It doesn’t begin with Koyaanisqatsi*, but with hubris. Purples and pinks gone all frosted. Summer filling up with rain. Killing frosts on a way wrong end of August, warm Decembers, people freezing in the spring. Way too muddy for nine men’s morris.
Not that I don’t relish a good fight, but it can be gone far too shrill, and that’s for the both of them. Shrieking and beaming versus sullen sanctimony. Him fucking everything that moves. Her. . .well, who knows? Maybe.
As if any small bit, any fragment of mortality might mean anything. Wild carrots (Queen Anne’s lace–often amusingly confused with deadly hemlock) opening white umbrella tops at the forest edges. Mushrooms. Smell of damp earth. Fish spawning on the margent of the sea.
We were always tribal, like the mortals I’m guessin’. Us, all different batches, varied loaves, pulled from the oven. Braided, seeded, some smooth and golden, egg washed, shining like baby buttocks.
When I worked the houses, the villages, I liked the maidens especially. How they could act mother one way but amongst the sisters or with friends still act and think big wicked. That was my seein’. Hardly my frighting. Them at variance with themselves, scaring themselves silly with their own thoughts. Funny as all the hells to see, them scaring themselves far more than any shape I could assume.
Of course, I could only ‘see’ part of it, which he would point out endlessly. Drag that one out again and again. Hear him talk. He could see mermaids, leviathans, even gods. He could see where the arrows of the sky would fall, where faded traces of desire would bloom in flower fires. How many times we’ve heard that one.
Damnsome jam, but how he dances about that seeing, waving his gift as if the only one. As if it made him better. ‘King’. Uh, huh. ‘Captain’. Yeah, right. Still call it him if him it quiets, if him it happy makes. Panting after tall, pale girls. Short tough girls. Warrior girls. Mortals. His type.
See. Fair enough. But he can’t gothere. He watches from his invisible perch outside. Looking in a window at the action. Sad perverted voyeur and he doesn’t even know it. Watching those little slivers of life streaming away down the drain of existence like morning melted moonbeams.
What he can’t see though. Doesn’t see outweighs the see. Where he can’t go is walking, circling the globe, walking among them. Can’t know how desire plays out when embers burn away to ashes, when those dead tumble oh so less snug within their graves. Like a spaniel, she says, and so he takes her then and there. No, that’s not in the play. Both of them moaning and then her all smoothing clothes and him trotting never happened away. Neither of them mentioning it again. No one there to see it.
That’s a go-between’s job. More than just fetch flowers, and rub them soft as nightfall against the eyelids. Not just see the mortal fruit hanging on the bough, but taste that real mortal end of things all the way down to the bitter bottom of the cup. Seeing lillies in light gone far beyond the gilt. The guilt. Edges of the blossoms going brown and curling up. Not just seeing, but knowing. Knowing how their wanting feels to them. Blushing blossoms, love-wounded, purple fading quickly, mistress of boastful disappointment.
Racing to the grave. Fighting, breeding, disappearing. Soft rain in the night and mist by morning. Little scarecrows, soon enough stacked in boxes, weirdly buried near churches or in crossroads which I never understood. What damned good does it do? Them rising again to troop dissatisfied throughout the dark. Crumbling stone unnoticed. Pies untasted left upon the windowsill forever. Can’t eat the damned things now. Besides, it might stain the shroud. Oh, I can just hear it.
As though they had been made of fragile, vanishing stuff. Wanting. Dreams. Leaving not a rack behind. Fireflies. Ridiculous. Beautiful.
It’s not like that when you live forever, but there are different ways of understanding then too. Oh, I know what he be thinks, what they all think. When I dance as naked and proud, I don’t do silly robes or ringlets. No cheap ‘finery’ or pretense at formal aesthetic presentation. Dance purely as the stuff of life, as the expression of joy and nothing else. Yet, should we ever be like them, like those abbreviated trumpet flowers? An’ he thinks I’m a blunt. Lesser. Clock cog cream clot. Churn the maidens. Drop old women on their bums.
Doubt, for all his sport, he’s ever really seen a bum. His precious perception like an inkblot, focused on the ink alone, missing all the empty space around it. His space, his ‘Ma’**, remains just that, never meltin’ to Yohaku. Yohaku no bi.*** Missing forest for the trees, yes. Missing flowers for how brief they are. Missing the ephemeral because he doesn’t have to worry. Never thinking. Dismissive of the dead.
Whole dimensions gone from his sight. How that folding works–life folding into life–offspring, ‘issue’ related to but not the same as the original lovers. Each fold changing the original into something else. Passion fading into more fading. Vanishing succeeding vanishing, disappearing into the earth while still the worn trail glows just so in latening sunlight. Constantly darkling into autumn. Dead left behind but with them. Memory. Desire. Stirring together as April showers moisten roots anew, stirring shoots to new and wanton riots.
He can see what he likes. What he can. I prefer where I go. Being in being, not just in seeing. He lives at the edges of the world, the wood, the dawn, the moonlight. I know that eternal threshold, sweeping for ever present change, endless transition. Hobgoblins remains suspicious that anything or any aspect may be sacred, yet if there is something, it must lie in that.
*Hopi term for “unbalanced life” or life out of balance. Also a remarkable film directed by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by Philip Glass with cinematography by Ron Fricke.
**Japanese (間) – the space between things, the empty space that is carefully expressed in all forms of art ranging from painting and flower arranging to garden and landscape architecture.
***Japanese (余白の美) – the beauty of the void, relating to the blank or white space deliberately left in a painting, especially an ink wash painting. This painting of a Shrike on a Dead Tree by the famous swordsman, Miyamoto Musashi, is often cited as an example of the power of empty space. (Musashi, who lived from 1585 to 1645, was a contemporary of Shakespeare’s although their worlds almost certainly never intersected.)
A deal with the devil is always made in darkness, in silence. Even while talking in the brightest daylight, with hot noontime sun hammering down on us, in a crowd, or in the midst of commotion, the deal itself is always made in the inner landscape away from light or sound. The tempter, be it Christian devil or Buddhist demon, written words, or seductive popular opinion, in the simple damnation of everyday suffering that tempter only reaches out a hand, offering a choice. We may choose to take the hand or turn away, but if we grasp that extended hand, clasping happens deep within the quietest places in ourselves, where tendrils of emotion and instinct wind away from our conscious existence, extending into the primal roots of collective humanity.
Not that there are not sometimes complications or extenuating circumstances. In the Confessions of the Forfar Witches of 1888, Joseph Anderson tells us that, after her arrest for witchcraft in Edinburgh in 1671, Kethren Portour offered an excuse for finding herself in the devil’s presence:
“Kethren Portour was a blind woman who confessed to having met the devil in the company of two other women. In her confession, she repeatedly emphasized her desire to leave her companions and their associate but was unable to walk away due to her disability. ”
Anderson further notes that “While Kethren laid the blame on her female companions, she also confessed herself to having been “a great banner and a terrible curser, and a very wicked woman’ in her life.“*
Albeit it may seem that in 1671 more people may have met the devil as an actual figure, someone passing in the street or in the forest. But we are always meeting the devil really. Ah, the wicked world (or perhaps that is the merely the wickedness of humankind). Angus Graham, in his book Disputers of the Tao, points out that much of the debate in classical Chinese philosophy (roughly supposed to have expanded greatly from 500 BCE to 221 CE) focused on how to rule, but that the underlying argument was about the moral nature of humanity. At base, were people naturally good, bad, or were they basically good (for example) but also very easily misled?
We always want something. Need something. But does that make us bad? We want to live longer, writer better, make perfect music, have an ideal lover, or be wealthier. On and on the list thunders just beneath the threshold of our hearing, while our spirit listens to the inaudible din. Our physical selves may hear nothing, but that is unimportant.
Rudolpho Anaya writes:
The body is not important. It is made of dust; it is made of ashes. It is food for the worms. The winds and the waters dissolve it and scatter it to the four corners of the earth. In the end, what we care most for lasts only a brief lifetime, then there is eternity. Time forever. Millions of worlds are born, evolve, and pass away into nebulous, unmeasured skies; and there is still eternity. Time always. The body becomes dust and trees and exploding fire, it becomes gaseous and disappears, and still there is eternity. Silent, unopposed, brooding, forever… But the soul survives. The soul lives on forever. It is the soul that must be saved, because the soul endures.**
Yet, that turning point. Ahab seeking the whale even at the great expense of others. Dorian Gray rejects the Shakespearean actress out of hubris, precipitating her suicide and his own descent into increased debauchery and crime. When we seek what we want most in ways that cause others to come to harm, then we alter not only our own threads of fate, but so many others.
Rudolpho Anaya’s curandera character, Ultima, speaks of “the rules that guide the interference with any man’s destiny”, and in that character’s transgression–as she breaks the rules of destiny to save a man’s life–Anaya illustrates how intertwined we all are. Perhaps Clarence, the angel in Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life, says it best:
We damage our own souls, our own selves, by figuratively or literally damning helter skelter, left and right, all about us as we trudge through life. We judge others, curse at them, betray their confidences and tell their sins to others. Sometimes, we do these things while halfway convincing ourselves that we are somehow doing right or good.
Should whistleblowers alert the public to corporate or government wrongdoing? Absolutely. Should we individually judge and punish others for their transgressions? Doing so may start us on a precarious path to damnation. We may spend subsequent decades mopping up, damning ourselves for our own transgressions, lonely as the houses on our little street scream and then fall asleep.
Long ago, after a long day of difficult battles, two soldiers found themselves heading home across a desolate heath. Covered in mud and blood, they worked their way across a barren landscape when suddenly three witches appeared to them. The witches spoke to them and told them things, offering information.
Macbeth is often seen as being trapped in some kind of web of constraint (and it is notable that this web is suspiciously female). Shakespeare was hardly above being sexist. On the contrary. But to blame the witches (and perhaps Lady Macbeth’s ambitions) for Macbeth’s fate also seems reductionist and simplistic.
When the witches say “the charm’s wound up”, it doesn’t seem to mean that they’ve made Macbeth’s choice for him. As is often noted, the word choice suggests the threads of fate tended by the three norns, the fates (sometimes in mythology personified by a maiden, a matron, and a crone) who spin, measure, and cut the threads of human destiny:
Norns Spinning, by Arthur Rackham***
Yet, Macbeth himself says “If chance will have me king, then chance may crown me without my stir.” Then he does stir. He grasps the hand of the devil and goes ahead and murders Duncan anyway.
The point is that he sees it. He knows it ahead of time. But in the fevered moment of decision, he grasps the vision of the dagger from the air, reaching for the bloodied instrument offered to him and embracing it in his decision. “I go and it is done; the bell invites me.” Simple words. Simple choice seemingly simply made. Yet it is those words and their accompanying choice, determine Macbeth’s fate more than any witches may do.
Banquo’s less ambitious contrast remains important as well. There is no indication of Banquo pushing for his son, Fleance, to be heir to the throne. He does not push the wheel of fate, urging it to turn one way or another. His prophecy is fulfilled without his stir.
So is it all preordained? Again, Macbeth’s choice, his “I go” moment, suggests that it is not. Otherwise why would such a moment be written into the play at all? As for the Wyrd Sisters, they seem terrible, throwing awful things into a cauldron, selfishly cursing people for refusing to share chestnuts. They apparently deal in life and death constantly, and possibly eternally. A “finger of birth-strangled babe” is nothing to them. It is only another flicker in the constant parade of fated shadows that dance incessantly against the walls of their perception. Who knows how such eternal beings might perceive human activity and the passages of human fate? A longer, perhaps immortal outlook might obliterate kindness in the end, replacing it with a twofold attention, split between the eternal and the momentary with little room for anything in between those two extremes.
The witches’ existence is hardly to be envied, not only because they are ugly or cruel. Rather, they suggest the natural end of Macbeth’s path, what Dorian Gray’s picture of his inner self has become. In seeking to interfere with human fate, to intervene in selfish ways that lay wholesale waste to others, shaping or cutting their threads indiscriminately, our own thread becomes twisted, knotted, and unfit for further weaving, eventually causing defects in the fabric of human existence. In the Harry Potter books, it isn’t Voldemort’s evil quest to dominate the world that sets his downfall in motion. It is the murders that he commits in order to work the dark magic of splitting his soul so that he might always live forever.
Better than being wealthy, beautiful, being king or queen, being all powerful, or living forever might be living in harmony. Sounds terribly clichéd, doesn’t it? Yet, it may be in those contact points, the points where our lives and our fates touch those of others, where salvation or damnation lie. At each turn in life, each day, some or other tempting hand reaches out for ours. Do we take it? And where will it lead if we do?
*Anderson, Joseph. 1888. “The Confessions of the Forfar Witches (1661), from the Original Documents in the Society’s Library”. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 22 (November), 241-62. http://journals.socantscot.org/index.php/psas/article/view/6265.
In Shakespeare’s sonnet 63, human decay becomes something of a journey through time:
Against my love shall be as I am now, With Time’s injurious hand crushed and o’erworn; When hours have drained his blood and filled his brow With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn Hath travelled on to age’s steepy night; And all those beauties whereof now he’s king Are vanishing, or vanished out of sight, Stealing away the treasure of his spring; For such a time do I now fortify Against confounding age’s cruel knife, That he shall never cut from memory My sweet love’s beauty, though my lover’s life: His beauty shall in these black lines be seen, And they shall live, and he in them still green.
Inevitable as the erosion is, the subject is envisioned as having “travelled on to age’s steepy night”, on a journey, as it were, to the river’s end. And the end is known, even if particular details and individual tributaries along the way remain unseen. The “king” of the youthful “beauties” will fall victim to a time that will “[steal] away the treasure of his spring”, as his life eventually falls under “age’s cruel knife”. The poet contrives to immortalise his “sweet love’s beauty” in the lines of the sonnet so that it will endure after his love’s death.
Frankly, it seems a cold comfort. Similar kinds of dedications were popular in Shakespeare’s day, but it is notable that the lines spend more time describing how time and age will ruin the lover’s beauty, than they do describing that beauty. “His beauty shall in these black lines be seen. . .” where, exactly? Does this durability, this denial of death, lie merely in the fact that lines have been set down in defiance of beauty’s inevitable loss? Can lost beauty be perceived in the understanding that the lines themselves were set down to “fortify” against its loss? Dependence on the durability of something as ephemeral as paper or parchment and ink seems like a poor fortification indeed. Yes, we read these lines now, albeit countless other such dedications have almost certainly been lost to time, but we have no idea about the lover’s actual beauty, only that someone once found him beautiful enough to write about it.
In one sense, it is only our very limited participation in that lover’s beauty, a participation removed both by time and by perception from that lover’s actual beauty, that gives us any sense of it. The beauty itself reaches us as a kind of ghost, if even that. Any beauty that the lover had has been filtered by the poet’s perception, by his expression, by the medium in which he set it down and which was subsequently edited, going through however many hands before being published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609. And the time since 1609 has filtered the sonnet as well, as our understandings and perceptions today cannot be assumed to be identical to those of Shakespeare’s day.
In the end, the poet’s efforts seem to result in only a partial victory against death and time. Hamlet’s list of things that keep one from committing suicide comes to mind:
To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Again, it comes down to a mutual participation, and this is a mutual participation (or anticipation) that keeps us from embracing death. It’s those dreams. Not that they just come to us, but that we will be likely to participate in them somehow, in ways that seem to matter more, and seem potentially far more unpleasant, than merely watching them might be.
Yet, Hamlet’s perspective, his hesitation, is hardly the only view of death. In The Tempest, when Ferdinand thinks his father has died in a shipwreck, the spirit Ariel sings:
Full fathom five thy father lies.
Of his bones are coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
(Then the spirits chime in: Ding Dong! Ding Dong bell!)
Although Ferdinand’s father has not really died, this vision reflects a kind of wondrous transformation–a view of death that is transformative and transcendent. Yet, the transformation is still something that happens to Ferdinand’s father in the song. He does not seem to participate in it actively, at least not as far as we can tell.
Not that death can’t be something in which we actively participate. The last part of Tom Waits’ song “Shiver Me Timbers” suggests the possibility of becoming part of the process of goodbye:
And please call my missus Tell her not to cry My goodbye is written By the moon in the sky And nobody knows me I can’t fathom my stayin’ And shiver me timbers I’m a-sailin’ away
And the fog’s liftin’ And the sand’s shiftin’ And I’m driftin’ on out Ol’ Captain Ahab He ain’t got nothin’ on me So come on and swallow me, don’t follow me I travel alone Blue water’s my daughter And I’m skippin’ like a stone
And I’m leavin’ my family And I’m leavin’ my friends My body’s at home But my heart’s in the wind Where the clouds are like headlines On a new front page sky And shiver me timbers I’m a-sailin’ away
Some read this song as a parting, a farewell, a goodbye song, and it is, but it also suggests more than that–a leaving that might be more permanent. Whether you take the song more literally or figuratively depends on your perspective.*
Carlos Castañeda extends the metaphor. He records the words of his teacher, the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan Matus:
Death is our eternal companion. It is always on our left, at an arm’s length. Death is the only wise advisor that we have. Whenever you feel, as you always do, that everything is going wrong and you’re about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you’re wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch.
Here, death is more than the relief from the vicissitudes of life that Hamlet seeks. Death is a “friend”, perhaps bringing to mind the green fields that Falstaff speaks of at the end of his life, or perhaps it is more like the sleep that Hamlet and Robert Frost envision at the end of life.**
In As You Like It, after meeting a fool in the forest of Arden, the melancholic Jacques takes delight not as much in the fool’s wit, as in the fool’s observation, “And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,/ And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;/ And thereby hangs a tale.” (2.7.26-28). Time the friend. Time the foe. Steadily giving and taking away. At once paying and robbing us. Apparently, Jacques is simply one of those people who loves the depressive shit best.
If we believe the Yaqui sorcerer, maybe death is exactly as Jim Morrison described it:
This is the end Beautiful friend This is the end My only friend, the end
It hurts to set you free But you’ll never follow me The end of laughter and soft lies The end of nights we tried to die This is the end***
Just as Shakespeare’s sonnet suggests, although we may preserve something in the lines of our work, in the end all that we save or capture may be the mere record of our attempt to preserve something that remains beyond our ability to save, in the face of something against which we have no real power at all.
*Tom Waits’ “Shiver Me Timbers” may be heard here:
***Morrison’s “The End” (a famously long song–the Youtube version is combined with overwritten verse from Requiem auf einer Stele by Federico Federici) may be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GczoK62lsVY
**TRIGGER WARNING** Because I know that some of my readers may be sensitive to such things, this is a warning to sensitive individuals that the following post contains images of extreme violence, and some discussion of the same.
When we see powerful contenders meet, Titus and Tamora in Titus Andronicus, for example, or Coriolanus and Aufidius in Coriolanus, we can often feel the struggle beneath the skin. If scenes are written well, directed well, played well, the character tension becomes almost palpable.
Here’s a scene with Coriolanus, recently banished from Rome, meeting his enemy, Aufidius (who is general of the Volscians against whom Coriolanus has fought many times):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSQOdP56W-Q
Tom Hiddleston as Caius Martius Coriolanus and Hadley Fraser as Aufidius
When taken a bit out of context of the production like this, Aufidius’ almost giddy enthusiasm when receiving his old enemy feels uncomfortable. It may very well be meant to do so, as there is much in this play to make the audience uncomfortable. Relationships stand on the same kind of shifting sand as allegiances, reputations, and popular opinions.
Yet, one of the interesting choices about this scene is the kiss. Not just that it seems sudden and perhaps almost intrusively familiar, but it also reflects, as Shakespeare is often wont to do, the parallels between war or human struggle and intimacy. The kiss between Coriolanus and Aufidius may also bring to mind another kiss:
Glenn Carter as Jesus and Jérôme Pradon as Judas Iscariot
Granted, these are both productions with deliberate choices, but the kiss remains striking in both, reflecting the enormous vulnerability inherent in intimate interaction. Of course, in the Bible, Judas does betray Christ with a kiss, “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Humanity with a kiss?” (Luke 22:48). Not that the intimacy must be a kiss per se. When Delilah discovers that Samson’s long hair is the source of his strength, she coaxes him to fall asleep in her lap, and then urges the servants to cut his hair as he sleeps.
In Othello, Iago infiltrates Othello’s mind so that his poisonous influence becomes promiscuous with Othello’s psyche. In this clip from Orson Welles’ classic film, Welles cinematically illustrates Iago’s increasing intrusion into and growing presence within Othello’s mind. This clip includes some of the film’s proliferation of spider web imagery and the moment where Othello’s mind becomes (literally) an unsteady reflection of the poison that Iago speaks:
(Orson Welles as Othello and Micheàl MacLiammóir as Iago–which I hope readers can access, because TCM is persnickety about letting me imbed their clip here.)*
Playwrights and filmmakers readily grasp how intimate persuasion can be–and effective productions seldom miss the opportunity to underscore the parallels between sexual intercourse and penetrating another person’s mind, as we see in Justin Kurzel’s painterly Macbeth from 2015:
Michael Fassbender as Macbeth and Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth
The heightened intimacy of the scene is a production choice here, of course. When staged, the scene too often takes on more of a lecture quality, which arguably might be a less viscerally immediate choice.
Of course, people tend to engage with each other in so many acts that either are, or border on, the physically and the psychologically intimate. Here’s a clip with a trigger warning. If you are squeamish about murder and blood (a lot of blood), I advise you to avoid watching the following clip from Sweeney Todd. But it does highlight the intimacy of a shave:
Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd and Alan Rickman as Judge Turpin**
The death scenes from recent versions of Coriolanus, also depict this intimacy:
Ralph Fiennes as Coriolanus and Gerard Butler as Aufidius
Although the Sweeney Todd sequence may be paralleled in this bloody Coriolanus death scene, again with Hiddleston and Fraser:
https://vimeo.com/243738291
Tom Hiddleston as Coriolanus and Hadley Fraser as Aufidius
So frequently in narrative does the human struggle between good and evil lie in intimate contact with others, that it becomes a kind of super trope, whether that contact be physical, emotional, psychological, or magical force. The struggles of intimacy mark the collective human struggles with ourselves for the future of the world:
Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter and Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort
Intimate moments present a kind of sword of Damocles, perching on a ridge of human emotional and psychological topography that runs between vulnerability and power (or even abusive domination, as the case may be in many of these clips). The truth of our humanity lies in how we conduct ourselves in our moments of intimacy, how we exercise any accompanying power we may perceive, or how we may decline to abuse the vulnerability that others may offer to us. In the best cases, of course, intimacy strengthens us. Human connection lends us strength and support that may allow us to further our place and the place of others in the world. Yet, as the stories repeatedly remind us, intimacy also places us at the mercy of others, and those moments sit upon a knife’s edge, offering a strange and sometimes final evaluation of our past crimes and of our very existence.
(In light of the illustrative moments above, one can envision Trump singing a dark duet with Putin, Kim Jong Un, perhaps with Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, and various figures from the United States Congressional right and left as a kind of deranged chorus, with the climate changing world dissolving around us all. Will someone please write this?)
Here’s a famous poem by W. H. Auden, with the landscape he describes, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, below it:
Musee des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
XIR3675 Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1555 (oil on canvas) by Bruegel, Pieter the Elder (c.1525-69); 73.5×112 cm; Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium; (add.info.: Icarus seen with his legs thrashing in the sea;); Giraudon; Flemish, out of copyright.
As Zhuangzi said, “The tip of an autumn hair is large and Mount Tai is small.” Hamlet’s perspective again says that “There’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” Perspective may make or unmake our experience. Disasters that loom monumentally before us, conflagrations in our lives, may be, to our neighbours, only a distant sound of closing windows. We may doze blissfully on a porch surrounded by blooming lilacs, ham sandwich half consumed, lemonade sweating on the small circle table, while next door someone buries in their cellar a body knocked down in a desperate quarrel of which we may remain forever unaware. Fires burn in Sweden or Australia, while in northern Arizona, stars turn like diamonds above a dark horizon and a waxing moon silvers the tips of shadowed pines. In politics, inflexible fascistic blowhards may rant and rave while children are abused in dark cages on some or other border, and still some MPs take their tea as usual in the midst of stretching afternoons. Next time, perhaps, a bit less cream cheese with the cucumber.
All the tempests of social media, emperors of ice cream, dog days and holidays of our childhoods become distance and memory. “Ou sont les neiges d’antan?”* The confluence brings to mind the peculiar qualities of memory itself. All that we carry with us, and all we leave behind us when we go, memory is also fallible, malleable, and subject to the corruption of the time through which it endures.
Both individually and collectively, we record things in order to remember them, and yet so many of the records of classical Greece and Rome were lost in the Middle Ages that we still wonder at the snippets of what we have. In some ways, Time is a great clothes dryer, and socks disappear within it, along with pieces of our cultural memory, sometimes vanishing into the “lost” state–that place from which nothing returns. (Or, once in a while, when enough time has passed to render the lost article useless by virtue of a vanished cultural milieu, it may surface again as a curious artifact.)
Still, memory has a strange way of mixing with experience sometimes. As T.S. Eliot notes in “The Wasteland”:
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers.**
Our memories offer unwittingly blended ideas of a perfect summer day, an afternoon or evening we remember so clearly, with people, events, and places now perhaps long gone. We long for these highpoints, or moments of joy or ecstasy like those we can recall. Yet that garden, those blossoms, and the profusion of green around them, the droning bees, the buzzing cicadas from the windblown trees, all these things have gone. Cicadas, crickets, bees, and blossoms will come again, and there may well be other days nearly as fine, but they will not be, cannot be, identical to that one exalted day that we walked with a loved one on the beach. That day, the particular day where the storm blew in and we sheltered from a sudden downpour beneath an overhanging hedge, perhaps stealing kisses with rain falling around us–that day is lost completely to us now except as memory.
Of course, part of the richness in life’s proverbial tapestry derives from these moments and their ephemerality, and our inner existence seems to touch on it constantly. Right now, for instance, there’s a ‘meme’ circulating in Shakespeare and early modern literature/drama circles on social media. It asks people to answer the following:
SHAKESPEARE PLAY I HATE: SHAKESPEARE PLAY I THINK IS OVERRATED: SHAKESPEARE PLAY I THINK IS UNDERRATED: SHAKESPEARE PLAY I LOVE: SHAKESPEARE PLAY I CHERISH: SHAKESPEARE PLAY I COULD SEE AGAIN AND AGAIN: SHAKESPEARE PLAY I STILL WANT TO DO: SHAKESPEARE PLAY THAT MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE PLAY THAT CHANGED MY LIFE: GUILTY PLEASURE: SHAKESPEARE PLAY I SHOULD HAVE SEEN BUT HAVE NOT:
The person answers these (or early modern or other dramatic variants of this list) and their friends and colleagues gain the kind of insight that goes along the lines of: I had no idea! No idea that you liked or didn’t like that specific play! Of course, this touches on time too, and very obviously, with ideas like the play “that changed my life”, or the “play that made me fall in love” with Shakespeare. It is also interesting to this particular group of scholars as a social bridge between them, because the answers suggest those with whom they might be most aligned in terms of scholarly perspective.
I’m not going to fill in my own answers here, partly because of that first question. I really don’t hate any of the plays. I have favourites, naturally, but all of them teach me things and show me things, and I have seen some excellent productions of even those plays that I do not care to read or watch as much as others.
In some ways, I am as interested in this prompt list itself as I am in the answers people give, partly because the prompts ask for a reflective summary that would usually come from a long and deep familiarity with, and association with, Shakespeare’s plays. I am also interested in the way that we seem, collectively, to want to share; we want to tell others what we know, what we think, and how we feel. We want to communicate about our experience with Shakespeare, which partly suggests the communal spirit that lies at the heart of Shakespearean study and practice. The whole exercise suggests what social beings Shakespeareans (scholars and dramatic practitioners) may be.
When people note that they think that Taming of the Shrew, or Hamlet, or As You Like It is overrated (all responses I have seen), they are usually joined by a small chorus agreement in response. Yes, Hamlet may frequently be a palpable hit for theatre companies thinking of mounting a Shakespeare production, but the central character’s hesitation, and his inappropriately brutal treatment of Ophelia can also consign him to the rubbish heap of whiny failure in the back corridors of wannabe heroes. That his character’s inconsistencies resonate with a play that is itself full of such nonconformity seems beside the point. For example that Hamlet speaks of death as “The undiscovered country from whose bourn/ No traveler returns” seems distinctly odd when much of the crux of the play depends on Hamlet’s conversations with his father’s ghost. (Nope. No one ever comes back from the dead. What? Oh, yeah. Except for that guy! But except for Dad, no one.)
My own idea about Hamlet is that such character and circumstantial disconnects may be part of the play’s point. Not only is the time out of joint, but everything is out of joint. The potential for, or even the thought of any real internal consistency has been wiped away by a regicide that cracks Denmark’s very foundations–leaving the country silently grieving for her ruler as a kind of mute twin to Hamlet’s more strident antic disposition. Grief seems to be everywhere, and is everywhere ignored. The strange third person recounting of Ophelia’s death by Gertrude induces a subtle feeling of forced perspective, with more than a little suggestion of detachment. Time shifts, people shift, even the main character shifts as though we had been transported to a ghostly realm as soon as the strange fear grips us with “Who’s there?” at the beginning of the play.
Not that this opener isn’t a question of identity within the fabric of the drama (as is so often suggested), but it is also a question of foundation. Who is out there in this cold, dark world? Who’s on the throne? Who’s driving the car? Where are we headed and why am I in this handcart? We are surrounded by uncertainty. Are we on earth, in limbo, or in hell? “Why this is hell nor am I out of it” Mephistopheles tells us at the beginning of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, but only the devil seems to know the location with certainty. In Hamlet, the earth and all its attendant realms have become unsure, inconstant, and Hamlet (and everyone else) is left to grope through this strange new world–much in the way that the suffering that accompanies great grief in life may unhinge our world in such a way as to make it suddenly hang poorly in its frame, swing differently through the air, and how that world door may or may not finally close may be anyone’s guess.
This unhinging of the world is often reflected in the mind and soul such as those may be. Grief. Suffering. These can be, and often are, quiet and private antic dispositions. Still, they are no less cataclysmic for their subtlety. Persistent and relentless, the feelings pursue us like a father’s ghost–reminding us of our almost blunted purpose at odd times throughout our lives. We do not leave hell even when the exterior remains calm. Suffering is like coal seam fires beneath the earth, which are almost impossible to extinguish and, once burning, may burn for years. The ghost town of Centralia, Pennsylvania was emptied out by a coal seam fire which has been burning continuously beneath the town since 1962. Fires may erupt almost anywhere and buildings may suddenly be engulfed in flames that vanish again after said structure has burned to the ground.
Suffering has this strange quality too. In one sense, the individual suffering remains small in the life of the greater world, which hardly even seems to notice a man falling into the sea, or the internal, distracting ravages of loss or sorrow. Tiny houses on a ridge, distant, distant, high above a river or the sea in a classical Asian landscape drawn in ink. One of these burning might only trail a faint ink wash of smoke against an otherwise variable sky.
On the other hand, in our own homes/spirits/psyches, the fire may smoulder with such deep intensity that it gradually deforms the landscape, collapsing thought and emotion until that landscape transforms with deformation. Other effects may be telegraphed by sudden bouts of sobbing, or the adoption of previously uncharacteristic behaviour as the clearest reflection of the new and sudden violence in the mind. We are left with a strange, mismatched motley coat of character, or of being. The mind may lie quietly within a pall of dark smoke, only to burst forth at strange moments with tendrils of flame that reach out to scorch any and all within scope.
All the while, others pass us in the street, and we smile and nod and tip our hat. Or we do not. We answer, “fine” or “pretty well” when asked how we are doing. Or we do not. We head home as soon as we may safely do so, and we avoid the news as much as we can. If we’re lucky, it’s a little quieter there, perhaps cool and calm, and we may sit back, grateful, and momentarily at rest. Pieces fall out of our sky and we hardly notice. Perhaps we drink a beer, or have tea. Maybe there’s a leftover cucumber sandwich.
In the end, we are part of that mass of men and women described in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, leading “lives of quiet desperation.’ Quiet is the key word. We are legion: ships sailing calmly on, sky raining fire around us, earth beneath a relentlessly placid sun. We are ploughmen, we are cliffs and sky and wings of wax, softening beyond the edge of usefulness, almost drifting softly into the sea’s embrace. The day looking off towards the approaching invisible edge of evening, and the afternoon around us like subterranean fires that incessantly drive us to our own distraction. Suffering has so many colours, textures, variants, but even when seemingly carried with some modicum of what people collectively think of as dignity, marks a boundary–a border between the person that was and the person becoming.
Yes, in one sense that is life. But in another, deep suffering alters the inner topography. Where Hamlet’s journey began before he encountered his father’s ghost, the play is bounded with ghosts, certainly. At one end, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and at the other end Hamlet’s own. In the middle, Ophelia’s wraith comes to us as a body in funeral wrappings, present enough without standing, without making any pronouncements, as suffering may be always present. It need not be housed in a churchyard. Lying on a pantry shelf (this was my mother’s favourite recipe), or in a back room of our memory, the ghosts come calling, the fire keeps burning. We may turn away, but it never really turns away from us, even as the ship sails onward.
*François Villon, “Ballade des dames du temps jadis”. The poem’s title translates as “Ballad of the ladies of bygone times”, and the line above is almost always translated as “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”
**T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”, from I. The Burial of the Dead. Eliot dedicated The Wasteland to Ezra Pound, to whom he referred as “Il Miglior Fabbro” (the mightier maker or fabricator–albeit “fabbro” is most often translated as craftsman).
Late in the day, we get to the heath, and there are witches in the air, which hangs so foul and filthy over the land.
Have you ever seen so fair and foul a day?
No. And we are breathing that. Breathing it! And who knows what those damned witches have been doing in that air? W.C. Fields always claimed he wouldn’t drink water, because of all the disgusting things that fish do in it. Well, you can imagine witches. Right in the air you’re breathing! It’s appalling actually.
Is that even what these flying things are? Witches?
Well, they’re not fish!
Witches then.
Are they really witches, d’you think?
Yeah. Those are witches.
But they’ve got beards!
Who died and made you the authority on witches then? Like witches can’t have beards? Besides, how in hell should I know? Like I’ve seen witches so many times before now! But, I mean, they’ve got to be, don’t they? Long noses and chins. Wearing black.
You’re wearing black and you’re not a witch. Are you?
Stop that!
Just pointing it out.
Besides, they have brooms. And those pointy hats. That’s proper witch stuff.
They could be birthday hats. It could be a birthday.
Whose then?
Uh…William Shakespeare’s?
How would you know? How would anyone know? There’s no record.
Well, there’s a baptismal record…
That’s not a birth. It’s a baptism. Get off it! Those are witch hats.
The thick air practically hums with them, zinging like bees through this ragged soup. Swear to God, the air looks just like ragged soup!
What does that even mean?!? Wtf does ‘ragged soup’ look like anyway?
Like that! And we’re still breathing it. Damned King Duncan! Reducing air quality regulation.
Oh, it’s easy to blame him. Who left the watch fire smouldering this morning?
It was a battle! There wasn’t time! Quick! Act nonchalant because three of them are walking this way.
Just how do you “quick act nonchalant” I’d like to know?
Stop it! Eeethray itchesway! Alkingway this way!
Three witches?!? Walking what way? You call that walking? Shambling maybe. Stumbling. Creeping. Not walking. Certainly not walking. Oh, my God! I think you’re right! I think they’re coming over here!
And they are calling out. All hail, they say. Hail, hail, hail. All hail Macbeth!
Is that what they said? What the hell does that even mean? How the f— can you understand any of that? They’re just mumbling! Thought they said something about stale breath. Sudden death? Cooking meth?
Will you shut up and pay attention?!? They said Thane of Cawdor!
But that dude’s alive. Doing well.
Well, they didn’t say he was dead. Oh, wait! They said I was Thane of Cawdor. And then King.
Get outta here! They did not!
Did too!
Did not!
Then what did they say?
How the hell should I know? But if you’re Thane of Cawdor then he would have to be dead, and he’s not! All this zinging! Flying witches everywhere! And what is that on your shoulder?
It’s rosemary. Supposed to keep witches away.
Hmmm. That works well, doesn’t it?
They said I was going to be King.
Like Elvis?
No, hereafter.
What about me then? Here I was thinking that had done pretty well. That today’s battle might be bankable. Whoa! They really aren’t pleasant up close, you know?
Pay attention.
Not so happy, yet happier what? So, you’ll be king and I won’t be king. Doesn’t do me a lot of good, does it?
But you’ll beget kings, they said.
Beget?
Sire.
You’re not king yet. And even if you were to be king, I’m never calling you ‘sire’!
I meant…you’ll sire kings.
How many?
I dunno. A whole bunch of them. Sacks of them. Hatfulls.
Those little pointy hats wouldn’t hold very many kings.
Will you stop?
Oh. And now they’ve gone. Pop! Like bubbles of the earth.
Can we just get out of here please? I’m so hungry that I’d actually kill you for a beer and a sandwich.
Yeah. I think there’s a castle just over this hill with a decent tea room. Pretty good reputation for lunch too.
Okay. I’d say ‘lead on’ but that would be silly.
Let’s just go eat. Damned witches! They get everywhere!
This post goes out to my colleagues and comrades at the Shakespeare Association of America Conference in Washington D.C. (happening right now) in the hopes that you will all drink deeply of the collective knowledge offered there, and that you will drink responsibly otherwise. Difficult to imagine a group that is simultaneously as sage and as lost, and I mean both of those things in the best possible way. I raise a toast to all of you and salute you for your tireless work, and your ongoing contributions both within and beyond the field.
This week’s post was more difficult to write. Several things have been in the works, but perhaps due to my father’s sudden death a couple of weeks ago, or perhaps due to some unseen shift in the cosmos, the post for this week simply didn’t want to come together. This happens sometimes. Ask anyone who writes. Some nights the moonlight slants down just so and we must go running across that moonlit field instead of sitting at the desk. Some nights the crickets herald the coming summer with such subtle power that it almost drives us mad.
Yet, for this week, here is a verse my father loved:
There is something about a Martini, A tingle remarkably pleasant; A yellow, a mellow Martini; I wish I had one at present. There is something about a Martini, Ere the dining and dancing begin, And to tell you the truth, It is not the vermouth— I think that perhaps it’s the gin.
A Drink With Something In It — Ogden Nash**
We won’t go into the potential hazards of drinking to excess here, but a gentle drink (and that can be sarsaparilla, for those who don’t drink alcohol) can offer a cooling respite in the course of, or at the end of, a long day. Drinking may make peace or trouble, be opener or closer in negotiations, or may simply refresh us, in both body and spirit, and there are more witty sayings about drinking than there are about almost any other human activity except one.
For whatever reason people may drink alcohol, it seems to bring out the innate hyperbole in our character. Shakespeare’s Rosalind (while disguised as a male) tells the attentive Phoebe, “I pray you, do not fall in love with me,/ For I am falser than vows made in wine” (As You Like It, 3.5). As the wise Porter tells us in Macbeth, alcoholic drink “provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance” (Macbeth 2.3).
Amorous considerations aside, drink has more general implications in life. Oscar Wilde famously said that “Work is the curse of the drinking classes”. Earnest Hemingway said, “I drink to make other people more interesting”, and Yeats lamented that “The problem with some people is that when they aren’t drunk, they’re sober.” Even those of us who don’t drink often seek to enhance certain aspects of our lives. No argument that walks in the countryside, exercise, meditation, communion with like minded others, and yogic practice may offer similar kinds of alterations, but for so many, drinking seems to be a much faster way to get there.
One personal favourite artistic drinking depiction comes from the motion picture The Quiet Man, which, if you haven’t seen, I highly recommend. Without spoiling the story, there is a moment where two men have been fighting each other all afternoon, in a kind of epic battle that the whole county has been anticipating. The epic fist fight ranges across the countryside until they mutually decide to take a short break at the pub before resuming their brawl. Here are Victor Mclaglen and John Wayne**:
Just a reminder that, if you do drink, it’s good to keep it civil. Not that arguments over literary points may not be hotly contested, but I’m grateful that they don’t usually come to fisticuffs. If I have any advice, it is to have fun out there and be gentle with each other.
***Both John Wayne and Victor McLaglen were Academy Award Winners, John Wayne won a Best Actor award for his performance in True Grit in 1970, and Victor McLaglen won a Best Actor award for his performance in The Informer in 1935.
In A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor wonders “How could the famous stage direction–‘The Coast of Bohemia’–have ever slipped from Shakespeare’s pen?”* Because Bohemia is an ancient landlocked kingdom (now occupying the westernmost part of the Czech Republic), and because it does not border on the sea, it has no ‘coast’ at all. Was Shakespeare’s geography wrong? As Fermor asks, “How could Shakespeare have thought that her kingdom was on the sea?”
Eventually, Fermor sensibly concludes that “‘Coast’ must have originally meant ‘side’ or ‘edge,’ not necessarily connected with ‘sea’ at all.”** . Fermor, walking his way from the Netherlands to Constantinople, and spending this portion of his walk along the the edge of the thick forest, thinks, “Perhaps this very path was the Coast of Bohemia–at any rate, the Coast of the Forest: near enough!”***
People tend to defend those whom they hold in high esteem, and somehow, we don’t want Shakespeare to have been wrong. Our treasured memory of our father or grandfather, our mother or grandmother, often cannot admit mistake that might indicate mere mortal fallibility. Shakespeare must have had some reason for writing that stage direction in The Winter’s Tale. Mustn’t he? Certainly he can’t have been wrong.
Leaving aside the ‘what if he had been wrong?’ argument, and setting Fermor’s fine conclusions aside as well, let’s look at the idea of a ‘Coast of Bohemia’ in the context of the play, because only by anchoring these items in their contextual literary seabed does anything begin to make sense.
First, begin with the title of the play: The Winter’s Tale. What does this title mean? We know this much, that a tale told in winter was traditionally a fanciful tale by a fireside, a tale told to make the long winter nights pass more quickly. Such stories are not to be taken at face value, but rather are crafted to bring us within ourselves, to meet the devils that we might find within in a way that acknowledges more than it confronts. We know that tall tales seldom, if ever, describe their components with scientific accuracy. The point of such tales lies in their side stepping of the mundane and factual. Winter tales often fascinate precisely because they are fantastical, because they take us aside from the reality of our bleaker winter existence.
In The Winter’s Tale, the jealous Leontes’ son, Mamillius, has such a tale at the ready for his mother:
HERMIONE
What wisdom stirs amongst you? Come, sir, now I am for you again: pray you, sit by us, And tell ‘s a tale.
MAMILLIUS
Merry or sad shall’t be?
HERMIONE
As merry as you will.
MAMILLIUS
A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one Of sprites and goblins.
HERMIONE
Let’s have that, good sir. Come on, sit down: come on, and do your best To fright me with your sprites; you’re powerful at it.
MAMILLIUS
There was a man–
HERMIONE
Nay, come, sit down; then on.
MAMILLIUS
Dwelt by a churchyard: I will tell it softly; Yond crickets shall not hear it.
HERMIONE
Come on, then, And give’t me in mine ear.
(The Winter’s Tale, 2.1.21-32)****
The dialogue itself has all the elements of a thrilling tale, a ghost story, woven to pass the time. A sad tale of sprites and goblins, whispered into the listener’s ear. Except that in this instance, Mamillius’ tale seems to subtly insinuate itself into the present within the play’s context. “A man dwelt by a churchyard”, Mamillius tells us, but the tale’s initial softness carries into the present, until he is whispering his tale into his mother’s ear. Churchyard crickets, chirruping their choruses in tawny grass around the graves, become ‘yond’ crickets–crickets that are present in the onstage moment of the play.
This making of the tale’s tone, content, and context subtly promiscuous with the present action in the play is a device that Shakespeare uses repeatedly to underscore moments in life, bad or good, when things flow together. Imagination merges with past, present, and future like elements in a watercolour, defining new borders and outlines, and transcending traditional boundaries of our preconceptions. As in Fermor’s forest edge ‘Coast of Bohemia’, we find ourselves at a kind of crossroads, a place where we may meet devils or angels, where the dead may or may not find their way, or where goblins and sprites may come to us through whispers uttered below even a cricket’s threshold. Like this tale lying hidden beneath the surface of the play, a tale which we do not hear, Shakespeare’s point may be exactly that of ripples in the pond. Because, not just on ‘some level’, but on many levels, the fanciful tale extends into the reality of our human experience and our lives as well.
Perhaps Bohemia’s coast extends into Shakespeare’s play not just as a metaphor for the edge of a forest populated by darkness and the threat of bears, but because this coast extends always and ever into our lives. Those sprites and goblins always lurk just over the horizon, just beneath the cricket haunted threshold. Death reaches coldly into us even on the sunniest of days. Love’s rejections kills us, not just now, but also forever, and whispered tales may be more powerful than any speech. These elements exist beyond any mere physical ear because they lie at our core, simultaneously outside of us and within us, penetrating deeply into our emotional and intellectual landscapes, and profoundly colouring all our subsequent experience. We do not recover from Hamlet’s pangs of despised love, the proud man’s contumely, or the whips and scorns of time. Instead, they scar us and we live with the scars. Or sometimes we do not live with them. We never really forget, but if we are extremely lucky, we forgive and move on.
After his enraged, jealous explosion takes apart his world, Leontes eventually gets his second chance, but it also costs him. By the time the sixteen years have passed, by the time Hermione’s ‘statue’ returns to life, when his lost daughter, Perdita, is finally returned to him, Leontes’ son has already been so long lost. This may be fitting, in a sense, as Mamillius was the original teller of the tale who figuratively unwittingly brought the sprites and goblins, graveyards and crickets into the play. If there is a caution here, it may be that we should take care to be very careful with our words and thoughts. Otherwise, we risk falling off that forest/world edge that Shakespeare and Fermor envision. We may lose ourselves in storms at sea and find ourselves stranded on a wild coast, on the margin of a wood teeming with voracious bears. Goblins may come boiling from our own story and thrust themselves into our lives, sprites staying forever by our fireside even after the tale is done, and after that ancient story has been told.
Sometimes we long to return to the story, but we know that this can never be. Brook water flows on beneath the slanting willow. Voices come through the riotous growth of flowers, surrounding us and clamouring for something else, for more of what seemed to please us then or there. We try to keep up with the story, but sometimes we lose the meaning as we lose our page, losing our place in a book that long ago may have become available for free in digital format on some electronic tablet. Perhaps our only companions are joy and sorrow, and only one of those really seems to go any distance.
Once, long ago, we had stood in a field under a night sky as the stars came down to us. They spoke to us in ancient tongues and seemed to be our friends, awakening memories that had long lain buried within us. Now, we only ache with the memory of that reunion. Now, seas boil and choke around us, and the old high offices are filled with vultures. Schools too often trade in passing ignorance, with our basic rubrics founded upon trend rather than the depth or breadth that might lend texture to the fabric of our lives. Empty words rumble down the streets in massive pickup trucks, while we clamour for entertainments filled with spectacular balloons. Our leaders kill us either slowly or right away, and we let them do it because we give away our power for pablum dressed as trendy participation.
“Strong reasons make strong actions” says the Dauphin, but does he mean the reasons for the things we do, or the reasoning we use to choose what we are doing?***** For we are anchored in our faith or we are anchored without it. We are left, right, center, up or down, standing on the Coast of Bohemia:
The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.
(“Dover Beach”, Matthew Arnold)******
Like Leontes’ daughter, our loss, our Perdita, may yet come home from the wild and distant shores where she grew up. She may yet sail back to us, even if her attendant lord, Antigonus, has been devoured by a bear spawned from our own collective human ignorance. Like Leontes, we may be forgiven our defects. We may atone for our sins. Stranger things have happened, and there are more things in heaven and earth than we can put into a pudding.
Yet, brother Mamillius will still be gone. Some of us will never return. Victims of genocides ignored by governments who saw no financial interest in stopping them. Those deported back to places where only death awaited them. Children left behind, slipping through the cracks of political posturing. The sad tale of sprites and goblins that swept into our world will have swept out again like dust. The tale’s teller has been swept away as well; brushed across the threshold by a hobgoblin’s broom. It is us. We sweep such dust away, removing the old world, the old ashes, the old dead, and we sweep away ourselves. We also sweep away our understanding, erecting thought scarecrows in the place of knowledge. For the forlorn Coast of Bohemia is the edge of the proverbial wood, and that threshold is the very place where anything might happen, and frightening straw figures stand there, warding off whatever people think might threaten them.
Still, there is one rule:
Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
“Dover Beach”
Let us be true to one another and stop cutting cane to kill our toads, or killing toads to cut the cane. We need them, all of them, as we need all of us. Cane spiders big as a dinner plate, faster than snakes, harder to apprehend than faith based arguments. We dodge left or right, weaving our way through the world; and weaving the world while we are ignorant armies too. What we can do is try our best to pay attention, and to help whenever and wherever we can.
*Fermor, Patrick Leigh, and Jan Morris. A Time of Gifts. New York: New York Review Books, 2005, p. 171.
**Ibid.
***Ibid.
****Shakespeare, William. The Winters Tale. Edited by Stephen Orgel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
In the play, Antony and Cleopatra, when Cleopatra’s speeches often seem like a translucent veneer, expressive, but only partly revealing the underlying raging sea of will and passion. Cleopatra is given to dramatics, and the great Queen of Egypt’s theatricality such an integral part of her that it becomes difficult to imagine her being any other way. Her enthusiasm, petulance, and self absorbed tendency towards psychological game playing accent her striking physicality (however that may be portrayed onstage). Her character has been written as one whose feelings run deep and who wears her proverbial emotions close to their skin. ‘Bigger than life’, people often say, which seems a fitting description for a famously alluring queen who has been lover to, and potentially the ruin of, both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.
Yet, it could well be that those powerful figures ruin themselves too, wielding power like a firebrand and seeking some moment of cool solace away from the hot torch of sweeping worldly power. They seem naturally drawn to this neriad of the Nile, the great river and sea goddess who rules over her own land. Defined by the location where a great river flows into the sea, Cleopatra represents such a personification of Egypt that the name becomes almost interchangeable with hers, with Egypt being mentioned 43 times in the play, and serving as Antony’s pet name for Cleopatra, as she and the land are not only interchangeable, but are arguably one and the same.
Caesar’s mistake, and Antony’s too, is that Cleopatra herself exudes her own kind of divine heat. Enobarbus famous description of her opens with, “The barge she sat in like a burnished throne/ Burned on the water” (Antony and Cleopatra 2.2.201-2).* Although Enobarbus initially describes a kind of passionate and amorous heat, there is also great power in Cleopatra’s character beyond her allure:
I saw her once Hop forty paces through the public street And, having lost her breath, she spoke and panted, That she did make defect perfection, And, breathless, pour breath forth.
(2.2.238-42)**
With Cleopatra’s attendant divinity, it is no surprise that Antony, who rules a third of the world as part of the immensely powerful Triumvirate, cannot help but follow her. Beyond passionate considerations, beyond sexual attraction, Antony’s fascination remains acute and incurable. Even when Cleopatra, in speaking to Antony of his wife in Rome, says, “Let her not say ’tis I who keep you here; I have no power upon you; hers you are” (1.3.22-4), the audience can tell already that this is not the case.
When Maecenas says that Antony must leave Cleopatra, Enobarbus responds:
Never. He will not. Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies.
(A2.2.244-8)
Cleopatra is a kind of fire unto herself. For all her manipulation, the divine fire within her seems to burn in spite of and beyond herself, touching, altering, assimilating, or consuming virtually everything in her proximity. The play combines power with power, and, more metaphorically, fire with fire, compounding these similars into a sort of rising conflagration in a way that even Octavius Caesar’s rising star cannot oppose. In a way similar to opposing fires that burn each other out, in the face of his attraction, even the powerful Antony cannot survive. When he hears that Cleopatra has died (although she has not really died, but only fostered the rumour to inflame Antony’s passionate sympathies for her), Antony fatally wounds himself, ultimately dying in Cleopatra’s arms.
Yet, even with Antony gone, the attachment remains. In a way, Antony and Cleopatra is Shakespeare’s Moby Dick of love. The play looks at the whale of love from all possible angles, from the most base sport, to the most divine and transcendent. The cetacean of human passion is dissected into bones, flesh, and spirit, even as love moves through the play on so many levels, and immortality, as mentioned in the title, figures into that.
With Antony dead by his own hand, and having been captured by Octavius Caesar, the Queen of Egypt seeks to follow him to avoid having Caesar parade her through the streets of Rome like a wild animal in a cage. Cleopatra says:
Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me: now no more The juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip: Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear Antony call; I see him rouse himself To praise my noble act; I hear him mock The luck of Caesar, which the gods give men To excuse their after wrath: husband, I come: Now to that name my courage prove my title! I am fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life. So; have you done? Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips. Farewell, kind Charmian; Iras, long farewell.
(Kisses them. IRAS falls and dies)
Have I the aspic in my lips? Dost fall? If thou and nature can so gently part, The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, Which hurts, and is desired. Dost thou lie still? If thus thou vanishest, thou tell’st the world It is not worth leave-taking.
(5.2.379-97)
In this speech, in one sense, the immortal longings mean death. The individual who brings the poisonous Nile serpent to Cleopatra warns her that “his biting is immortal” (5.2.245-6). And yet, immortal means more as well, for Cleopatra speaks of reuniting with Antony, and of his praise of her nobile suicide. She also speaks of transformation, of being fire and air when all her baser elements are gone, suggesting an alchemical transcendence.
Cleopatra dresses for her death, calling for her robe and crown, a preparation that looks forward to more than merely leaving a regal looking corpse (which does not seem to be Cleopatra’s intent). She does cheat Octavius Caesar of his opportunity to parade her as captive through the streets of Rome, but the last words about death are reminiscent of lover, a stroke and pinch that comes in the face of a world unworthy of leave taking.
Critics speculate about the death of Iras, Cleopatra’s maidservant, who falls at her queen’s kiss. We have no specific note that Iras herself has yet been bitten by a snake, although some argue that this may be the likely case, and it is sometimes played this in production. The sudden death may also reaffirm Cleopatra’s own individual connection with divinity–that since the acknowledgement of death occupies the queen’s consciousness, dominating her will, intention, and being, then death may also occupy and act effortlessly on anything in her proximity.
In writing Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare was unlikely to have been thinking specifically about classical Egyptian concepts of an afterlife, but the Christian conceptions of an afterlife in early modern England would have offered ample fodder for that meaning of ‘immortal’ too. In that sense, Cleopatra’s ‘immortal longings’ seem like a door to the great beyond, one in which our robe and crown might still be useful, one in which we still may meet our love and stay to feast, to live on in another, purer way, and one in which we might love again. So often in Shakespeare, immortality suggests a change into a different state. Instead of acting as a finite end, immortality offers an indication of potential transformation, of a transcendence of our earthly state.
In funerary rites, we often describe a person’s nobilities, praising their most admirable characteristics or accomplishments. We speak of them going on to a better place, and there is much of this in Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra runs not to flee Octavius, but to meet her Antony, to receive that kiss “Which is my heaven to have” (5.2.302), as she describes it. Her last full exclamation is “O Antony” (311), making it clear that reunion remains the forefront of her mind and purpose. In the end, it is not one’s power or even one’s powerful character that endures. Neither the mighty Antony nor the nearly divine Cleopatra can survive their mortal tenure.
Yet, this play offers the strongest sense that, as much as both of those characters are defined by love, that the quality of love somehow survives in spite of individual endings. Melville’s white whale may be God or devil, and love may be divine, as much as it may bedevil us. The whale destroys what would threaten its perpetuity, dragging Ahab down into an unknown deep. Love remains more mysterious, and its eventual course can be more inexorable than that of the metaphysical whale. We can only hope that, in our lives, love may be so strong, if not similarly fatal. We may hope that our love, like Antony and Cleopatra’s, remains more solid and more durable than the very substance of our lives themselves, wherever those lives may lead.
*Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. Edited by John Wilders. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015. All citations in this post are from this edition.
**If we leave aside the argument (articulated by John Wilders in his Arden edition) about the two possible, and seemingly distinct interpretations of the last line here, this could also suggest both meanings: that Cleopatra, being breathless, still breathed, and that she exuded all the more power even when her mortal limitations were made evident. This singular incorporation of both potential senses of the line might seem more Shakespearean than either single interpretation of the line.
It does not seem meet that we should master grief ourselves, because part of its purpose seems to be to remind us that we are always part of a greater whole. Part of grief reminds us that we too dissolve and fade away, just as everything else in existence does. Mere oblivion. The alpha and the omega, at least in terms of human life. In between we may be impetuous and important. We may be potentates and imitate the shadows of the birds, boarding and swooping through skies of our own creation. Still we watch the shadows fall before us, becoming memories of a summer day.
Claudius reprimands Hamlet for persisting in his grief over his father’s death:
‘Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, To give these mourning duties to your father. But you must know your father lost a father, That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound In filial obligation for some term To do obsequious sorrow.
(Hamlet 1.2.87-92)
He is wrong to chide Hamlet thus, of course, making light of how deeply the terribly private assumption of mourning affects his nephew. He is also partly right, this murderer. Grieving is part of life. Loss of life part of the participation in life itself. Yet, everyone knows that it is not the easy part.
Some weeks we write out posts for the blog, and we can plan and work, or write for a time. Other weeks, we must travel to far places to be pallbearers for our own fathers. Obligation. Saying goodbye. Part of the beginning of missing someone forever. Even ghosts must have such weeks of sudden emptiness, and so they do. It makes for brevity, which in this case is not the soul of wit as much as it is the deepest core of memory and reflection when the last and biggest tree of the forest has finally fallen down.
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