Ghost of Shakespeare

The word “lonely” may well be one of the words coined by Shakespeare, and the above line may be the first use of the term we have. The word appears in Shakespeare’s late tragedy, Coriolanus, in the phrase above, which Coriolanus speaks to his family, friends, and supporters as he leaves Rome under banishment. He says:

What, what, what!
I shall be loved when I am lack’d. Nay, mother.
Resume that spirit, when you were wont to say,
If you had been the wife of Hercules,
Six of his labours you’ld have done, and saved
Your husband so much sweat. Cominius,
Droop not; adieu. Farewell, my wife, my mother:
I’ll do well yet. Thou old and true Menenius,
Thy tears are salter than a younger man’s,
And venomous to thine eyes. My sometime general,
I have seen thee stem, and thou hast oft beheld
Heart-hardening spectacles; tell these sad women
‘Tis fond to wail inevitable strokes,
As ’tis to laugh at ’em. My mother, you wot well
My hazards still have been your solace: and
Believe’t not lightly–though I go alone,
Like to a lonely dragon, that his fen
Makes fear’d and talk’d of more than seen–your son
Will or exceed the common or be caught
With cautelous baits and practise.

(Coriolanus 4.1.18-38)

The idea of the “lonely dragon” stands out here. It seems likely that Coriolanus refers to a fearsome beast when he speaks of a dragon because the line seems to reflect the same creature mentioned in King Lear when Lear warns Kent “Come not between the dragon and his wrath.” (King Lear 1.1.123) Yet, the dragon in the lines spoken by Coriolanus, like Coriolanus himself, is a retreating, solitary figure. Although presumably capable of great violence or destruction, Michael Goldman suggests that it is the dragon’s “fen”, the desolate and potentially dangerous place in which he dwells, that lends him a “fear’d and talk’d of” aura or mystique. * Perhaps. Yet, perhaps there is more here as well.

Usually ferocious by nature, dragons (as reflected in the mythology of the western hemisphere) may be rugged enough to dwell in places that would be far too inhospitable for other kinds of creatures. Yet, this particular dragon is also lonely, a quality emphasized by repetition. “I go alone,/Like to a lonely dragon” highlights not solitude, but the lone-ness, the lonely state in which the potentially fearsome creature finds itself. Coriolanus seeks to reassure his friends and family, but his own words seem to betray his feelings a bit here.

Of course, Coriolanus tells his mother, Volumnia, that he will not fall into bad ways in spite of the fact that he goes “alone” and “lonely”, and it is his reassurance to her on this subject which actually suggests that enforced solitude that may threaten his character and being the most. In an age where increasing focus fell on emotions and the conditions that might bring about emotional states (Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy would be published in 1621), this may be especially significant.

Loneliness wounds us. It can even kill us, carving years off of our potential lifespan.** In fact, the possible adverse effects are only just beginning to be studied and apprehended more comprehensively. Yet, here, in Coriolanus, is a suggestion that loneliness may change the landscape of our human lives.

Where solitude may be sought or sometimes preferred, loneliness comes unbidden, bringing with it a host of attendant doubts and sorrows. It can descend on us suddenly or gradually, and if the state is sustained, it can become the foundation of a wailing brutality of emptiness. A sinking swamp. A marsh. A fen. Something that sucks things down into the depths. Loneliness, by its very nature, may change us in profound and irreversible ways.

From a later age come the words of American poet, Edgar Allen Poe:

From childhood’s hour I have not been 
As others were—I have not seen 
As others saw—I could not bring 
My passions from a common spring— 
From the same source I have not taken 
My sorrow—I could not awaken 
My heart to joy at the same tone— 
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone— 
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn 
Of a most stormy life—was drawn 
From ev’ry depth of good and ill 
The mystery which binds me still— 
From the torrent, or the fountain— 
From the red cliff of the mountain— 
From the sun that ’round me roll’d 
In its autumn tint of gold— 
From the lightning in the sky 
As it pass’d me flying by— 
From the thunder, and the storm— 
And the cloud that took the form 
(When the rest of Heaven was blue) 
Of a demon in my view—

(Edgar Allen Poe, “Alone”)**

Inscribed as an entry in an autograph album, the poem was never printed in Poe’s lifetime. The lines reflect how prolonged or sustained periods of loneliness may permanently alter our perspective, setting us forever apart from others. We not only see differently, but we also experience the world differently, and this remains a permanent change, with our experience informing all subsequent experiences. Outer and inner landscapes merge, pebbles and twigs may become scarecrow friends, and demons may emerge or preside anywhere.

Grief and loss may precipitate loneliness. Being separated suddenly from friends, lovers, colleagues, our work, our purpose, or feeling the hollowness of ’empty nests’ when our children leave, or when we downsize to leave our old homes behind us, all of these may shake our internal pinions in such a way that we become proverbially unhinged, losing the ability to steer or navigate successfully through life.

The word “lonely” appears only one other time in Shakespeare’s work, in A Winter’s Tale. Near the end of the play, before Paulina opens the curtain to reveal the ‘statue’ of Hermione (which is, in fact, Hermione herself, who has been sequestered away for sixteen years while Leontes learns to atone for his rash and destructive fit of jealousy), Paulina describes the statue:

As she lived peerless,
So her dead likeness, I do well believe,
Excels whatever yet you looked upon
Or hand of man hath done. Therefore I keep it
Lonely, apart. But here it is. Prepare
To see the life as lively mocked as ever
Still sleep mocked death. Behold, and say ’tis well.

(The Winter’s Tale 5.3.16-22)

Deserved or not, Leontes gets a second chance, and critics like to expound on the possibilities suggested by the writing of a more mature Shakespeare, as The Winter’s Tale is generally agreed to be a later play. Loss and grief have worked a kind of partially restorative magic in this case, incomplete though it may be (as Leontes’ son, Mamillius, and the Lord Antigonus, are gone forever). Yet, this ending where Hermione’s statues comes to life (which may often be enormously moving when produced on stage) also suggests that the venom of loneliness remains. Even though, in the case of Hermione’s resurrection, it does not completely slay the bitten Leontes, in this case–acting instead as a curative kind of pain, the play also subtly reminds us that loneliness frequently does not act in such a way at all. “Lonely, apart” suggests that isolation persists as separation from the main.

Perhaps all of this urges us to keep in touch. It becomes all too easy to let friends slip away, especially as time, task, and distance intercede. Yet, this is clearly a mistake. No matter what solace we may take from other quarters, we remain dependent on other people. “No man is an island entire of itself” as John Donne reminds us, and he is right. Isolating ourselves may be an important part of our lives, but cutting ourselves off, whether individually or communally, can be fatal in so many ways.

William Henry Harrison Murray, the American clergyman whose series of articles on the Adirondack Mountains earned him a reputation as the father of the Outdoor Movement, wrote these lines:

Ah, friends, dear friends, as years go on
and heads get gray, 
how fast the guests do go!
Touch hands, touch hands, 
with those that stay.
Strong hands to weak, 
old hands to young, 
around the Christmas board, touch hands.
The false forget, the foe forgive, 
for every guest will go 
and every fire burn low 
and cabin empty stand.
Forget, forgive, for who may say 
that Christmas day may ever come 
to host or guest again. 
Touch hands!

– William Henry Harrison Murray (1840-1904)

We can be lonely for many reasons, or sometimes without seeming reason. We may be as lonely in a crowd, or with well meaning friends and family, as by ourselves. Life circumstances may take us far from colleagues or friends, and may leave us bereft of life’s usual solaces, unable to take comfort in the sound of crickets or the songs of birds, or even a host of daffodils, yet left with those as our only potential comforts.

Outdoor sustenance is wonderful. Essential. Yet, for all that, it is the people and the communities in our lives we tend to miss the most when they have gone. They forever leave an emptiness, no matter how fierce the dragon may be. Once the little boy grows up and moves on, Puff the magic dragon cannot bear it. Life’s adventure is at an end.

It will almost certainly end anyway, but there appear to be two potential roads that one may take. Bon voyage or the empty house. Although they may be different flavours, one still seems infinitely more appealing.****

*Goldman, Michael. “Characterizing Coriolanus.” Ed. Stanley Wells. Shakespeare Survey 34, no. 28 (Cambridge: CUP, November 28, 2002): 73-84.

**https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/does-loneliness-affect-life-span/2015/03/30/b5d112c6-d3ea-11e4-ab77-9646eea6a4c7_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.aaef5e6ee915

***Poe, Edgar Allen. “Alone.” American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 2: Herman Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals. (New York: Library of America, 1993). In spite of the fact that Poe lived from 1809 to 1849, the poem was first published by Didier in 1875.

****A note of special thanks to my readers, for having been my colleagues, in a sense, during an isolating time.

Theatre remains one of the great human acts of conjuration. On a stage we can collectively summon spirits that envision all of human condition and imagination. Stages, or screens, are places where our world becomes malleable to us. Enacted fiction is where reality and imagination are intimate and promiscuous.

We can evoke worlds:

Chorus: O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! (Henry V1.1.1-4)

And we can just as readily set up a scene only to uncreate it:

Prologue: From all that’s near the court, from all that’s great
Within the compass of the city walls,
We now have brought our scene —

(Enter Citizen [climbing onto the stage])

Citizen: Hold your peace, goodman boy.

Prologue: What do you mean, sir?

Citizen: That you have no good meaning. This seven years there hath been plays at this house, I have observed it, you have still girds at citizens. And now you call your play The London Merchant. Down with your title,boy; down with your title!

Prologue: Are you a member of the noble city?

Citizen: I am.

Prologue: And a freeman?

Citizen: Yea, and a grocer. (Knight of the Burning Pestle 1.1.1-14)*

In Shakespeare’s prologue above, the prologue itself enters as a character, a “Chorus” in the sense of the explicatory choruses so often present in drama of the classical age. The Chorus in classical Greek plays would usually be a group of figures that might dance, sing, and otherwise comment on the action of the play, and they also had a ritual significance. Scholars tell us of the choric “dithyrambs” (often described almost as a kind of hymn, or poem, or incantation, or perhaps all of these) to the god Dionysus, and that these elements of praise evolved into commentary on the plays. Think of explication or exposition as a sacred act–an act praising creation.

Comedy often carries a different kind of message, informed by a different kind of world. True to its creative form, Knight of the Burning Pestle seems to have a variously aspected chorus. The play begins with a typical dramatic prologue, spoken by a character who is part of the playacting troop and who is ready, with his company, to present a more typical kind of dramatic production for the audience. However, he is interrupted by the Citizen, a grocer who demands something different from his drama. The play then begins to be rewritten before our eyes, and we watch simultaneous creation and uncreation unfold as the original plot seems almost to dance with the new plot being written into the script.

Folkloric research additionally suggests that dance (with which the original Greek choruses are also associated, their commentary being a mixture of spoken, sung, and danced elements) may have served as an ontological foundation of the universe. In other words, groups of divine entities (or even a single divine entity with different potential aspects) may have “danced” creation into existence. ** In this sense, the dance continues even as the cosmos does, and dance may contain all the elements of creation that readily come to mind, and others as well.

Shakespeare and his contemporaries often ended comedies with a dance–and this is in keeping with the idea of marriage and creation. The “issue” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that are blessed by Oberon’s fairies at the end of the play resonate with the changeling child over whose custody Oberon and Titania struggle in weather changing disagreement at the beginning of the play. This issue, the children produced from the wedding union, stems from the dancing–the pure celebration of human union and ongoing creativity.

Of course, there are dances in other plays as well, even tragic ones. Romeo and Juliet meet at a feast, for example, where dancing would have been part of the celebrations, but that play moves backwards, with the dance opening the relationship between the doomed couple, who seem to move ever more steadily away from the festivities as the play continues. The grim intercession of acrimony seems to poison the well increasingly, until the marriage bed becomes the grave.

Perhaps the most famous form of dance as praise today is that of the whirling dervishes, the Mawlaw’īyya / Mevlevi Order (Sufi) devoted to the ideas of the 13th century poet and mystic, Rumi, who has been mentioned previously in this blog. You can see an example here:

Like undifferentiated whirling praise of the Dervishes, the empty stage remains open to all interpretations. It is Plotinus’ “One”, or the “uncarved block” of Taoist cosmology–the absence of the mirror in Buddhism that allows the dust to settle nowhere. That place where the sea and the sky become one thing, where all creation breathes and heaves excitedly, waiting to be born into some or other form.

When Zhuangzi’s wife died, Huizi came to the house to join in the rites of mourning. To his surprise he found Zhuangzi sitting with an inverted bowl on his knees, drumming upon it and singing a song.

“After all,” said Huizi, “she lived with you, brought up your children, grew old with you. That you should not mourn for her is bad enough, but to let your friends find you drumming and singing–that is going too far!”

“You misjudge me,” said Zhuangzi. “When she died, I was in despair, as any man well might be. But soon, pondering on what had happened, I told myself that in death no strange new fate befalls us. In the beginning, we lack not life only, but form. Not form only, but spirit. We are blended in one great featureless indistinguishable mass. Then a time came when the mass evolved spirit, spirit evolved form, form evolved life. And now life in its turn has evolved death. For not nature only but man’s being has its seasons, its sequence of spring and autumn, summer and winter. If someone is tired and has gone to lie down, we do not pursue him with shouting and bawling. She whom I have lost has lain down to sleep for a while in the Great Inner Room. To break in upon her rest with the noise of lamentation would but show that I knew nothing of nature’s Sovereign Law. That is why I ceased to mourn.” (Zhuangzi, trans. Arthur Waley)

We cannot know, but in our dramatic craft, we have wings we never have in our mundane lives, creating not only kingdoms, but also moments:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar’d all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
O’erpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colour’d fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did. (Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.202-16)

Enobarbus’ description is one of the most famously evocative passages in Shakespeare’s works, and the sheer grandeur makes it seem all the more tragic because we know the end, even if we haven’t read or seen the play. The goddess on earth with so far to fall.

Comedy tends to be different, but not always so different. Mel Brooks is often quoted as saying, “Comedy is when I cut my finger. Tragedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” Still, both the drama and the comedy can have a chorus, an attendant commentary that may be narrative or tonal, but that by its very interwoven nature seems to praise the creative act unfolding.

In Knight of the Burning Pestle, the chorus seems to have several aspects, with commentary shifting as readily as the plotline. One of the characters who performs a notable choric function (in fact singing all his lines, so performing a kind of choral function as well) is Old Merrythought. A proverbial jolly old soul indeed, he steadfastly refuses to lose his cheer even in the face of imminent disaster. He doesn’t have the very last lines in the play (the epilogue belongs to the Citizen and his Wife), but Merrythought does conclude the action of the comedy with a song:

Old Merrythought:
Strike up, then:
(Song)
Better music ne’er was known
Then a choir of hearts in one.
Let each other that hath been
Troubled with the gall or spleen,
Learn of us to keep his brow
Smooth and plain as ours are now.
Sing, though before the hour of dying;
He shall rise, and then be crying,
“Hey, ho, ‘tis nought but mirth
That keeps the body from the earth.”
(Exeunt omnes) (Knight of the Burning Pestle, V, 341-51)

The truth remains inscrutable. Yet, Shakespeare evidently appreciated that on the stage we may create or become anything. Of course, many dramatists of the early modern time knew this too, just as dramatists (and creators of all kinds) have always known it. Beaumont clearly knew it too, but the wild satire presented by his Knight of the Burning Pestle also seemed to be truly ahead of its time. Performed in 1607 (when the playwright was in his early twenties) the play was poorly received and the remainder of his major dramatic writings were collaborations, mostly with John Fletcher, some of which were later revised by Philip Massinger.

Beaumont went on to have successes in his collaborations but he didn’t write much if anything more on his own. He wrote no drama at all after his marriage in 1613, and he died in London in March of 1616. Shakespeare died the same year in Stratford upon Avon in April. Yet, for a single work, Knight of the Burning Pestle remains an astonishing presentation of creation and uncreation rolled into a single play. Dancing, singing, fighting, and a play deconstructing itself even while in the process of restructuring like a piece of stage magic in front of its audience.

Life is like that too, of course. And politics–especially in the present day, but also always. Sometimes a thousand times a day, a hundred times an hour, our worlds collapse and fold in upon themselves, only then to stand again in some new fashion. Terrible violence may descend upon us, and only our vision, our uncreating that in order to create something else anew, can save us. The conjuration that is theatre. Owl hooting. Hummingbird whirring. Branches in the wind. The Dervish always turning, supplicant to all creation even as that creation continues to unfold.

*If you would like to read Francis Beaumont’s play (better to see a production if you can find one), I recommend the edition edited by Michael Hattaway: Beaumont, Francis. The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Edited by Michael Hattaway. 2nd ed. London: Methuen, 2009.

**Much more on this may be found in Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s book: Barber, Elizabeth Wayland. The Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology, and the Origins of European Dance. New York: Norton, 2013.

The title is a line fragment, spoken by Troilus at the end of Troilus and Cressida. Troilus laments the death of his brother, Hector (the great Trojan hero), and cloaks his own frustrations in anger and resolution. Having lost his first love, Cressida, and now his brother to the besieging Greeks, he rages bitterly, inviting destruction itself. Troilus’ lines are partly a response to Aeneas, who tells Troilus that his ominous forecasts due to Hector’s ignominious death have upset everyone.

Aeneas says, “My lord, you do discomfort all the host“. Troilus’ replies with his final lines in the play:

You understand me not that tell me so.
I do not speak of flight, of fear, of death,
But dare all imminence that gods and men
Address their dangers in. Hector is gone.
Who shall tell Priam so, or Hecuba?
Let him that will a screech-owl aye be called
Go into Troy and say their Hector’s dead.
There is a word will Priam turn to stone,
Make wells and Niobes of the maids and wives,
Cold statues of the youth and, in a word,
Scare Troy out of itself. 

But march away.
Hector is dead.

 There is no more to say.
Stay yet. You vile abominable tents,
Thus proudly pitched upon our Phrygian plains,
Let Titan rise as early as he dare,
I’ll through and through you! And, thou great-sized
coward,
No space of earth shall sunder our two hates.
I’ll haunt thee like a wicked conscience still,
That moldeth goblins swift as frenzy’s thoughts.
Strike a free march to Troy! With comfort go.
Hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe. (T&C, 5.11.12-31)

Rage flows through this play, and few (if any) of the classical characters really come off well. So, it seems fitting that it should end on this note, with the death of Hector, and the subsequent final speech by the syphilitic Pandarus, who bequeaths death by venereal disease on the audience. A dark ending indeed, because it points the way downward–indicating a point in an arc of descent that, in spite of the play’s grim events, suggests that there may be much further down yet to go. This suggests the beginning of a revenge tragedy of sorts.

This description might be accurate enough, because Achilles (the “great-sized coward”), who killed Hector, is himself eventually slain as well. The virtually unbeatable, mighty warrior’s vulnerable heel is pierced by Paris’ arrow. His death comes from a distance, in such a way that Achilles cannot bring his own great power to bear against his demise face to face.

Actually tragedy runs both directions in Shakespeare’s play, with rage in the beginning and the end. Opening with Achilles’ petulant enraged refusal to fight, and ending with the death of Hector, the whole play is already imbedded deep in the siege of Troy.* This human war started as a disagreement amongst the gods**–ripples in a pond. Shakespeare’s play parallels Homer’s famous account of the war, with Troilus and Cressida ending as The Iliad begins, in rage.  As Robert Fagles translates it, the opening lines of The Iliad read:

Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.***

Interestingly, this translation strikes reasonably close to the “wicked conscience””that moldeth goblins”, as Achilles’ rage is both murderous and doomed, “hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls”. That a conscience should be wicked somehow seems peculiar. That a conscience, something that ideally nudges or urges one back to the path of light, should instead turn sour like milk left out for too long on a warm day. That a conscience might become overzealous or overreaching, until a vision of the right or true or good supplants the actual–the right or good or true become a windmill giant, a scarecrow demon at which the altered conscience carries us willy nilly, into the maw of overstepping understanding. A conscience gone rancid, incapable of distinction, reaching eagerly for souls, for any souls, perhaps seeing them as all bad now, to hurl them down to the House of Death.

Troilus’ resolution for vengeance tastes of fading nobility, fading resolve pickled in anger. Shakespeare was no stranger to this, to the idea of anger gone bad. Repeatedly, the plays give us moments of rancor, glimpses of characters for whom bitter resentment or suspicion has festered, or even worse, arises full fledged, misplaced, to strike at the innocent. Onlookers cannot understand, as indeed, in life, the only one who really knows the anger is the one within it, and then only for a proverbial moment.

Again and again we see it.

In King Lear,King Lear’s faithful servant, Kent, tries to stop the old king from punishing his daughter for a her reply (which he has failed to understand). “Come not between the dragon and his wrath” Lear snarls at him, the words spoken on the cusp of his most terrible, fatal mistake, as he banishes Cordelia, the one honest daughter of his three, the only one who loves him unreservedly.

In Othello, turned to terrible suspicion by Iago’s wicked words, Othello becomes certain that his wife, Desdemona, has been unfaithful to him. He comes in wrath to murder her and she cannot begin to understand his anger. She kneels and says to him, “I understand a fury in your words/but not the words.” The presence of wrath is clear, but it is nonsensical, an unspeaking foul presence in the room between them. Iago’s infectious rancor, nurtured into a cloud that now engulfs them all.

Leontes in The Winter’s Tale leaps onto his own ledge, suddenly, wildly, accusing his wife, Queen Hermione, of infidelity. Oedipus kills (unbeknownst to him) his father, Laius, in an angry quarrel, and marries his own mother (again not knowing it is she), Jocasta, after answering the riddle of the sphinx. In each of these cases, and in many more, anger precipitates the action of the play, and in each of these cases, rage prefaces deadly weather.

Perhaps this is what a wicked conscience is, not a conscience at all any more, but a warped shadow of what it had been. Conscience extinguished like a candle going out. Become life as an idiot’s tale.

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow. (The Beatles, “Revolution”)

Perhaps this becomes most alarming when we see world leaders embrace this kind of rage, remaining as contemptuous of others as they must be (perhaps only their deepest most secret places) of themselves. Admiring despots. Dismissing those who might acknowledge the needs of common people, those who may not be billionaires. Seizing power where they can. Blasting those perceived as opposition. Relishing the thuggish rhetoric of power and religion that have turned their faces from the light.

At some point, rage begins to change the timbre of the world, changing all subsequent things and events. It distorts and infects not just the enraged, but all with whom it comes into contact. Then we all become the devil, walking down the stairs forever.

One might project, not wrongly, that such an idea might resonate with the work of the Rolling Stones. Perhaps “Sympathy for the Devil”? Not quite.

More like where the enraged all go, when we finally paint everything as darkness:

Chinese folk Buddhism is filled with hungry ghosts, the spirits of those who lived in an animalistic way, living unbalanced lives that have been driven by their emotions. These spirits wander the earth forever, always hungry, always trying to feed on the excrement of the living. It has been touched on previously in this blog, but the idea bears repeating. If you decide to run any organisation, be it a corporation, a country, or a university like a mob boss, you might wish to recall how the careers of most mob bosses usually end.

———

*The Trojan War began when Paris abducted the famous beauty Helen from her husband Menelaus, the King of Sparta. Menelaus subsequently gathers all the Greek (Achaean) forces and sails to Troy to besiege the fortress city–a siege that lasted ten years.

**The disagreement was between the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite over who might be fairest (with the prize being the golden apple of discord). Zeus, aware of the challenges that would attend such a contest, sent the goddesses to Paris to let him judge. He declared Aphrodite the fairest. It won him Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, but it also earned him the strife brought on by the other two–who were, again, filled with rancorous rage that he had not chosen them.

***Robert Fagles translated The Iliad for Viking in 1990, with an introduction and notes by Bernard Knox. The book is relatively easy to find, still in print, and readily available on ereader services as well.

So says Apemantus, the bitter misanthropic philosopher in Timon of Athens. He says this while observing an elaborate mask that Timon puts on for his guests at a feast, part of an ongoing pattern of overspending that eventually bankrupts Timon and leads his friends to desert him. So Apemantus’ line describes both the mask and Timon’s own life, as Timon exhausts the contents of his purse.

Thin as bees’ wings, this boundary between madness and life. We can feel it, less than our skin away, and all of us walking, dancing, somewhere in between. Between all the things. Madness takes many forms, sometimes masquerading as life, sometimes beginning in the simple, or with becoming convinced of a single thing that seems like truth above all other things (and perhaps it is):

You desire me to give myself up to my duty, and to be wholly God’s, to whom I am consecrated. How can I do that, when you frighten me with apprehensions that continually possess my mind both day and night?
(Heloise to Abelard, c. 1128, translated from the Latin in 1722)*

Heloise terrified for her love, and at the thought of losing him. Love, at once both river and monument, even as their tomb marker stands in Pere Lachaise cemetery today. Love the conflagration or the journey. As Nizami expressed it:

Unleash upon me the saga
of being in love
o friend, be my layla
for i am majnun **

Indeed. The saga. Love leads us eventually back to the sea. Waves blossoming like long reaching petals across the sand, sinking into it. Dissolving warm day toes. Our own gull reaches us like no others, that single cry amongst many, and we know that it is ours, unlikely as that may be. The Red Queen tells us, “Why sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” ***

For the sea leads us places, and that characteristic air, the salty air that we tend to believe smells of the sea, really smells of the land. Ask a sailor. Out on the waves, the fresh wind tangs not so much of wild brine. Beneath us deepening layers of green to dark, above us heaving sometimes empty sky, our feet rooting us to some world we cannot see. We stew in reality, our flavours blending with others, pot constantly simmering.

Friday I tasted life. It was a vast morsel. A circus passed the house – still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out.
The book you mention, I have not met. Thank you for tenderness.
The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear today for the first the river in the tree.
You mentioned spring’s delaying – I blamed her for the opposite. I would eat evanescence slowly.
(Emily Dickinson, letter to Elizabeth Holland, May 1886)

The red in our minds. We eat of many things. Cupcakes, sponges, mops, and twinges. The stuff of feasts and scrub. Forests brushed clean by wayward winds. King Vikram, we travel with a vampire, a demon captured along the way, and it tells us tales. Fruit on low hanging branches that we cannot eat. We cannot even pick. Only gazing. Proverbial wonder. Trigorin writing stories to catch Nina’s attention. Seagulls wheeling. Herring in the waves.

You should have seen him in his dwelling about twilight, in the dead winter time.****

We do see him there. We are all there, always, even in the dead of summer. Washed against the cold, hung out before spring, our own Mayday letters delayed by circuses. Crocuses? No. The squirrels moved those long ago.

The Ojibwe of the Great Lakes region, tell of natural spirits of great power–the Manitou, who roam the great boreal forest, some with limbs like lightning, some with listening powers that speed across the earth. Sources of strange light and shadow. Each leather of them varying as it does for us, with bright Yang evaporating, coalescing into sinking Yin. So for Manitou. For also walks, on those wild winter nights, the Wendigo, alternately stalking and howling, its blizzard breath untempered by its gaze, the killing frost. Always hungry. Preferring the taste of children, but seeking anything. Hungry. Like the human heart.

Good King Peshawbes, look out on the feast and save us.

And we tell stories. To be together. To stay apart. To wall up our existence. To ourselves. Sometimes to others. Our feet root into the sand and wash away when the tide comes in, barnacling our tempests into air and clay until the day is gone. Fashioning our dwelling out of not what we see or touch, but what we think we see. What we think we touch. The long barkwood crafted lintel swirling around. Bees at noon. Taxes. Maui. Moana.

But there is no new Texas. Only so old the dinosaurs have turned to changing seas. Dark seas crushed beneath the rock. Fireflies consume us. Not now, but from our past. Those nights behind the low brick house upon the hill. Trees and wonder. Phobia. Distinction. Dereliction. The ceremonial sword of duty laid aside and all our thoughts plopping asunder, cut by our own days into cubes of jello.

Monsters there beside the road. And out on the sea. Untold monsters. Huge. Huge I tell you. And very bad and unfair. Like constitutions or restrictive regulation. And I alone am left to tell you to build a damned wall against them. Oh, please don’t let those ghosts walk from castle ramparts into my dreams. Please don’t let them find me. I only just found this bottle of port that I was given for my birthday. Birthright. Righteous.

Did you see the snow this winter? Global warming? I think not! Climate change come to kill us, a skeleton in armour wielding a flaming broadsword, sweeping swathes across the landscapes of the world. Burying us. Country matters and a scarecrow shivering in a stubbled field. Barney Rubbled field. Springfield. Wakefield. Sleep field. Think it into a cornfield when it’s gone because it has bad thoughts. Jerome Bixby come to tell us.

No date. The day had no date.—I went for a walk incognito on the Nevski Prospect. I avoided every appearance of being the king of Spain. I felt it below my dignity to let myself be recognised by the whole world, since I must first present myself at court. And I was also restrained by the fact that I have at present no Spanish national costume. If I could only get a cloak! I tried to have a consultation with a tailor, but these people are real asses! Moreover, they neglect their business, dabble in speculation, and have become loafers. I will have a cloak made out of my new official uniform which I have only worn twice. But to prevent this botcher of a tailor spoiling it, I will make it myself with closed doors, so that no one sees me. Since the cut must be altogether altered, I have used the scissors myself. (Gogol, Diary of a Madman)*****

We have all used the scissors. Amazing technicolor dream coats flapping in the wind. Freely. Sometimes expertly. Sometimes way too too too much. Hair trimmed too short. Nick the skin. Snip the lip. Even drawing blood. Throw a little more light over here, please. We’re casting spells. Making pies. Four and twenty blackbirds calling in the morning. Raucous as snowy egrets in a fire.

We are these margins, lights reaching out to us, finding us huddled in the dark, shivering in a letter because we can think of nothing else. We breathe that hunger. Taste that evanescence. Button hooks torn asunder by desire. Bodice open. Bosom heaving. Breathing. Enso interruptus.

Who can really tease out simple madness from our lives? That this or that is ‘right’ behaviour wrong. Those old telephones built to last forever, outlasted themselves. They don’t make motion pictures like that anymore. Motion pictures. River in a tree. Marshmallow in the bonfire, sizzling into blue fire song.

Oh hem. We ist der mosses and der bulbs. We eeeek livings by the ebb and flow. The tide that shapes the affairs of men. Birthmark canoes carry us across the voices and into that realm where sleep becomes electrum. Eleanthus. Days wearing into long days journeys into snow. No warming here. None. No ma’am. Not one drop.

Ypsilanti, Ypsilanti, I call out to ya, supplianti. Two damned houses. Two. No dignity I tell ya. And they need a wall between them. Capulets. Montagues. Hatfields. McCoys. Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River or not, it’s gotten Verona into the trees, and just the water ain’t enough.

Hot summer. All standing on a tin roof. Old songs ringing in the hills.

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay
My, oh my, what a wonderful day
Plenty of sunshine headin’ my way
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay******

Glory like madness. Very like madness indeed.

—–

*Abélard, Pierre, and Heloise. The Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Ed. Israel Gollancz. London: J.M. Dent and, 1904.

**Nizami was the pen name of Abû Muhammad Ilyas ibn Yusuf ibn Zaki Mu’aggad (c. 1141-1209) His work, The Story of Layla and Majnun tells the story of the famous lovers and is one of the great works of Sufi literature.

***Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: & Through the Looking-glass. Illustrated by Sir John Tenniel. NY, NY: Puffin Books, 2017.

****Dickens, Charles. The Haunted Man and The Ghost’s Bargain. London: Cassell &, 1891.

*****Gogol, Nicholas. “THE MANTLE AND OTHER STORIES.” The Mantle and Other Stories. May 27, 2011. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36238/36238-h/36238-h.htm#Page_107.

******Music by Allie Wrubel, Lyrics by Ray Gilbert, Performed by James Baskett
© 1945 Walt Disney Music Company, for the 1946 motion picture, Song of the South.

.

Past that “dinner with the parents” hour, but early enough that there are still people about, a pair of young men are looking about the churchyard at the Church of the Holy Trinity, in Stratford upon Avon, Warwickshire. It is dark, and they are peering half heartedly at gravestones, apparently trying to make out the old inscriptions on some of the Victorian era monuments. A large man sits on a nearby bench. He wears a broad brimmed hat.

“Excuse me, sir?” They approach tentatively.

“Yes?”

“Could you perhaps tell us which one might be Shakespeare’s grave?”

“Well, yes, but he and some of his family members are buried together, inside the church.”

The young man looks around at the darkness, the old gravestones, the overhanging trees rustling restlessly in the breeze.

“We have to leave first thing in the morning.”

The young men begin to look slightly apprehensive, suddenly more conscious of the hour. Almost fairy time.

Strange thing, fairy time. When the human world recedes and something else, something tenebrous, holds dominion for a time. Old world explanatory device. Why the world goes topsy turvy, why things occasionally seem inverted. Good luck, bad luck. How seemingly bad people might ascend the ladder of success while good ones sometimes get left behind. The vagaries of what the ancient Chinese called the ‘red dust’. The world in which we live can be wildly inconsistent.

Fairies, that people called “the good people” or the “good neighbours” in order to avoid offending them inadvertently (which offense could bring a whole host of ills and misfortunes that might hound one to one’s grave). That’s part of the strange thing when people analyse Shakespeare’s fairies–especially in terms of that “family romp” play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s fun for the whole family. Frolicsome. Hilarious. With magic, laughter, and madcap lovers caught in comic situations. Bring the kids!

Yes, it can be played that way, of course, and often is. Perennially on the list of Shakespeare’s greatest hits, this hit parade wonder may be one of the most frequently produced shows, and has been made into movies, and inspired music, poetry, and innovation on a number of fronts. Except, of course, that’s only part of the story, and as most partial stories go, this one too is inaccurate.

Catherine Belsey gets it right though. She points out that Shakespeare’s fairies don’t speak like his other characters, because they aren’t like his other characters–not even the non-humans like Caliban or Ariel. In fact, although Ariel tends to be grouped with the fairies at times, he is not exactly like them. Ariel differentiates himself from other characters in The Tempest because he isn’t “human”, as he says himself. The fairies, on the other hand, continue to differentiate themselves from the rest of the characters in Dream because those other characters are “mortal”. The fairies differ from each other too, with Oberon being able to perceive the divine while Puck cannot, but that’s a matter for another post.

This prises open the tin can of folkloric argument. What exactly are fairies then? Souls of the uncommitted or unbaptised dead? Rebellious angels awaiting judgement day? Soulless elemental spirits, more akin to the earth than humankind? Another tribe of people who somehow attained a kind of immortality along the way? Are they good? Bad? Remote and angelic? Devilish and wicked?*

Yes. They are. And they can be.

Nonetheless, when we see the play, we evaluate the fairies on mortal, human terms. Strange that, at the end of the play, Titania does not seem so outraged at Oberon’s trick as we do. But we forget that they are not mortals, and perhaps it is not so easy to judge them by some human, or some mortal criteria. Like the proverbial apple tree judging oranges. What do we know?

Shakespeare remains full of these ‘what can we really know’ moments. Filled with spaces that tend to slip away from precise categorisation. Puck is one of these. As the first fairy describes him:

Either I mistake your shape and making quite,
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Call’d Robin Goodfellow: are not you he
That frights the maidens of the villagery;
Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern
And bootless make the breathless housewife churn;
And sometime make the drink to bear no barm;
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?
Those that Hobgoblin call you and sweet Puck,
You do their work, and they shall have good luck:
Are not you he? (AMND, 2.1.33-44)

Farm task frustration blended with bits of luck, Puck seems to represent the vagaries of rural life, often fostering frustrations similar to those supposedly caused by gremlins in WWII aircraft. Of course, gremlins can cause serious harm, as can fairies. The old fairy lore is full of random darkness, the emptiness of moonlit hills where people disappear, children wither to roots, terrible capricious misfortunes descend like lightning strokes upon the lives of simple folk. Or sometimes, conversely, great good fortune comes to someone, only because they did some kindness to the little people.

Fairies may be the rage of storms, or the placidity of water beneath the moon. They may be grim shadow and dancing light. They may be, at least, these aspects within us–the light and dark, and sardonic laughter of our own internal landscapes. For when I look within myself, the winter forest lies there, frozen, glittering in its sleep. Entranced by the remote hooting of the occasional winter owl, I long to sleep there. Lie down and sleep forever.

For when the fairies take mortals, often children, but they take adults as well, they often take them forever. Forever dancing, feasting, laughing in the candlelit halls beneath the hill, under the fairy mound for all time while the outside world changes and passes away. They may leave changelings in the mortals’ place. Strange, twisted bits of string, or aging fairies, or dead birds. Dolls made with peculiar features that are then enchanted to appear like the mortal they replace.

This strange technology would often be used in the past to explain how people may suddenly seem no longer themselves. Unruly children. Changeable adults. Age fading elders. Even community leaders who suddenly would take their seats and make decisions that might seem almost uniformly harmful or unwise.

The point is that, all too often, when A Midsummer Night’s Dream is produced, directors choose to use the fairies as a reflection of the mortal court. We ascribe mortal goals and designations to them. “Oberon wants to humiliate Titania”. “Titania wants the child”. But how might immortals be different from those who only live 70 or 80 years? What might they think about (for they would have covered the grounds of thought we cover in our lives long ago)? How would their tastes evolve? Their humour? How jaded and sardonic might they become? We cannot know.

There’s no prescription for direction. Different directors will always have different tastes and different emphases, and they may focus on different elements. This is the nature of theatre. Dream tends to be funny whether or not the immortals are really considered as such, which is part of the reason that the play remains so popular. It’s difficult to make it not be funny.

Still, it might be good if directors occasionally gave some thought to the possible differences between mortals and immortals, in perspective, taste, and potential motivation. Naturally, some directors do this. But it does seem like the fairies are more often made magical versions of ourselves, and that may risk losing a serious dimension of the play. Even with Shakespeare’s potential modifications, the fairies remain different from us, and not just because they can do some magic.

What we do know is that, whether the good neighbours actually exist or not, the ones in the play are not like us–perhaps even less so than aberrant leaders or fractious children. They are something else. The darkling time falling as the last day dies, and still singing. Still dancing. Still carrying lights across the darkened hills.

*For further descriptions, read Katharine Briggs who wrote numerous fundamental works on fairies. For a look into the shadowy and capricious nature of fairies, read Diane Purkiss–At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies is a good place to begin.

Denounced in Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, American Civil War veteran, Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899), was widely known as an agnostic who professed no use at all for religion, which he regularly and publicly denounced. Yet, he remained a strong believer in love. At the grave of his brother, Ebon (who was buried in Washington in 1879), the poet and orator made a speech that in part said:

“Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death Hope sees a star and listening Love can hear the rustle of a wing.”*

Faced with that final kind of sleep that seems to overwhelm even love at the close of human life, Ingersoll could not admit that love might be extinguished. He would not deny at least the possibility of eternity that human love suggested and might somehow engender. Clearly, in Ingersoll’s lack of religion lies another kind of religion, a belief in something that transcended what he saw as mere ceremony, and embraced the sacred depth of human love in all its forms.

Much as anti romantics tend to dismiss such notions, our delicate lives all too frequently seem crammed with random moments rushing to an end. Fragility and need are often laced together into the latest pair of shoes, longing for a peace. Curling up against the overarching sky, our lives seem to become unfounded and baseless, exposing our naked skin to hailstones while we attempt to fortify ourselves against those angry, swooping birds. Our skies incessantly dapple with crises. Sorrow, like a nearly feral kitten, sleeps at our doorstep while we wait within, mumbling furtive prayers in some attempt to avert night’s arrival.

“Alas, it is Horatio, my sweet son!
O no, but he that whilom was my son!”
(Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, II.v.13-4)**

Yet, there is more to love and sleep than death and mourning. The phrase may also conjure images of some of life’s greatest pleasures or pinnacles of contentment. Here is Algernon Charles Swinburne (with the titular sonnet for this post***):

Lying asleep between the strokes of night 
    I saw my love lean over my sad bed, 
    Pale as the duskiest lily’s leaf or head, 
Smooth-skinned and dark, with bare throat made to bite, 
Too wan for blushing and too warm for white, 
    But perfect-coloured without white or red. 
    And her lips opened amorously, and said – 
I wist not what, saving one word – Delight. 

And all her face was honey to my mouth, 
    And all her body pasture to mine eyes; 
         The long lithe arms and hotter hands than fire, 
The quivering flanks, hair smelling of the south, 
    The bright light feet, the splendid supple thighs 
         And glittering eyelids of my soul’s desire. 

In the province of desire, language seems to fall away, instances in life where words become a needless buzzing, a thousand twangling instruments, merely humming about the ears. Yet, in this case, the reader is carried to the drowsy erotic space, first by two four line stanzas that rhyme in an ABBA pattern where that repetition underscores the narrator’s sleepy state. The change in the last six lines emphasises the erotic while coupling it with the dreamy open vowels and buzzing endings–like the thrumming of locusts on a summer night. And that word order: mouth, eyes, fire, south, thighs desire.

Life and the erotic remain as impermanent as sleep. We and our structures, our priorities, and our meanings all dissolve. Sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly. However fast it happens, eventually we are lost boys and girls, always left behind. The fairies fade inexorably from our view. The back garden remains untenanted. American gods strive to find their own believers and maintain their hold on them.

This “crude matter” (as Master Yoda would express it) may animate us in many ways, and perhaps more than anything else. Still, the intellectual and spiritual protest that flesh is not all, and they are right. It is not. Acute longing may derive from many sources and one person, in a single life, drinks at many springs.

Zen master Ikkyu, held sexual congress as a kind of sacred rite that could aid enlightenment. According to some sources, he would wear his priest’s robes when he visited brothels. Yet, he wrote:

“A wonderful autumn night, fresh and bright;
Over the echo of music and drums from a distant village
The single clear tone of a shakuhachi brings a flood of tears–
Startling me from a deep, melancholy dream.”****

Whatever connections we make seem like proverbial summer lightning–so bright, so quick, and so quickly gone.

Near the end of Romeo and Juliet Paris catches the distraught Romeo breaking into the Capulet family tomb to see Juliet. In the ensuing fight, Paris is mortally wounded, and he asks Romeo to lay him in the tomb beside Juliet. Not even certain whom he has slain, Romeo is further horrified to discover that he has killed young Paris. Subsequently, on opening the tomb, Romeo is confronted with Juliet’s seemingly unvanquished beauty, and he says:

A grave? O, no. A lantern, slaughtered youth,
For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence full of light.—
Death, lie thou there, by a dead man interred.
(Laying Paris in the tomb).
How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry, which their keepers call
A light’ning before death! O, how may I
Call this a light’ning?—O my love, my wife,
Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
Thou art not conquered. Beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advancèd there.
(Romeo and Juliet, V.3.84-96)*****

Of course, the audience knows that Juliet is not truly dead. Romeo only believes her to be so. Yet, even with her lifelike appearance, the very thought of her death is too much for the young lover, who resolves:

O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh! Eyes, look your last.
Arms, take your last embrace. And, lips, O, you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death.
(Kissing Juliet).
Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide!
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark!
Here’s to my love. (Drinking). O true apothecary,
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.
(V.3.108-20)

Breath and death mingled with last glances and last kisses, and moments later, Juliet awakens from her induced sleep. She echoes Romeo’s lines and actions in the way a dream might echo living moments:

What’s here? A cup closed in my true love’s hand?
Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end.—
O churl, drunk all, and left no friendly drop
To help me after! I will kiss thy lips.
Haply some poison yet doth hang on them,
To make me die with a restorative. (She kisses him).
Thy lips are warm!
(V.3.166-72)

Again the warmth. Again the kiss. The end itself is ‘timeless’.

Moments later, unwilling to leave Romeo, she stabs herself with his dagger and dies. Here love and death walk hand in hand, but what of sleep? Actually, there is much here that might be said of two households sleepwalking through a pointless feud, and how much we sleepwalk through so many parts of life. Too often, we set ourselves on some automatic course and neglect to consider where that might lead us, or how it might affect others around us. We might make life choices based on our parents or our friends, our faith or our economic station. These elements may shade or help to shape a choice, but if they begin to determine our choices more completely, we may be sleepwalking. Something to think about perhaps.

Loss comes soon enough. Sleep turning colder as leaves begin to brown. Rains sweep in off the sea and the summer visitors leave the grey and restless shore. Sleep gets longer in cold weather, until it seems almost endless. Kakinomoto no Hitomaro wrote:

In the empty mountains
The leaves of bamboo grass
Rustle in the wind.
I think of a girl
Who is not here.*****

Absence will arrive, is constantly arriving. That train already sits, steaming at the platform in the local station. Waiting for that kiss, that colour, the bright spread of wings, might take too long. The eternal promise of Robert Ingersoll’s love may well lie in the here and now, in each day before it dies upon the evening hearth. We are all already ashes, and our solace and our solution may be in taking to pasture, and in presence. Perhaps the only real point is to avoid sleeping our way through our human experience before that last sleep settles in for the long and cooling night.

*The entire speech was delivered in Washington on the 3rd of June 1879, and was printed in the New York Tribune the next day. It is not long, and it is a beautiful tribute which can be read in its entirety here: https://www.bartleby.com/268/10/9.html

**MacIlwraith, A. K. Five Elizabethan Tragedies. London: OUP, 1961, p. 163.

***Love and Sleep (Aegypt) is also the title of novel by the writer John Crowley.

****Ikkyu Sojun (一休宗純), 1394-1481, trans. John Stevens.

*****R and J quotations in this post taken from the Folger digital edition.

******Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (柿本 人麻呂), 653-710?, trans. Kenneth Rexroth.

Understandably, birds represent transcendence–in literature they often represent the human ability to rise above earthly circumstances and overcome physical, intellectual, or spiritual difficulty. The title line this week comes from Matthew, but a similar thought could be plucked from almost any source, from Farid ud-Din Attar (whose masterpiece, Conference of the Birds, has already been touched on in an earlier blog post) or from Chaucer’s work on regeneration, The Parliament of Fowls. The question of life’s focus threads endlessly through literature as it does through the human psyche. From the question of mastery in the Conference of Attar of Nishapur to the the question of love in Chaucer, we are seekers all.

In full, the titular verse says:

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? (KJV, Matthew 6:26)

This comparison offers some consideration. Better, better off, more, greater? Recall that, in the great Persian epic, Attar’s birds eventually find their ruler in themselves. Chaucer’s fowls find regeneration as they mark it, in love and song:

“Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe,
 That hast thes wintres wedres overshake,
 And driven away the longe nyghtes blake!
 “Saynt Valentyn, that art ful hy on-lofte,
 Thus syngen smale foules for thy sake:
 Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe,
 That hast thes wintres wedres overshake.
 “Wel han they cause for to gladen ofte,
 Sith ech of hem recovered hath hys make,
 Ful blissful mowe they synge when they wake:
Now welcome, somer, with thy sonne softe,
 That hast thes wintres wedres overshake,
 And driven away the longe nyghtes blake!”
(Chaucer, “Parliament of Fowls”, 680-92)*

Here, the birds herald renewal, with the first mention of St. Valentine as a patron of lovers and the coming of spring. The line “hys make” is often taken to include “his mate”, and the idea that one may find one’s ‘making’ in ‘mating’ may easily be read as harkening back to the ancient festival traditions of regeneration and renewal.

Not all of the bird renewals are necessarily so light. From the darker corners of Irish folk custom comes ‘Wren Day’ on St. Stephen’s Day, or the day after Christmas, where people (often young boys) would kill a wren and carry the dead bird about with them while begging/demanding money for its funeral. The sacrifice marked a transition, with the wren’s death representing the killing of the old year to herald the new year, often represented by the robin. This is really another version of the midwinter festival, and the symbolic killing of winter in order to usher in the new year, and the eventual return of sunlight the spring season, and new growth. Here is one set of lyrics for the “Wren Song” that was sung door to door on Wren Day (there are many variants of the song, but they remain mostly similar):

The wren, oh the wren; he’s the king of all birds,
On St. Stephens day he got caught in the furze,
So it’s up with the kettle and it’s down with the pan,
Won’t you give us a penny for to bury the wren!
(Irish traditional)**

So, while birds represent transcendence and renewal, akin to the ‘lofty’ or the celestial, they are not, in themselves, immortal, and their sacrifice may also be included in, or called for, as an element of regeneration. Birds and bees do die, and in many ways they represent the fragile nature of life, susceptible as they may be to weather or changes in atmosphere. The proverbial canary in a coal mine comes to mind–the canaries that miners would take down into the mines with them as a living gauge, because if carbon monoxide were to build up in the tunnels, the canary would succumb first, and if the bird died, the miners would still have a chance to get out before they died as well.

Yet, birds still represent a kind of gateway to immortality. Metaphors of the ascendent. Vehicles that, even though they resonate strongly with sky and freedom, remain fragile, and easily damaged or restrained.

In The Duchess of Malfi, the Duchess, whose marriage is opposed by her brothers, in contrast to the biblical sentiment, does not feel “better” (or better off) than the birds:

The birds that live
I’ th’ field on the wild benefit of nature
Live happier than we; for they may choose their mates, 
And carol their sweet pleasures to the spring. 
(Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, III.v.17-20)

The Duchess’s birds carol to the spring as Chaucer’s do, but even though the Duchess has married her love in secret, and has borne his children, the long term happiness that might be achieved by long term companionship with him is denied to her. Banished, imprisoned, and finally killed by her own brothers for marrying beneath her station, the Duchess nonetheless remains a strong and knowing character. When her maid, Cariola, asserts that the Duchess will survive her trials, the Duchess compares herself to a bird:

CARIOLA: Yes, but you shall live
To shake this durance off.

DUCHESS: Thou are a fool:
The robin-redbreast and the nightingale
Never live long in cages.
(Malfi, IV.ii.11-4)

The robin, symbolic of the spring is joined by the nightingale in the metaphor, the nightingale being a bird best known for its gorgeous song. (In fact, the ‘gale’ in the name ‘nightingale’ comes from an old English word, ‘galan’, meaning to sing and/or enchant.) The idea of song sorcery or enchantment, especially in terms of new or prolonged life, in the bird’s song is sustained. In the mines, when the canary’s song stops, the enchanted dream of life has come to an end. Death has arrived.

Just before she is murdered, the Duchess of Malfi converses with Bosola, a complex character whose sympathies and loyalties are not always in concert. This time, it is Bosola who returns us to the caged bird metaphor:

DUCHESS: Who am I?

BOSOLA: Thou are a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy.  What’s this flesh? A little crudded milk, fantastical puffpaste. Our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in; more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earthworms. Dids’t thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o’er our heads, like her looking glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison.
(Malfi, IV.ii.125-37)

Of course, Bosola describes himself in this passage as much (or moreso) than he does the Duchess. A man feeling compelled to serve a master with whom he does not agree, Bosola describes an arc of difficult personal revelation and changing loyalty throughout the Duchess of Malfi. Of all the characters in the play, he seems to remain most aware of the “small compass” of his own prison.

Much more strongly than the Duchess does, in fact. To her executioners, who strangle her, she says her last words:

Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength
Must pull down heaven up on me:
Yet stay; heaven gates are not so highly arch’d 
As princes’ palaces; they that enter there
Must go upon their knees. [kneeling] Come, violent death,
Serve for mandragora to make me sleep!
Go tell my brothers, when I am laid out,
They then may feed in quiet. [They strangle her]
(Malfi, IV.ii.233-40)

A grim ending for a vital character, who like the old year, ends as a kind of corpse festooned in ribbons and metaphorical ashes. Ropes and crowns. The queen of the old year brought down like a wren in the furze, or a lark soul in the body’s cage. One can almost taste the metaphysical parallels of the fertile Duchess, a character filled with lively passion, and her mad brothers, the cold Cardinal, and the feral Ferdinand.

But such is the way with old years. Seasons pass away and so do we. Yet somewhere in the midst of this canoe ride down the river towards the falls, these other moments assert themselves. Because as the old bird is buried, another bird will sing anew. Finally, here’s Shakespeare, with the concluding lines of the “Phoenix and the Turtle”:

Truth may seem but cannot be; 
Beauty brag but ’tis not she; 
Truth and beauty buried be. 

To this urn let those repair 
That are either true or fair; 
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
(Shakespeare, “The Phoenix and the Turtle”, 62-7)

It is our oldest human truth that things do not endure, and it may be nearly as ancient a human undertaking to try to circumvent this. Finding ways to live longer, live better, make things last, to sustain those brief bright moments. Failing that, we assign these ideas to metaphysics and the attempt to endure to a kind of alchemy. Somehow, if our minds and bodies fail us, we can still polish the spirit in hopes that it may go on somewhere, somehow. About the precise workings of such mechanisms, things tend to get technical, but also more than a little vague.

However, perhaps “better” or “more” than the birds is a mistake. Ultimately, we are the same. We are the eternal phoenix, lighting fire to its own nest and perishing in the flames only to renew itself. And we are also the turtledove, mated with the phoenix for life and so in love that we perish upon that pyre with our beloved when it departs. Instead of beauty, maybe the ashes are the truth. Or, in the end, maybe the ashes are beautiful too. We are Cinderella slipping in and out of glass slippers, at once the metaphor for creation, and the very creation itself.

*Geoffrey Chaucer and Christopher Cannon, The Riverside Chaucer: Based on The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Larry Dean Benson and Fred Norris Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008):
Now welcome summer, with thy sun soft,
That has these winter weathers overshaken
And driven away the long night’s black!
Saint Valentine, who are full high aloft,
Thus sing small fowls for thy sake:
Now welcome summer, with thy sun soft
That has these winter weathers overshaken. 
Well have they cause for to gladden often
Since each of them recovered has his make
Full blissful may they sing when they awake:
Now welcome summer, with thy sun soft
That has these winter weathers overshaken
And driven away the long night’s black.

**The Chieftans do a version of this song, and many many other individuals and groups do as well.

Sometimes, there is no more than cold. Pervasive, all consuming, air turned instantly to frost.

This week, parts of the United States’ Midwest have been experiencing a ‘Polar Vortex’. You know. You’ve read the news. Apparently polar vortex is climatologist speak for damn. Damn cold. Fucking cold. Freeze your ass off. Witch’s tit. Build a fire freeze to death.

Perhaps Tom Waits said it best:

Diamonds on my windshield
Tears from heaven
Pullin’ in town on the Interstate
Pullin’ a steel train in the rain

Wind bites my cheek
Through the wing
Fast flyin’ freeway drive
It always makes me sing

Duster tryin’ to change my tune
Pullin’ up fast on the right
Rollin’ restlessly
Twenty-four hour moon

Wisconsin hiker with a cue-ball head
Wishin’ he’s home in a Wiscosin bed
Fifteen feet of snow in the East
Colder than a well digger’s ass

–Tom Waits, Diamonds on my Windshield

Oh, he gets it. Rolling restlessly, waves rolling over us as well. Tolls. Sand, frost, night, even our footing can grow cold. Crunchy dewdark. Sound of frogs gone silent. Roses faded to standing brown corpses, iced against a garden wall. Desperate clench in Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love. Others seem to be driving next to us, but really. Oh, really. We roll alone.

That cold wind can be anything. Loneliness. Lack of work. Lack of meaning. Hot breath on the back of our neck. Golden Horn Hooligan. Angelo de Ponciano said:

have you ever sat by the railroad track
and watched the empties coming back?
lumbering along with a groan and a whine,-
smoke strung out in a long gray line
belched from the panting engine’s stack
– just empties coming back.

i have – and to me the empties seem
like dreams i sometimes dream –
of a girl – or money – or maybe fame –
my dreams have all returned the same,
swinging along the homebound track
– just empties coming back.

Places ripe and ripe too. And rot and rot. And become unweeded gardens. Or just fall away. And whether it is us or place that falls away seems to make little difference.

Like spending years seeking work in oversaturated markets, detailed CV hit send and send and send. We wonder how we will survive in whatever happened to our home. Doesn’t matter in the end because unemployment remains ‘at an all time low’. Nations turning their backs on scholarship, drawn instead to vapid spectacle. Replacing being with glass, with plastic, with polluted air. Take away the mirrors. No cameras. I can be Dorian Gray alone in my room. Alone.

Trying to come ‘home’ after long elsewhere. Few talk about that change. Isolated aliens. Home gone. Life a constant ill fitting assault. Perched on a precipice, no real idea what to do. Where to go. How.

Isn’t working, this ‘reverse culture shock’. Just take some of these and the depression won’t seem so bad. Days into months and years of not finding our feet again. No real work. No one knowing us, streets filled up with fog. Growing cold.

Fifteen feet of snow in the East. Colder than a well digger’s ass.

Grave digger’s ass.

We write about emptinesses, polishing old, second hand trophies, then throwing them away. No room to keep those ancient dreams. No room to keep the ones we have. No room for us.

Graves yawn, and crossroads fill with traffic for the devil. The devil speaks and acts like a petty, child tempered mobster. Or fiddles in a stern sounding whine, rhetoric of intentions and referendum. Please just let me see him. Please just let me make a deal. Doesn’t matter what the cost. You see, she needs. He needs. I need. We need.

We all need some I scream.

Oh, it wouldn’t be for me. Please understand. My own tin lunch box is filled with tiny dancing skeletons. Tcheriapin in a pocket, a dangling toy forever. That violin, how I remember.

Sometimes we can’t pull out of a skid, pull the plane out of a dive. The forty fathom bank yields something else besides the fish. Hurlyburly’s never done. Battle lost and won.

Outside, thunder. Lightning. Rain perpetual. Infinities of sand before us. Empty of flowers. Sky purple with love in idleness comes to the western outskirts but brings forth no rain.

Will there be balloons at the party? The long table that had been laid with old scratched silverplate? Will anyone talk to us beyond “What is open at this hour?” “Can we get the cheaper whiskey? Only because I’m low on cash.” “Did you see her leave?’

Did anyone see anything? Do you remember? Were you there? The moon like a drooling idiot bleeding light into the almost frosted sky. We’ve had our night in Bangkok. We cannot walk with angels. Besides, most of them are lousy at chess.

Not that we’d want to play. Not anymore. “I will revenge my injuries: if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear”.* Our own beasts walk within us and we pour them out into the pool halls of our spirit, the empty causeways of our mind.

Only at the end of tide. The end of green fields, home, grass, and soft summer evenings. The end of smiles and bees, ashes, silver, rust. Only then might there be some tiny scrap of peace, and perhaps not even then.

I heard upon his dry dung-heap
That man cry out who cannot sleep:
“If God is God He is not good,
If God is good He is not God;
Take the even, take the odd,
I would not sleep here if I could
Except for the little green leaves in the wood
And the wind on the water.”

— Nickles, in J.B.: A Play in Verse by Archibald MacLeish [The Pulitzer Prize play, 1959] (New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1958), p. 18.

No. We can’t sleep. Not in this weather. We shouldn’t even try. **

*Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin). “Frankenstein.” Project Gutenberg Frankenstein. Accessed January 31, 2019. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm.

**Other unstated references include (but are not limited to), Francis Van Wyck Mason, Jack London, Grantland Rice, Nick Cave, Oscar Wilde, 杜甫, Todd Rundgren, Robert Johnson, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (the version my grandfather left me, with strapping tape on the spine and his notes in the margins), Sax Rohmer, Les Galloway (who is one of many terrific and mostly forgotten writers), the I Ching, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George C. Chesbro, G.K. Chesterton, Mammoths (out of the Living Review, vol. 280), Richard Nelson and Tim Rice, Joan Baez, Richard E. Grant, and all the lonely people. Where the hell do they all come from?

As for the rest of you, if you’re reading this, you know who you are. Much love. Stay warm out there. You are greatly missed. If you aren’t reading this, well, why not?

Please feel free to subscribe, follow, comment, deface, or walk away René Girard Depardieu Gistang Picard. It’s over. Go home. Or, listen to this song, dedicated to early career early modernists everywhere:

The title is the first line of the poem “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost. The whole poem appears here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall

Famously, Shakespeare even turns a wall into a character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, showing us a simple craftsman who amazingly (and comically) embodies the very idea of human separation.

Snout. In this same interlude it doth befall 
That I, one Snout by name, present a wall; 
And such a wall, as I would have you think, 
That had in it a crannied hole or chink, 
Through which the lovers, Pyramus and Thisby, 
Did whisper often very secretly. 
This loam, this rough-cast and this stone doth show 
That I am that same wall; the truth is so: 
And this the cranny is, right and sinister, 
Through which the fearful lovers are to whisper. —A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.149-58

Of course, a different kind of wall tends to be in the news these days. Fearful lovers? The United States and Mexico? Yes. Exactly. For it is impossible to imagine a United States, a California, Arizona, New Mexico, (or Iowa, Illinois, or Nebraska) without the presence of the children of the sun, as much as it is impossible to imagine that great melting pot country without the Norwegians, or Scots, or Irish, or English, or Dutch, or any of the other great peoples who came to its shores at different points in its history.

Yet, some people remain afraid of love, for love can be a terribly threatening thing. A first kiss can seem like a plunge, and commitment risks losing the entire self into a union. Some people, it seems, would prefer to wall themselves up within themselves, keeping potential kisses, kindnesses, and the whole terrifying possibility of human connection at a distance, which may seem safe, albeit it really is not so. Stagnation remains the enemy of human life and experience.

But what about walls? Surely these speak of safety in an uncertain world. Surely they can keep invaders out, barring potential thieves from our collective back garden. But do they?

Casting around at the potential effectiveness of walls, we find that they seem to have variable effectiveness, at different kinds of occlusion, under different circumstances. They can temporarily stifle human (and animal) movement across a space, but they also seem to embody a challenge to any energy on the other side–presenting a thing to be surmounted, a line in the sand, an obstacle that human will might then repeatedly bend itself to overcome.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/05/san-diego-has-border-wall-did-it-reduce-crime/

Recent wall advocates equate increased border traffic with increased crime.  A wall would cut down on migration for a time, but would it actually cut crime in the ways claimed, and at what immediate and ultimate cost?  Here’s a pretty good article:
http://hir.harvard.edu/article/?a=14542

and another one:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trumps-border-wall-highlights-the-climate-migration-connection/

It is important to note that walls seem to increase (or reinforce) nationalist feelings, tendencies, and policies.  As mentioned, they manifest the idea of an obstacle, lending a border a more physical kind of presence, and immediately focusing scattered opposition to human restraint on both its tangible being and the idea that it represents. But there is an additional, environmental cost to the border wall with Mexico that has been proposed in the United States:
https://www.npr.org/2018/12/03/673022628/south-texas-butterfly-sanctuary-threatened-by-trumps-border-wall

Finally, the question is how much of our already imperiled non-human populations we can afford to lose (because it isn’t just butterflies, but other animal and human concerns–like clean water), what might be the larger cost to our world, and do we want to pay so much merely to stop people from seeking a “better” life outside of their own country?  Is shutting out refugees worth discarding clean water or successful crops (as bee populations would be threatened by such a wall as well).

Do criminals cross that border, bringing guns and drugs and crime?  Almost certainly.  Are criminals the majority of migrants?  
Here’s one more article and a highlighted quote below it:
https://crim.sas.upenn.edu/fact-check/do-mexican-immigrants-cause-crime

“The results of this research offer little evidence that Mexican immigration increases crime in the United States. If anything, there is some evidence that crime declines after immigrants arrive. These findings are supported by research from the Public Policy Institute of California on the composition of inmates in California prisons, which reveals that Mexican immigrants are dramatically underrepresented in the state prison system.” 

To me, these articles, the majority of which have been drawn from recent, reliable, and typically less biased research sources (albeit Mother Jones, the source of the first perspective, is known to often adopt a more liberal perspective) may not be absolutely conclusive, but they strongly indicate that the people of the United States should think very carefully before they throw a huge amount of tax money into a project with tremendous destructive potential for all the people in the country, and do so for what appears to be more paranoid and bigoted hot air than it is effective policy.

Sometimes, fate has other things in store for us. Sometimes the landscape changes. Sometimes the visitor at the threshold brings tiny gifts, or blessings, or small scrolls with a little ragged information. Best to listen for that knock.

When she comes to the door, she looks as she always does, and her eyes have that savant gaze that looks at me, through me, and far beyond me at once. No matter that typical mortal subjects like math, science, literature, and other things that we all learn in school remain distinctly beyond her use or understanding. She has always looked on something else, and I think she always will.

Rain has swept in off the ocean today. The land lies quiet and sullen, punctuated by rivulets. Bird song. Tonight’s darkness will be chorused by thousands of frogs.

I Meant To Do My Work Today

I meant to do my work today,
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,
And a butterfly flitted across the field,
And all the leaves were calling me. 

And the wind went sighing over the land,
Tossing the grasses to and fro,
And a rainbow held out its shining hand–
So what could I do but laugh and go? –Richard Le Gallienne

Other things in store, yes, except not that. Not exactly that.

For the moment, this moment only, there is pressing work. It only pays a little and it is far from permanent, yet I cannot pass on it in this long period of drought. So while I still seek something more supportive and more durable, I have to go and attend to what there is. A departure. But not a permanent or even a long one. Into the land of wishing it were a field, while I tend to what I can.

In the meantime, there is always advice. Listen as much as you can this week to frogs or birds or anything except the news. If you are near the shore, go there and listen to the waves or to the quiet of notwaves if your nearness is smaller ponds. Near rivers, go to them and think of them, hearing voices of all the stones they must have touched. Otherwise, go out and listen to this most excellent canopy the air. Bathe in that. Revel in it. Luxuriate. Continue to avoid the news. Then see if you don’t feel better.

For my part, I will be back as soon as I can, in a week I hope.