Ghost of Shakespeare

There is a tide in the affairs of men,                                                                                                  Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;                                                                           Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries.                                   On such a full sea are we now afloat,                                                                                                      And we must take the current when it serves                                                                                          Or lose our ventures.  (Julius Caesar 4.3.224-30)

Brutus speaks these lines to Cassius just before the two go into their losing battle against Marc Antony, again showing us that Shakespeare seldom missed the irony in the placement of his characters’ dialogue. When we read early modern drama, and especially when we read Shakespeare, it behooves us to pay attention to what is happening just before, and just after, any given lines or spoken, or the events in any scene take place. An essential element of playwriting is placement, just as it is in music, painting, dance, or any of the other arts. In some ways placement may be as meticulously and even mathematically deliberate as rhyme, meter, or other cadence variations in characters’ speech.

The metaphor of being afloat at sea is also especially pointed whenever it appears, and not just in terms of the familiar idea of ‘life as voyage’. In Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene, Phaedria tells Guyon (the knight of Temperance):

Who fares on sea, may not commaund his way, /Ne wind and weather at his pleasure call:/ The sea is wide and easie for to stray; /The wind unstable, and doth never stay. * (The Faerie Queene II.vi.23)

By virtue of his native temperance, Guyon is better equipped to resist Phaedria’s subsequent plea for him to rest in her beguiling safe haven, but the sea voyage remains a quest into the unknown. In our cultural understanding and in the innumerable literary works that reflect it, the sea around us describes the constant uncertainty of our lives, and it underscores the inherent isolation of so much of our human experience. The figure on the tiny boat appears in the midst of ever changing changelessness of waves. That figure, or even a relatively small shipboard company, remain ultimately alone on the ocean’s vast and unpredictable landscape.

The sea’s capriciousness, reflecting life’s capriciousness, retains a reciprocal intimacy with the our isolation, with each reinforcing the other. Brutus and Cassius, having embarked on their course (by murdering Julius Caesar), seem, in many ways, like a reflection of the same kind of confusion and isolation that the narrator experiences in the short story”Six Years After” by Katherine Mansfield. In the story, a mother who has lost her son to war struggles to make sense of what has become a stiflingly bewildering world. The story’s final lines reiterate the literal setting of the story, and the metaphorical setting of the narrator’s life:

” I can’t bear it! ” She sits up breathing the words and tosses the dark rug away. It is colder than ever, and now the dusk is falling, falling like ash upon the pallid water.

And the little steamer, growing determined, throbbed on, pressed on, as if at the end of the journey there waited . . .**

War has not only violently truncated the growth of her past into a present, but it also taints the present, as “dusk is falling, falling like ash”. Comfort is a dark illusory rug to be tossed away when it is colder than ever, even six years after her profound loss. The end of the journey into growing darkness remains unseen and unknowable.

Brutus notes that he and Cassius are already “afloat” on the “full sea”. The tide that leads on to fortune has been transformed in their present circumstance into a “current”. Already established, the flow already in motion no longer suggests the changeable lunar nature of a tide. Brutus and Cassius do not take the flow “at the flood” as much as they now “must take the current when it serves”. Circumstances have already altered, and the initial idea of “flood” cannot perhaps be further assured.

In fact, Brutus and Cassius have already lost their fortunes, having abandoned them by choosing a course that justifies murder by subtle (and ultimately meaningless) distinctions:

Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius. 
We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar; 
And in the spirit of men there is no blood: 
O, that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit, 
And not dismember Caesar! But, alas, 
Caesar must bleed for it! And, gentle friends, 
Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully; 
Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods, 
Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds. (Julius Caesar 2.1.179-87)

Death does not mince or dice, but ever takes a whole piece. When Brutus chooses to “stand up against the spirit of Caesar”, he little suspects that Caesar’s spirit will return to “stand up” against him later in the play. His choice in the second act only resolves in act 4. In both, however, as in that moment where Caesar’s ghost confronts him, Brutus, albeit surrounded by others, still stands alone.

Philip Edwards suggests that “Images of the sea, of storm, and of voyagine in fact maintain a powerful underlying presence in Macbeth, having to do (as in Othello) with the issue of control over one’s life.*** Indeed, these images throughout most of literature have to do with our lack of relative control, in most cases. Edwards highlights Mabeth’s line to the witches about how “yeasty waves/ Confound and swallow navigation up” (Macbeth,4.1.54-5) as our own deliberation may be consumed by circumstance or hazard.

In the Faerie Queene, Guyon’s temperance ultimately proves a little more reliable, especially for avoiding Phaedria’s temptations, but his journey too is filled with difficulties. At the other end of the spectrum, Mansfield’s narrator reflects a whole existence transformed or grimly translated by her son’s death, and she faces a future where the time, the season, and the surroundings have ceased to make any real difference.

In the end, what we cannot avoid is “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”, ripening and rotting, the ghosts of our Caesars become just that, even as we ourselves become the ghosts that we are always in the process of becoming:

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.  (James Joyce The Dead)

Our quick, bright moments matter most. Bird in a tree. Laundry flapping on a line. Sound of children at play down the lane. So much to take in. So much not to miss. How green, how fast, how soft, how tall, the gorgeous jazz or chocolate cake. Curve of an apple. Harmony. Summer bees.

For all of us live, ultimately at sea, no matter if we never see it. We live beneath the wings of owl and albatross, under the harbingers of everything–a crashing, sometimes crushing crescendo of human experience. Listening for the drone of planes, the sound of traffic, the wind or waves, ticking of the clock. Paris or New York, or dusty long gone afternoons in our childhood town, it matters not how far away in miles or years. If you listen, you might hear them now, as you might hear or see wherever you want to be and go. I hope that you can.

At some point, we all find ourselves leaving work late, closing down the place, driving home after everyone is long asleep, or walking alone down the darkened road. Another part of human experience, alone on a sometimes turbulent sea.

*Spenser, Edmund. Faerie Queene. Ed. J. C. Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909. Reprinted 1972.

**Katherine Mansfield’s story “Six Years After” appears in most collections of her stories and is also available on the New Zealand digital archive: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-ManDove-t1-body1-d10.html

***Edwards, Philip. Sea-Mark: The Metaphorical Voyage, Spenser to Milton. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997. p. 117.

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan;
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago. (“A Christmas Carol” by Christina Rossetti)

On a cold, dark night early in the new year, we find ourselves in a wood, seeking something. The trouble is, that rummage as we may in what Prospero calls “the dark and backward abysm of time”, we can’t seem to come up with what that something might be. Do we seek poetry, love, light, provision? Do we seek “the bubble reputation”, or some other concept or idea? Do we seek warmth? A simple fire or something to warm our winter weary bones? Whatever it may be, we are here, and our path appears to be heavily strewn with grasping tendrils and jagged opinions. Should we chance to stumble for any reason, we may fall down amongst dark stones and never rise again.

Although the year has only just turned, we seem to be antipodes distant from the fresh lap of the crimson rose. Hoary headed frosts have seized the crown of night and the wolf behowls the moon. Damn. We are gone to Goblin Market in a handcart. Trash tinsel shreds in a gutter. The sparkle of broken ornaments. Fire long since gone out. Guests departed. Wind roughing and tossing treetops in the forlorn night.

Our frozen night seems hopeless. Just don’t taste the fruit. Better not to even look at it. Damn, Pandora! I told you not to open that!

Yet, the bleakness suggested by the beginning of Rossetti’s poem is belied by the rest of the verses. The poem became enormously popular as a hymn, set to music by Gustave Holst (around 1906?), after Christina Rossetti published it in 1872. Holst’s music reinforces Rossetti’s lines, playing to us of hope and redemption, music that, like the heart offering in the final stanza, makes humans ascendant supplicants potentially equal of angels.

Here is the hymn, sung by the choir of King’s College, Cambridge University:

Interestingly, Shakespeare’s desolation often offers a kind of redemption too, albeit it can seem much bitterer and it isn’t always clear or uncomplicated. Wandering in the storm with his fool, King Lear’s mind erodes a precipitously as his privilege has done. Famously, the external storm echoes the internal, the landscape of the storm reflecting that of the dissolution taking place within the man himself. Lear eventually finds companionship and rude shelter, but it stands in stark contrast to his custom, as he shelters in a rude hovel. Raging against the storm and raving about injustice, a shred of Lear’s wits return to him in a moment of compassion. He thinks of his fool, who has been out with him in the terrible storm:

Storms in Shakespeare seem to represent a kind of atmospheric desolation–tumultuous overturnings of the air, just as desolate spaces often seem to represent those places where the self is left uncharacteristically unsupported, and dependent only on his or her own devices. * Simply these are turning points, places where the self must face the demons or face the self. Yoda on Dagobah urging Luke Skywalker into the cave, the “place of evil”. “In you must go,” he offers simply.

Whether storm or desert, forest or desert island, in lightning, thunder, or in rain, the confrontation remains somehow removed from everyday existence, even if that wilderness where it must take place (like in Rossetti’s poem) is in the wilderness of the human heart. Various layers of abstraction can make this seem increasingly obscure. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the struggle takes place on the battleground of convictions. In Timon of Athens, Timon’s struggle takes place partly within his own bonds of loyalty and generosity.

Wherever the wilderness appears, even if it is an external wilderness, thunder, cloud, or wood, it evinces roots that extend deeply into the human self. Prospero’s island is a place where the former Duke has subdued the wilderness through the artificial means of magic–a place where his stamp of civilisation remains tenuous, no matter how civilised it may seem in comparison with his various enemies’ conceptions and efforts. Puck may be seen as representing a kind of wilderness unto himself, constantly chafing against the reigns of order that the fairy and the mortal worlds would have imposed.

A landscape of change, the wilderness represents the space where changes are able to take place. It is the deep running of still water. The inner place of tumult in human existence and experience. As Lyle Lovett sings:

And if I were like lightning
I wouldn’t need no sneakers
I’d come and go wherever I would please
And I’d scare ’em by the shade tree
And I’d scare ’em by the light pole
But I would not scare my pony on my boat out on the sea. (“If I Had a Boat” lyrics by Lyle Lovett)

While the human state itself may be defined by change, the storm within it remains somehow constant and eternal in a peculiar way. The wind and the rain is always with us, and we come to prefer its risks and discomforts to the treachery of human nature:

Blow, blow, thou winter wind 
Thou art not so unkind 
As man’s ingratitude; 
Thy tooth is not so keen, 
Because thou art not seen, 
Although thy breath be rude. 

Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly: 
Most friendship if feigning, most loving mere folly: 
Then heigh-ho, the holly! 
This life is most jolly. 

Freeze, freeze thou bitter sky, 
That does not bite so nigh 
As benefits forgot: 
Though thou the waters warp, 
Thy sting is not so sharp 
As a friend remembered not. 
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly: 
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly: 
Then heigh-ho, the holly! 
This life is most jolly. (As You Like It, 2.7.179-98) **

Human aspects of life desert us and leave us bereft, abandoning us in wild places where the wind and weather may devour us. The only solace may be in the unfathomable movement of the divine, the constancy of wilderness and desolation, where emptiness remains our only dependable companion. The open grave, the point of the bare bodkin. Even memory cannot save us:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown. (Eliot, “The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock”)

It remains the art of our necessities that makes things precious, as Lear says. Perhaps only in the heart, whether in Lear’s almost forgotten compassion or in Prospero’s forgiveness of his usurping brother, lies a true road to the divine. Perhaps Rosetti’s hymn gets that right intuitively, especially in terms of recognition of the fellow human condition.

Let’s hope so, anyway. Especially just now. Perhaps if we lead the new year with compassion, it may turn out as beautifully as a hymn. Maybe then we won’t leave so many sleeping out in the cold.

*Gwilym Jones has written a well touted book about storms in Shakespeare, called (not surprisingly) Shakespeare’s Storms, and Jeanne Addison Roberts wrote an interesting book called The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender.

**As stated elsewhere in this blog, the song is echoed in King Lear.

The title, of course, is the title of John Barton’s famous work, and this is a bit of a departure for this blog, which usually focuses more on literature, philosophy, and politics. Still, there are a few issues surrounding the performance of drama written by Shakespeare or his contemporaries–specifically challenges for actors and directors–that can be annoying or mystifying for an audience member, and can nudge what might be otherwise good productions into the range of the mediocre or the downright awful. This week, we touch on some of these issues here in order to offer some guidelines (loosely sketched out by an actor and director) as to how actors and directors might specifically help to avoid these potential pitfalls.*

Both actors and audience members sometimes cite language as a specific challenge to Shakespeare, but it really needn’t be the barrier that people make it out to be. Really. It may take time for an audience member to attune their ear to Shakespeare’s language, but much of it is very clear:

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? (Hamlet, 2.2.327-32)

These words seem easy enough to understand. The challenge is that actors (and occasionally directors) can sometimes look at an early modern play text and sense themselves suddenly a bit at sea, not always because the language may be dense (which it can be, at times), but also because of the relative complexity of the ideas that tend to be expressed in much more economically muscular prose than that to which we are accustomed in our everyday speech. Hamlet’s words conflating the admirability of human function and capability with the base and ephemeral quality of physical existence say a lot in just a few words of text. And they say much more in the context of the scene, which we will not get into here today.

As actors, we carry the audience with us, lending the sense of the text to them even when they don’t immediately grasp it themselves. Yet, actors who aren’t used to early modern English sometimes seem to take a ‘run at it’ in alarming ways, apparently in an effort to make it through the speech as one might run through a downpour in order to avoid getting more soaked than necessary, or take a running start to leap across a void. This seldom ends well. It seldom gives us effective performance results.

Sometimes, performers will pitch their voices somewhere roughly two thirds up their register and stay there for the duration of a monologue, adopting whatever regular cadence that they feel the language might best suggest. This ramped up delivery seems to be an attempt to portray an energetic engagement with the text. Yet, the tension remains in their speech rather than in their physicality or their characterisation, and this tends to lose both actor and audience relatively quickly.

The resultant speech comes off to the audience a bit like a flat chorus or a vocal machine gun. The variance and modulation of natural human speech vanishes to be replaced by the wooden and metronomic. This is a damned shame. Not only does such treatment do a disservice to the text, but even more so, it diminishes the work of otherwise immensely capable actors, making their efforts fade into the proverbial woodwork or be absorbed, like their natural, internal light, by the curtain.

What Mike Alfreds says about live theatre and the essence of spontaneity is true.** Once that is lost in performance, it becomes much more difficult to recover a production as a whole. The mutually participatory illusion of a play falls down like an ill-secured piece of stage scenery.

The remedy is simple, albeit not necessarily easy to do, and it involves proper preparation. Not only must the actor be able to supply enough underlying energetic force (attention) to the character***, but the actor must also give enough time and effort to properly modulate what a character is saying. Mark Rylance Waters gives us some deceptively simple exercises that can be immensely helpful:

One of the challenges is that, in the case of amateur actors especially, although professionals can do this as well, seem to have less time to devote to honing the modulations of their speech and action, but it remains crucial.

And ‘action’ really is the second part of that. As actors, we sometimes adopt a habit of standing in certain ways, or delivering lines at certain points as we either move or or stand still upon a stage or set. Yet, as in speaking only one way, or in one part of our register, or at one cadence, standing repeatedly in particular ways also becomes static, in ways that can threaten to lose the audience’s engagement with a production. As a good friend (and a fine director) once said to me, “No one is ever ‘just standing’ there on stage.” The actor’s underlying energy should remain the same whether the character is napping beneath a tree or duelling another character to the death, but the attitude and posture should be as variable as the speech while remaining resonant with the character.

Forced variance must be avoided. Balance remains key. Otherwise the onstage attitudes may begin to look like the satirical dance postures in the number “Choreography” from the movie musical White Christmas ****:

It’s hilarious in this number, when the performers do it on purpose, but it doesn’t work nearly as well if it isn’t a satirical piece. Listen to Mark Rylance’s anecdote about pausing in the clip above, and let your modulation fall into the natural cadences of the speech, and not the ego attempting to precipitate some audience member’s pregnant expectation.

Most of the time, in a play, characters are just talking. So listen to how people talk, how they explain things, how they gossip, how they cajole, scold, wheedle, or express affection. Listen to how the tone of their voices changes when they do this. Watch their posture, their physical attitude, and see how they speak and move. It might help to think of Shakespearean characters as living lives too. Iago, Ophelia, Timon, Portia, all are representations of people with lives that extend beyond the boundaries of the stage upon which we see them. Just as comic book characters have lives outside of their drawn frames, so do these stage characters have problems that run like watercolour beyond the boundaries of the small dramatic frameworks that we see.

When we call our mother, our aunt, our friend, our boss, or our coworker, we tend to follow certain behavioural prescriptions, but we also tend to listen and respond to what they say. They have daily challenges too, and most of us do not merely charge ahead with our own agenda regardless of what might be happening in the lives of those to whom we are connected. We don’t just talk ‘to’ them or ‘at’ them. We talk ‘with’ them. We modulate between the effusive and the conciliatory, the supportive and the encouraging, as our engagement with them may direct our efforts. Our speech with others does not tend to be static, and neither is our posture, even in those moments when we may feel more relaxed and at our ease. Instead, we constantly vary our attitudes and postures according to the needs of the exchange.

As noted above, this isn’t necessarily easy to do. Good actors tend to work very hard for something that, in the end, may seem effortless. Great actors tend to look as if they are doing very little when they perform. It seems to pour out of them in the same way that our description of a difficult day might pour out to our mother or our friend. The fact that they can do it illustrates that it is achievable, however, and this is what we should strive for when we work as actors, and this is what directors should encourage actors to be able to do.

Part of the trouble is that, when we stand on stage, or even when we do something recorded, we can’t immediately see what we are doing. Directors (who tend to have enough to do) should break up these log jams when they see them. They should talk about the language, and about what things mean, what ideas are being expressed, and where certain scenes, or plays, might be going. But for the actor, it is important to be able to express oneself on stage or screen much as one expresses oneself in life, for that is the great secret of playing Shakespeare or anything else.

*Are these issues strictly related to performing early modern works? No. What works for early modern performance can almost invariably help with other styles of performance in dramatic works from other ages and cultures, with the exception of stylised dramatic presentation types, like Japanese ‘Noh’ for example, which are couched very specifically in particular kinds of ritual cultural vernacular).

**Different Every Night: Freeing the Actor

***For acting with energy/attention/focus, I suggest that the actor read Sonia Moore, Declan Donnellan, Bella Merlin, and countless others who have written extensively on the subject of acting.

**** (c) Paramount Pictures, 1954

Call me fishmeal, for I alone am left to tell thee in our universe. No Queequeg, Tashtego, or Dagoo. Where have they gone? What have you done with them? They were my friends, faithful and just to me. White whale swimming away into the vasty deep. Will he come when you do call him? Or will you wait? Perhaps tomorrow he will come. Food for fishes, merely fishes, jester wishes he were dead. Jack Point roasting on an open fire.

The title means many things at once. We who have been schooled outside of traditions that regularly use this concept sometimes tend to ‘think’ we know what ‘dharma’ means.  We may even tend to think that we understand such concepts, if we think about them at all.  We look them up on Wikipedia and that copy (well written and well intentioned) tells us that the term might have something to do with right behavior (in the Hindu tradition), or some sort of cosmic law and order in the Buddhist tradition.  In simpler, more vaguely new age terms, dharma seems to have something to do with ‘truth’, perhaps in the sense of some kind of ultimate truth, which may harken back to that idea of cosmic law that seems to have spilled across the internet like coffee or whisky across a desktop.

All worth considering, but maybe not a case of “All is true”.   Rather, a case of All is somewhat true, or true from a certain perspective, or true in certain contexts.  Partly true. When does ‘all is true’ slide into ‘what you will’? ‘Tis the season, after all. The pint sized Falstaff lounging around in his pajamas. Alcohol and swordplay never mix well. Or perhaps they do if Falstaff says so–sherry the source of courage, melting within us and without us, invented as a merchandising tool, left to us to wonder at in season.

Life is not a simple God given right to bear arms.  To assert that the Constitution of the United States might really be directly derived from the ten commandments remains pure nonsense.  It’s only about getting along. Only if we all get along and behave a bit is merchandising truly successful. Although earthly law may, to some extent, reflect what we think might be divine or holy law, it is worth noting that earth is not exactly heaven. Oh, must we apologise to Sir Thomas Aquinas and to the founding Puritan tradition? Substrata of the collective consciousness of the U.S. mind? Laws divine melt like sherry at the holidays or fat before a fire, melt, thaw, and resolve themselves into a purely utilitarian dew. All the rest is cranberry sauce. Rhetoric. Your very own cheese pizza. Oh, fudge. (Mind you, I am not picking on the United States. Liberté, egalité, and fraternité may apply to a spiderman rescuing a child on a balcony, and the remaining core of the British Empire may still make a few great shoes in Northampton, but how do these ideas apply to the wider field, and at what cost?)

Yet, what is this blog yammering on about anyhow?  Have I lost you already?  No doubt so many were lost before they signed on, before they read these sayings from the voice in the fire. Since I alone am left to tell thee, thy friends, family, cattle, all lost. Only you that have abandoned hope, since I know you cannot leave this place, only to you can I speak my words. Only to you can I possibly tell the truth. Allfather Odin, put out your eye and hang yourself upon this tree. Everywhere are gods dying on a tree. Everywhen as well.

Yet, we are at sea. We need context.  A centre.  We need to hold acquaintance with the waves, seeking what the classical Chinese philosopher/commentator Wang Bi likened to the hub of a wheel–dharma, if you will.

Here is T.S. Eliot:

  In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl. (The Four Quartets, East Coker 2)

Desolation knocking at the door? No. Already inside. Deep within the house. Enjoying brandy by the fire. The holidays. Deep lanes alway shuttered with branches and the past closed off like that recipe of nana’s that we cannot find to save our souls. They were the best damned cookies, I tell you. The best damned. Houses always turning into fields. Into roads, caterpillars and birds becoming mud in winter’s memory of spring. The pale horse, the passing van passing while we all await the owl. “Go forward, Faustus, in that famous art,/ Wherein all Nature’s treasure is contained”. * Proust’s memory.

Always going forward. Hurtling. Spinning. Falling forward to the deep guffaws of time. Faustus asking Mephistophilis (or Mephistopheles in the earlier A text) how it is that he might be out of hell. The devil dressed as a monk replying “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.” Our own surroundings always overturning like catfish roiling in the mulm. Bottom of a muddy pond. Marley’s ghost accompanied by his own infernal atmosphere, his hair and vestments constantly stirred by some hot wind that Scrooge doesn’t feel. Cats, soldiers, and skeletons. Old stone houses falling into disrepair, estates locked up in courts for generations. Old adobe houses unclaimed, melting back into the earth, crows and antelope, oxblood kiva fireplaces where someone once kept hearth. Time in The Winter’s Tale turning 16 years into a monologue. Perspective only the greatest power on the earth, turning moonlight into sunflowers. Turning flours into the best damned cookies.

Sometimes our greatest block to understanding, that old Hamlet “[T]here is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” quips Hamlet. “There is nothing in the world greater than the tip of a bird’s feather, and Mount Tai is small.” says Chuang Tsu. In spite of the fact that Einstein tells us that not everything is relative, an even greater prophet of our times has observed, “It is a strange thing, but when you are dreading something, and would give anything to slow down time, it has a disobliging habit of speeding up.” (J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. )

Hamlet thinks too much. Such men are dangerous. Aye, to themselves. They end up on the roadside, all dressed up with no place to go. In the room the women come and go, sipping their vintage fine porto. My kingdom for a whisky that isn’t counterfeit.

Shhhh. Let it be. Only the holidays bring this out in him. He’ll recover. He’ll be fine. There’s nothing that time can’t ease or can’t erase. Even ourselves.

We are all houses, the beginning and end in each of us. The alpha and the omega. What the hell? What the hell indeed?

One by one the bulbs burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house made once of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were. (Crowley, Little Big)

These are the ghosts of Christmas presents, or the deep winter holidays, paper littered across the floor, remnants of feast in the next room, in the next house. Lipstick on a glass. A kiss of port left as a burgundy smear at the bottom of the well. A half a truffle, chocolate wasted, on a plate set aside by some remark, or some activity. These fulsome days replete with rich sensation, becoming cloying memory even as we watch them. Islands in the stream. Perpetuities in a nutshell. That estate chained up behind those iron gates. No one visiting in living memory, but old ones still tell tales.

*The Evil Angel encourages Faustus to raise devils to aid him in his purpose. (Marlowe, Dr. Faustus)

If one is an English speaker, and one elects to study classical Chinese, one typically encounters some version of the following fable:

On a blustery evening, when heaving trees are beginning to throw random shadows around the courtyard, the birds become restless, and a crow calls from one of the treetops.  A boy, hearing the crow, picks up a stone and throws it at the cawing bird, causing the bird to fly to the top of another nearby tree.  The boy’s father sees this and emerges from one of the houses surrounding the yard.  Going to his son, he demands of the boy, “Why did you just throw that rock at that crow?”

The boy answers, “People say that the cuckoo’s call predicts good fortune, but that the crow’s cry bodes misfortune.  The bird that just cawed was a crow, so I threw a rock at it.”

The father says, “But humans have a much greater knowledge of the world than crows.  If a human can’t tell in advance what might be lucky or unlucky, then how could a crow possibly know such things?”

Fair enough perhaps.  Yet, we often still heed omens, assigning meanings to sights or sounds, or divining the future based on the colours in the sky.  We seek to perceive the flow behind the stream, the movement of stars beyond the heavens.  And who is to judge?  Who can say whether or not such things may or may not be so?  Divining the future by reading entrails?  By falling leaves?  Drinking tea?  Cloud trails?  Pathways in the sea?  Perhaps we only lack the perspective, intuition, understanding, or accumulation of joss to read such signs properly.  Or perhaps some of us can.  Any such knowing lies beyond the ken of some simple blog post.

Like the boy in the story, our collective cultures have long found meaning in the cries of various birds.  As Macbeth murders King Duncan, who is his guest, Lady Macbeth waits outside the king’s guest chamber:

That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold;
What hath quench’d them hath given me fire.
Hark! Peace!
It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman,
Which gives the stern’st good-night. He is about it:
The doors are open; and the surfeited grooms
Do mock their charge with snores: I have drugg’d
their possets,
That death and nature do contend about them,
Whether they live or die.  (M.2.2.1-11)

Here, the owl fulfills its customary office as a supernatural messenger of death, but it is not the same kind of portentous messenger that many of Shakespeare’s ghosts seem to be.  Here, the owl seems to provide a simple marker of a time, like stopping a clock at the time of someone’s death.  In many cultures, as this blog has noted in the past, the owl represents death and nature not in contention, but embodied in a single winged creature. 

Not that they can’t seem ominous as well.  For those who have not heard an owl in flight, you never will.  They fly absolutely silently, another echo of death that so many cultures have seen in these nocturnal predators.  Not such a stretch to think of death as something at least vaguely predatory, coming to steal our lives away on silent wings in the night.

Moments after Lady Macbeth hears the owl, Macbeth himself enters, carrying two daggers in his bloody hands:

Macbeth  I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?

Lady Macbeth  I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry. 
Did not you speak?

Macbeth  When?

Lady Macbeth Now.

Macbeth  As I descended?

Lady Macbeth  Ay. (2.2.20-5)

The owl’s scream has been joined by the finality of crickets, crying out or weeping.  Finished, as is Macbeth’s descent.  His fulfillment of that descent will take the rest of the play, but not only has he descended her, but Lady Macbeth has also recognised that.  Nature’s orchestration.  Nature’s punctuation.  Romeo and Juliet gently arguing about whether the singing bird they hear is the nightingale or the lark, these are Thomas Merton’s birds of appetite.  Wanting one thing, then another.

Any knowing we have of the birds remains an old one.  In the Qur’an, it says:

And Solomon inherited David.  He said, “O people, we have been taught the language of birds, and we have been given from all things.  Indeed, this is evident bounty.” 27:16

Knowing or understanding would seem to walk hand in hand with plenty.  Yet, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth hear the owl, but they seem to largely dismiss its potential significance.  And perhaps it all comes too late.  Plenty for them seems to have fled with an earlier bell, inviting Macbeth and summoning Duncan.  Or perhaps the plenty here is merely an abundance of miserable descent.

The famous Persian work The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar (c. 1145-1221) recounts the quest that the different birds make in order to find their ruler.  The journey takes them across seven valleys: seeking, love, knowledge, detachment, unity, wonderment, and poverty.  A metaphor for a mystical trajectory, with an objective of knowing beyond knowing, the birds’ journey parallels the steps of mystical experience.  Interestingly, the title may also be translated as The Speech of the Birds,  a fable in which the birds eventually discover that their ruler is themselves.

This beautiful and balanced outcome seems to be the result of genuine seeking–a different thing indeed from ruling like a mob boss or a thug.  Agents or progenitors of forced authority rarely meet good ends, be they Shakespearean characters, or actual despots in any sense of that term:

But man, proud man,                                                                                                                                Dress’d in a little brief authority,                                                                                                              Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d–                                                                                           His glassy essence–like an angry ape                                                                                                Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven                                                                                    As make the angels weep. (Measure for Measure, 2.2.143-8)

In angels’ tears lies the unsettling of the world.  One wonders if old adversaries ever cried in frustration at missing their own enlargement of the world.  Dancing skeletons, waltzing bones rattling into skyscrapers of a red and falling world.  Sitting down and weeping because there are no more worlds to conquer, or because we have conquered worlds more beautiful than any we might imagine making.

Perhaps in the first story, the boy’s father is right to dismiss his son’s superstitions.  Perhaps he is wrong.  Or perhaps he is only partly right.  Right in a singularity, in one context.  Whatever link between our understanding and the language of the birds remains a constant, however much it may couch in the collective background of our awareness.  Hearing the ‘owl scream and the crickets cry’, did we listen?  ‘Did not you speak?’  Did not they speak as well?  Are they not speaking to us now?

Birds are mentioned throughout the works of Shakespeare.  In fact, they are plentiful in all our stories, verses, plays–in all the literary and other creative expressions of the fabric of human experience.  Paintings, dances, musical compositions, all of these bring us multitudinous birds.  Still, the best way to really hear them may be simple.  Maybe if we take a walk outside, someplace where it might be quiet enough, we might be able to listen and to hear.

From Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont, here is Old Merrythought (singing, as he does throughout the play):

‘Tis mirth that fills the veins with blood,                                                                          More than wine, or sleep, or food;                                                                                           Let each man keep his heart at ease,                                                                                    No man dies of that disease.                                                                                                       He that would his body keep                                                                                                From diseases, must not weep;                                                                                                But whoever laughs and sings,                                                                                              Never he his body brings                                                                                                            Into fevers, gouts or rheums,                                                                                                      Or lingeringly his lungs consumes,                                                                                           Or meets with aches in the bone,                                                                                             Or catarrhs, or griping stone,                                                                                                    But contented lives for aye;                                                                                                      The more he laughs, the more he may. (Act II, 433-66)

Good as his word, Old Merrythought sings his way through the play as it goes variously around him, singing out and making merry even against the scolding of his wife and his own dwindling fortunes.  The production at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London in 2014 had Paul Rider not only singing Merrythought, but also dancing him through the production, which was an astonishing feat in a wonderful production of this play.  A bit of a spoiler to say that it all turns out well for Merrythought anyway, albeit that isn’t so surprising in a comedy.

Yet, when we look at “real life” (and if anyone can explain that distinction to me, you are certainly welcome to try–for I have come to believe that the best bits of stories really do tend to be built out of our own experiences anyway), we all seem to know these figures.  We all know those who pay no mind to seeming misfortune, appearing able to shrug or even laugh off life’s grimmer threats, and frequently these folks seem to turn out alright in the end.  When we do encounter them, it is difficult not to view these eternal optimists with a kind of wry admiration.  Marvelous work, if you can get it, right?  Marvelous, if you can get it right.

Of course, there is a distinction between living “for aye” as Merrythought puts it, and the kind of merrymaking associated with dissipation and dissolution.  In the Bible,  Moses meets God (Yahweh) in the form of a burning bush on a mountaintop, and in this encounter, God tells Moses, “I am that I am”. (KJV, Exodus 3:14)  God seemingly defines or delineates himself as the very state of being, as “is”-ness, as creation itself.  Living for assent, for agreement, for the very quality of yesness asserts a kind of affirmation of being that resonates well with creation or being.

Contrast this assertion of being with the ideas expressed by Shakespeare’s famous reveller, Falstaff:

A good sherris sack hath a two-fold
operation in it. It ascends me into the brain;
dries me there all the foolish and dull and curdy
vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive,
quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery and
delectable shapes, which, delivered o’er to the
voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes
excellent wit. The second property of your
excellent sherris is, the warming of the blood;
which, before cold and settled, left the liver
white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity
and cowardice; but the sherris warms it and makes
it course from the inwards to the parts extreme:
it illumineth the face, which as a beacon gives
warning to all the rest of this little kingdom,
man, to arm; and then the vital commoners and
inland petty spirits muster me all to their captain,
the heart, who, great and puffed up with this
retinue, doth any deed of courage; and this valour
comes of sherris. So that skill in the weapon is
nothing without sack, for that sets it a-work; and
learning a mere hoard of gold kept by a devil, till
sack commences it and sets it in act and use.
Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for
the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his
father, he hath, like lean, sterile and bare land,
manured, husbanded and tilled with excellent
endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile
sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. If
I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I
would teach them should be, to forswear thin
potations and to addict themselves to sack. (2 Henry IV, 4.3.71-102)

Falstaff is like T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men”, his headpiece filled with sack instead of straw.  Scarecrow propped up against the cold wind, burning with a tenuous fire fueled from outside of himself, his courage and ‘heat’ arising from a source outside of his own being, the inconstant companion of liquid courage.  To Falstaff “honour” is “a word”.  It is “air”.* For Falstaff seems to revel largely to run away, To him, affirmations remain elusive and illusory, empty as the promises of politicians or lawyers.

For all his wickedness, lying, stealing, conniving, the mighty pain at Falstaff’s core urges us to forgive him to some degree, or at least, if we think of our human kin, to lean towards forgiveness.  For who has not known others in such pain?  And who among us can easily judge them for what that pain might have made them do?  How it might have made them act?  Should anyone then pontificate about right and wrong, or controlling one’s behaviour and one’s attitudes, it brings to mind the question of whether or not the judge has encountered that kind pain, the pain not only of tremendous loss, but of the dizzying loss of self and all the world, that makes the world we thought we knew spin away into the dark corners of disarray and absence.

Of course, Merrythought eagerly embraces mirth over the seductions of wine, sleep, and food, choosing laughter and song instead of sack.  Yet, although he is enormously entertaining in the play, we also tend to find him a bit implausible.  His character interest springs at least partly from the fact that he maintains his good humour more staunchly than it is readily believable that most people could.  We tend to like him, and even admire his perseverance, but many people tend to sympathise and even identify more with Falstaff, especially if they perceive some glimmer of the kind of pain that it seems must have sometime knocked him off his compass.

But perhaps Falstaff was always a bit askew?  He might argue that he follows scripture, after all.  The Bible does say, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die” (Isaiah 22:13) and variants of these ideas abound not only in the Bible but in many other places as well.  In “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”,  Robert Herrick wrote:

• see 1 Henry IV,  5.1.130-42.

In As You Like It, Duke Senior, whose throne has been usurped by his brother, takes refuge in the forest:

DUKE SENIOR

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference; as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
‘This is no flattery; these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.’
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
I would not change it. (AYLI, 2.1.548-65)

As a chief representative of benevolence in a play full of characters that represent various perspectives, Duke Senior naturally sees good reflected in his surroundings. Yet, there is also much precedent for this idea of the forest (and Nature) as wise and benevolent counsellor.  An ancient belief, of Meskwaki people among others, holds that the souls of the ancestors inhabit trees, and so we are constantly surrounded by our knowing ancestors, the dead murmuring and whispering to us over the medium of moving air.

Trees have long been seen as a kind of bridge, a symbol of connection between the earthly realm and the celestial.  Reaching into the heavens, and with roots extending unseen beneath the surface of the earth,  trees stand between our mortal existence and worlds adjacent to and beyond it.  Yggdrasil may be the most well known example, stretching through the nine worlds of the old Norse cosmology.  A great ash tree, that touches all of existence, Yggdrasil’s three roots drink from three wells of three different worlds: Hvergelmir (the source of all waters), Mimisbrunnr (the source of wisdom), and Urôrbrunnr (the spring of fate).

Each of these provisions flows variously into our lives, governing and shaping them.  Water makes life possible.  Wisdom is the salt of life, seasoning our existence and sometimes healing wounds into scars even as the knowledge of our faults makes those wounds more painful.  Odin only gains his “all seeing” status by sacrificing himself to himself–hanging himself upon Yggdrasil for nine days and nights and giving up his own eye, so that he might see further, more deeply and broadly into existence–paying a high price for his more comprehensive understanding.  The stream of fate remains largely inaccessible to human kind, meandering behind life and experience whilst appearing to dictate its circumstances and direction.

For all their differences, these springs offer up kinds of language to us.  Whether it be life, wisdom, or fate, the mythical sources give us various bases for knowing our own existence and experience.  Yet, as with anything, these seemingly sacred foundations of cosmology may be perverted.

Known for its particularly brutal violence, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (that may have been a collaborative work, perhaps with George Peele) speaks profoundly to the perversion of language on several levels.  Envisioning two disparate camps, the play represents a power struggle.   On one side, the family of the Roman general, Titus, collectively seems to take language in literal terms, with words mostly representing the concrete things that they describe.  The words “hand”, “tongue”, “head”, and so on (words for body parts being repeated almost endlessly within the text of the play) tend to mean just what they describe, the actual parts of the body that they indicate.

Opposing them throughout the play are Tamora, Queen of the Goths (who are enemy to the Romans), her lover, Aaron, and her sons.  They seem to see language much more as a fluid tool, as a malleable rhetorical process that is most useful for eliciting given responses, situations, or effects.  Aaron and Tamora largely use language to persuade or convince others to feel or act in certain ways, and they shape reality and the body politic to their own ends accordingly.

One of the great villains of the canon, Aaron shows a particular mastery of language and its understanding, frequently employing it like a dark ritual to impose his will on the others around him.  In his exchange with Titus’s eldest son, Lucius, towards the end of the play, Aaron as much as admits that language–and religion that he sees as largely composed of it–means little or nothing to him, but that he can wield it because it belief still means something to others:

LUCIUS

Who should I swear by? thou believest no god:
That granted, how canst thou believe an oath?

AARON

What if I do not? as, indeed, I do not;
Yet, for I know thou art religious
And hast a thing within thee called conscience,
With twenty popish tricks and ceremonies,
Which I have seen thee careful to observe,
Therefore I urge thy oath; for that I know
An idiot holds his bauble for a god
And keeps the oath which by that god he swears,
To that I’ll urge him: therefore thou shalt vow
By that same god, what god soe’er it be,
That thou adorest and hast in reverence,
To save my boy, to nourish and bring him up;
Or else I will discover nought to thee.  (TA, 5.1.2206-20)

After Lucius swears to let Aaron’s son live, Aaron details his villainy in graphic fashion:

LUCIUS

Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?

AARON

Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,—
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men’s cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg’d up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends’ doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
‘Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.’
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more. (5.1.2258-79)

The climax of this litany of evils lies not so much in plotting and executing ills, as in the terrible rhetorical power that he exercises, even lending tongues to the silent dead so that they may speak grief’s terrible perpetuation to their dear ones.  Such a force would be difficult to overcome, and a kind of caution is carefully woven into the text here–the caution against not only those who plan evil, or do evil, but against those who speak evil, or who incite or counterfeit the frame, to make it seem as though others speak or act wickedly.

These days, we don’t have to look far for awful examples of Aaron’s exercise.  Power, misguided and misplaced, too often becomes a mouthpiece–maligning other groups and speaking untruths and half truths to the gullible in order to persuade them that things that are less than true are somehow fact.  Like Titus and his family, words are more literal to them.  For example, stating that climate change scientists have a “political agenda” negates their findings, in spite of the fact that true scientists spend so much of their lives in meticulous attempts to avoid any bias in their conclusions so that they might offer the best kind of guidance to the world.  To deny their findings, especially in dire situations, seems especially foolish because the outcome lies between two alternatives: the considerable expense of making some massive economic and behavioral choices now versus the much greater expense of the end of the human world as we know it.

Yet, perhaps it is worth it to keep the coal burning, to keep the lights on until that last moment when the earth again sinks into the primordial, overheated swamps where humankind will be at a distinct disadvantage, if survival is possible at all.  Perhaps we should cut down all the forests and use the land for crops and livestock while we descend to the hell of an overheated earth in a handcart of our own making.  These modest proposals aside, what we all really want is for our children, our grandchildren, and all the descendents of others to live in comfortable harmony, happy and safe in their surroundings.

Aside from the few villains like Shakespeare’s Aaron, most of us wish for peace, happiness, and contentment in the future.  There is really no contest between Duke Senior’s vision and Aaron’s.  The pleasant and livable, for the vast majority of us, remains a much more compelling prospect.  Yet, to maintain that vision, and to ratify and solidify it, it remains up to us to continue parse the rhetoric that we hear everyday.  We must sort what others tell us, from where we actually wish to go, and what we want the world to be.  Once we use our reasonable faculties to discern the truest course, the course most likely to realize the world we desire, then we must follow that regardless of what other voices, even those in positions of power, may say to us.

The Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy (which may have been conceived somewhere between 1200 and 1500 c.e.) famously says that any decisions we make now–usually, but not exclusively, in relation to energy, natural resources, and conservation–should take into account the effects of those decisions on the next seven generations.  This bears repeating; urging us to think seven generations ahead in what we do.  This can make decisions more difficult, but the alternative, the quick and easy way, leads to falling down amongst dark stones, never to rise again.

Thinking for ourselves remains the key to the future.  It appears best for us to listen to the wise, but to not necessarily buy their wisdom wholesale, no matter what their authority may seem to be, and do not fear to speak openly and honestly to wrongs when we see them, but do not create open opposition in the street.  Rebellion may be a personal affair until such time as circumstances may come to demand open insurrection.  As the Countess tells us in the opening of All’s Well That Ends Well:

Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use, and keep thy friend
Under thy own life’s key: be cheque’d for silence,
But never tax’d for speech. (AW, 1.1.61-5)

For this week, and in the future, it might be wise to bear these words in mind.  So, like the Countess, I bid you farewell and wish you all the best for this coming week:

What heaven more will,
That thee may furnish and my prayers pluck down,
Fall on thy head!  (1.1.65-7)

A famous story about a man named Hugh Glass (c. 1783-1833) recounts how he was badly mauled by a grizzly bear near the forks of the Grand River in what is now South Dakota.  His companions carried him for two days, but they became convinced that he could not possibly survive his injuries., and eventually they left him for dead, wrapped in a bear hide shroud, and lying in shallow grave.  Glass awoke to find himself alone, badly injured, and 200 miles from the nearest settlement of any size.  According to the tale, glass set his own broken leg and, wrapped in the bear hide they had left him in, began to crawl the 200 miles to Fort Kiowa.  He allowed the maggots (which only eat dead flesh) to feed on his wounds in order to prevent gangrene.  He crawled south to the Cheyenne River, and then fashioned a crude raft that allowed him to float downstream to Fort Kiowa, where he recovered to live for ten more years.

Of course, although this story may be true, or may be based on true events in some way, the story of Hugh Glass and his long crawl to Fort Kiowa is generally regarded as a tall tale.  Or a ‘winter’s tale’, as Shakespeare might have put it.  Indeed, perhaps he did.  Tall tales are ‘tall because they stretch the truth somehow.  Winter’s tales are tales told by the fireside to pass the long dark hours of winter–when day or night might be prohibitively inclement.  Not surprisingly, bears may figure in both.

We won’t dwell on the famous stage direction in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, except in passing.  This stage direction happens when Antigonus, who has been ordered to abandon the baby princess, Perdita (whose very name means “lost”), flees an approaching bear, leaving the baby to fend for herself in the teeth of a descending storm.  “Exit, pursued by a bear” may be the most famous stage direction ever recorded, and production staff still routinely debate how factual or fanciful a given interpretation of this note is supposed to be.  However the direction is interpreted, however, for the purposes of the plot, the bear consumes Antigonus, while baby Perdita is rescued by a passing shepherd.

On one level, the bear and the storm both serve as chimeras, as devices to heighten tension and speed the course of the play’s plotline.  The bear remains that vague dread at our backs, reminding us that danger lurks, unseen and undefined, behind us, ever at our heels, ever moving closer.  Like old wrist watches fashioned in the shape of skulls, these devices remind us that there is only so much time, and that it is always ticking away from us, sand slipping through the glass.

On another level, the bear especially serves to emphasize the fantastical nature of the tale.  A bear happening along the beach, just at the moment when Antigonus agonizes over abandoning the child to the coming storm in an especially barren place?  Yes.  Of course.

Most of us recognize these story elements with something of an inward smile.  Excuse me, Madam?  Excuse me, Sir?  Did you drop this gold ring?  Does it belong to you?  Whatever form the old con game takes, the pigeon drop that draws us into the tale does so with our tacit permission.  We let ourselves be ushered in.  We let ourselves step inside the storyteller’s world.

In the very first line of The Winter’s Tale, the character Archidamus grounds us in our new territory:

If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia, on
the like occasion whereon my services are now on
foot, you shall see, as I have said, great
difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia. (1.1.1-4)

Archidamus tells Camillo that this place is not like that place.  That the two places are not the same, that great differences lie ahead.  These differences are grounded not in ‘when’ but in ‘if’.  The very first word suggests not the way that things are, but the way that they may be.  “If you shall chance” is very different from “when you go”, after all.  A “like occasion” may be similar, but it is not necessarily exactly the same.  The ground shifts beneath us here–not just because Bohemia and Sicilia are different places, but also because there is a “betwixt”, a subtle indication of possibility not grounded in either place, but lying somehow in between them.

Strangeness, or the distinct possibility of it, is afoot.  Whether or not Hugh Glass lived through his encounter with the bear, or whether he lived through some similar encounter, our knowledge of the sometimes tragic turns that may occur when humans meet bears is enough to lend a weighty creedence to the possibility that Hugh Glass survived, or that Antigonus might have been eaten.  Perhaps the Sicilian lord’s bear was hungrier than the frontiersman’s.  Perhaps the lord fought less strongly, or more so.  Perhaps Antigonus was tastier.  What human being can really know the ways of the bears?  Another reason we tend, in stories, to consign the bear to wild and fantastical realms, making them seem all the wilder and all the more fantastical.  Bears can seem like monsters among us, for all their essential nature as apex predators, because they can so easily–should they choose–make us their prey.

Yet, in the tales, and in our minds, they represent the wild unknown, the wild god slouching out of the forest to consume us.  Our faith, or our disbelief, devour our being, our groundedness, our understanding of our world and of our place within it.  We can’t know what that wild god really wants, and those who have succumbed do not come back to tell us.  Bears have legs and teeth and claws, the undiscovered country come alive as agent.  Burnham Wood marching on Dunsinane.  The threat made solid.  Our fears made real.

And in this sense, comes the other bear.  To ‘bear’ something, meaning to endure it, or to carry it.  This sense is not unrelated to the first, for it is that great animal, the fear, that we carry within us, that we endure, until the bear walks out of the woods at the end of whatever long day we have lived as our life.  We carry all kinds of things, of course.  Not just in the sense of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.  Not just guilt, memory, or experience.  But we bear the weight of perspective and cultural expectation too.

Near the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hippolyta remarks to Theseus about the strangeness of the stories that they have been told of the lovers’ fantastical night in the forest.

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 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.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

HIPPOLYTA

But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images
And grows to something of great constancy;
But, howsoever, strange and admirable. (5.1.1-27)

Sometimes the bears are bushes.  Sometimes we merely bear our own thorn bushes, in addled imitation of the moon.  Sometimes, however, the bear is not merely compact imagination.  Sometimes, just as it is in our minds, the bear emerges from that primeval forest, huge and hairy, teeth bared to eat us alive.

Conversely, there are those rare moments when we pursue the bear, in whatever form, because we are compelled by something–and that is often something we cannot easily define.  Callisto, was transformed into a bear by a jealous Juno when Jupiter became attracted to the beautiful sleeping maiden.  As a bear, Callisto was hunted by her own son (another version of the Diana/Actaeon myth pattern) until Jupiter stopped her son’s fatal arrow and flung both Callsto and her son, Arcas, into the night sky where they remain as bear constellations– Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.  There are, in fact, far too many strange and wonderful bear stories to collect them here.  Suffice it to say that the word “bear” appears in some form 25 times in The Winter’s Tale–more than any other Shakespearean play.  (Antony and Cleopatra ranks next, with 23 uses of the word, which is not surprising in a play about, among other things, the endurances of love in all its forms.)

At some point, we all find ourselves a bit uneasy, and dancing with the bear.  Perhaps we are in a barren, windy place, or perhaps nearby wildfires have made the air oppressive and dangerously smokey.  Even, maybe, on a sunny day when it seems like one could not have a care in the world, we can find ourselves suddenly on the edge of the betwixt, of that strange continent between continents.  And that is just the bear brushing past us, seen or unseen.  Wordsworth was right.  “The world is too much with us late and soon”, and even in “getting and spending” we do not, we cannot, perceive the world aright.  Too much of ourselves in ourselves, and we are too much a part of the world to be able to step back and see it for what it really is (whatever that might be).  Only the bear remains something of great constancy, reminding us of fancy and peril combined into a single agent, and we ignore or dismiss that at great peril indeed.

The title comes from Hamlet, and from an exchange where Hamlet deliberately plays with Polonius sycophancy–the adaptability/malleability of hypocrisy being one of the ideas to which Hamlet (both the character and the play) repeatedly returns.  Here is the exchange:

HAMLET.
Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

POLONIUS.
By the mass, and ’tis like a camel indeed.

HAMLET.
Methinks it is like a weasel.

POLONIUS.
It is backed like a weasel.

HAMLET.
Or like a whale.

POLONIUS.
Very like a whale. (3.2)

The vast differences in shape between camel, weasel, and whale underscore both the erratic nature of Hamlet’s suggestions (the ‘antic disposition’ that he is wearing to make the court assume that he is off the rails), and the lack of sincerity in Polonius’s continued agreement.

Yet, this plays too on the idea that human nature may be as changeable as human fortune (and should you doubt that, you should spend a few days with a toddler), and neither clouds nor human experience fit readily within a box.  Much as we tend to try to pigeon hole various aspects of our experience, just as we seem to grasp something, it becomes a camel, a weasel, and a whale, refusing to fit within any prescribed box, and breaking prescription even as we fashion it.

Shakespeare’s plays touch on the frequently amorphous nature of our existence in a number of ways, for today it will be clouds, because they figure prominently at a pivotal moment in another drama too.

Just as Melville’s Moby Dick looks at the idea of a whale from every angle, providing a kind of cubist perspective on cetaceans, Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra appears to do the same kind of thing with love.  A & C is Shakespeare’s Moby Dick of love, a kind of cubist journey through the wide range of possible perspectives on what love may be or mean, in both good senses and bad.

In Antony and Cleopatra,the character of Antony is older than he was at his appearance as the rebellious instigator in Julius Caesar.  He has grown more dissipated, pursuing the pleasures of Cleopatra’s lavish court much more than he tends on his administrative responsibilities as one of the powerful Triumvirate (Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus), or on his wife and duties at home in Rome.   Finally, of course, he turns against Octavius, and suffers a crushing loss in the battle of Actium after Cleopatra’s forces desert him.

After this loss, and after Cleopatra fakes her own death, Antony has the following exchange with Eros:

MARK ANTONY

Eros, thou yet behold’st me?

EROS

Ay, noble lord.

MARK ANTONY

Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish;
A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,
A tower’d citadel, a pendent rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon’t, that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air: thou hast seen
these signs;
They are black vesper’s pageants.

EROS

Ay, my lord.

MARK ANTONY

That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct,
As water is in water.

EROS

It does, my lord.

MARK ANTONY

My good knave Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body: here I am Antony:
Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave.
I made these wars for Egypt: and the queen,–
Whose heart I thought I had, for she had mine;
Which whilst it was mine had annex’d unto’t
A million more, now lost,–she, Eros, has
Pack’d cards with Caesar, and false-play’d my glory
Unto an enemy’s triumph.
Nay, weep not, gentle Eros; there is left us
Ourselves to end ourselves. (4.14)

Of course, Shakespeare remains mindful that our own being, the human condition, in standing against the vagaries of the world, may be as changeable as the clouds.  In the next scene, Antony kills himself by falling on his sword.

The miserable change now at my end
Lament nor sorrow at; but please your thoughts
In feeding them with those my former fortunes
Wherein I lived, the greatest prince o’ the world,
The noblest; and do now not basely die,
Not cowardly put off my helmet to
My countryman,–a Roman by a Roman
Valiantly vanquish’d. Now my spirit is going;
I can no more. (4.15)

Yet, even after it ends for one, the human struggle remains.  Antony and Cleopatra continues for another act after Antony is gone before Cleopatra follows him by ending her own life.

One more turn of clouds deserves a mention, and these clouds are real.  Clouds of smoke.  Today, wildfires again rage through parts of California, and whole towns are being evacuated.  A terrible conflagration has consumed the entire town of Paradise, just north of Chico, and it threatens the larger city as well.  A fearsome fire also rages in the south, outside of Ventura, threatening Malibu and Calabasas.  Smoke is everywhere, north and south, its billowing clouds looking like fog.  Air quality remains so poor that local schools and college campuses are closing their doors, either teaching exclusively indoors or advising students to stay home.

A similar, albeit less immediately palpable fire has also been raging for many in higher education, as the perceived need for scholars and ‘experts’ drops away.  After all, what need to take a course in something when the internet supplies all the cursory information we might need at a few keystrokes.  Everyone reading this can look up Shakespeare’s plays on Wikipedia, for example.  How could anyone in any field need more than the super encyclopedia can tell them?  What can some ‘expert’ tell me that I can’t discover-and quickly-for myself?

Naturally, this trend extends to early modernists as well.  Even if someone thought that Shakespeare was great in school, of what value is it ‘in the real world’?  And, in keeping with the driving, underlying force that seems to move the world, what money can one make with Shakespeare?

Indeed, it is a challenge.  Unable to find sustainable work in his own country, the main author of this blog continues to struggle economically, and his family along with him.  Remunerative spaces for scholarship in the world seem to be a bit like California rain these days.  When they may be found at all, they tend to be Quixotic in attendance, and they may quickly evaporate, often leaving too little behind them to support any life.  Clouds continue to shift from shape to shape.  Hexagram 9 of the I Ching describes dense clouds approaching from the West,  but offering no rain.

Yet, I would assert that Shakespeare, and indeed all of literature, philosophy, and the arts have unfathomable value that the current prevailing attitude puts us gravely in danger of losing.  Oh, Shakespeare’s fine (we hear the dry commentary in our mind’s ear).  By all means, take a class in that, but major in something related to technology.  Go into IT.  Do something with software, hardware, AI, and the like.  Take a course in Shakespeare, read poetry, take that intro to philosophy class, but don’t major in those!

There are professors enough who wasted their lives on such things.  The world doesn’t need more Shakespeareans, more philosophers, or more wanna be painters!  The world has starving artists enough!  What would you do with such a degree?  Who needs it?  

What good has it ever done you?

The question brings to mind Scrooge’s nephew, who, when challenged on the value of Christmas, responds that it does him good in innumerable ways.  Not that Shakespeare or literature or the arts are necessarily like Christmas, except that these disciplines, and the study of them, do tend to offer us a broader and deeper experience of the world, perhaps one less prescribed by television, bourbon, politics, and the strange and often mundane vagaries of undulating life.  Because whilst our activities occupy so much of our lives, our lives really are shaped almost exclusively by our thoughts.

(I hear these protests too.)  Oh, that old magical thinking crap!  If we could be such and such just by thinking, then I would live in a palace!

Yet, it rings true.  When we think of things long enough and hard enough, they tend to appear.  Think of a friend you haven’t seen and suddenly the call comes in.  Dreams of relatives, of symphonies, of stones.  All these things exchanging electrons constantly, abiding in the same streams of existence.  Does the cult of logic dictate that synchronicity is not ‘a thing’?

That brings to mind what the clouds might manifest for you.  Do you see a camel?  An angel?  A demon?  Question marks or frogs?

We all have only a limited amount of time, and it is ours to spend as we wish.  Frankly, I would rather see angels in the smoke than devils.  I would rather embrace the whale than be shut inside the box.  By all means, watch television and drink whiskey.  Life is too short not to do these things and life would be truncated without including some of these experiences as well.  But do think as well as medicate.  Think ‘higher’ thoughts (which may leave Shakespeare out because those works encompass so much of both celestial language and the earthiest kinds of imagery).

Mercutio might tell us to think not of higher, but of harder thoughts.  Perhaps they are really one and the same.  In response to the Nurse’s question about whether or not it might be afternoon, Mercutio responds, “‘Tis no less, I tell you, for the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon.” (2.4).

On so many levels, this reflects not just the time, but also implies the challenges of time draining away our lives, our awareness, and our potential ecstasy.  Resist the temptation to dismiss the world of the mind as convoluted bullshit, because it is not.  It is as present and immediate as any light or shadow in our day or night.

But, if you are reading this, it is most likely that you already believe me.  That I preach fire to choristers who would readily preach it back at me.  Why else read of Shakespeare, fire, clouds, or anything else?