Ghost of Shakespeare

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the strange hobgoblin, Robin Goodfellow, seems to embody an ancient remnant of the old fairy faith of the British Isles. Also known as ‘Puck’, the character is often refered to in the script as ‘Robin Goodfellow’, perhaps for the same reason that fairies as a whole were often called ‘the good neighbours’ by those folk who believed in them most strongly. One never wanted to refer to them directly, for fear of drawing their attentions, and one never wished to insult them, even inadvertently, because they were as often magically powerful as they were tempramentally capricious.

Various ideas survive about the good neighbours themselves, and there is some imprecision about their relative immortality, although Shakespeare’s fairies in Dream distinguish themselves most readily from the ranks of other characters in the play, all of whom are ‘mortal’. Puck’s darker perspective on the matter of mortality has been touched on in this blog previously, but this close to Halloween, it might be worth remembering Robin’s unusual monologue:

ROBIN
Now the hungry lion roars 
And the wolf behowls the moon, 
Whilst the heavy ploughman snores, 
All with weary task fordone. 
Now the wasted brands do glow, 
Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud, 
Puts the wretch that lies in woe 
In remembrance of a shroud. 
Now it is the time of night 
That the graves all gaping wide, 
Every one lets forth his sprite, 
In the churchway paths to glide.
And we fairies, that do run
By the triple Hecate’s team
From the presence of the sun,
Following darkness like a dream,
Now are frolic. Not a mouse
Shall disturb this hallowed house.
I am sent with broom before
To sweep the dust behind the door.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.388-407

This monologue speaks to much of human fading, and academic opinions vary about Puck’s sweeping, and there is a well known academic article that speaks to the incongruousness, or not, of Puck’s apparent domesticity.* Yet, when we look at the sweeping through the lens of the speech itself, it may be that what is swept is as interesting, or even more interesting than the activity of sweeping it. Dust. Following the tenor of Puck’s words, dust suggests the earthly remnant of the dead themselves. It is the substance that they (we) eventually become.

Maybe what everything becomes. Dried, pressed, flowers certainly, the memories of affection, but also cars and edifices, and all the testaments of human influence on the world. Certainly the Bible contains enough mention of it, starting with the curse on Adam as he and Eve are expelled from Paradise:

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

Genesis 3:19

Is Puck removing the specter, the reminder, of death from a doorway to a house about to host a wedding? In the annals of human ritual, weddings seem to look especially to the future, to the idea of promise and increase, marking the establishment of new households, speaking of union and generative potential. It may be that Puck’s sweeping marks not just a ritual purification, but a ritual safeguard, something done to temporarily banish death’s presence at a wedding celebration which is itself an affirmation of ongoing life in spite of death elsewhere and elsewhen.

We seek to assuage death at such times, to soften the awareness of perpetual decay.

Still, it seems that people romanticise it. Becoming a ghost. There’s something about old haunted places that appeals to some less lighted corner of the psyche. Children are often entranced by ghost stories. They may be one of the only things about my childhood that I really remember.

Like most processes, becoming a ghost, being a ghost, is probably much less like what people think it might be like. Winding sheets and moonlight, curtains blowing across darkened hallways. Strange lights moving in the night.

That’s what Puck seems to conjure.

Funny thing, remberance. What would ghosts remember? Would recall be like sleeping? Awareness in tatters. Fragments of knowing, doing, being. Flotsam and jetsam turned in. . . In what? Some kind of tide we cannot name.

Not that ghosts probably get out much either. Not like in the tales. Not rising and wandering at night, no gathering at fervid crossroads or flung like autumn leaves through restless air beneath the moon. More like dust and long silence. Night and silence, if you will, except that night isn’t really part of it. Neither is day, to be fair. For these delineations fade as well, and vagueness sits in the throne of all attention and remembrance.

Not like dozing. More like awareness plotted as points on graph, and not as though one remembers in betweens. At least I shouldn’t think so. There might be tea, for example, but there might also be long queues and one might never quite remember how one came to be there. Just waiting. Then sipping. Sometimes, there might be others at a table. Sometimes someone might speak. Sometimes not.

Each awareness brings a new sense that perhaps some long time has passed. Years or even centuries unremembered, tumbled into an unseen abyss of time. Not like living days, or weeks, or years, but more like periodically and momentarily observing them as they move past. No sharpness, no peculiar definition to experience, which becomes more like a waking kind of sleep.

Recollection of being adored once too. Or perhaps adoring someone else. If that’s even how that works. Recall that there was this ‘feeling’ that seemed big, huge even. Like a giant troll beneath a mountain, blocking the way so that we must find other ways to go.

Would one remember fragrance? Orchids? Roses? Would we recall our mother’s roses? Great banks of them spilling over fences and walls at some place that I think we might have been? Would we recall the lilacs that our father planted when we were small?

Perhaps memory becomes a watercolour, spilled across the tumbled stems of wonder. And fragrance like something sweet and lost, marvelous and aching, just out of reach and our expression. Talk of planting this or that near or upon a grave. Rosemary for rememberance. Roses for sweetness. Tenderness and growth as a living placeholder for what lives no more.

Fading from the world can be easy even when we are alive. Lose family, love, health, or a career track. We remember what they might have said, what we might have done, left isolated in some place where we feel we don’t belong. Cut off from friends, colleagues, cherished surroundings, feelings of home. Lose life’s anchors and the meaning may quickly slip away. This can prompt a glance, a gaze, a looking towards the dead. Sometimes a yearning for anticipated peace.

But what do the dead remember? What do they recall? If anything, is it merely a gradual breaking down of memory? Is it like life in that even faces may fade, as fires burn low? Do the layers of existence gradually erode down to a scent of dust. Hair, skin, the human texture and fragrance, all gone like last year’s roses?

As for walking in the night, one wonders how the dead would walk, or would they merely glide? It would seem that the dead would have no need to go anywhere. Coffin or jar, dust or ashes, it hardly matters. No need to stretch long irrelevant legs or stride forth against shadowed parts of days. Owls might call the dead, but might the dead not hear them as readily as we do from our living rooms? No. It would seem unlikely that the dead might be summoned forth by story devices like fairies or witches. Unlikely to be called from any vasty deep. Merely at rest forever.

Is that what being a ghost might be? Fragments of recorded lives. Memory flowers dried in absent time.

We all know stories of the ghosts who have unfinished business. Vengeful spectres rising from the mists of their wrongs, facing those who wronged them. Murdered subjects of despotic rulers. The murdered wife’s skull screaming at a certain hour every night. Footsteps on the staircase at 8 o’clock, treading to the thirteenth stair. Brown Lady of Raynam Hall, perhaps actually Lady Dorothy Walpole, kept from her children after an alleged adultery. Her phantom was supposedly captured by photographers for Country Life in one of the most celebrated ghost photographs of all time:

Yet, for the most part, we usually hope for some sort of remembrance. Even strive for it. That we will remember the dead, that they will know that we remember them, and that they might remember us somehow. Perhaps not as individuals. Maybe as beautiful points of light. Some of them brighter or with colours, but all brilliant, which might be a better remembrance in any case.

Do the dead really await anything? Or are they simply dead, perhaps in some restful sense that may be difficult for us, from here, to understand? Near us? Far from us? Perhaps not nearly so sad.

Still, I can’t help but hope that someone might plant roses on my grave. Or perhaps peonies, which my mother loved. White. The kind that grow into huge and rambling tumbles. Not for me. For those who might come after. Even if they only pause a moment to admire.

For me, I expect little and I hope for less, albeit I do hope that there might be tea.

*Wall, Wendy. “Why Does Puck Sweep?: Fairylore, Merry Wives, and Social Struggle.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no. 1 (spring 2001): 67-106.

The photograph might serve as a metaphorical image for the striation on the human soul, with stains of light and dark, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ decisions, which may accumulate over a lifetime of human experience. Either light or darkness may eventually come to dominate the image, depending on the life. The image suggests Christian duality, an idea that we have a nature where ‘good and evil’ are locked in an eternal struggle for dominance over our eternal souls.

Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay. And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine. **

What shocks Jekyll is the immediate recognition of himself even when he is Hyde, and how singularly alive and expressive he seems when unimpeded by the muddying influence of his ‘better’ moral half. The welcome is not just for a half of himself that he has known but never really seen, but also for the singular self, the natively free being that emerges from the depths of his previously divided being.

The internal struggle may take many forms. Freud’s ego, for example, seeks to balance the moral super-ego with the id, tempering that latter’s eternal search for immediate gratification. Jung’s persona presents a complex interweaving of various unconscious influences (the Apollonian reason sometimes in conflict with the Dionysian call for sensory experience) that may variously affect the psychological and spiritual search for individuation.

When externalised, these dualised influences or archetypes provide much of the basis of western art or entertainment. Here’s a clip that I’ve featured previously, illustrating how deeply the good – evil duality concept is imbedded in popular mythic consciousness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZSXlNRRoGU

In the current, popular television series above, good and evil unite against a common threat. Yet, the very idea of the duality of human nature dates to antiquity. The the werewolf in European folklore stretches back to the Roman Empire (mentioned by Petronius, c. 27-66, in the Satyricon) but is probably much older than that.*** In his Histories, Herdotous, c. 484-425 b.c.e., describes various peoples, among whom are the Neuroi and Androphagoi, both of whom present some lycanthropic characteristics:

105. The Neuroi practise the Scythian customs: and one generation before the expedition of Dareios it so befell them that they were forced to quit their land altogether by reason of serpents: for their land produced serpents in vast numbers, and they fell upon them in still larger numbers from the desert country above their borders; until at last being hard pressed they left their own land and settled among the Budinoi. These men it would seem are wizards; for it is said of them by the Scythians and by the Hellenes who are settled in the Scythian land that once in every year each of the Neuroi becomes a wolf for a few days and then returns again to his original form. For my part I do not believe them when they say this, but they say it nevertheless, and swear it moreover.
106. The Androphagoi have the most savage manners of all human beings, and they neither acknowledge any rule of right nor observe any customary law. They are nomads and wear clothing like that of the Scythians, but have a language of their own; and alone of all these nations they are man-eaters.

Herodotus. The History of Herodotus. [online] Gutenberg.org, 4.105-6.****

The trouble with werewolves is that the savage segment of the human animal emerges episodically with free rein over individual actions, with the release of base and beastly impulses uniformly resulting in the worst kinds of predatory, murderous actions.

Eventually, at least in stories, the superabundance of one aspect of human nature over another seems to result in spiritual exhaustion. Even the werewolves become weary of their endless hunting. Boredom overtakes existence, dominating everything.

After arranging to have his best friend, Banquo, murdered, Banquo’s accusatory ghost appears at his erstwhile friends’ banquet. The vision further unhinges Macbeth who says:

For mine own good,
All causes shall give way. I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

Macbeth 3.4.167-70

The above lines mark the acceleration of a fading process. Like Ahab’s casting away his pipe, or navigational instruments in Moby Dick, Macbeth’s focus increasingly becomes the blood, a word he subsequently dwells on throughout the play. Along with his disappearance from himself, with his vision of his own Hyde in the mirror of his self, his exhaustion compounds as well. At the approach of his final battle, Macbeth almost seems to hope for some revitalisation, even as he realises that any hope remains unrealistic:

This push
Will cheer me ever or disseat me now.
I have lived long enough. My way of life
Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf,
And that which should accompany old age,
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have, but in their stead
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honor, breath
Which the poor heart would fain deny and dare
not.

Macbeth 5.3.24-33

Life’s colour, cadences, textures, richness, and variety, eludes Macbeth at this point. His entire life has withered, and his ‘leafy screen’ has faded to sickly yellow. No fullness of approaching posterity awaits him. Not only is his sceptre barren, but so is his spirit. At the news that Lady Macbeth has died, Macbeth utters another extraordinary soliloquy:

She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth 5.5.20-31

With his wife’s death, Macbeth’s last earthly foundation, his anchor, and his pillar have gone. Aside from its nihilistic perspective, this frequently cited passage is also famous for its metaphor of life as theatre, a comparison that Shakespeare makes pointedly in many other works as well.***** This echoes that Jungian idea of the persona, the mask that we consistently present to the world which can be constructed of so many elements.

Yet, Macbeth’s progressing dissipation is marked by a falling away of everything on which his being stands. Negation finally consumes him to the point where his greatest desire is to deny existence itself:

I ’gin to be aweary of the sun
And wish th’ estate o’ th’ world were now
undone.

Macbeth 5.5.55-7

Nothing is left to him except waiting oblivion. In gaining the crown, he has thrown away everything else, lost everything that once seemed to give meaning to his life. Yet, in terms of playacting, is that all life is? A brief gavotte over the stage on the way to whatever lies behind the curtain? Well, it certainly seems brief enough. It sometimes seems as though we come and go through Jaques’ “exits” and “entrances”, and sometimes we seem to do little else.******

Macbeth’s lines suggest a kind of dissolution of the soul, as it is ripped into tatters by an individual’s own choices and actions. The resultant ennui becomes so complete that it obliterates the individual. The anti human eventually erases itself. Curses replace any collective memory of Macbeth. Not only his reign, but his very existence realises only a negative of any former potential that it might have had. Hyde’s “livelier image of the spirit” has burned so hotly that it has finally burnt itself out, leaving only the cinder of curses as an aftermath.

Perhaps this result is inevitable. By giving in to baser instinct or desire, allowing evil unrestricted freedom does not tend to produce good results. Werewolf stories never end well.

This may often be true in real life as well, but not always. Too often Mr. Hyde remains hidden at the margins of our own society and its institutions. At the time of preparing this post, (following on the heels of my having directed a production of Macbeth), the particular resonance of the werewolf with certain figures in the public eye becomes inescapable. This past week, the death of a prominent academic has again raised the terrible issue, not only personal, but also of institutional abuse.

The horror of the real werewolves among us reminds us how vigilant we must all remain, and how ready we must be to fight, to denounce, to struggle against not only individual predators, but also the institutions and fields that may, whether intentionally or not, mask them and allow them to hide. To look aside, or to be otherwise complicit, poses a greater risk than the considerable damage it may perpetuate socially and institutionally. It jeapordises one’s own soul, however one might equivocate to try and justify it. Whether in the highest political or judicial offices, or in some other capacity, it remains our duty, as intellectuals, as citizens, as fellow human beings, to look monsters in the eye and slay them by whatever means.

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

**Stevenson, Robert Louis. “The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde.” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43/43-h/43-h.htm.

***A translation of Petronius’ werewolf story may be read here: https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2015/10/26/five-days-until-halloween-a-roman-werewolf-from-petronius/

****May be read online at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2707/2707-h/2707-h.htm#link42H_4_0001

*****The Tempest, As You Like It, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream all have familiar examples.

******Jaques’ ‘seven ages of man’ speech may be found in As You Like It 2.7.145-173. The mention of ‘exits’ and ‘entrances’ is around line 148 depending on your edition.

When Bottom awakens alone in the woods after his liaison with the Fairy Queen, initially his words and senses seem confused:

The eye of
man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen,
man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to
conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream
was.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 4.1.220-4

In reality, however, this synesthesia may also be read as a prophetic trait, as the indicator of an understanding that transcends mortal human senses. Having glimpsed another reality, having been intimate with a magical and immortal world, it is not Bottom’s senses that fail him, but his language. Because his experience can neither be confined within the limitations of a few mortal senses, nor sufficiently encompassed by the range of human linguistic expression, Bottom lacks the ability to describe the vastness of his encounter in simple words.

Yet, prophetic vision isn’t always confined to the marvelous or the mystical. It may also include curses, as in Shakespeare’s Richard III, when the Duchess of York pronounces the imprecation in the title on her son. The curse presages Richard’s downfall but its dire tone also suggests a potential desolation at his end. Because Richard III, like Macbeth, is a ruler who ‘makes his own bed’, so to speak, his increasingly tyrannical behaviour in advancing his own rise to power leaves him without any meaningful support as his reign draws to a close. Not only the mortal world abandons him, but the spirit world does so as well. By the time the ghosts of Richard’s previous victims denounce him in a dream before the Battle of Bosworth Field, he realises that he has isolated himself so thoroughly that he has become trapped on the island of his own infamy. Awakening, Richard notes “I shall despair. There is no creature loves me,/ And if I die no soul will pity me” (Richard III 5.3.212-3).

Naturally, prognostication was an old idea even in Shakespeare’s day. Any number of his plays feature instances of dreams, forecasts, omens, portents, and spirits that variously impart some vision of the future to the mortal world. Of course, accurate as these predictions may be in the theatre, such ideas fall into the realm of superstition, which common knowledge dictates isn’t to be trusted. After all, even a prophecy that comes true might ultimately lead on to disaster. As Banquo tells Macbeth, who has been newly made Thane of Cawdor as the witches had predicted:

. . . oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s
In deepest consequence.

Macbeth 1.3.135-8

Apparently caution is always the order of the day. Here’s Stevie Ray Vaughn’s cover of Stevie Wonder’s hit song on the subject of superstition (which particular video, I admit, I include for sentimental reasons, which some of you who watch it carefully may recognise):

The Bible contains a specific injunction against fortune telling:

¹⁰ There shall not be found among you [any one] that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, [or] that useth divination, [or] an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch,
¹¹ Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.
¹² For all that do these things [are] an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.
¹³ Thou shalt be perfect with the LORD thy God.

The Bible (KJV) Deuteronomy 18:10-18:13

Yet, in spite of the scriptural directive against it, fortune telling remains ever popular. People want to know what the future might have in store for them. Leave alone all the suggestions from the world of psychological evaluation that prophecies so given may become self fulfilling, people always seem to want to know what the future holds, albeit they seldom want anything in the form of a curse.

In Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the magician Merlin constructed a ‘glass’ that was capable of revealing things to those who looked upon it.

The great magitien Merlin had deviz’d,
By his deepe science and hell-dreaded might,
A looking glasse, right wondrously aguiz’d
Whose vertues through the wyde worlde soone were solemniz’d.

The Faerie Queene III.ii.xviii.159-62**

The glass is capable of not only showing the entire world and all that’s in it, but it also reveals Britomart’s future love to her. The glass not only shows what is, and even what has been, but also what will (or perhaps what is most likely to) be.

In cases like in the Duchess of York’s pronouncement above, words also retain a creative or destructive potential, giving the author, or the speaker, the ability to shape the future world. This suggests an important notion about perception and even understanding–the perception of what literary thinking specialist, Philip Davis, describes as the opening that Shakespeare and other writers leave between things–between tones, ideas, or juxtaposed thoughts or words–to enable and promote a kind of creative leap between them.*** Such spaces offer an interpretive gap that call for a creative fulfillment, which is supplied by the reader, performer, or interpreter of the work.

These gaps may be simple juxtapositions of ideas that seem to be initially disparate. On his entrance, Macbeth speaks to his friend, Banquo, saying, “So fair and foul a day I have not seen.” (Macbeth 1.3.39) Initially, a critic might say that it is fair and foul for any number of reasons: fair because Macbeth and Banquo have won the day in battle and escaped with their lives, and foul because soldiers have been lost in the fighting, because there was a rebellion against King Duncan at all, and because the weather is foggy and suspect. However, the fair and foul also prefigures the coming pronouncement of the witches, that Macbeth will be Thane of Cawdor, and later king, and that Banquo will be father to a line of kings, albeit he will not be king himself. The possibility of coming honours seems auspicious, except that the witches do not reveal that Macbeth will murder his king to take the throne, in an infamous instance of fair ends achieved by foul means. The day is fair and foul for both Banquo and Macbeth because it simultaneously presages both their successes and their losses.

Yet, these gaps may be much more subtle. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairy king, Oberon, and his lieutenant, Puck, roam the woods both causing and attempting to right troubles resulting from romantic attraction. The juice of a magical flower has been dropped on the eyes of a number of sleeping characters, resulting in their doting on the next thing they see. Still, even more interesting than the comic love story, is the difference between servant and master. Oberon’s language is replete with beautiful conjurations of the natural world:

OBERON
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet muskroses, and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.
And there the snake throws her enameled skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.
And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes
And make her full of hateful fantasies.
Take thou some of it, and seek through this grove.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.256-67

When we contrast this with Puck’s language, we find that although the goblin’s words may also be beautiful, his focus differs greatly:

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

AMND 3.2.399-409

Not every passage is this way, of course, but throughout the play, while Oberon’s perspective retains a quality that is richly evocative of the growing world, Puck seems to envision a world of threatening beasts, graves, corpses, and wandering ghosts.

Although it remains only indirectly expressed, the midpoint between Oberon’s evocations of life force and Puck’s haunted cemeteries seems to be the mortal world–personified by the Indian boy, the child over whose custody Oberon and Titania quarrel. The child may represent not just humanity, suspended unseen somewhere between nature and the grave, but also humanity’s future, an unknown quantity, looking forward to a more distant maturity.

There are many examples of this in Shakespeare, which suggests a kind of literary pointilisme, a written aspect of chromoluminarism of divisionism like that found in the paintings of the impressionist painter, Georges Seurat. Seurat’s landscapes were remarkable not only for their impressionist use of colour and light, but also for the technique of keeping pigments distinct upon the canvas. Instead of mixing the colours, the points of individual pigments compel the viewer to combine the colours optically, rendering a canvas of individual coloured points into a credible landscape.

Here is the same image with a closer focus on the hem of the lady’s skirt (the one with the red parasol, who is walking with the little girl), where you can see the dots of pigment that Seurat used to create the image:

As Shakespeare does in his drama and poetry, Seurat does not blend his colours, but instead leaves them distinct, promoting the creative engagement of the viewer’s mind, which bridges the gaps between the points to render the landscape as a whole.

In this case, the eye, or mind, of the beholder crafts the picture, participating in the creation in the same way that Shakespeare’s plays encourage a kind of creative participation from the reader or, even moreso, from the audience. Because the framed elements demand our participation to reach a sense of completion, creativity becomes mutual. These paintings and plays are not imposed upon a passive viewer, but more accurately are elicited from them, making the viewer or the audience an integral part of the creative act. While all art may arguably do this to a greater or lesser degree, the viewer’s creative response seems to be more specifically engineered into such works that deliberately provide the kind of creative interpretive space offered by those of Shakespeare and Seurat.

In a similar fashion, a scrying glass or stone, whether Merlin’s magic mirror, a piece of obsidian or other shiny surface, like the crystal crystal ball pictured above, usually presents a combination of depth and reflection to the gaze. Somewhere between the viewer’s attention, the viewer’s subconscious mind, images perceived in the reflective surface, and the collective nature of ‘reality’, creative connections may be made that allow the gazer to see things that are remote in time and space. The trick to actually seeing anything supposedly lies between the actual viewing and the viewer’s receptive state–which creates a kind of empty space that may ‘pick up’ ideas or events, whether or not these have actually yet manifested. Thus, various kinds of ‘between-ness’ seem to accompany the creative artistic act, offering different potential visions of the past, present, and the future.

The mythological soothsayer, Tiresias, who (among other things) tells Oedipus that he will murder his father and marry his mother, gives us an example of embodied dualities. Blind, but with a ‘second sight’ that enabled him to ‘see’ and predict the future, his vision was arguably greater than that of his sighted companions. His experience was broader as well. Legend has it that the goddess, Hera, transformed him into a woman because he once struck two copulating snakes with his staff. Remaining a woman for seven years, Tiresias became a priestess of Hera, and married and bore children. After seven years, Tiresias resumed his masculinity, but he retained a broader perspective because he had lived life from two different points on the gender spectrum.

Of course, in a more general sense, poetry (and drama) are inextricably linked to both magic and prophecy, with verse itself retaining properties of both conjuration and prophetic pronouncement. Language is power in many senses. Heimskringla: The Lives of the Norse Kings, by Icelandic poet and statesman, Snorri (Snorre) Sturlason, readily demonstrates that Norse ruling authority was inextricably linked to poetry, with each jarl (king) having a scald (poet) dedicated to preserving his deeds, and many jarls being accomplished scalds themselves.****

The Carmina Gadelica, collected from the Gaelic speaking parts of Scotland between 1860 and 1909, by folklorist, Alexander Carmichael (who worked as an exciseman), reveals a society preoccupied with magical charms, many of which also serve as prayers or hymns.***** The work is seen as a reflection of the widespread unrest in more remote parts of Scotland, especially in the Highlands at the time, but it also indicates an underlying belief in literary pronouncements that might influence the human future. Of course, ‘modern’ forms of religious observance also use language, scriptural passages, prayers, and/or hymns, as a form of incantation, as the basis for conjuring a variety of outcomes ranging from goodwill to spiritual communion.

The Dream of the Rood (dream of the tree/cross), possibly one of the oldest surviving works of English literature, is presented as a vision:

As a ‘dream’ of Christ’s crucifiction and subsequent entry into heaven, the poem offers the possibility of transcending what seems to be a dark world, vaguely fraught with peril. While not exactly a scrying crystal, the poem does present the vision of a better kind of future, an affirmation of spiritual ascendance that has served as the basis for one of the largest religions in the world.

Yet, other poems may be seen as incantations too, as spells in a sense. Here is one, a ward against death, an ode to, and a vision of a kind of immortality:

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

William Shakespeare, sonnet 18

Here is Dame Harriet Walter reading Shakespeare’s sonnet 18:

Lest it should be thought that this link between poetry and magic has been forgotten or abandoned, or even overshadowed by more contemporary concerns, here is a more recent poem that remains conscious of its roots, also serving as a kind of magical invocation:

INCANTATION

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.

Incantation by  Czeslaw Milosz*******

Perhaps using words as conjuration has fallen out of fashion. Or, perhaps it is now widely thought too late, our compounding of dire, dystopian futures having brought us where we are–tottering on the brink of our own end, our planet nearly engulfed in flames. I honestly don’t think so, though. Not just yet. Our end need not be like that predicted for (and met by) Richard III in the play. We may still use our words as judiciously as our resources in an effort to craft something else. We need to conjure new worlds for ourselves instead of lashing out with words of destruction, bludgeoning and bullying in public forums as world leaders are often wont to do?

We can envision the greater good, after all. And if we can see it, certainly we can find ways to realise it too. Someone once said that it is a terrible cliché to say that the real answer to most questions lies in love. Perhaps. But like most clichés, this one is also true. We can see healing, creation, grace, and we can see a world where all these work in concert. If writers write it, and if leaders read and pay attention to it, perhaps those incantations will begin to change the world for all of us. Or maybe we don’t need any current leader. Maybe we can lead our thoughts, ourselves, our world collectively now. Not that incantations alone will be enough, of course. But at least they will be a sound beginning.

Let us think not only of ourselves but also of each other, and starting with our words, our writing and our speech, begin to weave more promising tomorrows. What kindness can we offer to the next person we encounter? The next person who reads our work? How might we help them to success? Let us offer that now.

Thank you all, always, for reading. I wish you the very best of days, of weeks, of lives. I wish you good company, dappled time brimming with hilltops and clear running streams, green trees, and rich autumn fields. I wish you smiles and understanding, and all the wondrous things you may know, that await you just around the corner of those long golden afternoons that you remember. May you abide there, in joy, peace, and plenty.

*Often cited as one of the best guitar players of all time, Stevie Ray Vaughan won six Grammy Awards, and was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame and the Musicians Hall of Fame. He was widely associated with the 1980s resurgence of the blues. He died in a helicopter crash in 1990.

**Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Qveene. Edited by A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki. Oxon, England: Routledge, 2013. Note that although this is the standard scholarly edition (and it is excellent), the Penguin paperback offers a more affordable solid alternative.

***This blog has featured some of his work previously, but interested readers are encouraged to consult Philip Davis’ works on Shakespeare. Sudden Shakespeare is a good start:
Davis, Philip. Sudden Shakespeare: the Shaping of Shakespeare’s Creative Thought. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003.

****Snorri Sturlason (1179 – 1241) was an Icelandic poet and historian who was twice elected lawspeaker of the Althing, the Icelandic Parliament. He based his Heimskringla on the lost history of ancient kings, Hryggjarstykki. Also worth consulting is Snorri Sturlason’s Prose Edda, which gives us a much clearer understanding of how old Norse literature worked:
Sturluson, Snorri. Heimskringla or the Lives of the Norse Kings. New York: Dover Publ., 1990.
Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda: Norse Mythology. Edited by Jesse L. Byock. London: Penguin Books, 2005.

*****Carmichael, Alexander. Charms of the Gaels: Hymns and Incantations: with Illustrative Notes on Words, Rites and Customs, Dying and Obsolete. Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1994.
A nice example of a sleep prayer may be read here:
https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/cg1/cg1038.htm

******A translation of the Dream of the Rood by Dr. Aaron K. Hostetter of Rutgers University may be read here: https://anglosaxonpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/dream-of-the-rood/

*******Milosz, Czeslaw. The Collected Poems 1933-1987. New York: Ecco Press, 1988.
Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) was a Polish poet who exiled to the United States after WWII, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. The poem was written in Berkeley, California in 1968, when Milosz was a professor there.

The autumnal equinox marks the official beginning of autumn in the northern hemisphere, when summer wanes as the seasons begin to tilt more noticeably towards the year’s eventual death. In many places, the grass will have transformed to golden straw, and insect sounds fade, even if the weather remains warm. Harvest approaches, wine makers ready for the crush, mills prepare for an influx of grain, and the lucky anticipate bounteous tables. The equinox itself is that moment in the year when the length of the night (the ‘nox’) stands most closely equal to the length of the day. It is the moment when the center of the sun passes over the earth’s equator.

Shakespeare uses the word ‘equinox’ only once, and not in an astronomical sense. In Othello, after prompting Cassio to drink (for which Cassio himself readily admits he has no head), Iago describes Cassio to Montano with characteristically subtle maliciousness:

IAGO
You see this fellow that is gone before,
He is a soldier fit to stand by Caesar
And give direction. And do but see his vice,
‘Tis to his virtue a just equinox,
The one as long as th’ other.

Othello 2.3.118-21

The idea of cosmic balance is an old one, a divine (or other sort) of measure that somehow determines weight or ‘heft’ of an individual’s or a community’s virtues and vices, rights and wrongs. The idea of possible divine reward or retribution for our actions and decisions seems to pursue us as relentlessly as time. Representations of Lady Justice (derived from the Greek goddess, Themis, the goddess of the law) reflect the idea of an impartial universal balance.

In the picture below, of a statue at the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong, Lady justice is blindfolded (as she often is, which suggests her impartiality), and she holds a balance with which to weigh issues, and a sword of power and just dispatch:

She need not always be blindfolded. Indeed, in many representations, she is not. At the United States Supreme Court, the blindfolded figure of Justice, with her blindfold and scales, is being held in contemplation by a larger figure–who presumably represents the judicial process in careful contemplation of justice itself:

Of course, Iago’s above quote is far from just. On the contrary, his characterisation of Cassio is deliberately engineered to mislead his listener. In this sense, Iago’s use of the word ‘equinox’ is perverse. Iago deceives Montano by implying that Cassio’s drinking (an activity that Cassio regularly avoids) is somehow equal in scope to Cassio’s loyalty, service, and sense of duty. Iago prevaricates, suggesting that the drinking is literally an ‘equal night’ to the daylike good behaviour for which Cassio is widely known.

Iago’s words raise Montano’s curiosity about Cassio’s drinking habits. “But is he often thus?” (2.3.124)

Iago’s lie comes almost effortlessly:

‘Tis evermore the prologue to his sleep:
He’ll watch the horologe a double set
If drink rock not his cradle.

2.3.125-7

But there is another, more subtle sharpness to Iago’s description. For a “soldier fit to stand by Caesar” might be Brutus or Cassius as well as it might be some more loyal soldier. Iago doesn’t say so directly, rarely stating things in direct terms. Still, a phantom of potential treachery haunts the remark, implying that Cassio may be as unreliable as others who had stood by Caesar before subsequently turning to assassinate him.

Yet, any measure of equality may be a tricky thing, seldom definable in an absolute. From a micro perspective, a measure of equal or unequal may also be framed in more challenging ways. In Macbeth, having murdered his king in order to take the throne, and having murdered his friend in an attempt to keep Banquo’s issue from succeeding, the play’s discussion of equality begins not with a day equal to a night, but with the night itself. More specifically, the question becomes one of the night’s progression, of how long until morning:

MACBETH
–What is the night?

LADY MACBETH 
Almost at odds with morning, which is which.

Macbeth 3.4.156-7

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth already inhabit a night of their own making. For them, and for those around them, day and night seem to have inverted, not only perceptually, but also morally and experientially. Sleep becomes impossible, not only because Duncan’s murder has set the kingdom’s underpinnings on unstable moral ground, but also because as night increasingly inhabits day, more ordinary activities (like sleep) become impossible. Murder has become a rule rather than an exception. It is not only Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s guilt that will not let them sleep, that keeps her sleepwalking in attempts to wash blood from her hands. It is this polarization, this reversal of the underlying moral order, the negative perspective that has been rendered on monarchy, on loyalty, and on the scope of friendship and kinship.

MACBETH 
Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep”—the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.

2.2.47-52

The most uneasy night has invaded and supplanted Macbeth’s day. Try as he might, once his own ‘light thickens’ he cannot return to the sun. “‘Twas a rough night” (2.3.70) becomes Macbeth’s sole reality, displacing all his other possibilities. As he tells us:

MACBETH 
Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessèd time; for from this instant
There’s nothing serious in mortality.
All is but toys. Renown and grace is dead.
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.

2.3.107-12

Any prospect of life as he knew or imagined it is gone. The darkness rising in Macbeth’s landscape becomes like the ‘rooky wood’, like the Birnam Wood that he perceives marching against him–the branches form a latticework of shadow inexorably surrounding him, truncating his life, and, as he describes it, chaining him to a stake like a doomed bear in a bear baiting arena.

Macbeth’s self imposed perpetual night has a curious balance in the impending rise and reassertion of a new moral order. However bloody Macbeth’s reign of terror becomes, there are always the forces rising to replace him. Even in the deepest part of night, Malcolm and his allies are a kind of moonlight shining between the trees, promising a sunrise to come. As an inversion of Macbeth, Macduff, whose family Macbeth has murdered, bears the righteous conviction of the wronged in place of Macbeth’s false faith in right asserted by his treacherous might.

This balance, Yin and Yang always rising in turn to occupy the place where the other stood just years, months, days, or moments ago, remains familiar. In Macbeth, the witches opening chant of “Fair is foul and foul is fair” (1.1.12) is realised almost literally, as fair and foul become each other. The hero becomes the murderer, becomes the sneering tyrant. Life’s waves roll on against the beach as days shorten, lengthen, and then shorten again. Individual time in the sun, or under the moon, is short.

We’ve seen all this time and time again in Shakespeare, in various forms, and it is hardly proprietary to his works. The world’s regard may be spurred by appearance, action, understanding, or some other attribute that lends reputation, but in the end, the high and low stand always in a proverbial balance, however uneasy that balance may appear to be in a given moment. From the perspective of those of us who are ‘here on the ground’, the imbalances may seem enormous. From a cosmic perspective, however, these variations in the trend lines of fate are as small as movements on a market scale when recorded against a backdrop of many years.

BELARIUS
Though mean and mighty,
Rotting together, have one dust, yet reverence,
That angel of the world, doth make distinction
Of place ’tween high and low.

Cymbeline 4.2.313-6

It may be as Belarius believes. Reverence may serve as a kind of angel to the world, prompting us to greater heights in sincere imitation of the divine, but it is also true that the world’s reverence or irreverence also eventually dissolves back into dust. Death takes no account of individual differences or accomplishments.

It is only our brief perspective that seems to foster our idea of moving time. Now that this autumnal equinox has passed, we look forward to a gradual diminishing of daylight. In the northern hemisphere, darkness will increasingly dominate our days until we reach the winter solstice, celebrated since ancient times as the return of the sun. That will be on Sunday, the 21st of December this year, when we will pass through our longest night of 2019. Then, our days will gradually return as light will occupy more and more of each 24 hour period again.

Unlike Macbeth, or Iago, however, most of us will make it back from this invasion of the dark. For most of us, our days, and perhaps our lives as well, will grow lighter once again. For now, may those of you who can do so enjoy the abundant tables of the autumn, wherever you may be. For those of you in the southern hemisphere, may you enjoy your sunny seasons and all their golden joys. Please remember to tell your loved ones that they are so, and tread carefully on the earth in the ways that you can.

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

In 1908, Kansas City art teacher and illustrator, Florence Pretz, patented the idea of the Billiken, after having claimed to have seen the mysterious figure in a dream. The Billiken is most often described as “the god of things as they ought to be”, and although his popularity, like that of the kewpie dolls with which he is often compared, has faded into some obscurity over the years, the god remains a bit like fairies, as a kind of faded token of a different kind of faith. Still the mascot of the Jesuit educational institutions St. Louis University and St. Louis University High School in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, the Billiken is is also the emblem of the Freemasonic affiliated Royal Order of Jesters, which is an invitation only Shriner group.

Alaskan Native peoples, especially those with an Inuit tribal affiliation, have also carved images of the Billiken, often out of moose antler, bone, or fossilized ivory. For many years these have been sold to the Alaska tourist trade, as both a local symbol and a potential source of good luck. It is said that the purchase of a Billiken brings good luck to the purchaser, but that receiving one as a gift brings even greater good fortune.

Of course, the world is filled with curious good luck charms, amulets, talismans, and practices thought to increase or enhance one’s luck. These charms may take any form, from bones, to medallions, to incantations.* In the Harry Potter stories, there is a potion known as Felix Felicis, nicknamed ‘liquid luck’, which temporarily makes the person who drinks it able to sense the most positive options in terms of things to do. When Harry seeks to retrieve a memory from the aging professor who has been hiding it, he consumes a vial of felix felicis in order to help him achieve his goal:

It is worth noting that Harry almost never uses magic selfishly, but tends to use it in efforts to defeat evil, to help others, and for the general good. Perhaps this is the real secret to good luck, even when it comes in potion form. Not that wanting things for ourselves is always wrong. Taking care of oneself includes not only attending to one’s own needs, but also indulging oneself on occasion. But when we navigate the world less selfishly, things seem to flow better. Expecting others to conform to some idea or norm, believe or behave a certain way, may carve a path fraught with frustration.

Paul McCartney’s 1969 song for the Beatles speaks to this, to relaxing and not dwelling on the difficult, but also to people overcoming differences. “When the broken hearted people living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be.”

Contrast Harry’s idea of luck with Falstaff’s. The title phrase for this blog post is uttered by Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, and has become part of the lexicon of English in general use, although we often now shorten it to “as luck would have it”, and it sometimes can refer to ‘bad’ luck as well as good. (The idea being, for example, that even after waiting for several hours ‘as luck would have it’ the last ticket to the performance was sold to the person who was right in front of me in the queue, so I wasn’t able to see the show.) Generally, however, the phrase has come to describe a providential turn of fortune reflecting the complicated relationship between the human and the extra human realms of happenstance. As Richard Hardin puts it, “Whether in drama or narrative, a plot always takes shape as a result of negotiations between luck and contingency, between happenings by ‘hap’ or chance and those determined by a plan of events causally linked.”***

In the play, for example, Falstaff describes his ‘lucky’ escape from Mistress Ford’s jealous husband while hiding in the buck basket (the basket of dirty laundry). Unbeknownst to him, Falstaff describes this escape to the very same husband from whom the escape was made. The jealous Ford having disguised himself as ‘Master Brook’ in order to gain Falstaff’s confidence, perversely convinces the knight to seduce his wife–in order to test her faithfulness to him. Such ‘tests’ seldom turn out well in Shakespeare. Consider the ‘love test’ that opens King Lear, for example. In truth Mistress Ford has no interest at all in Falstaff beyond her plot with her friend, Mistress Page, to give the knight his comeuppance for the presumptuous and clumsy overtures that he has made to both of the wives.

As Falstaff describes the good luck of his escape to Master Ford, it becomes increasingly apparent to an audience who have also seen the actual events transpire on stage, that the escape wasn’t really an instance of good luck at all, but rather a merry prank played at Falstaff’s considerable expense:

Falstaff  You shall hear. As good luck would have it, comes
in one Mistress Page; gives intelligence of Ford’s
approach; and, in her invention and Ford’s wife’s
distraction, they conveyed me into a buck-basket.

Ford  A buck-basket!

Falstaff  By the Lord, a buck-basket! rammed me in with foul
shirts and smocks, socks, foul stockings, greasy
napkins; that, Master Brook, there was the rankest
compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril.

Ford  And how long lay you there?

Falstaff  Nay, you shall hear, Master Brook, what I have
suffered to bring this woman to evil for your good.
Being thus crammed in the basket, a couple of Ford’s
knaves, his hinds, were called forth by their
mistress to carry me in the name of foul clothes to
Datchet-lane: they took me on their shoulders; met
the jealous knave their master in the door, who
asked them once or twice what they had in their
basket: I quaked for fear, lest the lunatic knave
would have searched it; but fate, ordaining he
should be a cuckold, held his hand. Well: on went he
for a search, and away went I for foul clothes. But
mark the sequel, Master Brook: I suffered the pangs
of three several deaths; first, an intolerable
fright, to be detected with a jealous rotten
bell-wether; next, to be compassed, like a good
bilbo, in the circumference of a peck, hilt to
point, heel to head; and then, to be stopped in,
like a strong distillation, with stinking clothes
that fretted in their own grease: think of that,—a
man of my kidney,—think of that,—that am as subject
to heat as butter; a man of continual dissolution
and thaw: it was a miracle to scape suffocation.
And in the height of this bath, when I was more than
half stewed in grease, like a Dutch dish, to be
thrown into the Thames, and cooled, glowing hot,
in that surge, like a horse-shoe; think of
that,—hissing hot,—think of that, Master Brook.

(The Merry Wives of Windsor 3.5.77-113)

Falstaff’s description of his lucky break sounds to us like a description of a soul boiling in oil, writhing in the agonizing heat of eternal damnation. Compare his words to those with which Hamlet chides his mother:

Hamlet Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty!

(Hamlet 3.4.91-4)****

Is this luck? No. This is the language of damnation, of being condemned for sins. The image of being boiled in grease. In oil.

At best, Falstaff’s example of ‘good luck’ is a complex intersection of providence with human wit, and wit that, in this case, stands decidedly against him. Albeit the fact that this seems lucky to him in the instance cannot be dismissed, and the contrast is part (and only part) of what makes the moment funny. What seems lucky to him, in escaping a jealous and potentially murderous husband, also results in him undergoing an ordeal that has been engineered to be unpleasant and humiliating. Plunged into the overheated stench of old, filthy, greasy laundry, Falstaff is subsequently thrown into the muddy river, and left to his own devices either to drown or save himself. The movements of fate might exist seem to coincide with the deliberations of human wit, but perception figures prominently as well.

Similarly, in Macbeth, where a man who initially appears to be good conspire with his wife to murder his sovereign in order to take his throne, such ‘fate’ or ‘chance’ perceived as luck truly bears a double edge:

Macbeth If chance will have me king, why, chance may
crown me
Without my stir.

(Macbeth 1.3.159-60)

Of course, Macbeth makes the wrong choice. Even with his realisation, even with all the arguments (that he states himself) against the murderous course of action, he decides to kill King Duncan anyway. In settling on regicide, Macbeth seems to subscribe to the idea that “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,/ Which we ascribe to Heaven” (Helena from All’s Well That Ends Well 1.1.217-8). Yet, it is important to remember that in Shakespeare, this particular perspective sometimes proves misleading. In Julius Caesar, Cassius uses the same argument to urge Brutus to join the conspiracy against Caesar–a decision to turn against his friend that ultimately proves disastrous for Brutus:

Cassius  Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

(Julius Caesar 1.2.142-8)

There is some grim irony when Brutus echoes this same argument again as he urges Cassius to press their apparent advantage in the Roman civil war against Marc Antony and Octavius’ troops:

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

(Julius Caesar 4.3.249-54)

To the audience, it appears that Cassius and Brutus may have ‘lost their ventures’ long ago, when they first decided to murder Caesar. Murder and mayhem are never good choices in Shakespeare. Good fortune and good luck seem to come from a kind of virtuous participation in the world. Falstaff falls down, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and in the subsequent parts 1 and 2 of Henry IV (and Henry V as well, in a much briefer, but no less crucial mention) because his participation is not virtuous. For all his cleverness, for all his sheer entertainment value, for all the riotous life force that many critics note in his character, he is also an ‘old vice’, a character whose subscription to matters around him remains focused on self advancement and aggrandisement. As genuine as his affection for Hal may be, that relationship also hinges perpetually on Falstaff’s self serving considerations for his own future.

The word ‘luck’ itself is mentioned variously in Shakespeare’s work, but the word is used five times in The Merry Wives of Windsor, three of them by Falstaff. In both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Merchant of Venice the word appears three times, but it is worth noting that in Merchant, the word is used more specifically to describe ‘ill luck’ which seems to fit more with the strange discordant nature of that play.

In Dream, the word may be most notable in the incantation like lines of Puck’s closing monologue.

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

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.409-22)

The ‘unearned luck’ mentioned here is, by context, bad. Yet, the monologue itself also erases it. In all of Shakespeare, this may be the best example of union expressed in language. With a Harry Potter like sense of seeking good for all, the monologue transcends its simple call for applause to offer restoration, rectification, and coming together. Not only does character meld with actor here, but both also speak with the voice of the play as a whole, reaching across the boundaries of theatre, boundaries between fiction and the ‘real life’ of those in the audience, momentarily removing all the boundaries in the world.

Perhaps this is what J.K. Rowling shows us with Harry Potter’s use of felix felicis, that luck is really just the removal of boundaries. Once we remove the boundaries between ourselves and others, or even just the boundaries within ourselves, the world begins to open up for us in ways we might never have previously imagined. Here’s another clip from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in which Harry tricks his dejected friend, Ron, into thinking that he has consumed felix felicis just before the big quidditch match:

Perhaps the fault really isn’t in our stars, but in ourselves, but it may not quite work the way that Cassius thinks. As soon as Cassius uses the word ‘fault’, he already establishes borders–lines in the sand that have to do not just with responsibility, but also with laying blame. It smacks of the language of moralistic judgement which seems, ultimately, to get us nowhere.

A well known, ancient Chinese fable illustrates this idea of the fluidity of perceptions of luck:

A farmer and his adolescent son scratch out a meager subsistence in a remote area, and they have only one horse to help them plow their field. One night, the son forgets to fasten the stable door, and the horse runs away.

“What terrible bad luck!” all the neighbours wail.

“Who knows whether it is good or bad?” the old farmer responds to the neighbours who peer at him quizzically.

The following day, the horse returns, leading five wild mares into the barn. “What great good fortune!” the neighbours all cry. “Who knows?” responds the farmer.

A week later, the son is thrown while breaking one of the wild mares. His leg is broken badly and, because of the lack of proper medical care in the rural area, it remains doubtful that he will ever walk properly again. “How terrible!” the neighbours all mourn. “Who can tell?” the farmer answers.

Within a month, the country is plunged into war. The government soldiers come and conscript all of the young men to take them away to the war, but they leave the farmer’s son behind because his leg is bad.*****

Good luck? Bad luck? Perhaps one should remain as open as one can (while still keeping one’s lucky charms close at hand).

*Shakespeare’s sonnet 29 might have been included as an example of a visionary or incatatory device used to change either fortune or the perception of it. For the sake of post brevity, it is included here:

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.

William Shakespeare, sonnet 29

**”Let It Be”, with its opening lyric about “Mother Mary” coming to me in times of trouble, is often thought of as a religious song. However, it is worth noting that Paul McCartney’s mother, who died when he was young, was named Mary, and he has said that he was thinking of her when he wrote it.

***Hardin, Richard F. “The Renaissance of Plautine Comedy and the Varieties of Luck in Shakespeare and Other Plotters.” Mediterranean Studies 16 (2007): 143-56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41167008.

****Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Harold Jenkins. London: Thomson Learning, 2005. Jenkins’ note says that the word ‘enseamed’ “combines with others in the context to suggest the grossness of the sexual behaviour through physical metaphors of disgusting exudations.” He notes that other explanations, describing the term as one from falconry or from the woollen industry are “quite beside the point”, n.92, p. 324. Just so, it appears.

*****Traditional folktale, retold from memory. Please feel free to offer other versions or correct me on the details.

Tortured by his thoughts, Macbeth has no safe refuge even within his own mind. After murdering King Duncan in order to take the throne, Macbeth comes to his wife with his hands still bloody and the daggers from the murder scene:

MACBETH 
Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep”—the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.

LADY MACBETH What do you mean?

MACBETH 
Still it cried “Sleep no more!” to all the house.
“Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore
Cawdor
Shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more.”

Macbeth 2.2.36-44

Perhaps more than any other, this remains a play where voices and presences have been given to both conscious thoughts and subconscious impulses. Guilt becomes more than just another character, more than just a voice that cries at Macbeth from within the darkness of his deed, or a prison spotlight that throws a glare over him forever. It also becomes a feverous ripple that manifests in the play’s action, rousing Lady Macbeth from her sleep near the end of the play, so that, sleepwalking, she makes a last fruitless attempt to wash the psychological stain of complicit blood from her hands. The guilty memory of blood haunts her, having sunken much more deeply into her mind more than any mere recollection of its colour might do against her inner eye. In her somnambulism, when her subconscious mind is awake, she can even smell the blood upon her skin.

Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the
perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
hand. Oh, oh, oh!

5.1.50-2

In terms of Macbeth, Ewan Fernie describes the “transitional phase of self-abandonment to sin the Devil [that] becomes truly an end in itself.”* Of course, an ongoing critical argument debates whether self-abandonment and being drawn into, or even coerced into something are exactly the same thing, but Fernie’s evaluation makes a valid point. “Macbeth’s original criminal act does have the quality of the absolute he wishes for it; for a time at least, it indeed is the be all and the end all.”* Like powerful nations steered by simple profit motive, or fires in the Amazon rainforest, Macbeth’s decision to murder his king, regardless of whatever falling domino of the psyche may have pushed him over that tipping point, becomes an all consuming event.

This decision, this step into destruction, not only destroys Macbeth and his Lady, but it also (at least for a time) destroys the entire world. Fierce in his observations of his country’s suffering under Macbeth’s tyranny, Ross tells us that Scotland has become a place where “violent sorrow seems/ a modern ecstasy” (4.3.169-70). Fernie writes that “Macbeth is most alive in his sheer negation of life”*, but even as he struts and rages, his colour also drains from him. He tells us that his “way of life/ Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf” (5.3.22-3). Nearing the end, he admits, “I ‘gin to be aweary of the sun,/ And wish th’ estate o’ th’ world were now undone” (5.5.48-9). Macbeth’s fateful decision to murder Duncan precipitates the decline and dissipation that occupies the rest of the play.

As Macbeth tells Lady Macbeth:

Light thickens,
And the crow makes wing to th’ rooky wood,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
Whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.

(3.2.51-4)

Light thickening twilight aside, the atmosphere itself also physically thickens around the Macbeths, constricting and confining them. Already banished from sleep, Macbeth has also become isolated from the good things of the day, as these are still able to droop and drowse. He has (unwittingly or not) sworn his allegiance to the confederacy of night’s predatory agents, and as the light thickens around him, it becomes a confederacy which he cannot escape.

Once on that road, the way becomes relentless as a driving rock beat, which reminds us of how much music seems to deal with the subject of damnation:

Reflecting certain structures in human consciousness, the play Macbeth seems to work in threes, with the prophetic trios echoing those in scripture. The three witches that appear to Macbeth and Banquo on the heath suggest a pre-Christian prophetic potency eerily reminiscent of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The three murderers who assail Banquo and Fleance, again suggest this supernatural triad as it becomes imbued with human agency, the prophetic three realised and embodied on the physical mortal plane.

Notice the devil drawing the three witches’ attention away from the light and towards the night. Conversely, in Rembrandt’s drypoint drawing of The Three Crosses, the chiaroscuro is dominated by the central light, suggesting holy illumination, from above.

Structurally, the play partitions Macbeth and his Scotland, defining his initial heroic, supportive, pre-murder phase, which is followed by his multitudinous killing spree which eventually winds down into his final exhaustion at an existence to which his own being has become antithetical. By the end, Lady Macbeth cannot stop seeing and smelling the blood of complicity on her own hands, but Macbeth himself has moved far past seeing or even being sensible to such things. Blood has become such a common feature of his interior landscape that it is beneath his notice. “I have supped full with horrors;/ Direness familiar to my slaughterous thoughts/ Cannot once start me” (5.5.13-5).

The structure also bears a curious resemblance to a kind of unholy rite. Margaret Jones-Davies notes that Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline fits perfectly with the alchemical narrative. The whole play is alive with alchemical connotations that are ingenious ways of bringing coded peaceful answers to the current polemical issues.”** Yet, a similar argument may be made for Macbeth, that the play’s structure, beginning with an intrusion of the obscure, the “foul”, and the “filthy” into its atmosphere, progresses through a series of murderous episodes that have been initiated by a blood sacrifice made to baser human impulses which supplant the nobler goals of spiritual transcendence encoded in alchemical ritual.

Taking the lust for power as its impetus, Macbeth inverts the whole of the alchemical wedding. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth both partake of murdered King Duncan’s blood. “My hands are of your colour” (2.2.83) Lady Macbeth tells her husband after retrieving the daggers from him to replace them in the murder room. Rather than seeking a spiritual detachment from their grosser human natures, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth pursue and embrace their baser selves. Lady Macbeth advises Macbeth to “Look like th’ innocent flower, / But be the serpent under it” (1.6.76-7). The blossom of spiritual ascension is eschewed for the ways of the Satanic serpent lurking beneath. The metaphor explicitly incites the carnal and opposes the alchemical symbolism of abandoning the physical for the spiritual. The path that leads to the loftier cultivation of the flowers in the garden of the human spirit is forsaken for a way that leads deeper and deeper into blood.

Fairies and ancient goddesses dance the world into existence by dancing in a ring. *** Their dance unites the creative impulse of dancing itself with all of creation as it spins into being. In Macbeth, the witches dance too, but their dance around a cauldron that contains dead pieces of flesh amputated from once living creatures, is a dance of uncreation, in a sense. It is a dance of truncated and dissected corpses.

When Macbeth encounters the witches at their cauldron, and asks what they are doing, they answer in unison, “A deed without a name” (4.1.50). This nod to unbaptism, to things existing outside of the holy order of being, features an unnamed deed that does not/cannot participate in creation. When the scriptural God says, “I am that I am”, He asserts that He is the quintessence of being or “isness”. Conversely, the unnamed is the essence of what is not, the uncreated, the unformed, the incomplete, the unuttered and perhaps unutterable. If what is named or what is in being is holy, then that which is not named, or is not in being must be the inverse of holy. In this scene, the witches, and by extension Macbeth (since he has come to seek their counsel) become mutually participatory in unbeing. Through his interaction with them, Macbeth becomes more intimate with the undoing of creation, the uncreation that is the photographic negative, the dark antibeing to universal assertion of existence. It is an undoing that weaves into Macbeth’s fragmenting and disintegrating being, even as he continues his reign of terror, extending undoing to those around him by upsetting and undoing their lives as well.

Ultimately, this is where Macbeth’s subscription to negative alchemy takes him. His weariness of the sun marks an exhaustion with the life giving affirmation and sustenance of the world. Although his character remains alive almost until the final scene, Macbeth becomes a kind of ghost even as we watch, fading into the literally growing woodwork of his own play. Birnam wood not only marches to Macbeth’s Castle at Dunsinane, but it consumes him, as life again takes root where death has been.

Malcolm’s final line returns us to the inclusivity, the positivity of being. “So thanks to all at once and to each one,/ Whom we invite to see us crowned at Scone” (5.9.40-1). No longer is the monarch killing others off or shutting them out, but he is specifically inviting them into the process of their own sovereignty. Like the outcome of the search in Farid ud-Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds, Malcolm’s new monarchy reasserts an affirmation of life over death. For all the rough weather in reaching it, the end of the play becomes an affirmation of the ways in which we seem to long for life to work.

Of course, it isn’t perfect. Life is fluctuation, variance. Sometimes, people, through no fault of their own, remain unable to do what they want to do or unable to be where they feel they might belong. When Macbeth sends a murder squad to surprise the Thane of Fife’s castle, Macduff loses, as Ross sorrowfully relates, “Wife, children, servants, all that could be found.” After such grief, Macduff’s new life mission becomes avenging his family and putting Malcolm on his rightful throne. In some ways, even though it seems to right the ship of state again, for Macduff it also seems most likely that life may become hollow once Malcolm is on the throne. Nothing really brings back the dead. Even Banquo’s ghost remains an echo of guilt as much as he might be an actual phantom at the feast. Too close to Macbeth when the corruption began perhaps.

In terms of Macbeth’s turn to the tyrannical, the point is well taken that what we do follows us, and again, in music we find some of the most vivid examples of possible damnation. There’s a legend that famous blues musician Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a local crossroads to become a famous bluesman. Apparently, it is a legend that the singer cultivated as much as possible, because it provided him a kind of mystique which he might otherwise not have had. Whether or not there might be any kernel of truth to the story, Johnson’s final recorded musical track (Hellhound on my Trail, 1937) remains no less haunting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHAIgpih86E

Part of the lyrics are:

I can tell the wind is risin’, the leaves tremblin’ on the tree
Tremblin’ on the tree
I can tell the wind is risin’, leaves tremblin’ on the tree

Strikingly reminiscent of Macbeth’s life, “fallen into the sere/ The yellow leaf”.

After his final recordings, Johnson disappeared from the public record. He apparently had been found dead by the side of a road in Mississippi in 1938. According to an account by another famous bluesman, Sonny Boy Williamson, Johnson may have consumed whiskey that had been poisoned after he had flirted with a married woman. It remains difficult to know whether or not hell had finally caught up with him but death certainly did when Johnson was only 27 years old.

The fact remains that most of us, we strive to affirm as much as possible, embracing the ways of growth and life over those of “dusty death”. We help ourselves by helping others, as not one of us gets out alive. Life seems short enough without going down to the crossroads at midnight on the dark of the moon, or deciding not to wait for chance, even though it certainly may crown us without our stir. When the moment of decision arrives, brief candle though we may be, let us hope we will all make the most of that, for whatever time we may have upon the stage.

*Fernie, Ewan. The Demonic: Literature and Experience. London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 51, 61, and 67. Ewan Fernie’s excellent book looks at the idea of the demonic from a number of different perspectives, as it relates to human experience in a number of different literary and philosophical works.

**Jones-Davies, Margaret. “Cymbeline and the sleep of faith” in Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare. Dutton, Richard, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson, eds. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003, p. 208. A fine collection that purports to look at Roman Catholicism in early modern England, but with some far ranging implications in terms of religious thought in general as well.

***For further reading on this idea, see Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. The Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology, and the Origins of European Dance. New York: Norton, 2013.

Here we are again. That outer edge of summer, tipping over into autumn. Blond grass over the hills. Breezes gradually taking on leaves. Foliage going bronze. Blackberries. It always seems like a goodbye.

Shel Silverstein understood this:

Changing Of The Seasons

Oh the changing of the seasons it’s a pretty thing to see
And though I find this balmy weather pleasin’
There’s the wind come from tomorrow and I hear it callin’ me
And I’m bound for the changing of the seasons

Oh it’s blowin’ in Chicago and it’s snowin’ up in Maine
And the Islands to the south are warm and sunny
And I’ve got to feel the earth shake and I gotta feel the rain
And I’ve got to know a taste of more than honey

So don’t ask me where I’m goin’ or how long I’m gonna be away
Don’t make me give you all the hollow reasons
I’ll think of you like summer and I might be back some day
When my heart miss the changing of the seasons

Oh it’s blowin’ in Chicago…

Oh it’s nothing that you said and it ain’t nothing that you done
And I wish I could explain you why I’m leavin’
But there’s some men need the winter and there’s some men need the sun
And there’s some men need the changing of the seasons

Yeah it’s blowin’ in Chicago…

Shel Silverstein – Changing of the Seasons from Crouchin’ on the Outside*

We live perpetually on the margins of a changing wilderness of weather. Even in the places where the climate varies little, subtle changes heave and smooth the life within us and around us. And often our stories so often arrive or depart with a change in the weather.

Like countless tales, the old faerie ballad of Thomas the Rhymer begins in weather as well:

It was one of those dismal autumn nights, with the wind whistling like a mad huntsman calling up the Hounds of Hell, and you know there’s rain toward. And sure enough it came, battering at the roof and shutters, and not a little down the chimney so the fire smoked up the place.
. . .
My Meg looks up. “Oh, Gavin,” she says, her voice strong against the noise of storm. “Gavin it’s a night for the dead to ride, and no mistake.”
. . .
“The Wild Hunt rides tonight.” Meg’s eyes glinted with her eerie tale. “They ride on hoses with nostrils like burning coals, chasing the souls of the wicked, that cannot rest for–” Then her head came up sharp. And “Gavin,” she says, there’s knocking at the door.”**

Naturally, in the tale (which is much older than Kushner’s retelling of it) there is indeed someone at the door, as the outer reflects the inner. Tales may be like the weather themselves, prevailing patterns in the winds or clouds that manifest in tone, in pace, in character, or in the movement of words across the page, and across the inner world of our brewing minds. Stormfronts may set birds crying on the darkest nights, or breezes may die away, yielding to enormous winds that may flatten all that stands upon the earth.

Shakespeare borrowed from such patterns as we all do. Plays like Macbeth and Othello feature a sound of knocking at the door. The title of today’s post comes from Love’s Labour’s Lost, from a story so familiar that it must have ached in Shakespeare’s day–a tale of four young men who swear away the company of women in order to devote themselves to three years of fasting and the most strict and diligent study. We feel the result of such an oath in our bones long before it arrives. Like coming rain, we know that such an oath, boldly framed to front the coming tale, will inevitably fail.

The title line is spoken by the clever Berowne, finishing out a rhyme begun by his friend, Ferdinand, who is the King of Navarre. The King chides Berowne for criticising the plan to devote themselves wholly to study and fasting for three years. “O, these are barren tasks, too hard to keep,/ Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep” (LLL 1.1.48-9). Feeling that the oaths will prove too difficult, and also that swearing in this way pointlessly denies life’s natural order, which to him encompasses female company, dining, and ample rest. Berowne argues with his friends in verse:

KING 
Berowne is like an envious sneaping frost
That bites the firstborn infants of the spring.

BEROWNE 
Well, say I am. Why should proud summer boast
Before the birds have any cause to sing?
Why should I joy in any abortive birth?
At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled shows,
But like of each thing that in season grows.
So you, to study now it is too late,
Climb o’er the house to unlock the little gate.

(1.1.104-13)

Seems fair enough, and the King readily, and curtly dismisses him. But for all his pot stirring, Berowne protests that because he has already sworn to the conditions, he is also willing to sign his name to the oath on paper, and he does so. Upon reading through the articles again, only a few lines later, Berowne points out their doom in more particular terms:

BEROWNE
A dangerous law against gentility.

[Reads] Item, If any man be seen to talk with a
woman within the term of three years, he shall endure
such public shame as the rest of the court can possible
devise.

This article, my liege, yourself must break,
For well you know here comes in embassy
The French king’s daughter with yourself to speak—
A maid of grace and complete majesty—
About surrender up of Aquitaine
To her decrepit, sick, and bedrid father.
Therefore this article is made in vain,
Or vainly comes th’ admirèd princess hither.

KING 
What say you, lords? Why, this was quite forgot.

(1.1.131-44)

Certain kinds of weather, in certain spheres of life, when on the near horizon may spell damnation.

But Shakespeare used the weather more specifically as well. As Tillyard said, “they [the ‘Elizabethans’, as he called them] saw in nature allegorical pictures of human states of mind”.*** Unsurprisingly, Shakespeare’s The Tempest opens with a shipwreck in a great storm that reflects tumult on multiple levels. Prospero’s mental and spiritual unease echoes the disquiet of the native denizens on the island where the play is set, as well as the unstable nature of more distant political structures that his brother and confederates have constructed over the years since they usurped Prospero’s dukedom.

The aftermath of the initial storm reverberates throughout the play, permeating not just the physical setting but also the tone. The previous storm, that of the usurpation, is repeatedly echoed too, as ideas of obedience and rebellion are repeatedly questioned and reformed. After the shipwreck, Trinculo, who is jester to the King of Naples, wanders the beach lamenting:

TRINCULO 
Here’s neither bush nor shrub to bear off
any weather at all. And another storm brewing; I
hear it sing i’ th’ wind.

(The Tempest 2.2.18)

Yet, Trinculo’s coming storm does not take the same form as the first. New storms arise in the form of Caliban’s revolt against Prospero (who enslaved Caliban after the former tried to mate with his daughter), and also in the form of a new romance between Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, and the King of Naples’ son, Ferdinand. In addition, a tempest simmers over the eventual confrontation between Prospero and his usurping brother, reflecting the seething turmoil within Prospero himself about how to juggle responsibility and revenge.

It is a complicated play, but like the play’s inherently changeable weather, Prospero’s revenge eventually transfigures into forgiveness before the audience’s eyes. By the end, as Alonso, the King of Naples, asks for Prospero’s full story, Prospero gives his final instructions to the bound spirit, Ariel, to bring good weather for the voyage home. The final lines before the epilogue distinctly marry the ideas of narrative and weather as Prospero sets Ariel free.

ALONSO 
I long
To hear the story of your life, which must
Take the ear strangely.

PROSPERO 
I’ll deliver all,
And promise you calm seas, auspicious gales,
And sail so expeditious that shall catch
Your royal fleet far off. [Aside to Ariel] My Ariel,
chick,
That is thy charge. Then to the elements
Be free, and fare thou well.

(5.1.370-8)

In addressing Ariel, Prospero still uses ‘thy’ and ‘thou’ (a more familiar, less formal form of address than your or you–more often used to address those of equal or somewhat lower social status), but his wishes also seem heartfelt as he draws calm, auspicious weather to end his story, and returns his efficacious spirit servant to the elements where he apparently belongs.

The Tempest is hardly the only example. Storms in Julius Caesar, King Lear, and in Macbeth, Hamlet, Pericles, are only the tip of the iceberg, with Dr. Gwilym Jones telling us that “there is some instance of storm in every Shakespearean play”.**** Some of these references appear obliquely, in metaphor, in bits of character speech or presentation. Others, like in The Tempest above, are more central and direct. All of them serve to remind us how central the weather is to our lives and our perceptions of the world around us.

Whether bees in their quarter, humming from forest ridges on a summer’s day, or old Wang Wei laments the autumn and all that it suggests, the only constant in our human surroundings is change. Bees gather from blossom and from field while weather fends other weather off. But in many places, even now, the colder weather will come again.

Huazi Ridge

Birds fly away to the ends of the earth;
The mountains have an autumn look again.
Going up Huazi Ridge, and coming down,
I am moved by feelings of the utmost sorrow.

Huazi Ridge, from Wang Wei’s Wang River Collection, translated by Peter Harris.

But once we have abandoned literature and the arts, once we let slip our understanding of days and nights, of storms, springs, and autumns, who will notice? Who will recall our mild sunlit glory in the heat of ever advancing day? Who will still dare to eat a peach? Certainly not those who might have been confederates but did not choose to be. Those who, childlike, wrestling with a complicated toy, choose to discard their deeper reason into the teeth of fast images upon a screen, vapid entertainment sketched for monetary haystacks in the human field. Cyclones of the pound. Hurricane dollars vented to the circling winds.

How can we countenance the owl, the traditional messenger of death, even as we descend the steps to river’s edge? Our regency truncated by a growing trend of inattention. Waters swarm with the sea snakes of hatred, and reflections of intolerance fill the skies. Moon at wrong angles, still coming down. We sing the detritus of existence, dancing in rings beneath an expanding sun that will not let us go. All becomes the weather, constantly enfolding us.

Apparently, this is not how it used to be. “In Old English and other Germanic languages the sun is feminine: in the north, she is gentle, life-giving, nurturing; she does not burn the earth or strike folks to death.”***** My, my, how the weather changes. The heatwave of 2003 in Europe claimed some 15,000 lives in France alone and summer temperatures just seem to keep rising. Still, this is something of which the ghost has written previously.

At this juncture, what can we do? The ancient Chinese classic, the 大學 (Dà Xué) or Great Learning, says in part:

其本亂而末治者，否矣 (When the root [of matters] is neglected, what springs from it cannot be well ordered.)****** The key here is that, as in our perceptions of the weather, so much lies in ourselves. Rather than assign fault, as Cassius does, perhaps we should frame our thoughts and faiths, differently. The idea is not to change our faiths, but rather to invest in the kinder and more caring sides of those. Plant trees. Plant renewal and restoration on the land and in ourselves.

Unbreakable oaths, like those in Love’s Labour’s Lost, may become impediments, but perspectives seldom are. When we look to ‘proud summer’ as making a ‘boast’, we miss the gentle summer that begs us for mediation. When we think of vengeance, we often lose the compass of forgiveness. Violent weather may obscure the subtlety of patterns that lie beneath it.

As this post is being written, a massive category 5 hurricane, one of the strongest such storms in recorded history, is sweeping its way across the Bahamas. A few small changes in the atmosphere, the slowing of a northern low pressure system that may help divert it, will result in that storm making landfall in the U.S. state of Florida. The prospects are terrifying, and potentially devastating, not just for those in the Bahamas who have suffered the brunt of this ferocious storm and who will now suffer the economic and logistical aftermath, but also for those still waiting, and those who will lie in the path of whichever way it eventually turns.

In the end, we are not Prospero or Ariel. We cannot command the elements. We cannot avert life’s storms. But just as gentle weather accompanies ideas of forgiveness, kindness, and gentle embrace in literature, in our ideas, in most of our faiths, and in the great psyche of our collective consciousness, so may the changes in our own ideas result in something less polarised, less violent. We cannot remain silent in every situation, and although opposition also breeds contention, kindness may also find kind reception, even in disagreement. Finding ways to speak our pieces peacefully will, at the very least, not continue to feed the storm.

So may our gentle stewardship of our world command eventual changes in all the climates which may not be less profound. Intellectual, artistic, political, economic, and environmental realms do not really lie so far apart. Rather, they are mutually participating and deeply dependent upon one another. When one is sacrificed or minimised, the whole falls out of balance with the rest. Best to keep a weather eye out in all the ways we can, an eye that honours all we can. Best to help others do this too, spending as little energy as possible raging against unproductive, contrary scarecrows that stand alone in dry and barren fields. The world we save may be beneath our own feet. In fact, it is.

The Chinese classic of the Tao Te Ching says, 道常無為而無不為。(Tao abides without striving, leaving nothing undone.)******* This is not blind acceptance, but a different kind of resistance. Resistanceless, it is fighting that is not fighting. It remains the essence of teaching, of learning, and of reading and creating. It is also an idea that may still save our fast erupting world from burning or smothering itself.

*Silverstein won two grammy awards (and was also nominated for a Golden Globe and an Academy Award). Notably, he wrote the Johnny Cash hit, A Boy Named Sue, and The Cover of the Rolling Stone, which became a hit for Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show (for whom he wrote most of the songs). He also wrote Unicorn that was a great hit for the Irish Rovers. This song, Changing of the Seasons, from Shel Silverstein’s album, Crouchin’ on the Outside, may be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxsB2aksk9o

**Kushner, Ellen. Thomas the Rhymer. London: Victor Gollancz, 1991, p. 10-1. Kushner reworked older ballads of Thomas the Rhymer (perhaps ca. 1400 but condensed into the better known ballad form in the 1700s), into a modern retelling of the story of a balladeer or bard, a professional player/singer who is spirited away by the Faerie Queene.

***Tillyard, E.M.W. Myth and the English Mind. New York: Collier, 1962, p. 42.

****Jones, Gwilym. Shakespeare’s Storms. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016, p.2.

*****Herbert, Kathleen. Looking for the Lost Gods of England. Cambridge: Anglo-Saxon Books, 2010, p. 12.

******and*******are my rough translations. Please feel free, if so inclined, to suggest translations that you feel might be more accurate or more evocative of the texts.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves 
      Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: 
All mimsy were the borogoves, 
      And the mome raths outgrabe. 

First quatrain of “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Caroll

Trouble is that those damned slithy toves get everywhere. A bit like garden slugs, only much bigger, gyring and gimbling in the wabe really ends up being about the least ominous thing that they could do. And so close to the house. What the hell? Best not leave anything valuable on the front porch. Certainly not a bicycle.

Sound and almost-sense words combine to make the poem effective. It lends a feeling of falling off the map, of being in kind of narrative without definitive reference points, or without reference points that we can understand. “But when worlds collide,” said George Pal to his bride, “I’m gonna give you some terrible thrills, like a science fiction (ooh, ooh, ooh) double feature.”* Elements combining dangerously one evening out back of the Warbonnet. Bruce King would tell us just enough, but maybe not the whole truth–at least not until the end.**

We combine things when we write. Ideas, aspects, perspectives. Gets damned boring when we don’t.

The vernacular may vary. We can tell if it’s an American novel. “It’s because he stays out there, right under the window, hammering and sawing on that goddamn box. Where she’s got to see him. Where every breath she draws if full of his knocking and sawing where she can see him saying See. See what a good one I am making for you.”*** Someone might be swearing, either externally or internally, and events complicate around plain, simple, often rural actions.

Russian novels may move in identifiable ways as well. “I thought today’s fête had been cancelled. I confess all these festivities and fireworks are becoming wearisome.”**** As happens in Chekov, Tolstoy’s characters tire of having things the way they are. Ennui becomes a plague that can only be relieved, sometimes, by tea or by a final gunshot. The thick air of disillusionment and brewing tension tends to be both political and personal.

Yet, in any language, the most highly regarded works tend to be those that juxtapose mundane human life with eternal considerations. Novelist Lady Murasaki Shikibu (973-1014) wrote The Tale of Genji around the year 1000, apparently to address what the Japanese cultural scholar Motoori Norinaga termed ‘mono no aware’, or the sadness at the ephemeral nature of, and the great beauty of human life. Having lost his great love, Murasaki, to a tragic early death, Prince Genji mourns for her ceaselessly:

I long to melt like snow, to disappear
From this world of sadness…but snow
still falls
And I still live on against my wishes*****

Beauty and Sadness (also the title of a famous novel written in 1964 by Yasunari Kawabata) have always walked together. The aspen leaf flickers everywhere at the margins of life’s borders. Life and eternity seem to be two sides of the same leaf. The brevity of mortal life, the comparatively long slow speech of the trees.

Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats. fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughtersons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John of Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!******

Not all juxtaposition, not all our daily tasks, roll our lives into days and afternoons, chatterweeping us into trees. Do we root in place even as our individual selfhoods vanish? Languages muttering, breeze pattering leaves? Does all finding ultimately lose the self?

We perpetually become our myths, intertwining with them, bedding down with them, their fingers always in our sleeping hair. We fashion myths out of our own living flesh, our skin a parchment to our own blood. We hear the eight directions in the wind, see the ancestors gathering above the sacred mountain, watch the mounds for torchlight in the dark. This is why the Diné (Navajo) skinwalkers may be so dangerous. They can rewrite what has already been written in us, already written for us. They recode the DNA of our spiritual existence.

That robin tapping at our window has a rider whom we both can and cannot see. Or whom we sometimes see, and sometimes cannot see. The universal contracts complicated as listening and hearing. In listening, we may hear what others do not hear, or they may hear some other something. Footfalls, breath, storms. The unsteady earth beneath our lives is, in a sense, encoded in the meeting of Shakespeare’s fairy monarchs in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

OBERON 
Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.

TITANIA 
What, jealous Oberon? Fairies, skip hence.
I have forsworn his bed and company.

OBERON 
Tarry, rash wanton. Am not I thy lord?

TITANIA 
Then I must be thy lady. But I know
When thou hast stolen away from Fairyland
And in the shape of Corin sat all day
Playing on pipes of corn and versing love
To amorous Phillida. Why art thou here,
Come from the farthest steep of India,
But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon,
Your buskined mistress and your warrior love,
To Theseus must be wedded, and you come
To give their bed joy and prosperity?

(1.3.60-8)

In the shifting contract of Titania and Oberon’s relationship. ‘Am not I thy lord?’ proposes a definition in terms to which Titania almost seems to agree. ‘Then I must be thy lady.’ Her ‘must’ then undercut by ‘But. . .’ The initial stated agreement becomes a feint, and all subsequent passages fall to wrangling, to negotiation.

Fairies are this way. Famously, infamously liminal. Furzing the wooded edges of the world, hazing once clear boundaries into indeterminacy. Now you see ’em, now you don’t. A here and not here, king and no king kind of quality. And the fairy immortals often display a distinct taste for mortal lovers. Of course, the caveat is that, in a mortal world, mortality and immortality cannot mix together successfully–at least not for very long. For while fairies remain young forever, mortals grow old and infirm, and they eventually die. Still, we roll this immortality into ourselves.

In Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operetta Iolanthe, the fairies have a strict law against marrying mortals, and this law sustains the tension in the plot. The titular character, Iolanthe, is the pride and joy of fairy kind. Beautiful, vivacious, joyous.

A fairy amongst fairies, Iolanthe has long arranged the fairy songs and dances, but she has also committed that most serious of crimes, marrying with a mortal. She has a son by her marriage, the shepherd Strephon, who is immortal from the waist up. Mortal and immortal juxtaposed, combined impractically, comically, in a single being.

Because all the fairies so love Iolanthe, the Fairy Queen commutes her death sentence to eternal banishment, on the condition that she never see or communicate with her mortal husband again. The problem is that, after several years without her joy giving presence, the other fairies come to miss Iolanthe so much that they plead with the Fairy Queen to let her come back.

Of course, the Fairy Queen acquiesces, summoning Iolanthe back out of the swamp where she has been living.

Fairy Queen: Iolanthe! From thy dark exile thou art summoned! Come to our call– Come, come, Iolanthe!

Celia: Iolanthe!

Leila: Iolanthe!

Fairies: Come to our call, Iolanthe! Iolanthe, come!

Iolanthe rises from the water. She is clad in water weeds. She approaches the Queen with head bent and arms crossed.*******

In her banishment, Iolanthe has been living at the bottom of a frog pond where her immortal nature blends with the most basic generative aspects of life. Clad in water weeds, she has come to embody a kind of underlying life force for the world of the play. She symbolises life itself.

Here is a recording of the invocation, by the Columbia Light Opera:

The operetta sets mortality and immortality at odds, in effect lifting a chord that Shakespeare makes in passing. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairy queen, Titania, is at odds with the fairy king, Oberon, over the custody of a mortal child, a “changeling” boy. While Oberon says that he wants the boy as a retainer, Titania claims guardianship based on the fact that the boy’s mother was her votaress and friend who did not survive childbirth. “But she, being mortal, of that boy did die;/ And for her sake do I rear up her boy;/ And for her sake I will not part with him.” (2.1.135-7)

Again, mortality is supported by immortality, the two worlds operating (with the immortal world largely unseen) side by side. A principle tenet of the ancient fairy faith holds that the parallel world of immortality goes on much like our own (in spite of sometimes operating under somewhat different rules), and that it can, and sometimes does affect the workings of our own world. Yet, it also seems to be a combination of elements, mortality and immortality, that may augment aspects of existence as well as creating friction. The capriciousness of fairy nature is repeated in countless stories, and they may either help or harm the mortals and their world, sometimes doing both in succession.

This current of immortality represents a kind of underlying spark, something glimmering beneath the fairy mound or at the bottom of the frog pond. (In the Epic of Gilgamesh, when Gilgamesh finally finds the herb that confers immortality, it is a weed that grows under the sea.) Whether we regard the idea of an ultimately achievable physical immortality as absolute fiction or not, it remains a compelling idea, a part of our collective psyche and understanding with which we cannot dispense. Of course, our religions tend to reassure us–the countless scriptures affirming that our lives persist beyond our deaths. Religious or spiritual promises of immortality after death aside, however, in our literature and our thinking, we never abandon this idea that there may well be something else, some potentially achievable facet of life that is both everlasting and unseen.

The old fairy faith, especially in the Celtic countries, held this always to be so. Fairies’ enduring popularity in literature provides evidence that we have never really abandoned this hope, this spark that we seem to perceive with our internal eyes. For this is what fairies really seem to be, a kind of hope. A hope that mishaps might be warded off, but also a hope that another kind of enduring life might exist.

There are the stories of people being trapped in fairyland–dancing forever, passing years in a minute in the company of the immortals, returning to worlds where everyone they ever knew has long since passed away. But this too is a kind of barrier, showing us, cautioning us, how dangerous and out of synch immortal being may be with ours. The compelling may often also be dangerous. Still, it is there. Shining.

Our literature so often blurs standing lines. Mortality, immortality, tones, ideas, and the very stuff of life. The slithy toves get into everything, crawling everywhere, changing our ideas and our thoughts, merging them into new shapes that nonetheless reflect the old ones. They steal our bicycles right off the porch in every culture. Lightning striking the tree. Strong growth carpeting green in the fire’s wake. Sometimes we become the trees and sometimes they are us. Springs rivulet the rocks or forest floor, our lives rife with muttering vanishings and risings. Immortal life around a bend ahead of us, or in a glimpse of meadow under moonlight. We may not reach it yet, but we perceive it. Feel it breathing us.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania famously has a liaison with Bottom, who may be the most mortal of mortals, who, in his blundering fallibility, embodies a kind of quintessence of mortality. In subsequently giving her changeling child to Oberon, Titania, in one sense, acquiesces to the changes inherent in mortal existence, to the ideas of changing placement and station that accompany maturation. Titania returns to a harmonious amity with Oberon, and Bottom goes on his mortal way. The contested child, however, as a kind of representation of human future potential, remains with the immortals, having simply moved from Titania’s camp to Oberon’s. Possibility always has at least a hope of living forever.

In Iolanthe, the fairies (who, in the operetta, are female) eventually all marry mortal husbands with whom they cannot help but fall in love. Immortality and mortality always attract each other in some way, and in order to save both the fairies from the impracticable doom of fairy law, the law is permanently changed to state that any fairy who does NOT marry a mortal must die. In this way, the fairies come to fulfill their function as the representation of our immortal aspect. They are the more beautiful, more youthful, more magical reflection we hope to see in the mirror. They are that sparkling drop of life that we hope will never leave us, and which never really does.

*From The Rocky Horror Show. “Science Fiction/Double Feature” music and lyrics by Richard O’Brien.

2*King, Bruce W., and Hanay Geiogamah. Evening at the Warbonnet: And Other Plays. Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2006.

3*Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying: the Corrected Text. New York, NY: Vintage, 1990, p. 14.

4*Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. London: Oxford University Press, 1965, p.4.

5*Shikibu, Murasaki. The Tale of Genji (unabridged). Translated by Dennis C. Washburn. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016, ch. LXI.

6*Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Penguin Books, 1996, pp. 215-6.

7*Iolanthe by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. https://gsarchive.net/iolanthe/web_op/iol02.html. (While the costumes ideas reflect the optimistic projection of the immortal, most of the illustrations from this website are also included because they are so lovely.)

8*Ibid.

There’s this old story. You’ve no doubt heard it, but it bears telling again:

A fox makes his way across the countryside when he comes to a vineyard where ripening grapes hang abundant on the vines. They look delicious, full, juicy, and glowing in the late sun.

Having travelled a long way without any food, the fox suddenly realises that he is famished. He licks his lips as the plump grapes beckon to him, but the grapes are too high, and try as he might, the fruit remains out of his reach.

The fox finally departs, still hungry, muttering to himself that the grapes are green and sour anyway, and that they aren’t worth the effort. The “sour grapes” myth has come to represent bitterness and disappointment–a rationalisation that something difficult or impossible to attain is probably undesirable or bad in any case.

Aphra Behn (1640-1689), one of the earliest English women writers to make a living from writing, wrote the following quatrain:

The fox who longed for grapes, beholds with pain
The tempting clusters were too high to gain;
Grieved in his heart he forced a careless smile,
And cried, ‘They’re sharp and hardly worth my while.‘

from Francis Barlow’s illustrated edition of Aesop’s fables (1687)

In typical fashion, the fable describes a bit more than just a fox’s experience trying to reach some fruit. As many critics have noted, the grapes themselves may either be sour or not (or somewhere in between), but after the fox fails to reach Schrödinger’s fruit, that fruit sours within his mind. The fox’s conception of the grapes sours as his experience sours, and the seeds of bitterness grow into sour grapes that hang on a vine within him–and these grapes remain sour. It becomes immaterial whether the actual grapes are sour or not because this particular bunch of grapes sour forever in the fox’s interior landscape. Further, once his worldly defeat prompts him to change his mind about the grapes’ desirability, he walks away from the vineyard still carrying a sourness that he has created inside himself. The smile that he forces is false, only assumed in order to mask his deep disappointment at being incapable of reaching the grapes.

The dual quality of the grapes, suggested by their potential, is interesting. Like the well known story of Schrödinger’s cat*, before the fox reaches the grapes, they exist in a state that is indeterminate, being both sweet and sour. Unlike in Schrödinger’s thought experiment, however, because the fox never reaches the grapes (no one looks inside the cat’s box to see whether it were actually alive or dead), the grapes remain both potentially sweet and sour to the outside observer, to the reader of the fable who remains outside of the fox’s immediate personal experience.

However, the fox also makes a kind of choice. “Grieved in his heart”, he subscribes to the idea that the grapes must be sour. So, although he can’t know how the grapes actually taste, they remain sour for him. Bending his reality, the fox banishes any remaining uncertainty within himself. Significantly, when disappointment enters his being, it not only sours his internal conception of grapes, but it sours a small part of him as well.

Yes, the fox’s forced perspective is a rationalisation, but life is full of those, isn’t it? Eating particular foods, working at particular sorts of things, being one way or another, all of these so often involve some element of rationalisation. We make decisions, but the decisions also make us. They define and shape us as we move on to perhaps become those who shun grapes as opposed to those who devour them.

As the Taoists might have told us, if you fill your bedroom with books, those books will steal increments of your soul as you sleep. If you read those books, they will also steal bits of your soul, but in slightly different ways. Anything with which we engage will simultaneously engage with us, making our observation or our participation mutual. Nietzsche wrote, “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby becomes a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”**

Because that in which we participate also participates in us. Here is lay Buddhist Wenxiang, who was born in China in 1210:***

Grief
A million men gallop afar
into the dust of battle;
how many can keep the body
they had when they set out?
Who knows the number of generals
gone to war since ancient times?
All of them have become the spring
in the green grass of the borders.

–trans. Thomas Cleary

Those who participate in war, in the dust of battle, eventually become the dust. They become the grass, and the seasons sweeping repeatedly over the borders, no longer conscious of those demarcations over which they offered up their human lives. The generals, in attempting to subdue the world, gallop across its surface. In the end, they participate so fully in that surface that the generals themselves disappear into the very dust across which they sped so earnestly.

In the opening scene of Thomas Middleton’s 1606 play, The Revenger’s Tragedy, Vindice enters carrying a skull. The skull is his wife, Gloriana’s, who was poisoned by the Duke nine years before the beginning of the play. Again, things that we carry with us become a part of our internal landscape. Imagine carrying your murdered wife’s skull with you for over nine years. Nine years. Carrying a skull. Plotting your revenge. It seems almost like an early modern precursor to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Death and war, riding the bereaved and the soldier (who may be the same person) side by side.

The skull has become an integral part of Vindice’s psychological landscape, so much so that it is arguably now a part of himself. His opening monologue offers explication:

Thee, when thou wert apparel’d in thy flesh, 
The old duke poison’d, 
Because thy purer part would not consent 
Unto his palsy-lust, for old men lustful 
Do show like young men angry, eager-violent, 
Outbid like their limited performances. 
Oh, ‘ware an old man hot and vicious! 

The Revenger’s Tragedy 1.1.31-7****

In a play filled with especially loathsome characters, the terrible old Duke makes an appealing target for an audience whose descendents would be watching a cinematic action revenge movie four hundred years later. (And there are really so many of these):

Or, as we said, this is Vindice, who lost his wife, not Hamlet, who lost his father:

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/04601bd4-0036-4337-9cd3-077b53a09bd9

Revenge and razors. We can’t begin to measure the weight or significance of human loss. People carry loss with them variously throughout their lives, and for all his gruesome obsession, Vindice has been subject a past grief that has reshaped his world and his very being. Disappointments on such scale discourage us, sometimes leaving too much life still to live after our life has ended.

Then what of Shakespeare’s infamous villain, Iago, in the play Othello? He destroys the lives around him, fanning the fires of Othello’s insecurities and jealousy until they become a conflagration. In the opening scene, Iago tells Roderigo that, ” I follow [Othello] to serve my turn upon him” (O 1.1.41). He tells Roderigo that because Othello passed Iago over, giving Cassio a promotion in his stead, he will revenge himself upon the Moor. Iago later says, “I hate the Moor/ And it is thought abroad, that ‘twixt my sheets/ He has done my office” (O 1.3.385-7). Then, he immediately admits that he doesn’t know if this is true. Yet, these are his justifications for building and setting in motion his terribly destructive psychological machine.

That the Moor is racially different makes him the ultimate outsider, perhaps prone to self doubts that others might not have. Yet, Iago is an outsider too, with few real friends, distant even from his own wife, an aging ensign passed over for promotion.

In terms of the play, however, one of the most noted problems with Iago is that the reasons he gives for his destructive hatred of others seem to be wholly inadequate. Like that in a Victorian fairytale, the punishment he metes out to Othello seems disproportionate, brutal, and deadly in its finality. While deserving people are sometimes passed over for advancement, and while the slighted may seethe with resentment at their loss, seldom does it seem to merit prolonged psychological torture and murder. Iago’s purported grievance is not commensurate with his vengeance. He seems like a gunman at a festival or a public shooter in the United States, and we can’t help but wonder how Iago might have become this way.

If enough rain falls, we may become more like the rain. If hot sun beats down relentlessly, we may become gradually acclimated to the heat, and more susceptible to cold. Our surroundings may influence us to a degree, but still relatively few of us would begin to think seriously of gunning down strangers, mailing bombs in an attempt to kill distant recipients, or blowing up buildings full of unsuspecting strangers. These deliberations do not depend from the weather. These are not acts of precipitation. These seem much more like the results of the kind of slow poison that Iago pours into Othello’s ear throughout the play–the infection that eventually prompts Othello to murder his innocent wife, Desdemona, in their bed.

But where did Iago get this toxin with which he infects Othello? Where does such evil originate? Perhaps it is like the grain of sand that irritates the oyster. Once the sand is inside the mollusc’s shell, the animal famously secrets its nacre around the uncomfortable particle, smoothing its edges but also incrementally increasing its size so that the irritation increases as well. Eventually, layer upon layer, the grain of sand becomes a pearl–a wondrous sea gem, lustrous and vaguely luminescent.

Yet, the oyster is singular in its product. What galls humans seldom if ever produces the same kind of effect. People tend to store their poisons up, stacking their grievances like boxes in a dark warehouse, sometimes, too frequently, storing them like kegs of gunpowder, where they stand ready to ignite at the slightest spark.

There are hints that Iago may have been carrying poison inside him for a long period of time. His first line in the play opens with the curse “S’blood”, (an abbreviation for ‘God’s blood’) suggesting violence and a divine finality rolled into a single breath. The whole line is, “S’blood, but you’ll not hear me. If ever I did dream/ of such a matter, abhor me” (O 1.1.4-5). Although we don’t yet know what subject he’s discussing with Roderigo, already the line sounds like a lie. In fact, it sounds more than a little like the fox’s lie in Aesop’s fable. A overly cautious nonchalance seems to lurk beneath the syntax of “If ever I did dream”, and it chafes at credulity. The opening curse seems slightly too emphatic, perhaps a little too strongly stated for Iago’s protestation. Interestingly, the line also includes the core of “you’ll not hear me”, which prefigures Iago’s silence once the true extent of his villainy has been revealed at the end of the play.

Further, Iago seems more vexed with Othello’s choice for the lieutenant’s office–“a Florentine,/ A fellow almost damned in a fair wife/ That never set a squadron in the field/ Nor the division of a battle knows/ More than a spinster” (O 1.1.19-23). It is not Iago’s being “worth no worse a place” (10), but rather the man whom Othello has chosen in his stead that seems to bother him the most. If we listen carefully, we can hear the jealousy that infects Iago’s being. The same jealousy that blooms like toxic algae in the sea, to eventually inhabit the entire play. The jealousy that Iago plants in Othello’s mind has first been carefully cultivated inside Iago’s soul.

For in the end, the things we carry tend to be the traces of our lives. They might be termed scars, but they are unseen marks, most often left behind by some kind of wounding. A wound. A blessing (a word derived from the old English word for blood that was sprinkled on altars to consecrate them–offering God’s blood) . The words assume their older meanings, as over our lives we become the Fisher Kings and Queens, watching our childhood fields recede gradually from existence. In our mind’s eyes, we still see them, carpeted with the undulating pulses of fireflies in the growing dusk, ripples of light extending to the edges of the bygone woods. When we look behind us in the mirror, the great green walls of the Forest of Arden stand again for just a second. Then they are gone and we remember how quiet snow could be. Sound of birds at sunset.

Life repeatedly presents us with the strangeness of loss, the seeming madness of ongoing days in the face of emptiness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N3N1MlvVc4

It seems likely that Iago may enter the action of Othello already deeply wounded. Dripping his own blood on the altar of the play, swallowing his own poison like saliva, eating his own griefs as they eat him in return. His childhood birds have long since fled and blood itself has supplanted any god he might have had. His only trust lies in silence or prevarication. His only real remaining connection seems to be to audiences who are not of his own world, stretching across theatrical boundaries, reaching over barriers of art and fiction to reach observers whose very existence must seem to him like madness. His spirit, his being, has become a twist of cruel invention and he has become a poison unto himself.

Of course, he will die anyway, although not in our view. Desdemona and Emilia, the murdered wives, will haunt the audience enough, albeit perhaps Roderigo is a kind of murdered wife as well–a scarecrow murdered in the field before the gruesome feast. Trust breaks in all directions, and the brittle poison shatters in outward radiating cracks like Brabantio’s broken heart. Othello takes his own life and Iago alone is left to tell thee, except that he will not do so, having willed himself to perpetual silence. That’s the poison of swallowing our griefs, of keeping them too deeply within ourselves. We fall silent, stopping the language that Toni Morrison affirms “may be the measure of our lives.”

With language goes humanity, and this is the great tragedy in a world where literature becomes marginalised by profit motive. We stop studying poetry. We stop reading Shakespeare. We don’t produce or see it because there’s no real money in it. It matters not that, as Christopher Zoukis tells us, “Studying Shakespeare teaches complex language and literacy skills, critical thinking about human emotions and the consequences of choices, emotional intelligence, empathy, self-reflection and gives rise to the exploration of new ways of thinking.”***** Instead, we sacrifice our humanity for gain. We lose the ability to identify and participate in each other, and instead we begin to lament only lost sour grapes. We lose expression, and we lose meaning.

The voiceless reach out with violence in place of those words we no longer have. Our voices may become the voice of distrust, of prejudice, of weapons. Knives. Handguns. Assault rifles. Angry words of the frustrated and impotent turn blindly against our fellows. By the time we bang out those awful bloody cadences, true communication has long ago become impossible. Poison has eaten us whole and by participating only in that poison, we have become the poison that we may still believe we are somehow trying to prevent. Our own poison blinds us and we lose any ability to move forward in human ways. Only inhuman tools remain at hand–inhuman tools that we must moderate in order to save and support our collective humanity. In order to speak amongst ourselves.

How many more might choose a language beyond language to try to ease their pain? How many tomorrow? How many next week? How many children?

Then, how can we help? Only by taking the inhuman tools from our own bloodstained poisoned hands and sitting down to talk again. As painful as that may be, it will certainly be a better path than perpetuating and reinforcing the cup of poison in our hands, the one from which we all drink. We must set that cup down now. We must take up the cup of our common humanity before our own poison kills us all.

*In Erwin Schrödinger’s 1935 thought experiment about the cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor (e.g. Geiger counter) detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.

2*Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Aphorism 146.

3*Note that Genghis Khan invaded northern China in 1215, around the same time that the Magna Carta was signed in England. Wenxiang grew up amidst a terrifyingly shifting landscape of war and political uncertainty. Wenhsiang. Sleepless Nights: Verses for the Wakeful. Translated by Thomas F. Cleary. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995.

4*Kyd, Thomas, Anonymous, George Chapman, and Cyril Tourneur. Four Revenge Tragedies: The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, The Atheist’s Tragedy. Edited by Katharine Eisaman Maus. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008. Note that The Revenger’s Tragedy was previously attributed to Cyril Tourneur, but now is most frequently thought to have been written by Thomas Middleton. Katharine Maus’s collection designates the author as ‘anonymous’.

5*Christopher Zoukis’s article may be read here: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/prison-shakespeare-programs-have-dramatic-impact-on_b_58dc09d7e4b04ba4a5e25019