Ghost of Shakespeare

The snippet of line comes to us from Mercutio’s speech about Queen Mab:

She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders’ legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider’s web,
The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,
Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love.

Romeo and Juliet, 1.4.52-69

As Mercutio’s language eases us from miniature into journey, the fanciful nature of the miniscule substitutions prepares the listener’s mind to consider the essence of vision and dreams. The way seems darkly familiar, like tumbling down a place where the road dips beneath the overhanging trees at night. So dark inside that for a moment, there may never have been stars.

We are the lolly men. Codpieces filled with slaw.
Our slanted marshmallow inability climbing up ourselves to eat our heart within.
Bad men in the streets. Bad men in the storm.
Bad men in the seats and out amongst the corn.
Bad men flying drying heat, arcing wingtips madly,
Bad men making riddles up, some of them are Daddy.

I am no viper, yet I feed
On mother’s flesh which did me breed.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre 1.1.66-7

Titus and Antiochus cook and dance in murderous and ravenous, eye glistening glee Threatened. Alert. Listening. See.

Crises beget by other crises. What a patchwork, what a motley we have made! Espousing narrow ideals at our own expense. O, how we await the snow, geese calling, falling through that ashen sky, smoke fostered by ourselves, seeking that last sigh when all conveys the answer to the riddle of the sands.

This is not the little cabins, smoke curling from an autumn chimney, discussions of the trout stream over tea and coffee. Breakfast at the local diner. This is no hometown, moantown, downtown, Hadestown, urinetown.

Have we been here? In bands? In bandits? In heat? In hate? Radios spewing filth across our minds, television/internet/motion picture turning us to dead. We shamble towards the middle distant house with light seeping from between its boarded windows. Duane Jones awaits us there and he will not teach us acting. It is too late for that too late. Too late the brothers and the dog coming through the misty twilight, open grave waiting in the garden, teawater cooling on the hob.

No one made the coffee. No one poured the tea.

Oh, we have seen them and they are us. Blond leaders, blocky in their blood, burning down the world against the unseen clocks of Fillory. Were we once kings and queens? Did we trade away the tools of honour for a tray of turkish delight? Rumpleminz. Our advertising loins thrown in a pond of fond. Water horses swimming in the lea. Aiee. Aiee.

Whoever would come over that ridge, scarecrows lined up against descending air, leaves rattering against the siding. Town captured by its own surety. Its own denial. River in Egypt. Dead people beneath the sand. In the swamp. In the front yard. Front garden. Necklace of dead toes. Jack’s sparrows, all that’s left of the once bird kingdoms of the air, far too small against the big wind.

Oh, Hayden, your Fry is French. Belgian, actually, although it might pain the far constituants to hear it. Your cheerleaders launched high in the air, cutting capers with your Mitterrand. Pyramiding for François. Johnson’s ‘new beginning’ starts today.

And I alone am escaped to tell thee. The devil walks amongst you. At your side. In your very shoes. Oh, would the headaches leave me. Would that they could. Lack of mercy to a poisoned soul. A poisoned soul journeying with nor wit nor weed.

Back to the country of your birth. County of your birth. Even if your country were untimely ripped. Vampires beneath a trailer home, working on ceramics all by touch. Everything gone like rockets in July. Her eyes that flash against a green wood. Then hammers. Tongs. Cerebus the Aardvark singing arias into the howling still. Red sword aglimmer. Tongs.

How we have sung the swords. Soul eaters, drinkers. Spies, tailors, soldiers, tinkers. Keeping us alive even as they whittle away the isnesses, the lanthorns, the shoes. Doc Martin loves his boots but hates the sight of blood. Keep it in the kitchen. Someone might get hurt.

By what? The fire? That tale of goblins already told. Long told, gone cold, then bold like snowflakes filtered from heaven that we cannot see. Sea? Though she be no bigger than an agate stone, forfinger of an alderman big, taste I the salt. Taste I the warm chocolate of her being.

All we seek is union, except for those who don’t. Those leavers, those wall builders–seeking to fortify imaginary barriers, to subjugate those they see as ‘others’. Those x men! Mutants dictating our policy. Stealing our healthcare and our jobs. Costing us money! Union? Onion. All seek it in the soup, mocking the turtle, the noiseless, patient spider eating curds and whey. Way out. Oh, Spiderman that tyger’s pacing behind his bars, burning bright in the forest, wrapped in a hide, singing in a Broadway show. Those cats, what do they know? They only no.

Obviously, people feel different about division, with many believing strongly that dividing people remains a terrible mistake, a colossal blunder. Some people believe that discarding ideas for which others fought so hard can only lead, ultimately, to disaster.

For yes is the empowering word, the bridging word, the inclusive word, the noble ideal. I take your hand and then am pulled away from you until I alone am left to tell thee. Howling. Patient. Green. Best minds of my generation moving, flag above them remaining still. Lovers, poets, madmens’ seething minds, their urgency dismissed by Theseus, voice of authority and law.

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

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.2-23

Theseus, a little brief authority, has no need for these ideals. These lofty thoughts. These cherished human notions. Business is business, after all. Running things has no relation to fairy toys.

It’s all ok. It’s safe and so are you. It’s only a movie about ‘so called’ high ideals. Hush, my little one. I would not lie. To you I will tell every truth. Every bit of truth that would not hurt you and yet some that may. There are no bears. Not anymore. Truth rakes razors against the tonguetip. Truth hurts like glass shards, like social change. A ghost with no more commerce in the world, you can trust my words:

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma penciocche gammai di questo fondo
Non torno viva alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo*

O, full of scorpions is my mind, my world. They hang from leaves like fire against the sunset. Fire fairies divebombing the safelocks, slipped for havoc, vengeance for their lost existence. No one believed in Tinkerbell, who’s not merely jealous but enraged! Angry tiny little fairies, abuzz like bees, hoping that locusts might finally inherit the earth. Fallopian night bringing forth no more issue. Things gone viral. Best stay home and go to bed.

After the Feast (my Shapcot) see,
The Fairie Court I give to thee:
Where we’le present our Oberon led
Halfe tipsie to the Fairie Bed,
Where Mab he finds; who there doth lie
Not without mickle majesty.
Which, done; and thence remov’d the light,
We’ll wish both Them and Thee, good night.

–from “Oberon’s Palace” by Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

The world crushes us closed into tiny fists. Moon lowering over our beds, glowering over our heads, our crowns, our diadems slipping to the mud. We lose ourselves in arcing nakedly across the night, calling to diamonds that we never knew.

All the Gretas come too late. Or are we the late guests–feasting into wee hours pretending that the birds and bears still roam? Watching not watching. Hearing not hearing. Lalalalala. Hahahaha. Darl gone mad and laughing while we fiddle and Rome burns?

How we hope across the plains and hills, through the mountain forests and the rolling lands, now all on fire. She awakens to a fresh new morning, bridging her dawn with tea. Still in a robe, raising the kitchen shade, she looks out upon her orange new day. Trees bursting into flame. Walls of lava, of injustice, human cruelty. Where are the rainbows of yesteryear? Our larder and our teacups full? Where is that plenty? The banquet warm against the glistening snow?

Where are those scones? Our biscuits? Our jam? O, this bread. It will not rise. It will not find us in this morning as we scramble for the car keys and stumble, panicked to the car. Roads obscured by smoke lie ahead of us, our households abandoned to flames, tornadoes, storms, flooding, drought. Where shall we go? Gig economy leading us precariously into newer and deeper nights, as long as we escape the present flames.

For they have not stayed still, the moving fires. Coiled and curious. Hungry ghosts, licking with lascivious detachment at our fleeing heels. We Achilles. Inadequate with rage. World grown too too small and violent because we trusted leaders while we sat too long at tea.

The world will not thaw, melt and resolve itself in dew as others may do. This flower garden fancy grown up rank with weeds, and only deep among them a nodding violet unto a fairy queen, vanished from where she might have been, leaving no orbs where once was green.

*From Dante’s Inferno, canto XXVII, lines 61-66. Borrowed by T.S. Eliot as the prologue for “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Translation below:

“If I believed my answer were
to a person who might ever get back to the world,
this flame would remain still, moving no further.
But since, if what I hear is true,
no one returns from these undergrounds alive,
I answer you without fear of infamy.” (The ghost’s approximation)

The opening line comes to us from Shakespeare’s sonnet 71:

No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell; 
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so, 
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, 
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if (I say) you look upon this verse, 
When I (perhaps) compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan, 
And mock you with me after I am gone.

William Shakespeare, sonnet 71

The idea that “the wise world should look into your moan, and mock you with me after I am gone” seems extraordinary. Not only might mourning bring woe to the beloved, but that the world might knowingly participate in, or even compound, the beloved’s agitation or depression. In a sense, the sonnet seems to anticipate Wordsworth’s opening:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

William Wordsworth, “The World is Too Much With Us”

Yet, Wordsworth’s almost astonishingly contemporary sense of the world pictures a world falling away from us, a world that we are losing or have lost due to our own activities or our own desires. Shakespeare’s world seems to retain an almost singular consciousness, an awareness, willing or not, of our human existence. It is a world that might “look” or even “mock” the individual who resides within it. In contrast, Wordsworth’s world lies almost dormant alongside our existence, “up-gathered now like sleeping flowers”, and in his sonnet, we appear to have lost our participation in it through “getting and spending” and “lay[ing] waste our powers”.

Both Wordsworth’s and Shakespeare’s worlds might be our own, depending on how we choose to frame our perspective, but Wordsworth’s idea offers a romantic glance over our shoulder and into our past. Our having departed from the “pagan” “creed outworn” has deprived us of a structure that might have offered more comfort to our existence, with a framework of ancient gods to reassure us. Wordsworth’s sonnet also seems preternaturally prescient, especially in light of our own climate crisis:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51123638

Sir David Attenborough warns of our climate ‘crisis moment’ as he has continued to do, serving as a senior statesman to the global environment for as long as many of us can recall. But even the business side, those in the seats most promoting ‘getting and spending’ have begun to sit up and take notice, even if that is only because the climate crisis will begin to cut into their profits:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/19/davos-climate-crisis-threatens-more-than-half-of-the-worlds-gdp-wef-says.html

Of course, in the end, if the challenges are not, or cannot be, successfully addressed, these massive business concerns will be unlikely to have any profits at all. No businesses. No customers. One can hem and haw and fudge on climate change all one wishes (although that places one in a decidedly precarious position in terms of one’s morals), but in the end, whether the so-called climate ‘deniers’ believe in climate change or not, its impact on the lives of their loved ones, or on the very existence of their children and/or grandchildren will be equally profound.

In some ways, our whole time, our era, has become like the opening lines of a death poem. It is a poem that we write collectively, and yet this composition may have more in common with Japanese death poems than it has with either Shakespeare or Wordsworth. For Shakespeare’s narrator, there will be continuation. The beloved, it is assumed, will go on after the narrator’s death. For Wordsworth, the continuation is marred by a disillusioned and broken present, and yet, as bleak as it may be, existence goes on. Both speak to an audience, a reader or listener to whom they offer their thoughts–an auditor with awareness and understanding.

Our collective poem for this life now seems more like those end of life poems, largely in the Zen tradition, where the self, as in death, remains only marginally present in the text. These often seem as reflexive as certain verbs, not necessarily referring to another, but instead remembering the self to the self without any necessary extension beyond that containment. With some of the most famous examples having been written in the form of haiku (known in the West for its three line, 5-7-5 syllabic structure), continuation or sustenance frequently emerges in terms of the traditional reflection of human experience that is also often rolled into the haiku, the structure that Kenneth Yasuda refers to as “where, what, and when”.* Yasuda offers an example by perhaps the greatest master of the haiku form, Matsuo Basho:

On a withered bough,
A crow alone is perching,
Autumn evening now.**

The observer remains secondary to the observed. The natural world is foregrounded even as the observer becomes merely an obscure point from which the observations of branch, crow, and season emerge.

While this suggests the potential for a coming demise, it is not a death poem per se. Yet, even Bashō’s own death poem speaks more to the journey and the natural world around it than it does to the traveler:

Sick on my journey,
only my dreams will wander     
these desolate moors.

Bashō dissolves into only his dreams wandering on desolate moors–the moors symbolizing our earthly existence, and the wandering dreams are all that any of us really leave behind us when we go. Again, it is the natural world that remains, that endures.

One wonders what the poet might have thought today, when moors and forests in places like Australia and California, plagued by an unceasing succession of devastating fires, become increasingly desolate. The death poem that we have written, and that we continue to write upon the land that supports us, represents an inevitable backlash against our hubris. Our own displacement, our own conflagration seems to be something to which the gods have left us, letting us depend on our own devices to solve our predicament. Let us hope that we can do so.

Perhaps, like Togyu (who died in 1749 at the age of forty-four), poets who come after us, if any do, will recognise the impermanence, the eternal change expressed in this critical moment in our history:

When autumn winds blow
not one leave remains
the way it was.

Or perhaps like Toko (who died in 1795 at the age of eighty-six), they might recognise the futility of all record, or all human observation or thought:

Death poems
are mere delusion–
death is death.***

Should humanity endure, should we somehow find a way to help heal and restore a more natural balance to our world, we can only hope that we will also learn to better govern ourselves, with deeper concern for all instead of for only a few. Such governments as there may be must care for their people, and not leave the poor and helpless to fend for themselves against the incessantly pursuing wolves of ignorance, poverty, hunger, and ill health.

While this idea of taking the reigns of our own carriage, of taking better control of our lives and our world is not new, it is often most profoundly and dramatically expressed in various ways in popular culture. In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, there comes a moment when Harry and his unconscious godfather have collapsed, exhausted, at the edge of a small lake in a dark wood. There, they are attacked by the dementors, demonic creatures who kill their victims by sucking out their souls. At their darkest moment, a wizard appears on the far shore of the water, and conjures a ‘patronus charm’, a magical spirit protector that radiates joy and drives the dementors away. Certain that he has seen his father’s ghost who somehow arrived to save the stranded pair with his patronus charm, Harry travels back through time with his friend Hermione, and gains a new perspective on his rescue:

At the moment of crisis, Harry finally realizes that no one will arrive, and that he must save himself. Harry, orphaned as a baby, steps up to take his own father’s place, fathering himself, and taking that mantle on his shoulders, assumes the guidance of his world.

Our present crisis is no less dire, and our need to address our own challenges no less essential. We stand on the threshold of our own continued existence, and the ship of state, instead of turning, appears to be standing still. It is with our permission that it does so. We allow our leaders to continue to focus on issues of immigration and profit at the expense of our very selves.

While I do not necessarily advocate open rebellion or active revolution, we must undergo a revolution in our thoughts and actions, our attitudes and our behaviours. And this must happen now. Today. Not next week after that next job application has been submitted. Not after this chapter has been edited, not after tea. The time for slotting the necessity of planetary care somewhere down the to do list is long since gone. We stare into an abyss, and it is glaring back at us through the black and bloody lens of charred trees, flooding, and displacement.

Only through a thorough rejection and an active refutation of the purely selfish, profit driven incentives might we be able to save ourselves. Only by building a new structure of value will be able to leave anything behind us. Otherwise, our death poem will be a decimated world, where no one will be living to read our work, or to know any of the poetic side of our being and our lives.

A bit shrill? A bit histerical? Certainly the coming conflagration won’t consume us all. Surely, Ghost, you’re being silly. Passenger pigeons are the most abundant birds in the world, they could never go extinct!**** Certainly we will rebuild as we have always done, profit again as we have always done.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. We shall see. Science tells us that it may be too late even now, that we may have miscalculated, that the shadow of the hand of doom now sweeps inexorably over us. No longer mourn for me when I am dead for that is now unless perhaps I seize the slender thread of care that might continue my existence.

What can we do? My urging now is for every reader of this blog to walk into the coming weeks and years while keeping thoughts of change, conservation, and stewardship in the forefront of our minds. Change the way we think, the way we do, the way we vote, the way we spend. “No longer mourn for me when I am dead”, but let us change the now that we, collectively, may live.

Do not be dissuaded or deterred by the ‘climate deniers’. Do not look to so-called governmental ‘leaders’, who have been, almost uniformly less than useless in addressing our planetary challenges. The whirlwind is upon us, and it will find them soon enough. Look to your families, your friends, and your fellows, your local trees, and your own habits. Make the changes that you can make now, and join the larger actions pushing for larger changes.

Vote with dollars, pounds, your local currency. Let us not get and spend and lay waste to to our powers. Spend less with egregiously polluting firms. Support alternative packaging. Strive for less negative impact in all the ways you can. Shop locally. Travel less. Encourage others to do the same, but be inclusive of immigrants and refugees. Strive to open borders rather than to close them. Be inclusive rather than exclusive.

Further ideas are ubiquitous, and some may be found here: https://wwf.panda.org/wwf_offices/armenia/help_us/eco_help_living/

And here are the three major ways that we tend to impact the environment, often without even thinking about it (and, no, you need not join the Omega movement to read and implement them): https://www.eomega.org/article/3-biggest-ways-to-reduce-your-environmental-impact

If we all focus, we may yet have a chance. Let us write our death poem with grace and not with ashes. Let the wise world mock as it wishes, so long as it remains.

As for leaving something behind us, here’s David Gilmour with Sonnet 18:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1Zr3E6CpIY

While I realise that this remains a specialist blog, read largely (albeit hardly exclusively) by academics, I still urge my readers to let the acceleration of this effort to save ourselves begin here, now, and with us. Let this effort live, and let this give life to thee. To us.

*Yasuda, Kenneth. The Japanese Haiku. Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 2000, p.41,

**One of Japan’s most famous poets, Matsuo Bashō (松尾 芭蕉, 1644–1694), lived during the Edo period, under the Tokugawa Shogunate. Known for his elegant haiku (hokku) poems, he himself believed that his true skill lay in renku, a poetic form involving others and constructing a poem in turns. His most famous work is probably おくのほそ道, meaning “Narrow road to/of the interior”, contains many of his finest verses and thoughts. The work symbolizes, among other things, a ‘casting off’, a kind of shedding away of earthly things–leaving behind old connections, and even one’s self, in preparation for the end of one’s earthly time. Any writer, thinker, or poet could do much worse than to spend some time with Bashō, and perhaps accompanying him on his travels. An excellent English translation of Bashō’s most well known work is: Matsuo Bashō. Back Roads to Far Towns: Bashōs Travel Journal. Translated by Cid Corman and Susumu Kamaike. Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 2004.

***Both Togyu and Toko’s poems, and many more Japanese death poems, may be found in: Japanese Death Poems. Rutland, VT: C.E. Tuttle, 1986.

****Once so abundant that observers described flocks of them taking over an hour to pass, that they would darken the sky to the point of temporarily blotting out the sun, and that their collective wings would sound like thunder, the passenger pigeon was hunted to extinction over 100 years ago in large part because people believed that such an ubiquitous bird could never be eradicated. An excellent article on the passenger pigeon may be found here: https://www.audubon.org/magazine/may-june-2014/why-passenger-pigeon-went-extinct

The title line is spoken by the character, Alonso, who is the King of Naples in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

O, it is monstrous, monstrous:
Methought the billows spoke and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me, and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced
The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass.
Therefore my son i’ the ooze is bedded, and
I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded
And with him there lie mudded.

The Tempest 3.3.115-23

Having been confronted by the spirit, Ariel, who has magically disguised himself as an accusing Harpy, Alonso keenly feels his guilt at his part in the usupation of Prospero’s Milan dukedom. Ariel has told Alonso that he has been “bereft” of his son by the “ministers of Fate” who have judged the usurpers “most unfit to live”. Alonso believes that his son, Ferdinand, has been drowned in the shipwreck that has marooned the party on the deserted island where the play’s action takes place. Although this isn’t true, and Ferdinand is actually alive and well, the loss leaves the king feeling so despondent that he wishes to join his son in his grave at the bottom of the sea.

That Ariel should appear as a Harpy here is significant. Half bird, half human, harpies traditionally were associated with storms at sea, and Alonso’s internal tempest at this point seems much darker than the one that Prospero’s magic originally contrived to bring their ship to the island. In addition to the association with storms, Ariel’s harpy brings a concert of universal judgment on Alonso, and his fellow usurpers, his brother, Sebastian, and Prospero’s brother, Antonio (who currently occupies Prospero’s rightful throne in Milan).

Personifications of storms, harpies were also karmic forces, often leaving wreck and despair in their wake. Amongst his illustrations for Dante Aligheiri’s Divine Comedy, the engraver, Gustave Doré, pictured harpies lurking in the netherworld:

We may tend to think of these creatures, these embodiments of storm and guilty anguish as belonging to the province of Greek and Roman mythology, which is essentially correct. Yet, as storm birds, harpies are not alone. They bear great similarities to other storm spirits, especially, in North America, the Thunderbird, which appears in slightly different versions in various indigenous tribal mythologies.

The Thunderbird is a vast, seldom seen spirit in the form of a giant bird. It brings life giving rain, but can also dispense the thunderbolts of divine justice. Both terrifying and reassuring, both avenger and protector, the Thunderbird often travels concealed behind a thick cloud cover. Because it can be an unerring guide to those in need, the Thunderbird is often the subject of art, and its image is also frequently found on jewelry, especially in the galleries of the American Southwest. The mighty storm bird (in a brilliant artist’s interpretation of the creature by Arnaud Valette) also makes an appearance in the Harry Potter film extension series, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Rowling’s creative vision captures the blend of incredible power and unique sensitivity, the majesty, beauty, and danger that are all part of storms. Intelligent and wise, Frank (as the Thunderbird is named in the film) is also straightforward, like his name.

It seems as though there must a kinship amongst mythical storm birds. The mighty P’eng, mentioned by Chuang Tzu/Zhuang Zhou (莊子/莊周) sounds as though it might be closely related to the Thunderbird:

In the northern darkness there is a fish and his name is K’un. The K’un is so huge I don’t know how many thousand li he measures. He changes and becomes a bird whose name is P’eng. The back of the P’eng measures I don’t know how many li across and, when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky.

The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu*

Zhuang Zhou continues by citing a now lost text called the Universal Harmony**. “When the P’eng journeys to the southern darkness, the waters are roiled for three thousand li. He beats the whirlwing and rises ninety thousand li, setting off on the six month gale.”

Here the P’eng creates clouds and rides a great storm. He also rises to extraordinary altitudes, which Angus Charles Graham (who also translated the first seven ‘inner’ chapters of Zhuangzi) saw as “soaring above the restricted viewpoints of the worldly.”*** In this transcendant sense, he echoes Ariel’s Harpy, who has the advantage of the broad perspective. When he addresses Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio, he knows their transgressions, and he also has a broader perspective. Ariel, of course, knows that he/it isn’t really a Harpy, just as he knows he isn’t human, and that he only assumes these kinds of shapes at Prospero’s bidding. He further knows that Alonso’s son has not died, and that Prospero has engineered both the shipwreck and the castaways’ subsequent experiences in order to confront those who betrayed him with their own guilt at being complicit in the usurpation of his throne, and for having set Prospero adrift with his infant daughter in an unseaworthy boat in an attempt to assassinate them through neglect.

It is worth noting, as it says in the notes, that Zhuang Zhou offers an oblique caution about idealizing this broad perspective, which he ascribes to the P’eng through citation after initially admitting (twice) that “I don’t know” how many li. The implication seems to be that the citation, which specifies a figure of ‘ninety thousand li’ may not be so accurate either, that it’s merely what some book tells us. In fact, it seems almost laughable that the book assign a precise figure to the flight of mythological creature. He also cautions about the dangers of trying to be too exact when it comes to describing vastness or variation, especially when it comes to human thought, imagination, or true understanding or perception of anything that might lie beyond our exact knowing.

Zhuang Zhou records a conversation between the ‘animating force or breath’ and the ‘body’. At one point, the animating force (ch’i, qi, or 氣) says to the body, “You hear the piping of men, but you haven’t heard the piping of earth. Or, if you’ve heard the piping of earth, you haven’t heard the piping of Heaven.”**** Perception, in terms of that to which we are exposed, but also in terms of our selective focus, tends to limit our understanding. Seeking to understand, categorize, encapsulate and explain may only further our misunderstanding. Zhuang Zhou says:

Joy, anger, grief, delight, worry, regret, fickleness, inflexibility, modesty, willfulness, candor, insolence–music from empty holes, mushrooms springing up in dampness, day and night replacing each other before us, and no one knows where they sprout from. Let it be! Let it be! [It is enough that] morning and evening we have them, and they are the means by which we live. Without them we would not exist; without us they would have nothing to take hold of.

Zhou, Zhuang. Burton trans. II.p.37-8.

Even as he acts on Prospero’s behalf, performing the role of a Harpy in a kind of play that Prospero has produced and directed, one can almost imagine Ariel’s internal dialogue echoing some of what Zhuangzi says. The stroke of forgiveness, of release, of freedom at the end of The Tempest develops from this kind of realisation. Freeing Ariel from servitude, releasing Ferdinand and Miranda to their mutual passion, forgiving his former enemies, and even leaving Caliban in his island home, all suggest that the bulk of the island experience has been “noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not”. Stage lightning. Eclipses. Stages of the moon. These life storms are “sound and fury” as Macbeth calls them, but they seem to be authored in air and fire, and like the storm bringing Harpy who blames and speaks dire words, they are grounded in mere myth or limited perspective.

Broader vision, the true understanding, continually recedes before us, because each storm we weather, each experience we have, each state that we endure, each momentary enlightenment only occasions another in the distance. What the winds sing to us, and the thunder is the colour and motion of our moving lives. These are waves breaking over the banks out at sea under skies that variously threaten or smile upon us. Whether they are karmic or more like the eternal tides is impossible for us to say because our vision is curtailed through our standing on our insular little plot of time.

About the undulations of human experience, Zhuang Zhou says, “It would seem as though they have some True Master, and yet I find no trace of him. He can act–that is certain. Yet I cannot see his form. He has identity but no form.”***** The shape shifting spirit, the Harpy, the Thunderbird, the P’eng, each changes its form as its interaction changes with our lives, as it is formed from the variegated experiences from which those lives have been built. In the end, the ever changing colour and pattern of the vast quilt, the patchwork fields, waters, and woods that comprise the rolling landscape of human life. Our experience screams, sighs, weeps, dances, and sings as it undulates away from us, radiating outward and crossing other ripples on the way.

For we participate in the world, being intimate with it, as it is promiscuous with us. Our being shapes it as it forms and nurtures us. Our perspectives, mythologies, feelings, thoughts, our very being are not separate from what is around us, within us, or what we perceive, know, or understand. Neither is it distinct from what we do not know, or what our limited perception may have missed.

The reason that one of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s most famous poems is so often quoted may lie in this, in the way he captures the whole of human experience in a couple of lines in the second stanza:

Crossing the Bar 

Sunset and evening star,
      And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
      When I put out to sea,

   But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
      Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
      Turns again home.

   Twilight and evening bell,
      And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
      When I embark;

   For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
      The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
      When I have crost the bar.

–Alfred, Lord Tennyson******

That moment at the end of sound and fury, the moment of the tide that “moving seems asleep, too full for sound and foam”, marks one of those perfect descriptions of how we imagine our final turning away from life’s cacophony, when the dissonance of our experience is swept away by moving water or the wind over a field of grass. Much as the storm birds may guide or harry us, they are tides too, drawing out our guilt or triumph, and leading us finally to a known and unknown end.

Perhaps navigating the vagaries of our lives is, in itself, the ultimate achievement. If only we can be tough enough to do that. In closing, here are (who else?) the Fabulous Thunderbirds, even if I’m not certain whether the ‘tough’ about which they are singing is the exactly the same as others’ experience of that quality might be. Patchwork of human life? Well, it’s an experience:

*Zhou, Zhuang. The Complete Works of Chuang-Tzu. Burton Watson, trans. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1968. 29. The Taoist philosopher Zhuang Zhou is thought to have lived from perhaps 369 b.c.e to 286 b.c.e. (1) Please note that Chuang Tzu, Zhuangzi, and Zhuang Zhou all refer to the same person, as they are different romanizations of his Chinese name. (2) A ‘li’ is a traditional Chinese measure of distance, often approximated to about a third of a mile. (3) I recommend Zhuangzi to anyone who might be even remotely interested. Zhuangzi was truly a genius and I see something new every time I look at his work, even now.

**Zhuang Zi may have been making fun of those who cited texts in order to prove points or lend their work authority. No, the irony is not lost on me here.

***Zhou, Zhuang. Chuang-Tzu: the Inner Chapters. Translated by Angus Charles Graham. Indianapolis (Ind.): Hackett Classics, 2001.

****Zhou, Zhuang. Burton trans., 36.

*****Ibid, 38.

******Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was poet laureate of Great Britain and Ireland for almost 42 years, from 1850 to his death in 1892, and many his works are still famous and widely known. The poem “Crossing the Bar” was written in 1889, and just before his death, Tennyson requested of his son that the poem be placed at the end of all editions of his poems. His request has always been honoured.

Not from Shakespeare, the above line appears on the arch over Holworthy Gate in Harvard Yard on the Harvard campus. A gift to the University from the class of 1876, the motto was controversial even then, with some believing that it was inappropriately nostalgiac, and that the more favoured perspective encouraged moving on instead of recalling or dwelling upon the past.

With the New Year upon us, this point acquires a double edged quality. So, we may do both. We may pause and look back at what lies behind us before stepping through the gate into whatever unseen destiny may lie beyond it. Such reflection seems timely. If Antonio’s oft cited line from The Tempest has any truth out of context, then “What’s past is prologue” truly.**

But can we make the past a mirror, and in the surface of it discern an imperfect reflection of what might be? Difficult to say. Rife with imperfection, human experience often finds echoes or foreshadows everywhere, in everything. Yet, is the suggestion of a meaning meaning?

The sun’s reflection may share some of its brilliance, but it is not the sun. Or perhaps it is, at least as much as any image, as any thought, essence, or apprehension may be captured by anything in this world.

For the world itself, our world, seems cobbled completely together out of the inexact. It lies with us and against us, heaving and undulating in sound and still. And our experience constantly threatens to take our seeing and our feeling and dash what we perceive to pieces with each breath. Light in science both partical and wave. Love an ocean to us, our own feelings and reactions often incomprehensible, while also instantly recognizable and stunningly immediate. This moment captured by Robert Graves:

She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth turns in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.

“She tells her love while half asleep” by Robert Graves***

In love, as in life, elements are seldom as distinct as our tendency to compartmenatlize and define would have them be. Love can be like telling, in “half-words whispered low”, with passion a marvellous kind of visceral indistinction of grass and flowers despite the snow.

Our world, our understanding, seldom lends itself to sharp delineation, maybe more so at the turning of the New Year. Shakespeare’s only mention of New Year’s comes in The Merry Wives of Windsor, after Falstaff has been tricked by Mistress Ford and Mistress Page into hiding himself in a laundry basket to avoid a confrontation with Mistress Ford’s jealous husband. The contents of the basket, along with Falstaff, are subsequently dumped into the river Thames. Aggrieved, he later complains to his friend, Bardolph:

Have I lived to be carried in a basket like a barrow
of butcher’s offal, and to be thrown in the Thames?
Well, if I be served such another trick, I’ll have my
brains ta’en out and buttered, and give them to a
dog for a New Year’s gift.

Merry Wives of Windsor 3.5.4-8

This is Shakespeare’s only mention of New Year’s, because the Gregorian calendar wasn’t adopted in Britain until 1752, which was long after Shakespeare’s death in 1616. The early modern year (in Shakespeare’s time) changed after Lady Day on March 25th. However, as Ronald Hutton tells us, even the New Year itself was not so cut and dried:

But certain days among the Twelve were more important than others. The first such, after Christmas itself, was 1 January, known as New Year’s Day even though the date of the year did not officially change until 25 March, and had not done since the early Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the older Roman tradition of the turn of the year at the opening of January, still universally persisted in late medieval Europe.

Ronald Hutton****

Frustrated at having been so stupid, Falstaff has gone through a metaphorical gate, a dunking, a washing. His ordeal has not really cleansed him, neither physically (in the dirty Thames) nor spiritually, as he calls for sack wine immediately after making his complaint. Still, being carried in a basket and thrown like meat scraps into the river is a kind of symbolic initiation, involving the washing of unclean flesh, and as many initiations seem to do, this one points up Falstaff’s ignorance, his blind spots.

Although Falstaff believes that he is escaping a jealous husband when he hides in the basket, his real blind spot is underestimating Mistress Ford and Mistress Page in terms of both their intellect and their morality. Falstaff has been foolish enough to believe he might seduce these women for his own ends, and his casual sexism renders him an easy subject for much of the play’s humour. The image of Falstaff being thrown into the Thames, and blindly thrashing in the dark river in a tangle of wet laundry suggests the cold shock of sudden realisation. The idea of Falstaff’s proposed sacrifice, of his buttered brains being offered to dogs in the case of repeated stupidity, seems to smack of Ovidian retribution, as much as it does of either the ‘Great Hunt’ of medieval European tradition or the folk custom of wearing antlers or hides at the New Year.*****

Of course, any sudden realisation arising from his dunking in the third act does not take, and the audience realises that the comic structure of the play will demand a greater comeuppance from Falstaff before the play ends. The proverbial New Year’s gate is not always smooth, and can be especially rocky for those like Falstaff, for whom morality seems to be much more malleable than might be comfortable for most of us.

Often regarded as one of Shakespeare’s weaker plays, The Merry Wives of Windsor remains especially rich in material for those with a ritualistic or folkloric lens, and Falstaff’s immersion in the river bears echoes of Celtic tradition as well. F. Marian McNeill offers this interesting note about the New Year (Hogmanay) in Scotland:

The belief is found throughout the Celtic territories that certain Standing Stones, set in motion by the spirits which animate them, sometimes go to drink in river or lake. In Orkney, one such Stone was said to walk from the Circle to the Loch of Stennis regularly on Hogmanay, dip its head into the Loch, and return to its old position. The story goes that a sailor once seated himself on the Stone some time before midnight in order to test the truth of the legend, and next morning his dead body was found half-way between the Circle and the Loch.

F. Marian McNeill******

McNeill’s example illustrates how serious the ordeal, the New Year dunking, may be. Gazing at our own past while looking to the future may be one thing, but proposing to meddle with stones, or with the very earth itself, may be another thing completely. Mortality, by its very nature, denies even the comparative eternity of stone, and we might do best to look to our own gateways, leaving the spirits to themselves and whatever traditions they might have.

Of course, our human traditions tend to embrace a drink on the New Year as well. Robert Burns’ famous poem, sung at New Year celebrations all over the world, reminds us that the New Year really is a time to look both ways, and to toast to the past even as we plunge into our future. Here is the song, followed by its more contemporary English version:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne*?

Chorus:
For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

II
And surely ye’ll be your pint-stoup!
and surely I’ll be mine!
And we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

Chorus

III
We twa hae run about the braes,
and pou’d the gowans fine;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,
sin’ auld lang syne.

Chorus

IV
We twa hae paidl’d in the burn,
frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
sin’ auld lang syne.

Chorus

V
And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
and gie’s a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak’ a right gude-willie waught,
for auld lang syne.

Robert Burns, “Auld Lang Syne”, traditional

Here is the same in a more accessible (for many of us) English:

I
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne?

Chorus:
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

II
And surely you’ll buy your pint cup!
and surely I’ll buy mine!
And we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

Chorus

III
We two have run about the slopes,
and picked the daisies fine;
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot,
since auld lang syne.

Chorus

IV
We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine;
But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.

Chorus

V
And there’s a hand my trusty friend!
And give me a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll take a right good-will draught,
for auld lang syne.

“Auld lang syne” translates most directly as “old long since” or, as some would have it, “long, long ago”. Yet, as this ghost likes to think of it, New Year’s Eve presents a moment where we might pause, as Holworthy Gate might have us do, “In memory of dear old times”. Times change, and so must we. On New Year’s Eve or Day, looking back can be a good thing, helping us to better plot our course in days to come.

I urge you, then, to take a moment and remember. Take a sip of whatever libation you might favour in all the range from tea to whisky. Then step through the gateway of the New Year when you are ready to do so. May we all move forward from this point, and together, heal our ailing world.

Happy New Year to you all! May the coming days bring you all your wishes, all love, and all happiness. May the cup of kindness continue to flow from you and for you for all of your days.

*Some of my readers might recognize the building visible through the gate as Stoughton Hall, one of the Harvard freshman dorms on Harvard Yard.

**Folger digital texts, The Tempest 2.1.289.

***Robert Graves (1895-1985), was a poet, novelist, and critic. A number of his works are still in print, including his famous autobiography, Goodbye to All That, and his work on poetic myth, The White Goddess. He also wrote I Claudius.

****Hutton, Ronald. The Rise and Fall of Merry England: the Ritual Year, 1400-1700. Oxford: OUP, 1996. 15.

*****Among the stories in Ovid is the tale of Actaeon, the hunter who stumbles across Artemis/Diana while she is bathing. As punishment for having seen her naked, the goddess transforms Actaeon into a stag, and he is subsequently torn apart by his own hounds. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff is later tricked into disguising himself as Herne the Hunter, a forest spirit who wears “great ragg’d horns” (4.4.32), echoing Actaeon’s change. For the folk customs of wearing antlers at the New Year, see Hutton p. 47 and 62. For additional information on the Great Hunt, see: Lecouteux, Claude. Phantom Armies of the Night: the Wild Hunt and Ghostly Processions of the Undead. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2011. A noted Sorbonne historian of the Middle Ages, Lecouteux has written widely on the supernatural in folk tradition, and most of his major works are available in both French and English.

******McNeill, F. Marian. The Silver Bough. Edinburgh: Canongate Classics, 1989. 87.

Even today, for the winter holidays in the northern hemisphere, we tend to decorate with something evergreen, which turns our eyes away from the landscape of the fallen, the colourful litter of leaves that have left much of the canopy bare. Various conifers have become popular, but also the more ancient holly boughs may still be seen. Yet, this gets ahead of our story.

The opening line belongs to Feeble, a man who has been drafted into the King’s Army in 2 Henry IV. Although it may seem odd, he doesn’t mind having been drafted, even though he has just watched a previous man buy his way out of serving:

FEEBLE By my troth, I care not. A man can die but
once. We owe God a death. I’ll ne’er bear a base
mind. An ’t be my destiny, so; an ’t be not, so. No
man’s too good to serve ’s prince, and let it go
which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for
the next.

2 Henry IV 3.2.242-7

Cited in Hemingway’s short story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, the speech demonstrates Feeble’s native philosophy about death’s inevitability. As King John says in Shakespeare’s play of the same name, “We cannot hold mortality’s strong hand”. The idea is reminiscent of the often romanticised acceptance of death practiced by certain warrior cultures. Japanese samurai are said to have embraced death upon awakening each morning. A similar thought is attributed to various Native American cultures, and the overall sentiment has been paraphrased as, “Today is a good day to die.”

An old, familiar idea which appears in so many cultures, death’s inevitability walks alongside our human experience like our shadow. On sunlit days, it is an inverse, a companionable darkness. On darker days, it may seem a reassurance or even a comfort. Even to those who leave the world at large, death remains one of the great expectations of human life, like a channel marker guiding a boat into harbour on inclement nights:

My Mind

My mind is inclined to quiet;
outside of things,
I lodge in the brush.
The sense of the mountains is best
when you reach their depths;
the source of the valley stream, distant,
is naturally purified.
For the rest of my life,
all that’s missing is death;
all thoughts and worries are settled already.
Recluses should leave no tracks;
people stop asking their names.

Wenxiang*

The last two lines seem curious, hinting more at a kind of disappearance or invisibility than an actual death. If the recluse leaves no tracks, does this mean traces of them vanish? Even their names? Does this mean that the recluse does not die, but only disappears, vanishing from the ways and perception of the living? Methods of eluding death always seem to be shrouded in mystery, but there is also much good reason for that, and it may not only be that death might hear us speaking of them, or read these words and come for us. How do we remain ‘green’, regenerating ourselves in the face of death’s absolute command?

John Williamson writes:

During the uncertain early years of the Christian Church, its greatest challenge came from a religion that was centered upon the Persian god of light–Mithras. Mithraism was a faith that was very similar to Christianity: both religions promised immortality, as well as providing ethical and moral codes of behavior. The eventual supremacy of Christianity over Mithraism was not so much a defeat of the Mithras as an effective assmiliation of Mithraic ceremonies into the rites of the Christian Church. These included baptism with water and feast involving a sacred meal of bread and wine. Even the moral connotation of light in contrast to darkness came from this ‘pagan’ cult. The choice of December 25 as the birth date of Christ was not an arbitrary one, but was chosen because that was the time of the great Mithraic feast which celbrated the return of Mithras as the sun god. **

Well, okay then. Many of us have heard of this already. Where does it take us?

Wiliamson further writes:

To an agrarian society, trees were manifestations of the gods, and therefore both trees and deities became identified with the various seasons of the year. For instance, the oak came to represent the time of year when the days began to lengthen and brighten, after the darkness of winter. The ‘defeat of winter’ led to spring, when Zeus, Jupiter, and Thor released the fertile rains on the barren winter landscape, making the earth green and sprinkling it with flowers.***

Yet, people did not live only in the warm seasons. Late spring through mid-autumn may tend to bring the fecund part of the year to the northern hemisphere, but human experience endures not only warmth, growth, and blossoming, but also waning and cold during the other half of the year. During these seasons, evergreens not only became a symbol of dormant life enfolded in the sleeping earth, but also of hope for renewal and a better life to come. Williamson writes, “To a primal agrarian society, the sight of evergreen trees like the holly during the winter months must have been a striking contrast to the naked oaks.”**** Here was green life and promise.

Charles Pythian-Adams argued that Tudor England embraced a “ritual year”.***** Ronald Hutton notes that “for most people the first sign of the opening of the season of ceremony would have been the decorating of buildings with holly and ivy on or just before Christmas Eve.”****** Here again, our minds begin with the darkness. Just as each day begins in darkness, so does the year, with only a glimmer of green, a spark of life, showing amongst the bare trees in candle or torchlight against the snow. Like the womb of human consciousness, the world seems muted. A hush hush of snow and wind tossing bare branches like crooked fingers against the greylight sky. Hands reaching for light. The infant minds of our humanity collectively seeking a light they do not yet fully know. Here’s “The Holly and the the Ivy” as arranged by Walford Davies for King’s College Cambridge in 2008:

The final lyrics end with words of budding hope:

O, the rising of the sun,
And the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ,
Sweet singing in-
Sweet singing in-
In the choir.

The solstice marked the return of the sun, but it was only a beginning. Queen Mab in her coach riding across the eyelids of human experience. Yet, the fairies have gone from this world. Only a glimmer of them remains in story and in name. Few rituals even address them. Keith Thomas writes that “commentators have always attributed them [fairies] to the past”.******* In contrast, the green always looks forward from the now. Both Christmas and its midwinter holiday kissing cousins remain anticipatory, like a mirror that peeps into a future filled with brighter skies and canopied in green.

Not that midwinter was not a Janus too, as it still is. The two faced god looks backward and forward, sitting on the threshold of the new year’s gateway. Midwinter was a time to cast the inward eye back over the past year, be grateful and mournful, rejoice in our current presence, and reminisce about those who, for whatever reason, did not make it to this point.

Never mind that the early modern year was measured differently, that for a time, the year officially ended and began around the end of March. The bleak midwinter brought its own kind of night, dropping its own punctuation mark full stop into the marching of the year. The natural pause for a kind of sleep echoes Feeble’s coming death. For whatever Hamlet calls it, even if sleep is not quite death itself, each half-brother is only a room, only a moment away from the other. (Please see the John Waterhouse picture of Hypnos and Thanatos in the previous post, “Heat o’ the sun”.)

But, again, where does it lead us? Green trimmings around the entrance to the church? Around the parlour? Around the porchway entrance? King Holly who supplants King Oak for the winter half of the year? Is this avoidance of mortality, this averting of our gaze from barren branches, is it merely Jack Kerouac’s fallopian night? Is it as Lawrence Ferlinghetti would have it?

She loved to look at flowers
smell fruit
And the leaves had the look of loving

But halfass drunken sailors
staggered thru her sleep
scattering semen
over the virgin landscape

At a certain age
her heart put about
searching the lost shores

And heard the green birds singing
from the other side of silence

Lawrence Ferlinghetti “A Coney Island of the Mind”*********

Flowers, fruit, and leaves all blended with intoxicated copulatory ecstasy? Greenery around the doorway of the church inviting us into the the fertile recesses of promise for the year ahead? The green ivy mixed with spent matter in an attempt to generate a virgin birth, a new kind of birth that might somehow save us from ourselves?

The Green Knight stands in a winter field and Sir Gawain approaches, with great hesitation in his heart, to face him. Sir Gawain had beheaded the Green Knight long ago, a season ago, with the solemn promise that Gawain would face the same blow later. Williamson tells us, “Who the Green Man is is well established. He is the ‘descendant of the Vegetation or Nature god of (whatever his local name) almost universal and immemorial tradition whose death and resurrection mythologizes the annual death and re-birth of nature'”.********* Now the Green Holly King is at his height, and Sir Gawain fears the beheading blow that would almost certainly take his life.

Yet, the Green King is a king of understanding. Looking with his new year eyes, he sees both forward and backward, and lends self knowledge and understanding to those before him. Gawain has learned his weaknesses on his quest, and still he is afraid. He has not quite accepted death as Feeble has. He has not learned to stop leaving tracks like the sage.

The classical motif of the lovers also suggests such fecund kind of knowledge. A culmination of their physical union looks backwards to the individual selves who have been dissolved into the joining couple, and (in the sense of the green new year) that copulation also looks forward to the potential for new life. Generation itself becomes perpetuation. Even if we cannot live on ourselves, we can live on in union and procreation. In some cases, that becomes a mystical trajectory.

Christianity makes the mystery of regeneration more pointed, more direct. Midwinter, the return of the sun, becomes more about a birth. It is a birth that promises rebirth to all. King Holly, and his lover the ivy, fringing the entrance to the church, to the font of human regeneration. Like Feeble’s death, like the deciduous leaves, on may die this year and be quit for the next, or one may linger on in the green fields as it seems Falstaff does:

HOSTESS Nay, sure, he’s not in hell! He’s in Arthur’s
bosom, if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom. He
made a finer end, and went away an it had been any
christom child. He parted ev’n just between twelve
and one, ev’n at the turning o’ th’ tide; for after I saw
him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers
and smile upon his finger’s end, I knew there was
but one way, for his nose was as sharp as a pen and
he talked of green fields.

Henry V 2.3.9-17

Here again are flowers and green fields, life garlanding passing or ascendance. Ophelia strewing flowers about the court of Denmark as her spirit prepares to depart. The crown of thorns still a crown of vegetation, the cross a winter tree, Christ a green hope for new life upon it. These ideas have been shared, borrowed, and refined deliberately again and again, and here, at the winter solstice. we remember them just at the point when the sun begins its journey to return to us again.

*Hsiang, Wen. Sleepless Nights: Verses for the Wakeful. Translated by Thomas F. Cleary. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995. Born in China in 1210, just before Ghengis Khan invaded northern China, Wen Xiang lived under the rule of the Mongolian occupiers his whole life. His poetry often reflects life’s opitimistic green shoots in the face of tension, conflict, and oppression.

**Williamson, John. The Oak King, the Holly King and the Unicorn: the Myths and Symbolism of the Unicorn Tapestries. New York: Harper & Row, 1986, 29.

***Ibid, 61.

****Ibid, 62. Williamson’s description of how holly, which so closely resembles a non-deciduous Mediterranean oak, came to be a representative northern European evergreen is especially interesting, albeit the whole book is a fascinating, meticulous examination of the symbolism of the famous Unicorn tapestries.

*****Phythian-Adams, Charles. Local History and Folklore a New Framework. London: Bedford Square Pr., 1975. The argument appears on pp. 21-5.

******Hutton, Ronald. The Rise and Fall of Merry England: the Ritual Year, 1400-1700. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, 5.

*******Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England. Penguin Global, 2012, 726.

********Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems. New York: New Directions, 2006, p. 26. Included especially for my student, C.A., who mentioned this to me in class years ago, and my nephew, J.N., who writes great poetry.

*********Williamson, 74.

In our human experience, so many of us tend to find the mystical in nature. Or perhaps we find it through nature, using nature as a lens that refines our perception and understanding. So much in the natural world remains analogous to how our lives and the greater cosmos appear to function, that it is difficult not to draw the parallels.

We needn’t stray too far to stumble over it. Schelling (1775-1854) expounded on it in his earlier years, as he paused for breath midpoint between his initial adherence to Fichte’s ideas and his later burgeoning rivalry with his erstwhile friend and roommate, Hegel.** In many ways, our views of movement, or of something that is sometimes phrased as ‘the unfolding of the mind of God’, may depend largely on our own individual penchants or predilections. Where Hegel may have understood the unfurling of the universe in terms of the movement of history, theology, and politics, Schelling perceived Nature as representing the great unfolding of cosmic mystery and meaning.*** Although ‘Naturphilosophie’ stems from impulses embodied in other thought systems (Chinese Taoism, for example), and although it fell variously in and out of fashion with the mainstream of rigorous thought in the West, it nevertheless remains with us in a multitude of ways. Having had great influence on artistic expression, it also continues to emerge in literature, and in the works of those like Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman as a kind of counter perspective to the Puritan weltenshauung that seems to structure much of North American understanding even today.***

Yet, I can almost feel my small collective readership rolling their eyes, or throwing up their hands in frustration. Is this not a blog about Shakespeare?!? Well, where is it? Where’s the Shakespeare?

Not in the title words. Instead, those come from Opal Whiteley (1897-1992), the Oregon born child prodigy/nature mystic whose diary became an international sensation when it was published in 1920. She wrote:

And all the times I was picking up potatoes, I did have conversations with them.  Too, I did have thinks of all their growing days there in the ground, and all the things they did hear.  Earth-voices are glad voices, and earth-songs come up from the ground through the plants; and in their flowering, and in the days before these days are come, they do tell the earth-songs to the wind … I have thinks these potatoes growing here did have knowings of star-songs.

Opal Whiteley, 8 years of age, The Singing Creek where the Willows Grow – The Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley, Penguin, 1995.***** 

There’s that long view, the mystical perspective of something bigger than ourselves. Writing of “the days before these days are come” and “the knowings of star-songs” hint at a greater scope beyond our small imperfect ken. Days rolling on to something else, meadows beyond meadows, and fog clearing after socked in days to reveal a fragment of diamond stippled night. Those stars, as familiar but distant points of knowing light may seem far off, but never seem so far from our speculations, especially when we consider unions. For union expands the self, with the potential of extending the single self greater than its initial limitations or its initial understanding. This union, merging, mingling, even dissolving is the very crux of mystic experience. As Juliet anticipates her approaching tryst with Romeo:

Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
O, I have bought the mansion of a love,
But not possess’d it, and, though I am sold,
Not yet enjoy’d: so tedious is this day
As is the night before some festival
To an impatient child that hath new robes
And may not wear them.

Romeo and Juliet 3.2.20-8

Here, Juliet envisions Romeo making an Ovidian metamorphosis into stars at the very point of climax, improving the very face of heaven. The opening of the self reflects a greater knowing, a greater understanding, of potential participation in the heavens rather than distant adoration. This is the point where we surrender to finally receive the universal gifts.

In Karin Brown’s photograph above, the patch of sky centred in the frame is roughly the shape of the human heart, again reflecting that our engagement with what lies beyond our single self tends to be, in terms of mystical experience, emotional and spiritual. This intermingling, this promiscuity of our spirit with a greater spirit or universal force or energy, also transcends our physical sphere and the borders of our present existence, understanding, or experience. By giving up the self as it is, we join a union that exceeds that self and we transcend the mundane existence for an active intimacy in the greater cosmos of which we are a part.

Marginal thinking? Perhaps. Let us move away from lovers then, and instead consider monsters. Here is Caliban, the ‘monster’ from Shakespeare’s Tempest uttering one of the most oft quoted passages in the canon:

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again. And then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.

The Tempest 3.2.129-37

Caliban’s natural perspective seems both more limited and more expansive. Instead of envisioning stars, he not only hears the islands sounds, but he also delights in them. He longs for the celestial participation that he sees in his dreams, and the sounds of his island home sometimes take him there when they make him “sleep again”. Because his participation in the natural world around him already exceeds that of the other characters in the play (with the exception of the spirit, Ariel), Caliban needs no magical intervention beyond sleep because, although his dominion has been usurped by Prospero, he already has a more pronounced union with the world than other characters around him have.

Are there other ways to foster the connection with something greater than ourselves? Of course. As many as there might be thoughts. Singing, for example. Worshippers sing in churches not only because the Bible commands it: Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. (Colossians 3:16) We also sing because older occult traditions hold that the singing voice is closest to the voice of the angelic or the intercessors between the mortal and the universal constant, so when we sing in worship, the angels most readily hear us in our attempt to make our human voices more like their own, and they carry our prayers, thoughts, and hopes to that greater denominator of universal presence–the “is”ness of “I am that I am.”

Yet, most other cultures sing as well, and often do so, at least in part, with an expansive and connective aspect. The more traditional Diné (Navajo) of the southwestern United States tend to sing the sun up every morning, and their ways of restoring balance to their worlds are often translated as “sings”. In truth, these rituals, being intricate communal affairs occupying many days, involve much more than merely singing, but the term remains an accurate description of the comprehensive beauty of the communicative channels evoked in the processes. Many other, if not most other, indigenous cultures also. Here is a recording of a chant for world peace by the well known Tibetan Gyuto monks. It’s a longer recording, but it offers a taste of Tibetan Buddhist chanting, and it promotes world peace, so it is good to have a listen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L42AnSAdzXw

Here is an astonishing TEDx talk where the Tuvan group, Alash, demonstrate traditional Tuvan throat singing, of which the late physicist Richard Feynman was a huge fan:******

Of course, the Tuvan throat singers are renowned not just for their ability to simultaneously generate multiple tones in their singing, but also for their reflection of the natural world around them–with many of the traditional pieces being deliberately evocative of the natural world around them. Horses, insects, and even the rising moon have been enshrined in vocal pieces performed by Tuvan groups.

Which brings us back to Nature with the capital “N”, the Nature in which we find a direct reflection of the greater soul, the Atman, or the face of God. Of the traditional English ritual year, Ronal Hutton tells us “for most people the first sign of the opening of the season of ceremony would have been the decorating of buildings with holly and ivy on or just before Christmas Eve.”******* Indeed, in old English churches, the ‘green man’ motif tends to be prolific, often carved into the stonework in various places as a nod to the ‘sacred groves’ that occupied the spaces before the churches were built–a practice that swept across those parts of the world that became Christianized as older pagan ways were incorporated into the bases of today’s Christian ritual practice.

In fact, our connection with some greater movement seems so much a part of us that it remains with us everywhere. In Shakespeare, yes, and also everywhere else, around us, within us, and between us too, it is so often better described by great writers that we tend to overlook it. Here is Kenneth Grahame in a passage from his great mystical work, The Wind in the Willows which, although lengthy, is also worth it:

They got the boat out, and the Rat took the sculls, paddling with caution. Out in midstream, there was a clear, narrow track that faintly reflected the sky; but wherever shadows fell on the water from bank, bush, or tree, they were as solid to all appearance as the banks themselves, and the Mole had to steer with judgment accordingly. Dark and deserted as it was, the night was full of small noises, song and chatter and rustling, telling of the busy little population who were up and about, plying their trades and vocations through the night till sunshine should fall on them at last and send them off to their well-earned repose. The water’s own noises, too, were more apparent than by day, its gurglings and ‘cloops’ more unexpected and near at hand; and constantly they started at what seemed a sudden clear call from an actual articulate voice.

The line of the horizon was clear and hard against the sky, and in one particular quarter it showed black against a silvery climbing phosphorescence that grew and grew. At last, over the rim of the waiting earth the moon lifted with slow majesty till it swung clear of the horizon and rode off, free of moorings; and once more they began to see surfaces—meadows wide-spread, and quiet gardens, and the river itself from bank to bank, all softly disclosed, all washed clean of mystery and terror, all radiant again as by day, but with a difference that was tremendous. Their old haunts greeted them again in other raiment, as if they had slipped away and put on this pure new apparel and come quietly back, smiling as they shyly waited to see if they would be recognised again under it.

Fastening their boat to a willow, the friends landed in this silent, silver kingdom, and patiently explored the hedges, the hollow trees, the runnels and their little culverts, the ditches and dry water-ways. Embarking again and crossing over, they worked their way up the stream in this manner, while the moon, serene and detached in a cloudless sky, did what she could, though so far off, to help them in their quest; till her hour came and she sank earthwards reluctantly, and left them, and mystery once more held field and river.

Then a change began slowly to declare itself. The horizon became clearer, field and tree came more into sight, and somehow with a different look; the mystery began to drop away from them. A bird piped suddenly, and was still; and a light breeze sprang up and set the reeds and bulrushes rustling. Rat, who was in the stern of the boat, while Mole sculled, sat up suddenly and listened with a passionate intentness. Mole, who with gentle strokes was just keeping the boat moving while he scanned the banks with care, looked at him with curiosity.

‘It’s gone!’ sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. ‘So beautiful and strange and new. Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. No! There it is again!’ he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound.

‘Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,’ he said presently. ‘O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.’

The Mole, greatly wondering, obeyed. ‘I hear nothing myself,’ he said, ‘but the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers.’

The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/289/289-h/289-h.htm#link2H_4_0007.

As Grahame suggests, Mole and Rat hear differently, exist and experience differently. Mole, like Caliban, is more of the earth, a part and parcel of the world’s motion around him. Rat, on the other hand, represents a more active and engaged imagination, seizing on moments and movements as the human mind often seems wont to do. Perhaps our role, as teachers, as lovers, friends, and fellow human beings, is to hear how we hear, while allowing for how others may hear as well, letting their participation continue in its own way, seeking to be informed by it rather than to stifle it. If the greater music really is the same, and if our being is somehow delineated or enhanced by our own participation in the flow of the greater river, then the long slow listening of the trees really must be very like our own, if only removed by a single facet from our own perspective or from the edge of our own single being in this starlit world.

* As always, more of Karin Brown’s moving and thought provoking tree, landscape, and light images may be found on her website:  https://brownkcd.wixsite.com/imbolc , and also (as previously stated) on Instagram @imbolcphotographic. Thank you, Karin. I remain grateful to you for your continued willingness to share your work on this site.

**Prominent German thinkers who were often grouped as founders of the ‘German Idealism’ movement, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831) were contemporaries, and Schelling and Hegel were initially friends and university roommates.

***This according to the late Donald Fleming, and I believe him. Intellectual historian and Harvard University’s former Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, seldom have I met a more rigorous thinker, a more astonishing speaker, and a more generous human being. A brief memorial piece about him from the Harvard Gazette may be read here: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/10/donald-harnish-fleming/

****The late literary and cultural critic Sacvan Bercovitch (1933-2004) was born in Canada although he spent much of his life living and teaching in the United States. His ideas about the great scope of Puritan influence on social identity in the U.S. are laid out in his early books The Puritan Origins of the American Self and The American Jeremiad, while his later The American Puritan Imagination focused more on the Puritan voice in the literature of New England. A knowledgeable, personable, and compelling teacher, his instruction was always both fascinating and accessible.

*****Whiteley, Opal Stanley. The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow: the Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley: with a Biography and an Afterword. Edited by Benjamin Hoff. New York: Penguin Books, 1995. Opal Whiteley lived the latter part of her life in England where she committed herself to a psychiatric hospital in 1948, and she remained under psychiatric care until her death in 1992.

******More about Feynman’s associatio with Tuva may be read in: Leighton, Ralph. Tuva or Bust!: Richard Feynmans Last Journey. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.

*******Hutton, Ronald. The Rise and Fall of Merry England: the Ritual Year, 1400-1700. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 5.

Change can be gradual or precipitous, barely noticeable, or overwhelming. Most often, as with so many things, change lies somewhere between the two extremes.

The title line is spoken by Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when he awakens under the spell of the “love in idleness” flower. Although he had been pursuing Hermia at this point in the play, when he wakes with the love juice in his eyes, he sees Helena and loves her instantly.

DEMETRIUS, (waking up)
O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!
To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne?
Crystal is muddy. O, how ripe in show
Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow!
That pure congealèd white, high Taurus’ snow,
Fanned with the eastern wind, turns to a crow
When thou hold’st up thy hand. O, let me kiss
This princess of pure white, this seal of bliss!

MND 3.2.140-7

His love is so shockingly sudden to him that initially, as if in the aftermath of a particularly loud thunderclap, he can only define his attraction through opposition, describing how Helena’s physical attributes turn qualities like crystal and snow into their opposites when considered in comparison with her. Demetrius’ eastern wind fans the snow of the Taurus Mountains, but it might also be read as a harbinger of change to the snow, as much as Helena’s raising of her own pale hand, by contrast, demolishes the snow’s whiteness.

Culturally, the wind has long been associated with change. Former United Kingdom Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s famous speech to the Parliament of South Africa in 1960 clarified the U.K.’s changing policy to no longer block the movements towards independence of African territories that had been colonies of the British Empire. He said in part that “The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.”*

The idea of wind as an agent of change may be a very old one, and certainly predates the dissolution of the British Empire. It may stem from the birth of oceanic navigation (which may have been in its infancy around 800,000 years ago), but the concept may be even older than that as well. Human culture is replete with this idea. Here is the opening clip from the motion picture Saving Mr. Banks, about Walt Disney’s quest for the rights to the P. L. Travers series of Mary Poppins books:

Colin Farrell’s opening voice over for Saving Mr. Banks does a nice job of deliberately echoing the original moment in Disney’s Mary Poppins film:

Of course, in keeping with this blog’s focus, the question becomes whether or not Shakespeare used the idea of winds of change. The answer is yes, he did, and he did so in several instances in a number of different ways.

In the early Henry VI plays (parts 1, 2, and 3) Shakespeare made ample use of a character who represents the historical Earl of Warwick. Warwick Castle stands near to Shakespeare’s home town of Stratford upon Avon, lying some 8 miles to the northeast of Stratford in the town of Warwick.**

Back in the days when power was more often decided by use of arms than by politicians or referendums, two different branches of a single family contended for the English crown. The Lancasters, represented by a red rose, and the Yorks, represented by a white rose, struggled to dominate the monarchy in what has become known, not surprisingly, as the War of the Roses. During this struggle, Richard Neville, the 16th Earl of Warwick, became the most powerful noble of his age, and also known as Warwick the Kingmaker, partly because of the military forces he could muster, and partly because he was a strategically effective commander and administrator.

In Henry VI part 3, an argument over whether Warwick’s allegiance will abide with the Yorkist or the Lancastrian side, Warwick threatens that, if the Yorkist King Edward IV will not acknowledge him properly, then Warwick will support the Lancastrian King Henry VI with the powers at his disposal. King Edward answers him:

Sail how thou canst, have wind and tide thy friend,
This hand, fast wound about thy coal-black hair,
Shall, whiles thy head is warm and new cut off,
Write in the dust this sentence with thy blood:
“Wind-changing Warwick now can change no more.”

3 Henry VI 5.1.54-8

In this instance, Shakespeare’s ‘wind changing’ carries a double sense. King Edward implies not only that Warwick can change the wind with his power, but also that Warwick himself changes with the wind, and that his allegiance is changeable and unreliable.

More oracular winds also appears in Shakespeare. In Henry IV part 1, King Henry IV and his son, Prince Hal (who later becomes Henry V), find themselves pitted against rebel forces near Shrewsbury. Facing the coming battle, King Henry and Hal have the following exchange:

KING 
How bloodily the sun begins to peer
Above yon bulky hill. The day looks pale
At his distemp’rature.

PRINCE The southern wind
Doth play the trumpet to his purposes,
And by his hollow whistling in the leaves
Foretells a tempest and a blust’ring day.

KING 
Then with the losers let it sympathize,
For nothing can seem foul to those that win.

1 Henry IV 5.1.1-9

Again, there is a dual sense here, with the wind presaging both rougher weather and the coming battle which, in a sense, merge into one future–a future replete with blood and conflict. The day presents itself arrayed for battle, with King Henry’s bloody sun and bulky hill led on by Prince Hal’s trumpeting wind. The scene also marks an initial farewell between Hal and Falstaff, and one that foreshadows Prince Hal’s later repudiation of Sir John after the former becomes king at the end of 2 Henry IV:

FALSTAFF Hal, if thou see me down in the battle and
bestride me, so; ’tis a point of friendship.

PRINCE Nothing but a colossus can do thee that friendship.
Say thy prayers, and farewell.

FALSTAFF I would ’twere bedtime, Hal, and all well.

PRINCE Why, thou owest God a death. (He exits.)

FALSTAFF ’Tis not due yet. I would be loath to pay Him
before His day. What need I be so forward with
Him that calls not on me? Well, ’tis no matter.
Honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me
off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to a
leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a
wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then?
No. What is honor? A word. What is in that word
“honor”? What is that “honor”? Air. A trim reckoning.
Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth
he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible,
then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the
living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore,
I’ll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon. And
so ends my catechism.
(He exits.)

1 Henry IV 5.2.122-42

And here is the rift, of course, between Hal and Falstaff. For all his revelry, Hal has a deep and abiding understanding of honour. To Falstaff, it is only a word. Only ‘air’. This is not the moving wind of change. Falstaff’s honor is mere rhetorical paint, dead air that hangs still and empty in the realm of human experience. There is no life, no animation to Falstaff’s honour. His air is synonymous with emptiness. It is not the vacancy that looks expectantly after Cleopatra’s recent presence. Rather, it is a blank, a vacuum in human conception.

Yet, even Falstaff’s empty honour, his inversion of wind, brings change, just as the examples above tend to do. Demetrius’ renewed love for Helena, King Edward’s doomsaying against Warwick, Prince Hal’s winds of war that trumpet against rebellion led against his father–all of these bring about significant changes that precipitate the resolution of their respective plays. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry VI part 3, and Henry IV part 1 would not be the same without these pivotal moments.

The winds of change may bring so much, sometimes even a sense of vague forboding in the face of igniting passion:

Here, the sandstorm outside the vehicle again reflects a complicated array of changing circumstances, including the growing tensions that will lead to the Second World War, and the growing passion and emotional confusion of the various characters in the face of enormous changes in their worlds.

The changing wind in drama and literature is such a trope that there are far too many examples to list. Still, it can be enlightening to think about such different examples as Inherit the Wind, the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee that used a dramtization of the Scopes ‘monkey’ trial (a trial over the legality of teaching evolution in schools in the conservative Christian southern United States in 1925) to parallel McCarthyism. There is The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, the 1908 children’s book celebrating life and nature that has been adapted to stage and film many times.

As the final words of this blog post are being typed, the wind is literally howling around outside as the first big winter storm of the season has reached the place where the ghost currently tries to rest. Big winds. Not far from the ocean. One wonders what changes, if any, this wind might bring. One can only hope, whatever changes may be on the way, that they will be kind and good, and the ghost wishes the same to every one of you as well.

*A copy of Macmillan’s speech may be read here: http://www.africanrhetoric.org/pdf/J%20%20%20Macmillan%20-%20%20the%20wind%20of%20change.pdf

**The original Warwick Castle was built by William the Conqueror in 1068, and was rebuilt in stone in the 12th century. The formidable castle was later fortified again, and it was used as a stronghold and then a country house until Tussaud’s (the famous waxwork tourist attraction company) bought it in 1978, to run it as a tourist site. The impressive castle remains a major tourist attraction in the Midlands today, and is well worth a visit as an intact example of mostly 14th century castle architecture.

(With enormous gratitude to Theodor Geisel, Dr. Seuss, for his pioneering Green Eggs and Ham.)

I am Sam. Sam I am.

Not a yam. No, no. Just Sam.

Will you try green eggs and Hamlet?

I will not try them, Sam I amlet.

I do not like green eggs and Hamlet. I do not like them, Sam I amlet.

Wait. What the hell are you on about? “Sam I amlet”?!? Really?!? What the actual F?!? What is wrong with you? That doesn’t make any sense!

I do not like that guy, Polonius. I prefer the Monk, Thelonious.

Now, just a minute!!

I do not care for wan Ophelia, I much prefer a blue lobelia!

Lobelia? Really? Please just stop this right now!

I would not drown her in a brook, I would not drown here with her book,

Not where a slanting willow grows, or all those flowers tied with bows.

Argh! Really?!? You’re just rhyming nonsensically!

But this I know for certain, damnlet! I do not like green eggs and Hamlet!

NO!

I do not like them in a castle. Preparation’s quite a hassle!

I don’t like suspicious kings. Their guilty consciences have stings.

I don’t like sycophantic friends who lie to me for their own ends.

Please keep my father’s ghost away, I won’t like what he’s going to say.

Whatever tale it might unfold, vengeance is still best served cold.

I do not like green eggs and Hamlet, I do not like them, Sam I amlet.

Ok, that’s enough! Just stop this idiotic rambling right now!!!

If I know what they’re not seeing, it might make me question being.

Besides, I like Laertes well, I would not send his soul to hell.

Knock, knock, knock and ring the bell; summon Duncan, he will tell

The sceptre, learning, physic, must

All follow this and come to dust.

That’s not even from Hamlet! No more rhyming now, I mean it!

Anybody want a peanut?*

For I alone am left to tell thee, where thou goest remains to see,

Except that summers day, as God, white whale, or devil may,

As the King of the Cats, he comes, by the pricking of my thumbs.

Whatever words that man might say, pumpkin head, shirt stuffed with hay,

We cannot lead the mushrooms dance, or prick the moon upon our lance,

Lest we be turned into a stag, fleeing hounds and torn to rags,

In that dismal boneshop foul, in our hearts, where we all howl

To see the best minds of our generations, left with no remuneration,

Tortured by the madness, damnlet, of these damned green eggs and Hamlet!

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? No. No. Thou art less comparable

And more fearsome, thy canker blossom striving to the sky

With broken wings to fly too close to the sun. Day is done.

Or, like the boy on his father’s horse, Elf King pursuing through the course

of a fearsome ride.

“My son, wherefore seek’st thou thy face thus to hide?”
“Look, father, the Erl-King is close by our side!
Dost see not the Erl-King, with crown and with train?”
“My son, ’tis the mist rising over the plain.”***

Goethe’s poem scored by Schubert, guarding gates, as does Hubert,

Except these are gates of life, poetically beset by strife,

As each golden promise beckons, with our lives, we must reckon.

So, mortality’s a struggle, only so much we can juggle.

You’re getting yourself worked up over nothing. Just calm down.

(Quietly) I’ve told you,

I do not like green eggs and Hamlet. I do not like them, Sam I amlet.

It brings the Elf King much too close, Hamlet pursued by that ghost,

Written both in verse and prose.

Just no more, please. I beg you. Stop. Please.

Restless ghosts cannot boast like St. Dunstan pulling on the nose

of Satan, just to bring him down, and when he had him on the ground,

he opened wide the devil’s jaws, and put green eggs into his maw,

and then he made him watch the Hamlet, which finished him,

Sam I amlet.****

Do not speak to me of violins, of trumpets, or of angel voices

They do not tempt me with such choices, as ‘to be or not to be’

Strikes deep into the heart of me. Like the Once-ler and his thneed

No matter what we seem to plead.

Truffula trees all cut down, seas rise up and then we drown.*****

Man has lost his mare again and all shall be ill.

All shall be green, more profits than we’ve ever seen.

For we do mock the meat we feed upon, the land we live upon.

No, I tell you, Sam I amlet, I won’t consume green eggs and Hamlet.

But, don’t you see that Hamlet’s good?! Shakespeare’s like essential food,

For thinking, feeling, understanding, compassing experience, banding

Us together in what to do and not to do.

Well, I’ll look. I’ll take a look. I’ll read a smattering in this book,

This old book here in my house, chewed on by some errant mouse,

and yet the words I still can see, I’ll see what it might bring to me.

Tell me after you’ve read a bit. I’ll be here, awaiting it.

. . .

. . .

I read that play, I must confess, although I thought I’d like it less,

I like it greatly Sam I amlet, I really like this play called Hamlet!

And if there were some sort of way, I would go to see this play,

I would see Timon, I would see Lear, I would see them all right here!

These are most excellent I think,

They are not dull, they do not stink.

They help us see and understand

People, both the mean and grand;

Now that you’ve opened up this door,

I’ll treasure Shakespeare evermore.

EPILOGUE:

That ghost will always be chasing us, crown of the cats, elf king, or Fritz Leiber’s smoke ghost.******* Whatever form, it will always be chasing us, or we will always be chasing it. More than academic employment, we seek a level of competence, a level of excellence, in literature, drama, and the other arts. Merely getting by is no longer enough. We must excel. We must broaden and deepen our outlook in all the ways before the ‘same old, same old’ of regarding people and planet as mainly someone else’s problem grinds us away to ash beneath the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg:

But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic — their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.*******

The true challenge may lie beyond simply educating, or beyond educating as many of us think of that. Solutions to our challenges tend to accompany innovation. People decry scholarship for being stuck in its ways, for failing to use methods that might transcend its often (sometimes necessarily) narrow operative channels. ‘Academics easily become dry, detached, and lose the meaning of learning by subscribing to single meanings born of tunnel vision, or circumscribed perspective. Yet, engaging critically need not exclude engaging creatively as well. The best critical work may be as creative as any work of art. Merging the two does not make monsters. Instead, it tends to foster an aesthetic discernment that is too often discarded when one method is favoured over the other. Critical evaluation can promote a deeper understanding of the arts, but when we dissect works, impaling them on pins and dessicating their delicate expressive tissues with minute and incremental analyses, we most often lose the butterfly to scrutiny. Beauty may lie in a whole far beyond its parts. Should we analyse too closely, or compartmentalize lovely elements, we risk losing the myriad colourful possibilities of our engagement in misguided attempts to distill beauty into something we might further use, reproduce, or otherwise reductively describe.

*Borrowed shamelessly from Andre the Giant’s line in the Princess Bride: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP5-qJSzDUg

**The tale of the King of the Cats may be read here: https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/meft/meft32.htm

***Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1853). “The Erl-King”. The Poems of Goethe. translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring. p. 99.

****Hone, William (1825). The every-day book, or, The guide to the year, p. 670.
St Dunstan, as the story goes,
Once pull’d the devil by the nose
With red-hot tongs, which made him roar,
That he was heard three miles or more.

*****More about the Once-ler and his thneeds may, of course, be found in The Lorax by Dr. Seuss: Seuss, Dr. The Lorax. New York: Random House, 1971.

******More of Karin Brown’s fine photographic work at Imbolc Photographic Art on Instagram and at https://brownkcd.wixsite.com/imbolc.

*******Fritz Leiber’s story “Smoke Ghost” may be found in: Leiber, Fritz. Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions. Seattle, WA: Midnight House, 2001. Originally published in 1941, the story originally appeared in The Weird, and established Leiber at the forefront of writers who focused on the uncanny and unsettling nature of our increasingly urban landscapes.

*******These famous lines appear in any copy of The Great Gatsby, in chapter two (page numbers vary by version). Here’s a recent one: Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Penguin Books, 2019.

**CAUTION: Post contains some images and ideas that some may find disturbing.**

Anticipating twilight may be internal as well as external, and the two may not always be in synch. Crepescule may fall across our inner landscape before it falls outside. The best course may be to remain vigilant, and be aware of both.

Speaking of the end of the day, the title line for this blog post belongs to Brutus, who, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, is in some ways a bit of a stoic. Or at least he tries to be so. In the full exchange, Brutus and Cassius are saying their final farewells in case the upcoming battle against the forces of Marc Antony and Octavius Caesar at Philippi has an unfavourable outcome for them:

CASSIUS Then, if we lose this battle,
You are contented to be led in triumph
Thorough the streets of Rome?

BRUTUS No, Cassius, no. Think not, thou noble Roman,
That ever Brutus will go bound to Rome.
He bears too great a mind. But this same day
Must end that work the ides of March begun.
And whether we shall meet again, I know not.
Therefore our everlasting farewell take.
Forever and forever farewell, Cassius.
If we do meet again, why we shall smile;
If not, why then this parting was well made.

CASSIUS Forever and forever farewell, Brutus.
If we do meet again, we’ll smile indeed;
If not, ’tis true this parting was well made.

BRUTUS Why then, lead on.—O, that a man might know
The end of this day’s business ere it come!
But it sufficeth that the day will end,
And then the end is known.—Come ho, away!

Julius Caesar 5.1.118-36

At this moment in the text, and at this moment in the play, the final farewell is foregrounded against an internal landscape, against the finitude of human understanding, knowing, and existence. Metaphorically, it is the end of the day. Brutus has had ample warning about Philippi already. The ghost of Julius Caesar (the dear friend whom Brutus helped to assassinate) has, on the night before the battle, appeared to Brutus in his tent, and more about Brutus’ encounter with the ghost of his erstwhile friend may be read here:

http://bloggingshakespeare.com/great-caesars-ghost

When Brutus argues to Cassius that ‘it sufficeth that the day will end’, he also makes the argument to himself. He dismisses subsequent speculation in spite of the fact that the memory of his previous encounter with Caesar’s ghost would still be with him. Yet, Brutus also laments that we cannot help the longing to look into the future.

Sometimes, day’s outlook may be bleak indeed, especially if our lives seem confined to narrow circumstance. The lyrics to “At the End of the Day” from the musical, Les Miserables describe the life of the poor in such terms:

At the end of the day you’re another day older
And that’s all you can say for the life of the poor
It’s a struggle, it’s a war
And there’s nothing that anyone’s giving
One more day standing about, what is it for?
One day less to be living

At the end of the day you’re another day colder
And the shirt on your back doesn’t keep out the chill
And the righteous hurry past
They don’t hear the little ones crying
And the plague is coming on fast, ready to kill
One day nearer to dying

“At the End of the Day” from the film version of the musical, Les Miserables.

The cinematic clip captures the drama:

Yet, as oppressive as our lives may be, they may also be marked with strange kind of hope. Ironically, when threatened with extinction, we may then find our most powerful voices, and a truer vision of our potential immortality.

Even in the face of death, we may seem to transcend it.

Naturally, the end of the day may take us in many directions, and sometimes they may be good as well as bad. Yet, we live in scary times, and it so often seems that we also inhabit a fading world. In an interview with Greta Scacchi, Jack Watkins notes that the actress had “lent her support to an ongoing £25 million refurbishment campaign” for the Bristol Old Vic, which he notes is the “oldest continuously functioning theatre in the U.K.” Scacchi says, “These old theatres are rather like fireplaces or chimneys. They don’t know how to build them now.”*

The problems with theatre go much deeper than the loss of old theatres, however tragic and substantial that loss may be. With the growth of the internet and streaming television platforms, even cinema struggles to remain relevant. How much more so for live theatre, and the increasinly aged audiences who actually still attend it? Just as cinema and television tend to rely on formulaic constructs (even as artists within these realms strive to transcend those) live theatre has always relied on ‘chestnuts’, or popular best selling shows, to survive. Yet, its direct appeal is increasingly sidelined by rising ticket prices, and the ready availabilty of on demand movies and television series that viewers may watch in the comfort and privacy of their own homes, simply punching a button or two in order to see what they want, even after a long day’s work.

Perhaps deeper still is what seems to be a marked change in actor attitudes and training. As Greta Scacchi reminds us, when she attended the Old Vic (in 1977), “the training was about the spoken word, the quality of writing for the stage through periods of history and of the theatre as a sacred space.” She believes that “When [current drama schools] say they’re doing a film-acting course, that has to be a scam, because a student cannot possibly think ‘I want to be a film actor and that’s it.’ It’s not realistic.”

Of course, conservatories and university programmes may offer film or television acting as ancillary to their central training. In the United States, many young performers look to television and film because they seem much more lucrative than the diminished theatre, which appears to be dying on the vine. Theatre seems to be dying in the United Kingdom too, perhaps remaining most dynamic and vital in places like South America, Asia, and a few other hotspots where ongoing innovation in live theatre serves as a momentary resistance the withering onslaught of spreading cultural blight.

Again, however, Scacchi’s voice cautions us. “If you’re not interested in watching actors on stage, I don’t see how you can be interested in acting of any sort. The stage is a perfect cipher for all the skills you’d need for film. The way you adjust your voice or your physicality to a big theatre or a smaller space is the same kind of gauge you’d use for a film wide shot or a close-up.” The underlying sentiment is echoed by Sir Michael Caine, who advises aspiring actors to “work to be the best possible actor you can be”.**

It’s difficult to argue with this, yet there does seem to be a difference in perspective, especially between actor training in the United States and that in the United Kingdom. In the United States, the performance vernacular seems to be more cinematically based, which may again stem from economic considerations. Also, the cult of personality tends to dictate that motion picture and television stars remain a kind of social rage, with projects often being marketed on the basis of the personalities performing in them as much as they may be promoted on the virtues of the project itself.

Not that the United Kingdom doesn’t have its celebrities as well. Yet, training in the United Kingdom also seems to place more an emphasis on a given actor’s performative flexibility and adaptability. As U.S. actress Julia Eringer (who is originally from London) says, “In the UK, there’s a greater emphasis on an actor’s ability to play characters who are different from themselves… being able to walk their walk, talk their talk.”*** In the same article, Eringer says that “UK actors are highly regarded in LA; they’re known for being on point. They know their lines, they work hard and they’re not messing around. In general, I find US actors a little looser, perhaps not quite as sharp or on point, but as a result they often have very fluid emotional lives and can have very magical moments.”

Of course, there are great actors in both countries, and in many other countries as well. In terms of developing acting skills, however, is there really a best way? Dario Fo says:

In conclusion, practice is the best means of learning to read any theatrical text, and in theatre practice involves not just staging plays personally, but also going to see how other people, particularly performers of talent and experience, set about the business. I myself acquired the basics of the craft by standing night after night in the wings, spying on the more seasoned practitioners in the variety of companies I worked with. I would urge this course of action on young actors — go and watch every move, if necessary from behind the wings, even if the stage manager throws a fit and threatens to kick you out.****

In the end, balance in playing may be the very thing. Hamlet’s advice to the players is often quoted:

. . .let your own discretion
be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the
word to the action; with this special o’erstep not
the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is
from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the
first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the
mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature,
scorn her own image, and the very age and body of
the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone,
or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful
laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the
censure of the which one must in your allowance
o’erweigh a whole theatre of others.

Hamlet 3.2.16-30

Like in Simon Brook’s film of his father’s acting exercise, Peter Brook: The Tightrope, perhaps finding the middle way between the physical, emotional, and intellectual faculties may be the best way to perform, and this is, arguably, a middle way that can be solidified in actors by working with the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.*****

But we digress. As theatre becomes increasingly marginalised, do we lose performance altogether? Obviously not. Streaming entertainment studios will continue to produce projects designed to be as addictive as possible–series designed to keep the public watching, even binge watching when possible. At the end of the day, the death of live theatre would not take drama from us, but it would change its form, perhaps more drastically than we imagine.

In many ways, these changes are already taking place, sweeping the world of entertainment even as climate change sweeps over the earth. Will we gain even as we lose? Of course. The increasing production of projects for television may offer current actors more opportunity than they have had at any other time in history. Yet, we must bear in mind that we also pay for each of the gains we make. As live theatre disappears, so does its immediacy. The performers in our living rooms never seem to miss a line, miss an entrance. They never need to ad lib. All need for theatrical covering skills may be alleviated by simply recording another take.

Perhaps the loss of live theatre’s immediacy, intimacy, and mutual participation remains less important in the larger view, in the ‘big scheme of things’. What we gain, what we embrace may be far more relevant to our lives now. Still, it is good to recall that when we move towards something, we often move away from something else. Embracing one kind of idea or method often means letting go of another, and perhaps allowing that other way to fall into disuse or be forgotten completely.

Not that people will completely forget Shakespeare or the live stage. Those streaming services still produce versions of Shakespeare’s plays, with amazing production values, filmed at real castles (or animated versions of them). Audiences will have no need to imagine the arms or the scenery. We need not worry when the Prologue in Henry V pleads with us:

And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high uprearèd and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance.
Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth,
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our
kings,
Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times,
Turning th’ accomplishment of many years
Into an hourglass; for the which supply,
Admit me chorus to this history,
Who, prologue-like, your humble patience pray
Gently to hear, kindly to judge our play.

Henry V, Prologue, 18-36.

Things that the prologue asks us to imagine will be shown to us. Our imaginations will need to put forth no effort. We will not need to paint any clouds ourselves, or imagine any blue in some inward sky.

At the end of the day, in what may or may not be a kind of twilight for live theatre, does our choice of replacements tend to make us a bit lazy? Do we become more hesitant in our engagement, more likely to allow our imaginations to languish unused in some locked tower of our increasingly less agile minds? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps our imaginations will be spurred in other, equally challenging ways. Perhaps live theatre’s demise would initiate a cure for death, which we might have discovered sooner had we not been so distracted by those actors on the stage.

One is reminded of the theatre director who happened to be directing a Shakespearean play. Asked by an interviewer if the director were “doing [the play] in the original language”, the theatre director answered gently about ‘translating’ Shakespeare for modern audiences. The interviewer had been kind to invite the director on the show, and the director was grateful. Stil, when asked about the original language of Shakespeare’s plays, it is difficult not to ask, “Do you mean English?”

In letting outmoded methods of entertainment go, perhaps we lose little. We rush forward into our new and changing world, adapting ourselves to varied ever more hypnotic possibilities. Still, it may be, in fact it probably is, that we lose more than we realise, consciously or unconsciously.

Not that losing some part of our collective heritage matters. It is a western European heritage, after all, and the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Celts, the Anglo Saxons, Normans, the Picts and Scots, have all melted into the present. Similarly, other sages and shamans of the ancient world, both East and West have vanished, leaving only bits of their cultural understanding behind them. These bits remain as writings, yes, but are also threaded through our language and our understanding, with our cultures often seeming like struggling patchworks of the past. Sometimes our collective accretively conglomerated masses struggle so much that we can barely even allow our planet keep going without wrecking it. New voices, from previously long neglected cultural milieus must now step up and contribute to our experience and our understanding. If we wish to survive, we will need to listen to all the voices in order to do it.

Make no mistake. Our inattention can be immeasurably destructive. In embracing the new, we must not ignore the old, just as we must not discard the new in misguided support of only extant forms. If Kristof Koch’s concept of human consciousness is correct, all the voices may be threaded through our human experience in ways that we’ve only just begun to trace.******

Of course, this writer remains aware of just how much this blog ‘preaches to the choir’ as it were. Still, I urge anyone who may have just stumbled across this writing to actively support the arts. Go and see some live theatre. See something contemporary. See a musical. Just go see something. Then go see something by Shakespeare too. If you’re not used to the language, be patient and let yourself sit and listen. Absorb it without forcing it. The meaning may come to you if you let it. If it does not, if the experience is too tiresome, then try a different form of theatre the next time around. Or a concert. Or a two dimensional art exhibition.

Shakespeare may not be for everyone, but most peole enjoy live theatre. Naturally, artistic expression changes. Forms change. But our new forms are not grounded in nothing. They do not spring to us out of the air, but are derived from our history and our cultural milieu. Is there a place for Shakespeare in a rapidly changing world? The better question might be what kind of a world we might have with no Shakespeare, or no live theatre in it? If that form is derived from language, writing, words, and actions, or from our physical, emotional, and intellectual expressions of ourselves, then, at the end of the day, perhaps what we risk losing by losing Shakespeare or live theatre altogether is us.

*Watkins, Jack. “Interview: Greta Scacchi.” Country Life, June 22, 2016. Subsequent quotations are from the same interview.

**Fiorentini, Anna. “Acting in the UK vs US.” London Drama Schools, April 24, 2017. https://www.annafiorentini.com/news/blog/2017/04/24/acting-in-the-uk-vs-us.

***Hanly, Nouska. “UK vs US: how is drama training different?” The Stage, August 19, 2016. https://www.thestage.co.uk/features/2016/uk-vs-us-drama-training-different/

****Fo, Dario. The Tricks of the Trade. Joe Farrell, trans. London: Methuen, 2006.

*****Peter Brook: the Tightrope. Brook Productions, Cinemaundici, ARTE France, 2014. Available for rental online, and recommended especially for actors, and also for anyone who might be interested in the acting process.

******Koch, Kristof. The Feeling of Life Itself: Why consciousness is widespread but can’t be computed. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019.

With the tree in the centre of the frame, the vision might be both contemplative and also a little confrontory. The camera draws us into the picture, towards the tree, but the tree also appears to lean towards us, perhaps with the branches outstretched for an impending embrace. The misty silver tones and the light background lend an aura of mystery. We don’t know what the tree, or any of the trees around it, might be thinking. We don’t know what might lie just beyond the hedgerows, possibly picking its long, sharp teeth while recumbent in the grass.

At the edges of human habitation, groomed fields give way to the encroachment of tussled margins, and signs of human activity lessen. The forest is different from human dwelling places, and it has long been used as a kind of archetype of wilderness. Woods filter daylight often leaving those who venture within immersed in strange shadows. The forest may hold anything, death or triumph, and sometimes it holds a strange mix of both, which is why we find it so compelling. Sara Maitland reminds us that “forests, like fairy stories, need to be chaotic — beautiful and savage, useful and wasteful, dangerous and free.”** The boundary between civilisation and the wild is notoriously inexact, and perhaps Thoreau was correct:

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is in the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigour of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess of Concord, i.e. than I import into it.

Henry David Thoreau, Journal ***

In one sense, we carry a mythical landscape ever along with us and this secretive, unknown landscape may hint not only of death, but also of something beyond it. Simon Schama cites “David Friedrich’s explicit association between the evergreen fir and the architecture of resurrection”, noting that the painting speaks “to the heart of one of our most powerful yearnings: the craving to find in nature a consolation for our mortality.”****

Friedrich’s image is marked by the feeling of ascension, with cathedral, cross, and fir trees unified in indicating an apparently singular heaven above. In contrast, Brown’s photographic image asks more questions, suggesting a multitude of vectors with different weights and directions. Friedrich imposes the idea of Christian faith on nature, while Brown seems to take nature itself more at face value, allowing the natural light and tone to enhance the scene’s mysterious atmosphere.

In the painting, the human idea of cosmic order projects its centrality. The photographic image, in spite of being deliberately rendered in black and white, offers a less human-centric perspective, lending an almost equal weight to the tree as it appears to regard the viewer. If the painted image makes a human idea of universal order its centre, the photgraph appears to regard the human from another place, from the consciousness of the tree or of nature itself. While the painting urges our attention upward, the universe, or perhaps Nietzsche’s void, informed by an infinite generative natural potential, seems to regard us quietly from the photograph.

In Shakespeare’s plays, the mythical geographies are multitudinous. Timon’s cave, Ninus’ tomb, Juliet’s crypt, Ophelia’s grave, are all places of death, reflecting movement away from human life and towards some conception of eternity, even if that eternity remains simply being at rest in a “fine and private place”.***** In As You Like It, The Tempest, Hamlet, and other plays, geographical perspectives may shift. The usurped court, under a veneer of order, becomes a place where order is merely painted over the emotional and spiritual upheaval that lie beneath them. Usurpers like Frederick, Antonio, and Claudius constantly struggle to hold onto their power and authority against a kind of ever present moral threat from those from whom the rightful place has been withheld. In As You Like It, the Forest of Arden not only replaces the court, but also supplants its potentially benevolent authority. In The Tempest, the Dukedom’s authority is transported, albeit perhaps somewhat awkwardly (if we think of Caliban and Ariel’s subjection) to the desert island, where issues of authority and continuance are ultimately resolved. In Hamlet, not only is prince Hamlet’s political authority usurped by his uncle, but also his place within his own family, and even his affections for Ophelia fall prey to micro managed engineering attempts.

Yet, these literal, political, and psychological geographies only scratch the surface., because the empty air marking the absence at Cleopatra’s passing, and the crossgartered containment of Malvolio’s uncharacteristically riotous and lusty stockings are geographies as well, albeit more abstract ones, defining absence or suppression in the wake of human desire. Oberon proclaims his grove as haunted while simultaneously haunting it himself, his night-rule becoming a reciprocal wilderness of mutual participation. Even “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” is a kind of landscape, where the speaker is left “all alone” to “beweep my outcast state”******

It seems that there may be a little more to this than merely what we carry. Perhaps the boundaries between ourselves and our mythologies lie between our individual and our collective experiences. In the realms of mythical landscape, potential differences between what we carry and what might already be there, must become part of the definition, a hazy demarcation of the demarcation itself. For although black bears inhabited, and still may be found, in Massachusettes, the grizzly bears of Wyoming remain terrifyingly different. Wyoming grizzlies can tear open a cabin or a car as though they had been made of foil, but these more ferocious bears are no longer to be found in Thoreau’s wilderness recesses of Concord.

Landscapes may also differ by experience. So, they may be different for different people or characters, depending on what we might bring with us. In The Tempest, Prospero’s island is not the same as Caliban’s, neither is Antonio’s the same as Ferdinand or Miranda’s. In popular media often used for example in these blog posts, Harry Potter’s forbidden forest is not identical ro his friend, Ron Weasley’s:

Thoreau and so many others are right. We carry our own mythogy with us, configuring the interface so that any landscape we encounter becomes our own. Myth and landscape constantly participate fundamentally in our ongoing stories, which weave all of our experiential elements together into mythical tapestries that define the landscapes of our lives:

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried.*******

Story is where it all comes together. This story, that story. Your story and mine.

In the end, there is so much more to say and more to research about story, landscape, and myth, that it cannot be said here today. One door merely opens onto the next hallway. Instead, we must bow to the limitations of a blog post where there simply is neither space nor time to develop things as we might do. Yet, someday, perhaps I shall write this book as well. Or one of them. In the meantime, please think of these posts as glimpses into different landscapes, variant aspects of mythologies, and alternate perspectives on functions within the philosophiæ naturalis of Shakespeare, literature, art, and life. Please have a good week.

*As always, more of Karin Brown’s moving and thought provoking tree, landscape, and light images may be found on her website:  https://brownkcd.wixsite.com/imbolc , and also (as previously stated) on Instagram @imbolcphotographic.

**Maitland, Sara. Gossip from the Forest the Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairytales. London: Granta Publ., 2012, p. 10. Sara Maitland has a profound knowledge of the wilderness, having lived in the wilderness of the ancient Scottish forest of Glen Affric, and currently living a solitary life on a moor in Galloway.

***Thoreau, Henry David, and Damion Searls. The Journals of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861. Edited by John Stilgoe. New York: New York Review, 2009.

****Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Vintage Books, 1996, p. 15. A great book, by the way.

*****From Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”, which may be read here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44688/to-his-coy-mistress

******William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
       For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

*******O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. NY: Mariner Books, 2009, p. 34.