must, because this damn thing (points to the screen) is dead. The only living thing are the people sitting out here. It’s a projected image, and you cannot bring the thing alive unless you seize the people at the beginning. The riderless horse has to come in. The funeral of Othello and the lynching of Iago, is the riderless horse. It’s as simple as that.*

Here is the opening of the cinematic version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yG8N9U_1SU

Where Shakespeare begins his play with Iago’s manipulation of Roderigo, as a kind of preface to events, Welles opens his film with an aftermath, with Othello’s funeral and Iago’s imprisonment. The staged contrast of Iago’s negativity with those around him is transformed into a cinemascape of light and dark in stark contrast.

We can also the contrast between the small and fragile human world and a kind of vast emptiness in which human events take place. This idea appears in many other cinematic openings as well. Here is the opening sequence to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (Il Buon, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo):

This is the cinematic equivalent of James M. Cain’s opening line “They threw me off the hay truck at around noon.” It is ‘ugly’ Tuco’s “Call me Ishmael” moment, establishing who, what, and where he is. Questions abound, this sequence gives us a good idea of where the horse may be taking Tuco, and where the film may take us.

For the cliché is true that each film, play, story, poem really is a journey. The Spanish early modern playwright, Lope de Vega opened The Knight from Olmedo with Don Allonso (the titular knight) saying, “Let no one speak the name of Love/Who does not eagerly respond to it;/And yet, who is there on this earth/Of ours whom it has left untouched?” (1.1-4)** Clearly, this will be a play about love–and in the best of romantic literary tradition, it is. Star crossed and all.

But what happens if the love and the great emptiness get confused? Or what if they are participatory–even to the point of being part of each other?

Here is Mark Jarman’s “Unholy Sonnet 4”

Amazing to believe that nothingness   
Surrounds us with delight and lets us be,   
And that the meekness of nonentity,   
Despite the friction of the world of sense,   
Despite the leveling of violence,
Is all that matters. All the energy
We force into the matchhead and the city   
Explodes inside a loving emptiness.

Not Dante’s rings, not the Zen zero’s mouth,   
Out of which comes and into which light goes,   
This God recedes from every metaphor,   
Turns the hardest data into untruth,
And fills all blanks with blankness. This love shows   
Itself in absence, which the stars adore.

Jarman, Mark. Questions for Ecclisiastes. Storyline Press, 1997.

“Amazing” is the opening word, followed by “believe” and then “nothingness”. The progression has a kind of orgiastic freedom, an orgasmic sense of letting go, of the “matter” transcending the “friction” of the world of sense–even to the point where it “Explodes inside a loving emptiness.”

Of course, we can go on for more than a lifetime looking at such openings.

Yet, it behooves us to bear openings, prefaces, preludes, first words, first chapters, and first acts in mind. Especially now with such a year as we have all known now showing some signs of possibly shifting. Spring may come quickly, but this shift will take more time, and we remain impatient. The pandemic has been a year long season of loss and shadow, of fear, retreat, and deep concern.

Now, there are vaccines, and new leaves are budding on the trees. We see them curling against the blue spaces of the sky.

For this is a kind of opening too. Not for the ones we’ve lost, but for those of us left behind. And now, as we gather our old lockdown linen spirits together for a wash, we must look ahead of ourselves. We have the opportunity for renewed vision. What kind of world do we really want? What kind of world will we choose to forge for ourselves, and for the future? Where will this opening take us?

* Orson Welles in a question and answer session after his film of Othello premiered in Boston.

**Vega, Lope de. The Knight from Olmedo (El caballero de Olmedo) in Lope De Vega: Three Major Plays. Translated by Gwynne Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 83.

For L.F.

And for j.n., because you asked for poetry, and because poetry is never only itself.

In his works, Plato makes an argument that the poets should be banished from the Republic.* Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that, as Plato’s opinions on the subject of poetry and poets seem to be a mixture of admiration and damnation, apprehension and abandonment. It may be better for readers to consult Plato themselves rather than read some incomplete and cursory summary here. Still, part of the problem, as Touchstone tells us in the title quote from As You Like It, is that poetry often misleads or lends a false appearance. It misrepresents. It lies.

TOUCHSTONE:  When a man’s verses cannot be understood,
nor a man’s good wit seconded with the
forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more
dead than a great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I
would the gods had made thee poetical.
AUDREY:  I do not know what “poetical” is. Is it honest
in deed and word? Is it a true thing?
TOUCHSTONE:  No, truly, for the truest poetry is the most
feigning, and lovers are given to poetry, and what
they swear in poetry may be said as lovers they do
feign.

As You Like It 3.3.11-21

Touchstone claims that poetry is not honest in deed or word. It is a scarecrow, not of the law, but of truth. Feigning.

Yet. . .yet. Yet, although poetry may be argued to misrepresent ‘reality’, in another sense it becomes difficult to imagine anything representing the multifaceted nature of human existence and understanding so completely. Here’s Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who passed away this week at the age of 101:

Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Constantly risking absurdity
                                             and death
            whenever he performs
                                        above the heads
                                                            of his audience
   the poet like an acrobat
                                 climbs on rime
                                          to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
                                     above a sea of faces
             paces his way
                               to the other side of day
    performing entrechats
                               and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
                               and all without mistaking
                     any thing
                               for what it may not be

       For he’s the super realist
                                     who must perforce perceive
                   taut truth
                                 before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
                                  toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
                                     with gravity
                                                to start her death-defying leap

      And he
             a little charleychaplin man
                                           who may or may not catch
               her fair eternal form
                                     spreadeagled in the empty air
                  of existence

Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. “Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)”. A Coney Island of the Mind, poems. New York: New Directions, 1958.

Poetry constantly risks absurdity. But what is such a risk in an absurd world? Here’s a poem we have discussed at length:

Digging

by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb   
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   
Bends low, comes up twenty years away   
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Heaney, Seamus. “Digging”. Death of a Naturalist. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux (Macmillan), 1966.

Poetry, both loss and creation speaks beyond condition. Past margin, circumscription, and weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable uses. Rather, poetry is a calculus of language, embracing and encompassing arcs, curves, movements, and triumphs. Blushing and hemmering which tongue, hearing, and understanding might never otherwise comprehend. Without it, we were barren, empty, ragged saw grass ranging over the dry erosions of our being.

It helps us come to terms with passages and passings, the hard grit at the bottom of life’s seams. Seems. Bending words to make sense of the senseless, in that way representing the real beyond the words. Digging graves, memories, words. Angels of creation sprung from turned earth, from inklines traced across paper, across the skin. Within. Outside.

Moments. My remarkable mother in law passing away:

Here is rain.

Multitudinous waters, snow, thunder, the cat, Frankie, 

crying for water or for food.

Cold in, cold out.  Spring days

Summer days spliced

with long icicle cold snaps. 

Flowers trees Canada geese confused, 

flying every which way.

She died the way some of us 

might have wanted

to go ourselves:

Champion dancer bending 

gracefully beneath a lightning stroke.

Bringing the family together once more

in the hospitality part of the hospital

hospice room, so they could meet

and talk, while she walked 

deeper into the coma forest.

Nurses hush hush soft smile

unobtrusive turning, testing, 

checking, pastor stopping,

T—- with his guitar,

dealing in his way.

Helping us all.

Singing her beautifully

Out of this existence.

Narratives shape my life too,

now bended on another arc

in some or other curve 

to who knows where what when.

For AJN. Poem by the author.

Poetry is memory and expectation fused together. It’s Eliot’s April, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Shall I? So many summer days I remember. Summer days in profusion. Lilacs overflowing the edges of an improvised bowl.

We long for more. We long for things to stay, not to recede. We long to keep the loves we have, not lose them. Perfect heroes paddling rafts against the stormy waters off the beach. Perfect artists, poets. Perfect meals and meetings. Lamberts. Oxford. Across the South, the North, and over the fetching prairies of our own bygone Middle West. Saker. The Awful House. Gum, iced tea, and kicking things to pieces–the gold of personal history poured over our existence. Christmas in the Florida pine flats. Dragons. Tolkein by the lake. Fishing. The Old Thatch Tavern.

We call for more. Cheeses. Travels. More coming home. We dream of days yet to be. If we must speak in poetry, as we must, let roads keep us healthy until we meet again.

The Pass of the Roaring

by Norman MacCaig

Such comfortless places comfort me.

Not my body but I am fed by these ravens

And I’m nourished by the drib-dab waters

That fingerling through the harsh deer grass.

The tall cliffs unstun my mind

Thank God for a place where no history passes.

Is this ghoulish? Is it the vampire me

Or grandfathers and greatgrandfathers

Specklessly flowing my veins that bury

A hummingbird tongue in these gulfs of space

And suck from limestone with delicate greed

A delicate vintage, the blood of grace?

Books vaporize in my lightning mind.

Pennies and pounds become a tribal

Memory. Hours assert their rightness,

Escaping like doves through their cotes of clocks

And lame philosophies founder in bogs

The stink of summer in the armpit of rockfolds.

There’s always a returning. A cottage glows

By a dim sea and there I’ll slump by the fireside –

And another grace will gather, from human

Intercommunications, a grace

Not to be distinguished from the one that broods

In fingerling waters and gulfs of space.

MacCaig, Norman. “The Pass of the Roaring”. The Poems of Norman MacCaig. Edinburgh: Polygon, 2009.

We request. We ask for more. Another summer. Truth. Holy vindication. Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. As Basho notes:

The fifteenth, just as innkeeper predicted, it rains,

here’s the harvest moon

good old Hokkoku weather

don’t depend on it.

Basho. Haiku from chapter 51. Back Roads to Far Towns. Trans. Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu. Buffalo: White Pine Press, 2004.

No depending on the weather, on tomorrow. Against the greater currents of the cosmos, we bend like reeds. Sometimes we break. Still we hope against hope, against our doubts, against our fears. With all the powers of love, we hope to weather this storm too.

Urging always: open hands. Let pursuing demons go. Darkness enough in one life’s range of night. Let these others fall away. We do not need them. There are always more. Dharma will remain what it is. A rat. A luminosity:

“Enlightenment is like the moon reflected in the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is refleced even a puddle a inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water. Enlightenment does not divide you, just as the moon does not break the water. You cannot hinder enlightenment, just as a drop of water does not hinder the moon in the sky. The depth of the drop is the height of the moon. Each reflection, however long or short its duration, manifests the vastness of the dewdrop and realizes the limitlessness of the moonlight in the sky. We gain enlightenment like the moon reflecting in the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken.”

Dogen. “Genjo Koan” fragment. Trans. Shunryu Suzuki. Dōgen’s Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011.

Here is what I’ve said already, said again. Our childhoods, dreams, crowns and sceptres, snakes and ladders, all may not return to us. Ryōkan wrote:

Calling out to me

As they return home:

wild geese at night.

Ryōkan. Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf. Trans. John Stevens. Boston: Shambala, 2004.

Geese go home. Things go home. Bright and brief, experience remains a nightsound. A cricket at the end of summer. Margins of memory are old coats hallway closets with winters not what they used to be. Still, revelation waits in every step:

At night, deep in the mountains,

I sit in meditation.

The affairs of men never reach here:

Everything is quiet and empty,

All the incense has been swallowed up by the endless night.

My robe has become a garment of dew.

Unable to sleep, I walk out into the woods —

Suddenly, above the highest peak, the full moon appears.

Ryōkan. Ibid.

Shakespeare writes of how memory’s pageant dissolves. As here:

Truth may seem but cannot be;
Beauty brag but ’tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.

Shakespeare, William. “The Phoenix and the Turtle”, lines 62-4.

That old life tapestry. Unicorns. Poetic fabric. Dust. Grecian urns.

We have spoken in verses for so long, I have forgotten whole languages. How are tongues supposed to swim? I know few other ways to speak. Few ways to ask. Feeding rage and silence, pulsing stillness of the dharma underneath. All the ways boil down to this.

Here again is this:

You’ve heard it. You know it. One more autumn. More if we can manage, but at the very least one more. So many variances within the clew when the line’s drawn taut. Airfoil. From form to form, and tumbling down life’s hills. As this:

Sonnet 18

by William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Take that life giving sonnet and tumble it a bit. Knock its rough edges off with the other rocks of the world. It may come out like this:

For who will find these forms? Others, in the burning world will find their own. Not ours. Not what we have yet to find. Dribble castles on next summer’s beach. Destroyed in the very making.

First Tango in Lisbon

Sienna is red dirt, some men just want the fight,

gunpowder, tea, revelry after war. Hours, water &

salt. Where we go to bed is never really sorted.

All for some of the old letters. Dead alphabet

ghosts keep popping up asking for a softer place

& they keep haunting because they keep things 

alive. Hunting something else not to eat, to plant.

Dried flowers & lost seeds, & then the calendula.

Kingdom shadows when the suns start going down

as geese’ feathers brush new moons by eyelashes

in old worlds, old freedoms & gadflys & scales.

Weight of small fucking world’s like those born of 

large orb fairs. Careful of that Old Magic. It isn’t as

brittle as one may think. Watch those porcelain faces, 

They are watching Us. They’ve seen everything trade

their visions between like a shell game. Don’t play,

or be able to laugh generations away. Like an errant

thumb holding a cheap valentine smudging the

gallantry into night on the margins of the message.

Really it’s just about better sleep, warmer blood, 

almost peace, wash it, crawl into it & go home. 

Nichols, Josh. Private correspondence. 2021. Reprinted with the author’s permission.

Better sleep. Time and old magic, when destroyed, passes into ruin. Into sleep. Into finding.

Let poetry lie. Like all feigning, it lends us the orb and sceptre of truth, making us kings and queens of the world. Regal, commanding, full of grace, impoverished, throneless, wandering. Sense and hit the nerves. Carpal tunnel fishes thimmering freely in the cords of our arms. Old trout in a mountain pool or beneath a village bridge. Aching. Ageing. Seen it all. Seen nothing yet.

*Have a look especially at Republic II, 377-83, Republic III, 386-404, Sophist, 234-7, and Laws II, 658-63, Laws VII, 800-12, and Laws VIII, 829.

**Thomas, Dylan. “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight”. The Poems of Dylan Thomas. New York: New Directions, 1952.

The darkest threshold at the very end night marks the verge of approaching dawn. Dawn brings the light, of course, although the quality of the coming day may be variable. Stormy days may be presaged by the mariner’s old ‘red sky at morning’*, while a dawn chorus of birdsong may usher in the loveliest of days. Dawns may be circumstantial as well as temporal, as in the dawn of new eras or ages, or the dawns of new political regimes. As a liminal moment, a kind of marginal field between between changing states, dawn marks the edge of the mythical forest, the beached margent of the sea, the ephemeral nature of ringlets danced to the whistling wind. In terms of universal energetic flux, Yang’s ascension through the sinking Yin defines the morning. It may also be a moment when the magnetic field inverts and inverts the understanding of the world.

At the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo steals into the forest at the very margin of Benvolio’s perception:

BENVOLIO 
Madam, an hour before the worshiped sun
Peered forth the golden window of the east,
A troubled mind drove me to walk abroad,
Where underneath the grove of sycamore
That westward rooteth from this city side,
So early walking did I see your son.
Towards him I made, but he was ’ware of me
And stole into the covert of the wood.

Romeo and Juliet 1.1.120-7

Romeo avoids his friend, shunning both Benvolio’s company and the sunrise. For although Romeo emerges from the woods at dawn, he continues to flee the growing light. His father notes that in his dim mood, even after day arrives, Romeo prefers the darkness:

MONTAGUE 
Many a morning hath he there been seen,
With tears augmenting the fresh morning’s dew,
Adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs.
But all so soon as the all-cheering sun
Should in the farthest east begin to draw
The shady curtains from Aurora’s bed,
Away from light steals home my heavy son
And private in his chamber pens himself,
Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out,
And makes himself an artificial night.
Black and portentous must this humor prove,
Unless good counsel may the cause remove.

Romeo and Juliet 1.1.134-45

This brings to mind another passage, from another one of Shakespeare’s plays, which speaks specifically to an affinity for darkness. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, wishing to conclude the night’s enchantments, the fairy king Oberon addresses his servant with a list of things which are yet to be concluded. Puck responds with a warning about time which describes how the guilty dead shun the coming dawn:

ROBIN 
My fairy lord, this must be done with haste,
For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,
And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger,
At whose approach, ghosts wand’ring here and
there
Troop home to churchyards. Damnèd spirits all,
That in crossways and floods have burial,
Already to their wormy beds are gone.
For fear lest day should look their shames upon,
They willfully themselves exile from light
And must for aye consort with black-browed night.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.2.399-409.

In this blog, we have already visited this passage, noting how Puck’s caution spirals curiously into a meditation on the cursed dead retreating from light. The dead begin to flee at the very approach of the morning star, Phosphor (actually the planet Venus, but the star is not to be confused with the goddess in this case), in spite of the fact that Aurora, the dawn goddess, has not yet arrived. The light of the ‘harbinger’ remains far dimmer than that of the actual rising sun, but it still sends the night wandering dead back to their graves.

Romeo, like Puck’s damned spirits, eschews the dawn, avoids the light. Although Romeo’s exile may be more voluntary, it is in some sense even more oppressive than the ghosts’ “exile from light”. Romeo’s chamber is like an earthen “wormy bed” as he “shuts up his windows” and “locks fair daylight out”. The dragons who draw night’s chariot do not cut the clouds as they do in Puck’s verse. Instead, Romeo’s sighs add “clouds to more clouds”, and his humour itself becomes “black and portentous”. Romeo’s sorrow is like shame, secret with a hint of humiliation about it, like shames which ghosts would not reveal to daylight.

When Benvolio asks him the cause of his sorrow, Romeo suggests that his grief arises from being out of favour with her with whom he is in love:

BENVOLIO 
. . . What sadness lengthens Romeo’s hours?
ROMEO 
Not having that which, having, makes them short.
BENVOLIO In love?
ROMEO Out—
BENVOLIO Of love?
ROMEO 
Out of her favor where I am in love.

Romeo and Juliet 1.1.168-73

A bit odd and evasive, Romeo’s response initially sounds like lovesickness, with his sorrow having an overprotested quality. His monosyllabic “Out” makes sense to him, although it doesn’t quite explain the situation to Benvolio (or to us), so Benvolio presses for further qualification. Romeo’s answer ‘Out of her favour where I am in love’ seems awkward. We understand the sense, and the ‘where’ is a convention of the time, love possibly being understood as locative in a certain–being centred in the heart, in the beloved, or even in the gaze in some cases. Love may seem to be located someplace.

But there is also contrast here. Benvolio’s question is specifically temporal, about what “sadness lenghens Romeo’s hours”. Romeo’s answer centres on the locative. He speaks of being “Out of her favour where [he is] in love”, as though his love or his love’s favour might be actual places. Yet, some readers may note that even when we consider poetic conventions, romantic love ultimately tends to be personal, focused not on a ‘where’, but on a specific ‘who’ or ‘whom’. The object of romantic love is almost universally a person and not a place.

This suggests that Romeo may be speaking about something which he doesn’t fully understand. He seems to have an idea about love’s suffering, but he also seems to have little real experience with it. The crux of the matter may be that he is neither in or out of love, but that romantic love itself is missing from his life and he feels this keenly.

The old convention says that Romeo, at this point in the play, is in love with the idea of being in love, but it may be more accurate to say that he is acutely sensible of an exprience that escapes him. This is about to change, of course, for when Romeo first sees Juliet (which happens at night, at the Capulets’ party), she suddenly appears like a beacon in his life. In Franco Zefirelli’s 1968 film version, we see how the dancers at the Capulet ball suddenly part to reveal her as we watch through Romeo’s eyes.

Compare this moment with the aquarium scene from the 1996 film, where Romeo and Juliet’s eyes meet through the fish tank as the fish part to reveal them to each other. Both films offer us a moment of breathless revelation.

If we note the lyrics in the latter version, we hear a song about seeing stars–known for “punching holes in the darkness” as Robert Louis Stevenson reportedly said of a lamplighter he watched from his sickbed as a boy.**

Yet, Juliet dispels Romeo’s darkness not as starlight, not as a dim harbinger of dawn, but as a brilliant light against which other lights pale in comparison:

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!

1.5.51

The incandescence is sudden and complete. So much for Romeo’s darkness. Still, those making the moth to flame argument may continue to argue that to Romeo, love itself is locative, citing one of Romeo’s most famous lines to prove it:

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the East, and Juliet is the sun.

2.2.2-3

Yet, as the dawn marks the liminal moment of change from night to day, so does Romeo’s “East” transform as lovelight dawns within him. First, the dark itself is dispelled along with night and the moon:

Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.
Be not her maid since she is envious.
Her vestal livery is but sick and green,
And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off.

2.2.4-9

Marking the liminal, the margin, the edge of transformation, this dawn within Romeo is that moment of actual change. Once we have slain the moon and cast off the clothing of night, we suddently see our subject clearly. At this moment, Romeo’s confused conflation of love with light and location resolves into the personal:

It is my lady. O, it is my love!
O, that she knew she were!

2.2.10-11

Of course, we suspect that Juliet already knows. Shakespeare has telegraphed this to us. When Romeo and Juliet first talk, and first kiss, at the party, their lines to each other famously craft a sonnet:

ROMEO, taking Juliet’s hand
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
JULIET 
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
ROMEO 
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
JULIET 
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
ROMEO 
O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do.
They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
JULIET 
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
ROMEO 
Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take.
He kisses her.
Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.
JULIET 
Then have my lips the sin that they have took.
ROMEO 
Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
Give me my sin again.He kisses her.
JULIET You kiss by th’ book.

Romeo and Juliet 1.5.104-21

Here, we see the moment in Baz Luhrman’s film from above:

And here, we see the meeting scene in Private Romeo, where the final line of the sonnet is truncated:

Naturally, we set aside a number of considerations in order to walk through these lines in this cursory fashion. There is always much more to see. Still, it behooves us to remember that perhaps the most striking thing about Romeo’s recognition and resolution is exactly that–just how striking it is. It seems so resonant with the ways in which our human loves and infatuations take hold. How sharply our realization may focus our being, even to the point of temporarily robbing us of outiside motivation and of our reason. We suddenly see with new clarity and understanding, while lights pale in comparison with the new light before us. In this sense, love gives where it takes away.

When love’s incandescence robs us of our sense of propriety, and even of our geographical and (sometimes in mild and temporary ways) our moral compass. We may find ourselves crashing private events, or climbing over orchard walls, and perhaps waiting anywhere where we might catch some glimpse of our beloved. The world and its compass seem to recede and dim in comparison to the light which we perceive before us as we suddenly find ourselves drawn to an ineluctable brightness. This beacon gives us hope and purpose.

In contrast, night represents a loveless spiritual darkness. It threatens us with a vacancy, an emptiness of love, and potentially of everything. Bottom, the character who (often unwittingly) speaks a great deal of the truth to be found in Shakespeare, expresses it best when he plays the hero Pyramus, who thinks that Thisbe has forgotten to meet him near Ninus’ tomb:

BOTTOM, as Pyramus
O grim-looked night! O night with hue so black!
O night, which ever art when day is not!
O night! O night! Alack, alack, alack!
I fear my Thisbe’s promise is forgot.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.179-82.

In striving to make up his rhyme and metre, Bottom repeatedly uses the word “alack” signifying “a lack”, an emptiness, a void. Night represents the lack of love, the lack of human contact and intimacy, the lack of purpose and of joy. In the night of the soul, the human stands alone in the starkest sense, alone in a black, starless universe, a soul in fear, standing against utter emptiness.

At such moments, the stars themselves, with their glimmering light, offer hope that night may end, that light will eventually overcome the darkness. Phosphor’s indications aside, the stars do not bring dawn. They merely promise that light still exists, even at the darkest times. The idea is so ingrained in our consciousness that it pervades western esoterica as well, extending far into popular conceptions of what many perceive as spiritual. For example, the star card in the western tarot deck–a deck of archetypal mythic images often used for fortune telling–typically suggests the idea of ‘hope’.

Coleman Smith’s drawing depicts a feminine figure, surrounded by a starry sky, who seems to have come down to pour life giving water on fertile ground where flowers bloom. She also replenishes the pool or spring. Life and promise are abundant. In a mythic sense, stars may bring not only hope, but also bring us back to the promise of love. In a well known song that has been recorded by many artists, a nighttime field transforms into “a field of white” with a kiss.

Returning to Puck’s speech, however, we remember that the harbinger of dawn is not a mere star, but the star–the morning star, Phosphor. Harold Brooks notes that a ‘harbinger’ was “originally an officer sent ahead to purvey lodgings for a great personage” (who, in this case, is Aurora, the goddess of the dawn).**** The dragons drawing night’s chariot cut the clouds in the sense that they have not only cut across the clouded sky, but in Shakespeare’s way of sometimes conveying several senses of a word at once, the dragons have also literally cut the very fabric of the clouds, parting the darkness, removing obscurations to make the morning star visible.

These dragons, after all, are things of night, the dark counterpart to the steeds that draw Helios’ sun chariot. Brooks notes that, in Marlowe, dragons pull the chariot of the moon:

Nor that night-wandring pale and watrie starre,
(When yawning dragons draw her thirling carre,
From Latmus mount up to the glomie skie,
Where crown’d with blazing light and majestie,
She proudly sits) more over-rules the flood,
Than she the hearts of those that neere her stood.

Marlowe, Christopher. ‘Hero and Leander’, 1.106-11. Widely available in single editions and as part of The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe.

These night dragons appear elsewhere in Shakespeare too. In Troilus and Cressida, the ‘ugly night’ becomes a dragon at the moment of the noble Hector’s death:

ACHILLES 
Look, Hector, how the sun begins to set,
How ugly night comes breathing at his heels.
Even with the vail and dark’ning of the sun
To close the day up, Hector’s life is done.
HECTOR 
I am unarmed. Forgo this vantage, Greek.
ACHILLES 
Strike, fellows, strike! This is the man I seek.
[The Myrmidons kill Hector]

Troilus and Cressida 5.9.5-10

Moments later, Achilles says, “The dragon wing of night o’erspreads the earth”, signifying both the end of battle and the the deeper darkness brought on by Hector’s shameful death and even foreshadowing the fall of Troy.

Similarly, in Cymbeline, the villainous Iachimo rises from his hiding place within the trunk in Imogen’s bedchamber, having hidden there in order that he may subsequently convince her intended, Posthumus, that he has slept with her. Iachimo notes the details of her bedchamber, notices a mole on her breast, and steals a bracelet that Posthumus has given her–all details that he knows will make Posthumus doubt her chastity. Then Iachimo hides in the trunk again, to await the morning, saying:

Swift, swift, you dragons of the night, that dawning
May bare the raven’s eye. I lodge in fear.
Though this a heavenly angel, hell is here.

Cymbeline 2.2.52-4

These are truly moments of darkness, deeds meant for the figurative dead of night. The murder of an unarmed man by a group of combat hardened warriors, and a sleeping woman disadvantaged, eye raped, by a scheming man so that he may win a bet with her intended. The stuff of sorrows. Moans of empty days and nights. Tattered scraps of old newspaper shivering in tall grass.

The dragons may have been derived from those that pulled Medea’s chariot as she helps Jason win the Golden Fleece before he abandons her. She subsequently murders the sons she bore him for his betrayal, although there are various endings to the tale. Herodotus says she changed her name and resettled elsewhere.

The stars are not twinkling so/ brightly in vain,/ and it must be at your command that my chariot, drawn by/ winged dragons,/ is ready to take me’

Ovid. Metamorphoses 7. 217-9

The people despair. Potentates stand up and lie. People storm the capitol. People die. We may treasure the illusion of rhetorical independence over the working challenges of union. We craft the end of our own days and nights. Sometimes, in following the rhetoric of remaking, we craft the end of our own world.

Yet, morning comes again, for now, albeit it may be with fallen cities or with lovers meeting in a tomb. We seem to keep fighting. Fighting for Juliet to know that she’s our love, fighting for Thisbe not to forget her promise, fighting for our loves, our lives. Striving to find honest politics, respect, and, yes, love in the world. Brings Seamus Heaney’s poem to mind:

The Haw Lantern

The wintry haw is burning out of season,
crab of the thorn, a small light for small people,
wanting no more from them but that they keep
the wick of self-respect from dying out,
not having to blind them with illumination.

But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost
it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes
with his lantern, seeking one just man;
so you end up scrutinized from behind the haw
he holds up at eye-level on its twig,
and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone,
its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you,
its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.

Seamus Heaney from “The Haw Lantern”, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1995.*****

We stand against the cold winter, then against the fires of summer, and then against the winter again. Hawthorn berries, glowing against the frozen snow. As if to say, we must become our own harbingers, our own morning stars. We usher in our own early born Dawn, reaching rosy fingered into the shadows to dispel them.

For Dawn gives us the promises of life. Driving off the dragons, we wait for the orchard to bear fruit. We wait for a light in the window. We wait for compassion, friendship, understanding. We wait for love. We are the lark and not the nightingale, but we are not a lark of parting. We are a chorus, joined upon the first streaks of the morn–birdsong of the newborn day.

Perhaps we gash our own gold vermillion light against the sky’s dark throat, crying “Here we are!” We are here too. Still standing against the empty night. Watching for the morning star.

—

—

*Traditional weather wisdom, even mentioned in the Bible, is related in various forms, but often as “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky at morning, sailor take warning.” In the Bible, the line appears in Matthew 16:2-3, and the verse says, “When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red.  And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowring.” (KJV)

**An ill child, Robert Louis Stevenson spent much of his childhood confined to his bed in Edinburgh. Some believe that he may have suffered from tuberculosis. The oft told story says that one night Robert’s nanny couldn’t get him to go to bed. Young Robert stared out the window, oblivious to her requests. Finally, she said, “Robert, what are you looking at out there?” Pulling back the curtain, she could see that he was watching the lamplighter making his way down the street, lighting the street lamps. Young said, “Look at that man! He’s punching holes in the darkness!” –Many versions of this story exist, and it is widely favoured by evangelical Christians who like to use it as a metaphor. The story itself may be apocryphal, but I would enjoy hearing from anyone who has more substantive information about the tale.

***Many artists have recorded this song, with notables including Dame Vera Lynn, the award winning Sweet Adelaide acapella quarted Heat, and Gunhild Carling. All these lovely renditions and more are well worth a listen.

****Brooks, Harold Fletcher. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. London: Arden Shakespeare/Cengage Learning, 2007, p.80.

*****Diogenes (412[?] bce – 323 bce) was a Greek philosopher who, at one point, carried a lamp in the day, claiming to be looking for one honest man. Keen gardeners will note that the picture is not a Hawthorn, but a Winterberry, which is actually a type of holly. I simply didn’t have a Hawthorn image that I could use, but this picture gives you the idea.

Winter solstice close at hand. In the northern hemisphere, it is the long awaited return of the sun, the sign of rebirth and the renewed fertility of the world. Halls festooned with evergreen and holly, the symbols of everlasting life in the face of harsh winter. Mistletoe hung to invite kisses fostering the fecundity hidden beneath the sleeping surface of the winter world.

Still, even as we sense the calendar tipping towards a new regreening, many places remain in winter’s frozen clutches–with “water like a stone”, with people still scrabbling for fuel as “snow lay ’round about, deep and crisp and even”. Some seasonal carols tell us this.

At this moment of deepest darkness, the “longest evening of the year”, midwinter holidays are bright ‘holy days’, filled with light as a ward against midwinter darkness. Chanukah’s menorah is set as a beacon of increasing light against the backdrop of darkness, a reminder of success in the long ago recapture and rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The Christian celebration of Christmas being a holy day focusing on a birth which is itself the symbol of humanity’s spiritual rebirth. These religious observations stand on the ancient foundation of the pagan Yule and all its incarnations, probably stretching back for almost as long as there have been people living on this tilted axis globe.

In northern climes, the snow can seem like an ocean of white, like water surrounding us, undulating away in all directions. This can become overwhelming, even speaking to us of what we need to hear. In Conrad Aiken’s “Silent Snow, Secret Snow”, a boy’s growing pervasive obsession with snow that only he can see represents his increasing retreat and isolation from the world around him.

And with that effort, everything was solved, everything became all right: the seamless hiss advanced once more, the long white wavering lines rose and fell like enormous whispering sea-waves, the whisper becoming louder, the laughter more intensely maniacal.

“Listen!” it said. “We’ll tell you the last, the most beautiful and secret story-shut your eyes-it is a very small story-a story that gets smaller and smaller-it comes inward instead of opening like a flower-it is a flower becoming a seed-a little cold seed-do you hear” We are leaning closer to you”-

The hiss was now becoming a roar-the whole world was a vast moving screen of snow-but even now it said peace, it said remoteness, it said cold, it said sleep.*

Many critics have described this story as a portrait of deepening schizophrenia. A Jungian analyst might tell us that such visions or dreams represent profound emotional shifts, with the snow, a vision of a kind of water submerging the world.

Amongst the catalogue of Jungian archetypes, water most often represents emotional states which may range from raging seas to deep and quiet pools. Aspects of snow, desert, ocean. The surface of our inner ocean may be variously frozen or heaving, glass or tumult. Inner water speaks to us in ways that only we can hear. It shifts and roils in ways that only we can know.

For water, its reflections and its depths, cannot remain entirely external to us. Its conception and its very presence is reflexive. It flows into and through our natural surroundings, and it also extends back into our being. It represents our connection with flow, with attention, spirit, seasons, and time. “The waters are the source of all potentialities in existence; the source and grave of all things in the universe; the undifferentiate; the unmanifest; the first form of matter”.**

In literature and myth, water is often associated with the power and subtlety of sexual union. While seashells are often said to symbolise female sexuality, the ebb and flow of their watery source also parallels human passions, and the sea is ultimately the birthplace of all life on earth. In its reproductive aspects, water is seductive. In Homer’s Ulysees, on his long journey home from the Trojan War, Ulysees meets the sirens, whose irresistable call lures sailors to their watery doom. Homer’s Ulysees, in order to hear the song, has his crew tie him to a mast while they block their own ears against the call.

While the sea has its siren song, in dream interpretation water tends to represent our emotions or our deepest passions. Dreaming of rain, of swimming, of a taking a bath, or even of shoveling snow may suggest any number of possibilities, all of which may illustrate our underlying emotional state.

But when I came, alas, to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.

Twelfth Night 5.1.420-3

With all the bluff and counter, all the masking we perform in life, eventually it becomes difficult to swagger one’s way through the rain. Our emotional states, as perhaps the most defining characterisitic of our humanity, tend to catch up with us. We shove emotions aside at our peril. Eventually, they tend to catch up with us, to overwhelm us.

The idea of drowning may take this to its logical conclusion. Drowning in one’s emotions. Being overwhelmed by the water or the secret snow. Water as a grave, as a resting place, is often visually compelling. In Jane Campion’s film, The Piano, the near drowning represents a rebirth, a splitting of the new soul from its old attachments:

Here, we are drawn into the depths with Ada McGrath, as the character is literally roped to the emotional baggage of her sinking piano. In the scene, we go through a drowning, a baptism, a cleansing, before we are pulled back up onto the boat. The water signifies the purification of rebirth, like the rededication of a temple, or a birth offering a renewed chance for redemption.

Baptism is a regreening in the spiritual winter, the water washing away old emotional and spiritual weights and attachments, leaving us cleaner, lighter, and more ascendant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fztz_Vr9uHk

Water’s aspects converge in drowning. Death in water combines renewal with what is sometimes an awful finality. Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death in Hamlet puts the event at some remove from the audience, rendering it like a painting of a forlorn ending replete with imagery of both life and death.

QUEEN 
There is a willow grows askant the brook
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do “dead men’s fingers” call
them.
There on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,
Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,
As one incapable of her own distress
Or like a creature native and endued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
LAERTES Alas, then she is drowned.
QUEEN Drowned, drowned.

Hamlet 4.7.190-210

The drowned, drowned, drowned cadence of the language near the end of the scene punctuates the finality. That the drowning happens offstage, distances the event both in place and time from the onstage moment. That Gertrude does not name Ophelia in the description of events further isolates the drowned character, underscoring her loneliness. The description pointedly weaves life with death together. Profuse flower imagery includes a phallic blossom which hints at fertility but is also called “dead men’s fingers”. Ophelia’s clothes “awhile they bore her up”, but moments later, “heavy with their drink,/Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay/To muddy death”.

The language and the dramatic framework also suggest a greater matrix in which human life is embedded. Human trophies are merely weeds, and the brook perenially weeps, suggesting the mourning attendant on impermanence. The episode suggests that perhaps our lives are mere extensions, fantastic garlands that cover underlying truths, or reflections of an ever changing sky.

These moments in the plays offer potential historical reflections as well. Possible inspirations for Shakespeare’s Ophelia are numerous. Oxford historian, Dr Steven Gunn, found a coroner’s record of the drowning of Jane Shaxpere in a millpond near Stratford upon Avon in 1569.*** Two and a half year old Jane, perhaps a cousin of William’s, was apparently picking marigolds when she fell into the stream. Similarly, a woman intriguingly named Katherine Hamlet reportedly drowned near Tidington, a village near enough to Stratford that it is walkable, while fetching water from the Avon in 1579. And this blog has previously mentioned the local Stratford story about Margaret Clopton, from a Stratford family Shakespeare would have known. Reportedly suffering over a disappointed love affair, Margaret supposedly drowned herself in a watery depression which still may be seen in the Welcombe Hills just north of Stratford town–in a little hollow now known as ‘Margaret’s well’.

The point is not to sort through potential foundations of Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Neither is is it, nor could it, to diminish the sadness of those long ago deaths. Rather, the point is to remind us that winter–our present winter–represent a kind of alpha and omega. The season is a flow, a flux, like water which represents all the directions at once. The death of the old year marks a Phoenix turning point, consumed in water in place of fire. Submergence taking the place of conflagration.

If this moment can have a point, it may be that in endings, in finality, even in past tragedies, we can perceive new direction, a kind of rebirth or regreening of the world. We see this not only in terms of Shakespeare’s works, but also in our present. If it it true that nothing is ever wasted, then death may also be seen as the winter solstice of our collective mythical landscape–the pivotal well in which we drown the books of our past so that our new and unknown future lives may then begin.

After solstice, once the sun has turned its corner in the sky, the cold winter begins to retreat. This may be gradual. Ice slowly becomes water, flows into earth, and that muddy death becomes a bed for new life. Kisses beneath the mistletoe engender new sprouts. New affection, new connection, and even new generations on the earth. One creative vision of the impetus or spark for Shakespeare’s winter play, Twelfth Night, transforms the very idea of drowning, of emotional and spiritual loss. As it does in the play, love’s loss becomes connection, and the death of the old year again signifies the birth of the new.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74Q6gyH774Q

Few people I know will be sorry to see the year 2020 end. Rife with profound difficulties on all fronts, this year has been, in many ways, a political, environmental, economic, and public health disaster. The year itself has become its own meme about limitation, divisiveness, isolation, loss, and disappointment. In many ways, it has shipwrecked humanity and set us all on the shores of an unknown world.

Yet, in a sense, we are all constantly shipwrecked anew on the shores of Shakespeare’s Illyria. Life is this way–an ebb and flow. We feel that our vanished loved ones are truly gone just as Viola supposes her brother, Sebastian, to have been lost at sea. In a profound way, however, our loved ones are not and cannot be gone from us, because they are woven into the fabric of us, etched into our being.

In the wide world, as water flows on to water and into cloud and rain, our memory shapes us and the world we know in an ongoing rainfall of creation. Kisses stolen beneath winter’s green mistletoe in one sense represent the promise of our future. Let us bestow those sparks of love liberally. Let us always bring love’s needed light, but most especially at those times when our long winter has been so dark.

Here’s wishing everyone an abundance of love, light, and peace in the next year and in all the years to come. With continued patience, kindness, understanding, and care, we really can build a better world for ourselves, and for those who will come after us.

*Aiken, Conrad. “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” in The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken, 1934. His works, including his poetry, are widely reprinted and readily available in print and on the internet.

**Cooper, Jean. An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols. London: Thames & Hudson, 1978.

***https://www.worcesternews.co.uk/news/9072136.was-little-jane-shaxperes-death-inspiration-for-william-shakespeares-ophelia-in-hamlet/

Having made these notes the other day, it seemed only fitting that they should be shared here as an extra bit of Shakespearean performance history related to American history and the grim subject of President Lincoln’s assassination. A curious historical twist here offers a small bit of information in addition to what appears in previous blog posts. 

The famous 19th century English actor, Junius Brutus Booth (1796 – 1852), moved to the United States and fathered twelve children. Among them were three Booth brothers, Junius Brutus, Jr., and the well known Edwin, and John Wilkes. Both Edwin and John Wilkes were celebrities with successful acting careers, but Junius Jr., never achieved the same level of success as his brothers. As noted in previous posts, the three brothers only appeared once onstage together, in a benefit performance of Julius Caesar at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York on November 25, 1864. 

Staged as a benefit performance, the brothers performed to raise money for a statue of Shakespeare in Central Park which still stands today.

Tragically, the most well remembered Booth brother was infamous. John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, assassinated United States President Abraham Lincoln during a performance of the English playwright, Tom Taylor’s farce, Our American Cousin, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington D.C. on April 14th 1865. Seeing himself as a kind of modern American Brutus, John Wilkes Booth saw parallels between his own actions and that of the Julius Caesar protagonist, assuming what he saw as a noble responsibility to assassinate a would be tyrant. Although brother Edwin may be remembered as the best known American Shakespearean actor of his time, his brother’s infamy still overshadows his accomplishments by far, and the Booth family, if they are remembered at all, are mostly remembered in the context of the assassin to whom they were related.

Yet, true history really is almost always stranger than fiction. A year before John Wilkes shot Abraham Lincoln, in the same year the three Booth brothers’ performed in Julius Caesar together, Edwin Booth actually rescued Lincoln’s son, Robert, from almost certain injury or death: 

The incident occurred while a group of passengers were late at night purchasing their sleeping car places from the conductor who stood on the station platform at the entrance of the car. The platform was about the height of the car floor, and there was of course a narrow space between the platform and the car body. There was some crowding, and I happened to be pressed by it against the car body while waiting my turn. In this situation the train began to move, and by the motion I was twisted off my feet, and had dropped somewhat, with feet downward, into the open space, and was personally helpless, when my coat collar was vigorously seized and I was quickly pulled up and out to a secure footing on the platform. Upon turning to thank my rescuer I saw it was Edwin Booth, whose face was of course well known to me, and I expressed my gratitude to him, and in doing so, called him by name. (From a letter Robert Lincoln wrote to the editor of Century Magazine in 1909.)*

 
Edwin actually didn’t know whose life he had saved until months later, albeit that wouldn’t have made a difference. His act of heroism was apparently an instinctive reaction to seeing fellow human being in trouble rather than by political concerns. Edwin would have had no way of knowing that Robert Todd Lincoln would be the only one of the Lincolns’ four children to survive to adulthood.**

A Unionist, Edwin had been feuding with his brother for some time before the assassination took place. After the event, Edwin disowned his brother completely, refusing to have John Wilkes’ name spoken in his house. Forced to abandon the stage for many months after his brother assassinated Lincoln in April of 1865, Edwin was only able to make a successful return to the stage after the initial public shock and outrage over his brother’s actions receded. However, in January of 1866, he took up what became his signature role, Hamlet. He played Hamlet for 100 nights, setting a record that was only broken by John Barrymore, who did 101 performances in 1922. 

Twice a widower, Edwin continued to perform successfully until 1891. He died in 1893. A statue of him as Hamlet was erected in Gramercy Park in Manhattan in 1916. Like the statue of Shakespeare in Central Park for which he was partly responsible, Edwin Booth’s statue still stands.

It seems all the more ironic that, of all of Shakespeare’s plays, it should be Julius Caesar in which the acting careers of the Booth brothers should intersect. Not only did John Wilkes identify with the character Brutus, but it is also in Julius Caesar that the character Mark Antony incites rebellion against Caesar’s assassins (including Brutus) in a speech which contains the remark that “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones” (3.2.84-5). Although John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of President Abraham Lincoln is still widely remembered, his brother Edwin’s rescue of Lincoln’s son has been almost completely forgotten, remaining only a curious footnote in the pages of history.

For those who are interested, much more complete histories of the Booths exist, of course, including a memoirs about John Wilkes and Edwin by their sister, Asia Booth Clarke. Her memoir about John Wilkes was first published in 1938, and it was reprinted by the University of Mississippi Press in 1996. James Shapiro’s book, Shakespeare in a Divided America contains a chapter detailing the assassination and the Shakespeare related interests of both Abraham Lincoln and his assassin.*** Ewan Fernie’s book, Shakespeare and Freedom touches on the Booths briefly as well, albeit more briefly, and in the context of its broader subject.****

Edwin Booth’s rescue of Abraham Lincoln’s son is described in Goff’s biography of Robert Todd Lincoln.

*Goff, John S. Robert Todd Lincoln: a Man in His Own Right. Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968, pp.70-1.

**Robert Todd Lincoln graduated from Harvard and served as a captain in the Union army under Ulysees S. Grant before going on to become a successful lawyer. He served as the United States Secretary of War from 1881 to 1885, and as the United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1889 to 1893.

***Shapiro, James. Shakespeare in a Divided America. London: Faber & Faber, 2020.

****Fernie, Ewan. Shakespeare for Freedom: Why the Plays Matter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

In The Winter’s Tale, the rogue Autolycus speaks hypothetically of the King of Bohemia’s anger with a shepherd who fathered the shepherdess with whom Florizel (the prince of Bohemia) has fallen in love. Having discovered that his son loves a mere shepherdess, Autolycus notes:

AUTOLYCUS If that shepherd be not in handfast, let him
fly. The curses he shall have, the tortures he shall
feel, will break the back of man, the heart of
monster.

The Winter’s Tale 4.4.898-901

Autolycus’s line suggests that the character believes a monster’s heart to be a strong thing, something only the strongest tortures might break. This suggests that monsters are sturdy, perhaps the point of approaching invulnerabilty. Only chance flaws can overcome them. For example, the invading Martians in War of the Worlds whom all of the human world cannot defeat, are only eventually overthrown by an accident of biology, by their susceptibility to a microbe to which humans remain immune. There are many similar stories–triffids, zombies, plagues waiting to run riot over humanity and perhaps sweep us from existence.

Yet, it also seems that when we examine certain monsters, there is a human resonance. They often don’t seem quite so tough after all. In fact, they may be just the opposite. Perhaps some monsters end up being or becoming monsters because their vulnerabilties are that much more profound than those around them.

How they look me. Their eyes look me bad or dirty. Rains smearing. Ashes my hair my eyes my inside. Me eyes grey them back. Still wanting. Them.

Not need. Find my own honey wood not them. Track humblebees, sweet waters, berries. Not them. Tender bark for cord. Seed pod inside bed. Not them. Where grasstreesky make things. Wave wind music. Hummmm bees. Hummmm not bees. Leaves air. Big heaving land. Trees big dancing cloud blue.

Look me skin. Hateful, they speak. Find sharp nose speak. Hurt. Wet wood bunched bunched time. Sharp nose smell.

Small world big big. Big ache. How hurt look. Me look. Rasp din rakkatta elbmrt tem. Vartga allaga nsshhkt.

Me inside.

To them the storms are storms and not the distant parents of sweet airs. They cannot see together in the world. Only parts not whole. Lights out under the moon. Only lights. Not the other moons. Bronze and lavandula. They only have the one.

With monsters, their hearts seem to begin with hurt, and we are told that pain is the great parent of monsters. The idea of the so-called “poisonous pedagogies” maintains in part that one makes a proverbial junkyard dog by beating the puppy. Raising the animal with habitual mistreatment or neglect tends to render them fierce and wild, as the creature seeks to develop a kind of perpetual defense against its own defenselessness. In this way, mistreatment may amplify viciousness in children too. Cruelty remains its own parent, with cruel fostering cruel, turtles all the way down. Sea of stars rippling like a gelid lake only when one dips in a paddle breaking the surface.

Related to hurt, fear also lies at the core of the very idea of ‘monster’ because monsters represent an absence. Absence of love, of light, of belief. Needs unfulfilled. That empty scary closet somewhere down the back corridor of our lives.

We are afraid of monsters not only because of their alien nature, but also because of their similarity and resonance with ourselves. In monsters’ awful forms and behaviours, we often perceive terrible echoes with our own existence, and uncomfortable parallels with our own lives. Our culture is full of stories about horrible secrets, often hidden just beneath the surface of that nice family down the street, or even our own friends and family members.

We make light of monsters often enough, but this only underscores their presence among us. In field, in stream, in a cave, beneath a bridge where billy goats roam. Even in the White House, crouching in denial, spewing venom.

Naturally a monster embodies a kind of fear which prompts it to lash out at those around it, but a monster also represents those collective fears which our human society projects onto real or imagined beings or situations beyond ourselves. Of the many terrifying examples of projected fears, perhaps few are as frightening as Winnie the Pooh’s nightmare from the Walt Disney short film, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day:

From this perceived difference, from the foundations of otherness, outsidedness, of alienation, arises virtually the entire host, the whole legion of monsters which run so rampant through the darker fields of human existence. Pain and fear fester into rage, which may also give rise to depression which adds to the hurt. The cycle itself turns vicious. Psychology tells us (perhaps Alice Miller?) that depression comes from rage turned inwards–and that rage turns inwards when there is nowhere else to turn. When the landscape empties out and desertification dominates the world, that emptiness may prompt all the various stages of wounded rage.

In his works, Shakespeare characterises many examples.

In the words of Caliban from The Tempest:

CALIBAN: I must eat my dinner.
This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother,
Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first,
Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst
give me
Water with berries in ’t, and teach me how
To name the bigger light and how the less,
That burn by day and night. And then I loved thee,
And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,
The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and
fertile.
Cursed be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you,
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o’ th’ island.

The Tempest 1.2.395-411

As is typical in Shakespeare, the story is more complicated than Caliban admits. He is no wronged innocent. His attempt to copulate with Prospero’s daughter condemns him and he knows it. To Prospero and his daughter Miranda, he is a rapist. Yet, Caliban does not speak of the event not in terms of lust or domination. Instead, he uses the language of animal understanding, of breeding and peopling:

PROSPERO: Thou most lying slave,
Whom stripes may move, not kindness, I have used
thee,
Filth as thou art, with humane care, and lodged
thee
In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate
The honor of my child.

CALIBAN: 
O ho, O ho! Would ’t had been done!
Thou didst prevent me. I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans.

The Tempest 1.2.413-21

Although he seems to realise that he has done wrong, Caliban’s perspective appears to derive more from his kinship with the wild things than it does from the mind of a typical human rapist. Where Prospero speaks of his daughter’s “honor”, he seems to use a language foreign to Caliban’s understanding. Caliban’s perspective seems stepped somewhere outside of Prospero’s human realm of courts and scholarship, of social order and even basic human respect. These are things Caliban’s greater and lesser lights do not know, coming as he does from a kind of sub human or beast consciousness. He sees only the advantages of potential reproduction, of peopling the island to which he is so deeply linked and of which he is an integral part.

When we look at Caliban’s language throughout the play, his vocabulary as well as his cadences, his speech is replete with natural resonance. His thoughts are occupied with nature and natural processes. His borderline morality seems almost natural in him as he not only does not belong in the human world, but also lacks the kind of nurturance and human understanding to function successfully within it. The order of Prospero’s world, and that he has temporarily imposed upon the wild island, is patterned after a higher moral law in which is alien to Caliban, and in which he is unable to participate. His laws are comprised of the natural governance of pain and pleasure, benefit and avoidance, and his observance is peppered with the astonishing jewel like beauties natural existence. In Caliban’s case, his ‘monster’ heart may be much simpler and much more vulnerable than Autolycus’ opening line might imply.

Yet, Shakespeare presents many other monsters too, and much more human seeming ones. Iago in Othello bears a sense of internal woundedness that drives his seething resentment to extreme forms of psychological violence. Adept at poisoning the mind, Iago speaks poison into his master’s mind, raising and feeding the spectre of jealousy in Othello until it consumes him along with all the innocents around him.

Bob Hoskins’ Iago laughs frequently, but more with malice and emptiness than with mirth. His universal hatred has become such a part of him that it seems to bubble up from his depths unbidden:

In contrast, Michaél Mac Liammóir’s Iago is more detached, calmly watching Othello’s passions begin to tear him apart while continuing to pretend honest cousel:

Same monster, different takes.

George Lucas once spoke about Darth Vader as “a pathetic guy who’s had a very sad life”.* There can be a great sadness about monsters, especially when we begin to see how isolated they are, and how in many cases they may remain cut off forever from anything that might have brought them love or happiness. John Gardner’s novel, Grendel, narrated by the monster from Beowulf offers a similar kind of perspective–a monster at once thoughtful and horrifying.**

In the end, monsters come from us. Our griefs, sorrows, lonelinesses, and rages give them life. Our orphaned emotions feed and nurture them. Our inward gaze seats and houses them. Sometimes they are in our towns, and sometimes in wild places. Sometimes they hunker down in shadow, or in the highest seats of government, confront us in a terrible light. It remains important to remember that when we walk down the street (in the days when we hope to be able to do so more safely again), we can look to those around us for the monsters. And if we cannot find the monster among them, then it may be that the monster is actually us.

*Edwards, Gavin. “George Lucas and the Cult of Darth Vader.” Rolling Stone, June 2, 2005.

**Gardner, John. Grendel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.