Ghost of Shakespeare

An old ballad, which the musicologists tell us may have originated in Scotland, tells the story of a woman named Barbara Allen.  There are too many versions to be recounted here, but they all seem to follow some variant of similar storyline.  The lovely Barbara Allen somehow comes across a young man who is grievously ill.  In the American Appalachian version of the tale, the boy is a ‘witch boy’ (which brings to mind Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, in which Ewan McGregor plays the ‘very strange enchanted boy’).

In spite of the dangers, a “Conjur Man” gives the witch boy a human form to court and marry her, and he can remain human for as long as she remains true to him.  In the Scottish version, the young man is certain that he can recover if only Barbara Allen will give him her love.

But just as shadows creep across the moon, just as the first word in Macbeth is not ‘if’ but rather ‘when’, life so often remains a walk along the knife edge of possible despair.  In so many ways, life, and the human state, is inconstant.  Barbara Allen cannot give her love, or if she does, she cannot remain true.  The boy relapses.  Falls back into illness.  Becomes a witch boy again.  And he pines away.  Eventually, she does too.

They are buried next to one another, and from his grave grows a rose, and from hers grows a thorn, and these two plants become as one.

Haunting.  How beauty that we perceive may prick our thumbs.  The duality conjures Macbeth’s first line that rolls up jewels and excrement into the relentless magic carpet of the play:

So fair and foul a day I have not seen. (1.3.39)

And the witches in the play, be they fair or foul (and, of course productions have made both choices many, many times), understand this duality beyond a mere understanding.  It is incorporated into their being.

When Banquo challenges them, the witches naturally answer in dichotomies.  Banquo says:

No secret that academic employment is difficult to find these days.  In the United Kingdom, it helps to be from the United Kingdom (or possibly the EU, albeit that seems to be rapidly changing–but it may or may not change forever, depending on what happens with Brexit).  In the United States, it helps to have attended one of the small group of ‘elite’ universities, or to be already somehow on the inside track for the post, or to know someone (well) on the selection committee.

Oh, yes.  And it helps to be below a certain age.  If you’re over forty, and happen to be applying for a ‘junior’ faculty post, odds are against you (to put it mildly).

Not to take up the laments of the marginalised.  The complaint is ever among us that people need to make a living.  Need to house themselves.  Need to eat.  And, in the United States, need to pay exorbitant rates for health insurance, because health care costs run so high that one serious illness or injury can bankrupt a family into the far mists of even the vaguely foreseeable future.

Sacvan Bercovitch (who was Canadian, although he taught in the U.S., and at Harvard for most of his career) argued convincingly that the American identity derived in many ways from Puritanism–not just from the religious movement, but also from that movement’s social aspects.  And there is still an idea of “hauling oneself up by one’s bootstraps”.  Admirable, or is it?

A good work ethic is admirable, of course.  Do your job and do it well.  Young actors may lament when rehearsals run to overtime, while the more seasoned in a company are often grateful to have paid work in such a tenuous field.

Of course, this has its tragic side.  Public funding is an example.

“I don’t want to pay taxes to support the arts.  I pay enough to support defense and necessary things.”  (Yes.  I’ve heard someone say this.)

This seems like one perspective.  One decision.  There is an old Chinese saying about there being two ways to heaven.  One is to soar there on the backs of flying dragons, and the other is to burrow in the mud like a worm.

Perhaps.  Only life’s brevity remains our constant companion.

Think of this as an extension of the last post, if you will.  If you hated that one, go ahead and sign off now.  Don’t even read another word.  Not even this one.  Is this post political too?  You’d better believe it.  The title of this post derives not from Shakespeare, but from American journalist Jimmy Breslin’s 1975 book How the Good Guys Finally Won: Notes from Impeachment Summer. 

Of course, the book was about Nixon and the Watergate scandal that had shaken the foundations of the United States political system in the 1970s.  (Then President of the United States, Richard Nixon’s administration tried to cover its involvement with a breakin at the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office complex in Washington D.C.)  As the political columnist, Donald Kaul once said (if you forgive my paraphrase), “Nixon was to politics what the Boston strangler was to crime.”  This certainly seemed like the case at the time, and it may seem the case in retrospect as well, albeit there have been many other serial killers in the history of crime, and there are, of course, other politicians who may be just as bad, or even much much worse.  No need to cough so loudly at the back.  Please, someone get that lady a glass of water and a tissue.

Politics, like big business, readily lends itself to deception.  Lying can be an effective way to manage people.   In Hamlet, Polonius warns his daughter, Ophelia, against it, believing that Hamlet’s vows of love are really just lies to get him into Ophelia’s bed:

The speaker of this title is Romeo.  His subject is. . .not Juliet.  Instead, it’s Rosaline, with whom Romeo first fancies himself deeply in love at the beginning of the play.  His friends think him ridiculous, and he is a bit, in that sweet way that lovers can be.  But we can tell that he is born to be a lover, or at least we think that we can tell this, if only because he is initially so in love with the idea of being one.

Yet, for all we know of Romeo, he is a lover.  Initially trying to stop the fight and end the violence.  That his attempt backfires is another post.

Does the play confuse love and violence?  Does it conflate them?  Or is that a reflection of the world that we see?  ‘Love’ and violence running together where a lucid mind says that love and violence are not the same.  Love is not violence against another.

Hints of parties that one might not remember so clearly?  All locked away under the back attic stairways in the minds of those in high offices or appointed to high courts?  The crimes that either we, our communities, or our countries lock away have nothing to do with love.  Crimes unreported.  Or even worse, crimes reported and then ignored.  Put behind some Halloween mask–perhaps a Christian soldier on a high shelf.

Difficult to imagine how it might feel to have one’s injustices publicly ignored.  To be steam rollered in public by an entire segment of a legislature, by vapid, money grabbing politics.  To be overrun by ignorance and short sighted foolishness.  Most people are not mean, but many in power can be so.  Too casually.  Recklessly.  Stupidly.  Mean.  Mean when mean becomes the institution.  When bigotry becomes a twisted norm.  When abuse can be overlooked, or even condoned, by the highest offices in the land.  How does that feel?

I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall–I will do such things,–
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep
No, I’ll not weep:
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad! (King Lear 2.4.278-82)

Sadly, it isn’t even vengeance, but justice that is thwarted.

Oh, justice usually arrives in some form, but it may come far too late, or only in the distant dark of some final night when goblins come calling in place of angels.  For heaven and hell tend to happen here on earth, in the furthest moments of oppressors’ lives, even if that is years on down the road.  True justice comes in silence and in solitude, seldom choosing to populate the public times.

Shame on a people who, even tacitly, support such a culture, where people can be victims and their charges are trotted out and then publicly ignored or disavowed.  We the people?  Goblins tend to come for bystanders as well.  More than shame, damnation.  Funny word that.  Damn nation.  What might it tell us?  Not to say that we might currently abide under the yoke of processes that are being re-engineered to silence us and to keep us underlings.

A productive nation needs wage slaves.  So, the wily old coyote waves a flag–say Roe v. Wade–like a red handkerchief in a magic show.  Gets the bull running.  Bees buzzing.  Meanwhile, labour unions are steadily eroded.  Let them think it is about a right to this or that.  Let them eat the cake of hot button issues.  Let them not see unions, workers’ wages, workers’ rights, all going away.  Politics filled the vacuum of calculation–how best to govern?  Yet, it seems ever to devolve into a power money grab by concentrated wealth.

Speaking of the old smoke and mirrors, the ragged magic show, the ‘look over here, look over here’ of misdirection, let’s not forget the bone crunching drops in the stock markets worldwide.  The timing seems remarkable, just before the midterm elections.  October.  The old stock market horror show.  It might be enough to distract some people.  To make them focus on other things.  Forget to vote.

Lear’s fool would tell us that such things do not tend to end well, at least not for the underlings:

Winter’s not gone yet, if the wild-geese fly that way.
Fathers that wear rags
Do make their children blind;
But fathers that bear bags
Shall see their children kind.
Fortune, that arrant whore,
Ne’er turns the key to the poor.  (King Lear 2.4.40-6)

The poor are ended.  The middle classes will continue to erode, in spite of promises to the contrary.  Slip slidin’ away, as Paul Simon put it.  Promises like Lear’s daughters’ professions of love–merely crafted to engineer the outcome of a vote.  “Make America great again”, or the U.K. “getting our independence back” with Brexit.  Politics.  The oldest confidence game.  Voice of Satan talking up a storm, convincing people against their own interests.  Not for a mere blog to advise people.  To suggest that stupid is as stupid does.  Yet, we can all be stupid where devils are concerned.  They are all professionals while we are amateurs.

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart. (Merchant of Venice 1.3.96-9)

Now, moving deeper into autumn with winter yet to come.  Goblins with ice rime on their chins and frost on their breath.  Some little discontented voice posting in a blog?  Who pays any attention to that?  If any attention were to be paid at all, this blog might be ‘liked’ 25% less.

As for Romeo?  Juliet?  Rosaline?  The single tree’s single identity gone into that of the double tree into which it has grown.  Sacrificing oneself for love.  The self ‘become a new and greater self’ out in the wider world.  We believe there may be nobility in this.

But here and now the world, even as it catches fire, seems to fall away from love.  Far away.  The little balloon man, too far and wee for the whistle to be heard.  Selling balloons that we will never see, or seeing the world through balloons filled with insubstance.

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on. (Othello 3.3.170-2)

Beware of jealousy.  Beware of party lines.  Sacrificing oneself into a political party?  Two trunks as one?  A distant group that ‘seems’ to espouse one’s interests.  Or some of them, right or left?  Better to watch one’s own back to think for oneself.  Make up one’s own mind, rather than let parents, spouse, friends, coworkers, church members vote through you by proxy.

Do vote though, no matter how bleak the winter may be ahead.  No matter how many stormtroopers may be amassing at the borders of our being.  No matter what we may have to live through in the days ahead.  Jackbooted goblins under the stairs, coming out into the open.  Sharp teeth under the curve of sneering upturned lips, believing enough of the gullible people have been fooled.  And perhaps they have, while others stand quietly, lambs led to slaughter, wringing hands.  Something wicked, and no one selling lightning rods.

Initially, this week had wanted to look at sonnets, and there is plenty of both love and danger there, but that will be another time.  In the meantime, voting doesn’t take much, and as much as my single voice ever appears in this, here it is: 

I urge people to pay attention, and to vote.

Trouble with ghosts.  One can’t ever tell at what unexpected moments they may return.

That old feeling creeping up at times, that’s okay.  It’s when it settles in like a comfortable cloak around your shoulders that begins to matter.  Then, the night darkens and you wonder if that was really just an owl screeching outside.  Your gaze takes in the firewood by the hearth.  Such a small pile.  Just a few logs.  Why hadn’t you brought more while you still had the light?

Of course you could go now again.  It isn’t far.  The wood pile stands just back of the garage, near the edge of the forest.

Or, you could just use the little wood that’s left and let the fire burn down.  You could go get more in the morning.  Just go to sleep a little sooner tonight.

That sound again.  Just the wind?  Strangely, an old song keeps running through your head.

Had one.  For the post this week.  Fact is that I had it right here in my pocket, keeping it warm, ready to serve it up at just the right moment.

(Can you hear it coming?  Yep.)

But. . .

Sometimes the world just doesn’t work like that.  Sometimes, even if the words seem to be coming along just fine, we suddenly find that we have nothing to say.  Nothing to address.  Or, at least, nothing will come together in the way that we envision it, or in the way that it needs to be expressed.

My apologies to anyone who might have been looking forward to the next post.

Chalk it up to a bad week at the end of a bad year and a half.  No.  Lots of good in there too, just that sometimes that can be more difficult to see.

Sometimes we get tired and we need to take a little time off.  So, I’m leaving this blog for now.  I’m turning off the lights in the theatre, but I’ll leave the ghostlight on just in case anyone stops by.

Not that I won’t maybe start the engines up again at some point.  Maybe even in the nearer future.  For now I’m finished though, and it’s time to leave the building.  Goodnight and good luck.

The wildfire (the ‘Mendocino Complex’ fire) currently burning in Shasta County, California is the largest wildfire in recorded California history.  In spite of the tireless work of roughly 14,000 courageous firefighters, authorities say that the fire will not be reasonably contained until September.  In counties close to the fire, and even in neighboring states, the hot air is tinged with smoke, but the smoke has spread all the way to New York City, almost 3000 miles away.

Be careful out there.  Air full of knives.  Taste of summer campfires gone way way wrong.  Candles gone goblin, picking up their flaming skirts and running down the forest highways, eating everything.  For even when he or she remains invisible, the old hobgoblin is always with us, but sometimes quits the hob for something else.

I’ll follow you, I’ll lead you about a round,
Through bog, through bush, through brake, through brier:
Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound,
A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire;
And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn,
Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn.

Fire may change shape and direction at a moment’s notice–part of which makes fighting the huge wildfires so dangerous.  Brave men and women face those ever shifting, advancing walls of flame.

Bigotry does that too.  Changes shape and direction like a fire.  Prejudice.  The mind slipping sideways into certain ways of thinking, usually in a fearful reaction to something unknown or misunderstood.  ‘Keep them out’ or ‘let’s get ’em’ is never really policy, but people still attempt to legislate NIMBY (not in my back yard) not against false entities, the false gods of corporation and political posturing, but rather against individuals according to origin, faith, or sometimes racial characteristics.

All based in fear.  The kind of fear that someone might take something away.  That things might change.  That our little corner of the world will not remain the same.  (A news flash here: our corner of the world, no matter how changeless it may seem, will never remain the same.  Remember how Dickens referred to us, as “fellow passengers to the grave”.  When ‘we’ are gone, our little corner of the world will be different forever, perhaps even improved by our absence.)  Here’s this now often discussed Shakespeare monologue from Sir Thomas More:

You’ll put down strangers, 
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses, 
And lead the majesty of law in lyam 
To slip him like a hound; alas, alas, say now the King, 
As he is clement if th’offender mourn, 
Should so much come too short of your great trespass 
As but to banish you: whither would you go? 
What country, by the nature of your error, 
Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders, 
To any German province, Spain or Portugal, 
Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England, 
Why, you must needs be strangers, would you be pleas’d 
To find a nation of such barbarous temper 
That breaking out in hideous violence 
Would not afford you an abode on earth. 
Whet their detested knives against your throats, 
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God 
Owed not nor made not you, not that the elements 
Were not all appropriate to your comforts, 
But charter’d unto them? What would you think 
To be us’d thus? This is the strangers’ case 
And this your mountainish inhumanity.  

These days, we throw people out.  We don’t want them.  We may justify their expulsion or their poor treatment with equivocations.  “We want to help these people, but we want to help them in their own countries.”  A difficult argument for those fleeing violence or death–women and children, and men too, with the ravening hounds of rape and murder squads at their heels.  “We don’t have room.  The health/social/civil/_____ system cannot sustain them.”  A strange argument in a modern world where so many of our countries are comprised of former immigrants or their descendents.  Might these systems improve with an influx of new blood/new workers/new ideas/new taxes?  How well do these systems support everyone in a given country now?  In the United States, how well is that IHS working for you?  In the United Kingdom, does it seem reasonable to assume that more people paying into HMRC would somehow fail to provide more funding for the services that people use?

Simplifications, I know, but ideas worth considering nonetheless.  We live in complicated times, and like the wildfires, it can be most difficult to change the course of certain ideas once they take hold.  The idea that there is not enough to go around.  Well, certainly if we don’t address population, there will not be enough someday.  Yet, we neglect addressing the issue of population in our own back garden because we somehow feel insulated from the rest of the world.  Still, we think that by barring people from our borders that our own garden will be okay.  That we and ours can remain insulated from the greater world.  That failing healthcare, fires, economic fluctuation, political unrest all will avoid coming to our little town.  Our little changeless corner of the world.

Difficult to remember just how connected we are.  This past week, the current U.S. administration lifted the ban on the use of neonicotinoids on federal wildlife refuges.  (Neonicotinoids are a type of synthetic pesticide that have been demonstrably linked to the death of bees worldwide.)  Brings to mind Wallace Stevens:

Strangely, the smoke in the air reflects that ideological civil war in the current United States.  A ‘not quite yet hot’ civil war, albeit we have already had fatalities.  A slow seeping war of attrition this current American Civil War, the walking corpse of the earlier American Civil War stemming largely from the English Civil War, still haunting us.  Ancient ghost from 1642.  Wandering lonely as a cloud?  No.  Such poison does not come by ones.  When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.  Poison arrives in hosts, poisoners keeping company with the poisoned and poisoning themselves.

Some people sometimes think that Shakespeare’s Othello is about race, but it is really a distillation of poison.    Poisoning of the human mind.  After all, what is bigotry but the product of a poisoned mind?  Being racist, or behaving in prejudicial ways, is to have already succumbed to poison.  More so if such behaviors are cloaked beneath a guise of religion, righteousness, or some other bit of babbled mess that eats rational thought.  By the time we do that, think that, suspect that–by the time we make ‘them’ into them, we have already become them too.

By the time Othello listens to Iago–conjured brilliantly in Orson Welles’ film where Iago (Micheál Mac Liammóir, or Alfred Wilmore) is so often pictured in multiple shots as if his character is perched on Othello’s shoulder, whispering into his ear.  Pestilence into his ear indeed, introducing a fatal epidemic to Othello’s mind that has been and was.  In these shots, Othello and Iago become almost a single character, with their onscreen presences sometimes melding into each other so that they become a single sort of being.

Of course, many things can poison us.  Jealousy and rage, but also longing and loneliness.  We can twist the woven scarf to pieces, letting it fall like dead autumn leaves at our feet.  Or we can scour the sky for meaning, counting cold stars and looking askance at any food.  We can chase golden gods that thrum like bees across the blonding fields of dry deep summer, or we can chase the owls through wet tall grass before the dawn.  Until they’re gone.

Perhaps the Buddhists are right after all.  Perhaps it is all in the wanting–the attachment.  Ay, there’s the rub.  Attachment the force that damns us to becoming foolish fond.  Funny that people think the old hobgoblin can be outlined in some scripture when it’s here with us all along.  Do we then become a headless bear?  Is it best to let it go?  Or fight on all fronts?  Perhaps we become just ‘climate crazies’, the tree hugging dirt worshippers.  Perhaps we should become that if we aren’t already.  Or perhaps we should just let it go?

If we’re lucky, and that goes for most of us, human experience includes moments of realization–moments where one apprehends the nature of existence, Zen poet, Shinkichi Takahashi, writes:

Nothing exists, yet fascinating                                                                                                 The ants scurrying in the moonlight.

It is the eye deceives:                                                                                                                     The ants–they are but moonlight.

The idea of being’s impossible:                                                                                                 There’s neither moon nor ants.

Like many Zen poems, this one whittles down what we think we perceive, what we think we understand, until the ‘idea of being’ itself becomes ‘impossible’.  Ultimately, the poem gives us no place to stand–no ground to support even our consideration of the possible nature of reality.  Existence, and the mirror of our considerations (a famous Buddhist parallel), are both illusory.  We constantly live in their midst only because our perceptions typically suggest to us that there is nowhere and nothing else.

When we rap our fist on the solid oak table top, we know that this is ‘real’.  We can feel it.  Yet, when we step back from it, the nature of reality becomes a changeable construct.  Our table is actually made of atoms, tiny particles comprised of much more space than solid.  Our hand and the whole of what we see around us is constructed the same way–relatively vast (albeit on a tiny scale) spaces that are pinioned by particles so small that it becomes difficult for us, even with advanced instruments, to observe or measure them.  The whole of the table seems to be really a kind of fable–a loose congregation of tiny atomic solar systems, each a minuscule web of space cobbled together by only the occasional minute bits of solid and concretized by our own awareness of the thing.  When seen in the Zen poet’s moonlight, the table’s solidity, the table itself, and even our own singular presence there to see it, all vanish, as if they had never been.  Were they?  Or are these but tables of the mind?  False creations proceeding from the heat oppressed brain?

Naturally, Macbeth’s perception has an added dimension, and his famous dagger speech marks a vision already weighted down by a future of which the character only, as yet, conceives.  Macbeth’s perception of events conceives of a dagger looking forward.  Macbeth’s awareness of the world is skewed and his own mind adds a spin to the ball of existence that is already in play.  As he considers abusing the sacred trust of his own hospitality towards his king by murdering Duncan, that consideration becomes part and parcel of his reality.  He cannot quite touch the dagger yet, be he can see it.

All of this has long been well covered in Shakespearean criticism, and we only brush against the banks of the stream here.  The oak table may be solid and real, or it may not, but this possibility/impossibility fits so well with the confusion of human experience where our daily lives remain a constant/inconstant sea of transformation–of becoming and of falling away.

Shakespeare often writes of great transformations.  In The Tempest, a spirit called Ariel sings:

Full fathom five thy father lies; 
              Of his bones are coral made; 
    Those are pearls that were his eyes: 
              Nothing of him that doth fade, 
    But doth suffer a sea-change 
    Into something rich and strange. 
    Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: 
                              Ding-dong. 
    Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell. 

Ferdinand, having been through a frightening shipwreck, believes his father has drowned.  Ariel here plays on that belief.  Yet, Ferdinand’s idea about the nature of reality is mistaken at this point.  His father, the king, is alive and well on another part of the island.   Yet, in a sense, his father is also undergoing a sea change, a profound transformation from his old self into something else.  That the nature of his father’s sea change is not quite what Ferdinand believes it to be at the time that Ariel sings the song, does not belie its depth or scope.  For King Alonso also believes his son to be drowned, and his great grief finds its resolution in the resolution of the play.

A strange duality appears here–a nexus of the fleeting with eternity–and this too springs from our perception.  Incorporating the assumed, the perceived, or the projected into experience can roll it forward in perpetuity.  Ferdinand’s father seems dead to him, as Alonso also assumes his son to be “mudded in that oozy bed”, drowned at the bottom of the sea.  Death seems to be a permanence.  “Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities”, as Robert Ingersoll said while standing at his brother Ebon’s grave in 1879.

Yet, that vale is flux.  It is a compilation of change, an ever shifting bridge made up of birds or stars.  We live in the sea change, and while we lean back, and our hands and feet seek the supports of solid existence, we ultimately find nothing there to bolster us in our continued pilgrimage.  Love may be the most famous example–both constant and ever changing.  Birds and stars jostling for position against the deep clear blue of the sky.

Any solidity may be produced only by ourselves.  Like oysters, we secrete our own pearls in vague attempts to insulate ourselves from the shifting sands of change.  Sometimes, these pearls grow into plays or paintings or relationships, ‘enterprises of great pitch and moment’ that might soften the cries and crises of continuation.  Sometimes, these ephemeral beauties will briefly hold our gaze or our consideration.  Sometimes, they lend a meaning to the day, the field, the falling stars.

In the end, however, these too fade.  Pearls wear away to luminescent dust.  Stars go out.  Even The Nine Billion Names of God will all be named, uttered, and dissolve.  In the end, life and love are so much parallel that we cannot always tell one from another.  Lysander’s words apprehend it well:

[M]omentary as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say “Behold!”
The jaws of darkness do devour it up.
So quick bright things come to confusion. (AMND 1.1.145-51)

We have to wonder if anything really is transformed, or the sea change is merely the nature of things, of being, of ourselves and our experience.  Because we began with Zen thinker, it seems only fitting that we end with one.  One of the ‘greatest’ (and I sense that he would laugh at that) teachers of Zen Buddhism founded the Sōtō school in the 13th century.  Dogen often composed his thoughts in a poetic form that predates haiku, known as waka.  His description of reality?

To what shall
I liken the world?
Moonlight, reflected
In dewdrops,
Shaken from a crane’s bill.

Here, poetic description encompasses more than ponderous prose might have done.  Being in it, and not an independent observer, Dogen can only ‘liken’ the world, and each dewdrop, even as they may fly apart in all directions from the crane’s bill, contains a complete reflection of the moon.  Still, we are in motion, shaken off into space and falling, to land we know not where.  Whole and fragmented, complete and fragmented, participating in unknown trajectories.  Sounds like a sea change to me.

Last night, and for many nights, owls have haunted trees that stand around the field behind where I sleep.  Always at least one pair.  Sometimes more.  They hoot softly, answering each other gently as night cools the day away and shadows flood the tall, dry, blond grass, and twilight deepens into starlight.

These barn owls seem endlessly liminal, active in the time between day and night, perched in trees that mark the margins of human activity, between the earth and the sky, light and dark.  Their hoots seem hauntingly mournful, bringing to mind the thin line between this life and whatever, if anything, might lie beyond it.  Whatever (or whoo–mever) we may have lost, the owl plaintively seems to cry for that as much as for losses of its own.  Grief echoes our own there in the dark, as if lonely wee hours are wrapped up in those sounds, when we lie awake alone with our regrets while they agitate soundlessly around our weeping.

Then, Ophelia enters, unkempt, disheveled, staring wildly about herself, surrounded by enough invisible armies to conquer the world.  Her world, her wold, in any case, the relentless assaults of grief gathering her and crumpling her into a human rain.  Loss of lover, father, and a self.  Call me legion for I am many.  Legions of sorrows marching all at once like tears inside the consummation of all human sorrow crying rivers.

Night has gathered within Ophelia.  It is no longer a nighted garb that can be separated from her.  Night has fallen and rolled into her being.

We may accept what Chateaubriand wrote as resonant with truth:

Le comédien chargé du rôle de spectre dans Hamlet était le grande fantôme, l’ombre du Moyen Age que se levait sur le monde, comme l’astre de la nuit, au moment où le Moyen Age achevait de descendre parmi les morts; siècles énormes que Dante ouvrit et que ferma Shakespeare. *

Yet, if this might be the case, then what does Ophelia represent besides the long agonized cry of generations of women trod on by men who hurry on to other purposes?   Although she remains isolated (from the other characters, although it is doubtful that her experience isolates her from the play’s audience) in her experience and in the perspective that madness lends her, she also becomes a kind of prophesying angel of vengeance and its attendant downfall.  Seemingly alone, and yet surrounded by enough invisible armies to conquer the world, she carries the flaming sword of the liberated vantage point.  Experience.  Wisdom.  Death.  Her world, her garden, has been populated by legions of relentless assaults of gathering grief–gathering like clouds and crumpling her at last into a human rain.  Loss of lover, father, and a self.  Call me legion for I am many.  Legions of sorrows marching all at once like tears inside the consummation of all human woe crying rivers.

First she sings of a true love gone away as a religious pilgrim–a traveler whose journey is mandated by a faith.  Hamlet is not at Elsinore when Ophelia’s mind slips away.  Instead, he has become a pilgrim on the path of revenge, a lonely faith that will soon lead him, both literally and figuratively, to leap into a grave.  She sings of death rites, often assumed to be her father’s, but they could just as well be for her lover, or for anyone around her.  The sexual references too would easily lead to dying, again figuratively and more literally.

Although most of us cannot see them, perhaps the armies around Ophelia also somehow consist of owls.  “They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. God be at your table.”  (Hamlet, 4.5. roughly 45-7, depending on the edition).  The wandering Ophelia remains intent here, but does she reference only the folk tale?**  Or is demon Lilith here as well, standing with her owl feet?  Or if the bird footed figure in the Burney relief in the British Museum is not Lilith/Lilitu, but is instead Inanna/Ishtar or Ereshkigal perhaps it matters little.  Any way you look at her, angel of death, goddess of war and fertility, or earth mother, she is still flanked by owls.

Wisdom?  Death?  Do these not make good companions?

Lilith inhabits a tangled collection of tales, far too many to be included here in a brief post.  If we pick up what seem to be the dominant threads, however, they suggest some shape.  If Lilith was Adam’s original wife (before Eve) then she seems to have fled after quarreling with Adam–in what is often celebrated as a feminine rejection of a patriarchal establishment (Adam on top, masculine Lord, and so on).  So, when viewed through certain perspectives, Lilith becomes a symbol of female sexual power and feminine authority.

The very idea of rebelliousness, however, also (in some versions of the story) casts her in an adversarial light–as an adversary to God’s initial structure.  This sympathetic vibration manifests variously, with Lilith sometimes being rejected by Adam because she has sex with Samael (Satan), or with Lilith herself being a feminine aspect of Satan.  Feminine versus masculine.  Chaos against order.  Quiet against unquiet.  Wisdom and death walking hand in hand.

In some traditions, Samael/Satan remains a part of God’s host–the avenging angel, the scourge of God, the face of Allah that the Quran tells us one might rather wish not to encounter after death.

The question becomes whether Ophelia resonates and reverberates with the quality of vengeance here–the feminine aspect of the angel of death, come to sing of journeys, graves, sexual union, and the flowers that grow in the graveyards afterwards.  In the mad scene, Ophelia already walks with death.  “One that was a woman sir, but rest her soul, she’s dead.” (H 5.1.115)  Her hollow songs point in only one direction, culminating in flowers.

If Ophelia were a kind of Lilith, then owls might easily be mixed up in the baker’s dough, where the daughter becomes a casualty of a cycle of expansion and consumption that she remains powerless to interrupt.  She would also telegraph the owl’s mourning at what revenge may bring.  “To seek revenge may lead to hell, but everyone does it, though seldom as well as Sweeney, as Sweeney Todd.  The demon barber of Fleet Street.”

Ophelia’s last line, in the scene and in the play, is that of an owl as well:

Good night, ladies.  Good night, sweet ladies.  Good night, good night.

Horatio’s “Good night, sweet prince” echoes this so closely.  Remarkable.  Owls, angels of death.  Wisdom.  Foresight.  Ophelia swooping into the mad scene like an owl, and singing soft, sad, faintly hooting songs that predict the future.  Rebellious against the human order in her madness, in Hamlet, she becomes a walking omen.  An owl on her feet.

*  “The actor entrusted with the part of the ghost in Hamlet represented the great phantom, the shade of the Middle Ages, which rose over the world, like the moon, at the moment when the Middle Ages finally sank among the dead; a mighty epoch which opened with Dante and closed with Shakespeare.”            —from Chateaubriand,  Memoires d’Outre-Tombe, ed. Maurice Levaillant (Paris, 1949), I, 502.

** Christ (in most versions in disguise) walks into a baker’s shop and asks for bread.  The baker begins working a large amount of dough to back for the stranger.  The baker’s daughter scolds the baker for setting out such a large amount and reduces the dough by half.  Still, the dough swelled to a huge size, and when the daughter cried out, she was turned into an owl.

Hey there.  Yes, you.  Time to come along.  No matter where we’re going just yet.  Trust me.  Please.  Just follow me.

We’ll just head down this little stairway.  No.  Not the hallway.  Not through that other door.  Not into that hallway.  Someone pontificates just there.  The world of politics.  Policy.  It will make you ill.  (Maybe not right away, but it will.  Trust me.  You’ll turn white, then green, then. . . well, best not to go that way.)

Just down these steps here to the back of this blog post.  Careful, mind you, they are narrow, and the stone is old and rutted with the passage of time.  The best places to step aren’t always easy for the feet to find.  No matter.  You’re doing fine.  Just watch that railing.  It’s old and wooden and sometimes bits splinter out into the words you’re reading.  Also, the rail runs out about a third of the way down.  For the remainder of the descent, you’ll have to trust your balance.

I might be tempted to digress here just to say how lovely you look.  Oh, I know that everyone tends to look that way by torchlight.  Firelight is kind, isn’t it?  That’s why candlelight so often accompany romantic dinners.  Even makes me look good, you say?  Thank you.  Makes me wonder why we ever really switched to electric.  Still, you are, working your way patiently down these steps, looking even more gorgeously yourself no matter what the light is.

Shakespeare?  We’re getting there.  Or something early modern.  I’ve heard there’s a chamber off to the side of one of these hallways down here that has some kind of pentagram etched into the floor.  Gives one a different impression of what candle light might do perhaps.  Mephistopheles for a poker game?  A game of drawing matchsticks?  But never mind!

Complaints?  Well, not so many down here.  Still, I’ve had ’em.  What you might call “specific comments” turn out to be, in the blog universe, kinds of complaints.  Critical comments, if you like.  In this case, someone tacked a note onto/into the front door with a bare bodkin.  Oh, it wasn’t any ninety five theses or anything like that.  No disputation with the vasty deep.  No Echo echo seeking Narcissus.  Just a word or two that sometimes there might be just a wee bit too much Shakespeare in my posts.  Not that this can’t be fun, mind you, but it may not be so much fun for what the early modernists call the muggles.  Good lord! I hear you exclaim, Are you equating Shakespeare and early modern drama and poetry to some kind of sorcery?!?  No.  And, yes.

Not, as I said at the beginning of this blog road, that I harken much to comments, but it is good to be mindful.  And do be mindful here–that brackish looking pool at the base of that ste–  Ew.  Terribly sorry about that.  Well, I’m relatively certain that it won’t stain permanently.  It is just a blog, after all.  Just so awfully sorry about the smell.  

That’s the thing about listening too closely to fucking comments, if you’ll pardon the expression.  They tend to leave standing pools, filled with the most noxious, poisonous, stagnant–   Well, they can lead us astray, and I’m enormously capable of putting my own foot into it without them, thank you.

Still, now that we’re here (and that smell isn’t quite so bad down here as it was back there) where would I throw a bit of Shakespeare in, while we’re climbing down the stairs?  Perhaps something about light while we’re down here in the smelly dark?  Something “Like to the lark at break of day arising/ From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate”?  Something along those lines?

Well, I have not the tongue.  Oh, I know, but that was Shakespeare, not me.  But don’t let that stop you.  I’m willing to stand here for as long as it takes for you to have your way with a raft of early modern lines.  Please, feel free.  Just pause here at the end of this line and recite something you like.  I’ll just wait here.

Feel better?  I hope so.  I have only these ideas, you see, pictures of, say, roses left a little too long by the edge of the gate.  Images of stone walls ranging along old cottage gardens, crooked as a lawyer’s soul, and trying just as hard to stand nobly in the sun.  Flowers–roses–heap up, banking against those walls, rioting color, squeezing summer into the erotic folds of their opening blossoms.  Roses.  Thorns beneath green leaves.  Color in the mind’s eye.

We see such things along the way.  Now, just a moment here, and we’ll pause and give this door a push.  Seems to be a bit stuck.  Just lend your lovely shoulder here, can you?  Lean against this door, into it.  Break the locks of prison gates.  Well, no.  It’s unlocked.  Just a bit like that Tin man from another world.  Needs a bit of oil.

Still, there it goes.  Door unstuck and we freely tumble forth into the secret garden that must be nearer the deep inside of this blog.  And what lies within?  A bit of grassy, overgrown–  Ah, but the grass is long and green and soft looking.  And there is sunlight here, and the vines must bear fruit, or did once when they’d been pruned.

And that’s where we are sometimes.  Soft places in the sun.  No Castle of Otranto with secret skeletons in caskets.  No bodies rolled in rugs in the attic.  No Melmoth the Wanderer, with some mysterious ancestor living forever, trying to get us to take up his end of some wicked bargain he struck long ago.  No.  None of that (even as much as these ideas may have influenced Shakespearean image and production through the years, with the later gothic influence on Hamlet less easy to deny).

No.  It is not bitter cold here.  Not even the glorious summer of this son of York.  Instead, it is simply summer.  Soft and warm.  Deep along the burgeoning vineyard hills, and not so far from the sea.  The only reason that I brought you here, brought you along, is because I like it here, and I wanted to share it with you.  Not that it’s really ready yet.  Those grapes are only just beginning to form along the crooked reaches at the margin of the leaves.  But we can feel it.  Sunlight filling the infant grapes with sugar even now.  Water swelling them, preparing to partner with the sun in ripening them.

We’ll have other journeys, of course.  If you stick with me.  But once in a while, we have to rest, to have a day like this.  Without so much heaviness,  Without much Shakespeare.  Being like little fishes swimming forth into this happiness that lies along the way.  Sometimes, or really most of the time, that’s enough.  Just being.  To be or not to be?  Don’t even ask.  Just being is enough.  Just walking along the way so free and easy.  With friends.  That is happiness.

Even if we mix our classical philosophers once in while, isn’t that a bit like strawberry rhubarb pie?  A bit like wine?  A bit like summer?  Please do come along if you wish.  Does the soul good, whatever that might mean.  Communication.  Thoughts.  Listening to the little creek.  It will speak to us too.  Who knows where we’ll go next or what we might be doing?