Hamlet as Actor

The key to Hamlet is drama, plays, playing. First there is the idea that “these are actions that a man might play, but I have in my that which passes show.” He’s not telling the truth. He’s saying what he wants to convince himself and others is true. He’s trying to be, in Girardian terms, the model for others. But they won’t follow him. They’ve moved on past grief, too quickly in the case of Gertrude, but other desires were stronger. Shakespeare isn’t interested in what these are. He gives too little information to us on how to understand them. Etc. The point is that Hamlet brings up acting for the first time in this speech, and tries to raise and sustain the idea that there is a difference between acting and genuine action, a difference which always has to be asserted because it can never be sustained, not because action can reproduce anything that the genuine can (Shakespeare again and again, in Love’s Labour’s Lost and As You Like it, and Much Ado etc. has a player detail how you can tell the difference between acting and real life but, an actor doing this on a stage always belies the claim, turns it into a joke in fact, or an instance of irony—in acting you can’t x, said to the actor who has just x’d) but because there is no such thing as an unacted genuine, or if there is, it is a momentary impulse that dies unless acted—such is the impulse to revenge when it first arises. If anything is genuine it is that moment when Hamlet pledges to carry out as swift as thoughts of love is revenge, which there is literally nothing to stop him from doing at that moment. He knows where the king is. He has been full and immediate access to the king, who is drunk and unable to defend himself. Shakespeare makes the situation easy as can be for revenge. It practically takes care of itself. But instead of strutting down to the hall where the inebriate king is stumbling around, Hamlet pledges to pretend to madness. A completely unmotivated action.

Why? He’s again acting. This is what we do in plays. Hamlet has seen The Spanish Tragedy and all the Revenge Tragedies ever performed. And he knows that to delay he has to pretend to be mad. Why? He could kill Claudius. And Shakespeare has taken away the one thing that could have made him hesitate—concern for his own safety. Shakespeare has made it clear that Hamlet’s suicidal desire is real, his carelessness for his own life is illustrated by his willingness to approach the ghost (quote the line). In fact one of the few times in the play when he’s eager to act is when he approaches the ghost. Why? The ghost may give him reason to live, or to act, or to distract himself from suicide. And he doesn’t want to kill Claudius because killing Claudius takes away his reason to live. If he lives to kill Claudius then he doesn’t have to die. He also in a more profound way doesn’t want to kill Claudius because if life itself isn’t worth anything, then revenge can’t be justified. Claudius took from his father something that was not valuable: his life. As long as earth is an unweeded garden, a rank prison, as long as the only reason not to kill yourself is fear of what comes next, then there’s no point in revenge. I can’t go with Nietzsche here in his reasoning, but his conclusion is sound.

A New Thought on Hamlet's Most Famous Soliloquy

This'll probably only work once, but, hey:

Think of it as the type of Shakespeare's early-days soliloquy: Direct talking to the audience, and not one of his later-days ones: Audience overhears character talking to himself. Or rather, think of it as a hybrid, direct address to the audience AS character thinks things through.

Hamlet comes on stage, solus, (yes, Claude and Polly are hiding). He paces, thinking. Everyone knows what's coming. But he stays silent until things feel really awkward, like Michael Jackson at the Superbowl. Then he turns to the audience, looks directly around the room for as long as anyone can stand it and he says, "to be." And the house lights come on full. Light explodes everywhere, and (timing here is important) the lights stay bright just long enough for the average member to start to have a glimmer of what's going on, and he says, lights going dark at "or," "or not to be."

And the brightness of the lights before make this darkness as dark as can be.

Hamlet goes on in an explanatory way. He hasn't noticed the lights going up or down. "That is the question" (i.e. "that this play is asking"). People's eyes adjust. Hamlet is in no hurry to get through this speech. Just as the eyes start to see the outline of Hamlet/actor, the stage lights start to come up, but so slowly that no one can tell whether that is what is happening or whether their eyes are continuing to adjust.

He goes through the rest of the speech as though he's explaining the play to the audience. But the meaning is occuring to him at the same time. Or at least the illustrations and examples are occurring to him in real time.

He melts back into the play at the sight of Ophelia.

NB: This also helps us over the "bourne" problem. In the play he seems to have forgotten that he's seen a ghost. But in this performance, he's letting you know that that is a play, and this is real life.

Red, White or Blue

(draft)

(capo second fret: A D F#m E7 C#m Bm A shapes, quick strum, upbeat)

B                       E 

Why are you afraid today?

              G#m            F#7

You’re gonna die anyway

       D#m                            C#m

Or is the world trying to make

     E              B

A victim of you?

In A-merica

We shouldn’t care of you’re

Red or you’re white

It makes me blue

To see my brothers and

Sisters of color are

Suffering at the hands of

Systemic abuse

Black man in the street

He just wants some peace

Cop comes up and says

What do you do?

I’m just walking here

Isn’t that pretty clear

Haven’t you anything

Better to do?

In A-merica

We shouldn’t care if you’re

Brown or your black

But maybe we do.

Cop says he’s had enough

Puts the man into cuffs

Says "I gotta make

An example of you.”

On the news it said
That young man is dead
People in the streets yell
"What did he do?"

In A-merica

We shouldn’t care if you’re

Rich or you’re poor

Red, purple or blue.

You said we're weak:

Peaceful riots in the street

The presidential Orangeman

Threatening you.

“If you don’t go away

I knee to the ground I say

I bring the army in for

Smothering you.”

You may be surprised to know

That’s not how it goes.

Americans everywhere

Coming for you.

Red, white, black and brown

Driving you outta town

It really isn’t hard to see

The failure of you.

All A-merica

Sees just what you are.

It's time you start to think of
Something better to do.

We Talked

We talked and talked and talked
Until Darrel Danger got it right.
So we set that account aside
And kept on talking.

But what IS it?

Is there anything we can adequately define? To answer that question of course we first have to define "adequate." I would define it, in this instance (parenthesis of paramount importance), as "true or accurate in itself." As what is "propre" in French. But is anything truly, transcendentally itself? Or is everything, practically speaking, a "self" only in relation to us, human observers? I doubt it. In any case we cannot define anything as though we did not exist and not only because it is our language we are defining with. Which is to say that from the point of view of a different order of creatures, I'm pretty certain, everything would be arranged differently and defined through a language that could not translate into any of ours.

But isn't it okay to define adequacy in relation to our own perception? Would that be adequate? This is where it gets even trickier. We can dispense altogether with angels or aliens. I would say, in answer to the question, "adequate FOR WHAT?" All adequacies are temporized. And that means "adequate" in the sense we started with is LITERALLY in-adequate. All definitions turn out to be stipulative. That's not to say that "reality" (as we perceive it) does not play a part. It just means it doesn't play the definitive part without (as Derrida said) residue.

I'm reminds of my son's friends' debate about whether a hot dog is a sandwich, which they conducted as though "sandwich" were a transcendental category and not something we can, at will, define any hot dog into our out of. I want to ask them to define not sandwich but "hot dog." What is a hot dog? An animal casing in which processed meat is packed? A specific subset of "sausage"? Perhaps. But there's more than just processed meat in a hot dog. Forgetting all the "chemical" additives, there can also be cheese. If you add cheese to the processed meat is it still a hot dog? Why not? How much cheese? What is the absolute ratio: 49-51% But that's an arbitrary ratio. What about 1-99% What about 100% cheese in that casing? Is it still a hot dog? But there are "skinless franks." So I should be able to take away the casing too. Now I have a roll of cheese that is, arguably, a hot dog.

Of course a hot dog is a human creation. Too easy. Certainly we get to define human creations. Work this out with diamonds.

I Want Green

I want green?

It’s a sample sentence on a grammar test. The fifth-grade student is asked to parse it. It looks easy: pronoun, verb, ah—green?

“Teacher, I’m having trouble with this sentence.”

“Imagine I held out two shirts, one red, one green and you said, ‘I want green.’”

That’s all the help she can give.

He goes through his list of definitions. A noun is a person place thing or idea. It’s not a person or a place. Is green a thing or an idea? He’s never understood this idea of idea very well. Isn’t everything sort of an idea?

An adjective is a word or phrase naming an attribute, added to or grammatically related to a noun to modify or describe it.

Green is an attribute of the shirt. The shirt is the thing. Green tells you something about the shirt. So it’s really an adjective, green.

But the word “shirt” isn’t in the sentence. But it’s implied. Like the word “you” isn’t in the sentence “Go to hell!” And “that” isn’t in the sentence, “It’s the shirt I want.” So green is an adjective.

Or is it a noun?

And is the more intelligent student the one who gets the answer wrong or the one who gets the answer right? The one we reward or the one we punish?

Trump and Testing

Testing will save lives.

Testing will give us the information we need to make informed decisions about when and how to reopen the economy.

No one disputes this.

But Trump resists testing.

It makes him look bad.

It makes it less likely he will win re-election.

There is no other way to look at this.

The only good thing about Trump is that he’s so stupid, he doesn’t even understand that he should try to hide this.

He literally doesn’t care who dies. He doesn’t care how many people get sick—as long as he gets re-elected.

That’s the first horror.

The second horror is that over 40% of the country either don’t see this or deny it—though it stands out to them as starkly as blizzard in May. Or they don’t care.

You can’t make Trump supporters care, even if you can make them see. Trump’s mendacity was as clear as an open window the day he came down that escalator and lied about immigration, as the day he bragged on tape about sexual assault, as the day he mocked the disabled. It’s as clear as he denial of science, as his labelling of everything that doesn’t serve his interest as false. His lies are transparent. His failures and in competencies are as plain as day. Even his rare attempts to hide them are comic and feeble (“I meant to misspell ‘Nobel.’”) But they don’t care. You can’t make them care.

We may never know how many will get sick or how many will die because of this. We won’t collect enough information to know. We won’t do the necessary testing.

The Stone Upon the Highway

A                            F#m
I walked along the highway
D#m                     C#m
I paused upon the bridge

F#m                 D
I gazed into the river

           A              D#m  C#m (repeat*)
And I knocked a pebble in.

Do you remember

We stood upon this place

And I looked into your eyes

As they roamed across my face 

It was nice to be together

And you said you’d like to stay

And the stone is in the river

And the river flows away

          A                          D
         The fire upon the mountains
                    E                    A
          Rages gold into the sky
                 D                    E                     A
         The fire upon the windows rages high
                 A                     D
         The people in the houses
                       E                     A
         Rage in lonely, secret sighs
                  D                  E                        A
         The people in the houses close the blinds.

I drove into the mountains

Where the mountain wind blew loud

I went to hear the voice of God

Because my life was hard

I looked into the sky

And I tried to see a face

And the mountain wind blew loud

And the water flowed away.

          I guess that this is just the way
          This life is going to be
          We thought we'd be forever young and free
          Now the moment last forever
          In my broken memory
          And that is all that's left of you and me

         The fire upon the mountains
          Rages gold into the sky
         The fire upon the windows rages high
         The people in the houses
         Rage in lonely, secret sighs
         The people in the houses close the blinds.

And I walk along the highway

And I pause upon the bridge

And I gaze into the river

And I throw a pebble in.

(*repeat w/o words on verses one , three, five and six, ending on A after v. 6)

The Global Warming Fistacuffs

The right wing is apparently still on the rise, with its xenophobia, its nationalism, its ignorance and fear. This, like el Niño weather patterns, happens periodically. What makes complacency impossible this time is the planetary threat that looms in the setting with an urgency never understood before. That the alt-right can surprise no one. That its periodic recurrence of high-pitched rage has been given a boost by propagandist media and social networks means that its strength at this moment is particularly ominous. But in the normal course of things, it would subside. It would lead, again, to some catastrophic equivalent of the holocaust or Hiroshima and more compassionate alternatives would afterwards emerge. History does not repeat itself in the same way ever, but there are patterns of closing in and opening up just as there are patterns of boom and bust in a capitalist economy. But just as those economic patterns cannot persist forever, and that at some point that economy will fall of its own accumulated weight, and just as the universe cannot expand forever, these destructive patterns of right-wing fear and liberal recovery cannot endlessly repeat. At a certain point the squeezebox breaks. The threat this time, however, is not structural, it’s not the wearing out of the parts. It comes from the outside. Everything the right wing supports leads it to ignore the heating of the earth. It wants to hurry to accomplish as much as it can while it has the stage. Chaos is its friend. That liberal cause of species survival, which would seem to be a nuisance, even that can—by attacking it with the empty derision of made-up terms like "P.C."—even that can become an asset in the right-wing assault on compassion, decency, basic humanity. Global warming is now the mis-en-scene where our ultimately meaningless political battles take place. A sword fight in a burning building. And nothing will be done to put out the fire, and not because both sides are so intent on defeating the other that neither will call the fire department, but because one side won’t let the other call, blocks every move toward the phone, laughs “you can’t call until you defeat me, and by then it will be too late.”

Art Makes Everything Better

He said, "Women are the most beautiful thing in the world."

He said, "This is the most beautiful woman in the world,

and this is the greatest picture of the most beautiful woman. 

I could stare at it for seconds."

On (let's call it) Prayer...

We use pictures
because words can only take us so far
Music
because pictures can only take us so far
Silence
because sound can only take us so far...

Neither Arbitrary nor Absolute

This is where we live, between the arbitrary and the absolute. The colors we see are not the colors that are. But what we see does respond to the spectrum, which is real (though not a spectrum). Waves of energy exist at a range of frequency that we translate into color and these colors. (These waves may only exist as such from that narrow slice of being humans occupy with earth and the other planets and stars and all their animals, with all, that is, that is or would be sensible to us). These colors differ from person to person and their lines of division are drawn differently from culture to culture, but not so differently that we cannot translate "藍色" as "blue," though sometimes it's green. Better eyes would see better colors, more colors, infinite colors. Better ears hear all the nuance between G# and A (no, I take that back, not all the nuance, which is infinite, but more nuance). Every kilohertz could have a different name, every nanometer too. (But why the gross units of nanometer and kilohertz and not something finer?)

But that would not be useful.

What use does color have or sound? one may ask. The fundamental use of all the senses is survival--according to evolutionary theory. Other uses have developed since. A scientist said our senses are calibrated to what used to be useful. But they're used now for what gives us pleasure. Maybe they were always also for that. (But then maybe that is also useful--such gross terms when we want such fine meanings).

Okay. But all that stuff about sound and color, it's all merely the analogue. All language, all word boundaries fit the pattern, everything but numbers (but counting, applied numbers also fits the pattern). Governmental structure too. This is what the enlightenment toppled, the idea that there is a right governmental structure, echoing the one in Heaven, echoing the hierarchy of being. There are only those governmental structures that serve certain interests, that have certain uses, that respond to pressures of values and not those. And some that persist when serving what once was useful. Social structures, like seasonal lag, are never quite in sync with the time.

And values too are neither arbitrary nor absolute. This is the eternal flux and tension and failure of resolution.

Introduction to Poetry

An Introduction to Poetry: A complete online course

(That's a clickable link btw. Below is just a picture.)

The Freedom of a Sonnet

Freedom’s the movement of lines in a sonnet
Though every tenth syllable coughs up a rhyme
And every second has stress laid upon it
And if it’s done rightly it ends on a dime
After one hundred forty, on a coupleted line.
Predictable as sin, with its own mid-life crisis,
Spinning its happiness into regret
Like a wide-eyed zealot-for-god joining ISIS
Then coming to find they’re a murderous sect.
So we go through our lives eating breakfast at seven
And driving to work with the radio on
Then home come to supper, to bed at eleven--
Love, suffer and sweat through our little duration
And, inside that frame, make our peace with creation.

The two destinations of knowing

I want to say that there are two ways by which we determine that x is true. The first, and least often followed, is logic: the truth emerges as a conclusion to an inevitable logical sequence. Scientific knowledge, when it is itself, is of this form as much as philosophy is. The other is what T.S. Eliot refers to when he says, "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." It is the knowledge of feeling at home. It's full of dangers and misinterpretations. But it is essential.

The Conditions Are Not Neutral

After proving, despite themselves, that the winner of the Tour de France is the racer best suited to the conditions, and in an effort to dismiss the use of technology as long as everyone has access to it equally, the commentator says, "Les cyclistes les plus forts et les plus rapides remporteront toujours la compétition."

Take that in. He's just proven that his conclusion--reached after ample presentation of the evidence--is NOT true. And he punctuates his analysis with "the best man always wins."

There is no "best man." There is only "the best under these conditions." The Tour de France does NOT reveal the best cyclist in the world. It reveals the winner of the Tour de France. That's all. You can't generalize. At least you can't reach any absolute statement about the best. The best does not exist. There are no neutral conditions.

Why does this matter? There are no neutral conditions, period. For anything. Humans spend their lives trying to figure out where they fit in, how high in some pecking order they exist--sports, work, family, hobbies, church, social club--always confusing the essentially made-upness of these orders with some natural order, a great chain of being, that will give them their true and absolute value.

There's no accurate measure out there, none conceivable. Change the arbitrary rules of the game and you change the winner.

There is no activity or aesthetic that can judge you the greatest in the world. Or the most incompetent.

Thoughts Prayers and Ink

More guns equals more gun violence. A friend if mine told me I needed to say that again. There it is.

Words have proven as useless against gun violence as thoughts and prayers. Somehow the words that prevent action seem to work better. But I don't think they do. All words are pro forma at this point.

Persistence of Vision

A movie, a series of still pictures
presented too fast for the brain
to process. It cannot be convinced
despite knowing
what it seizes is not movement
but the illusion of movement.

I did some painting yesterday. Now
I’m ignoring specs of primer
on my glasses to see the page
to write the poem. Still

everything is clear.

I know

who I am,

what it means,

why I’m here.

Trying again, with words this time...

Every grammar teacher eventually figures out that no matter how you explain any concept in language, from part of speech to spelling to comma usage, you will be confronted by some accepted usage that your explanation cannot explain. Language being what it is—an organically human construct whose evolution no amount of effort can control—that things would be this way, though certainly a challenge, is not surprising. But this only mildly disturbing insight into language turns out to be true of everything try to put a handle on. It’s not that we haven’t understood evolution of physics or math or climate change pretty well. And we have marvelously useful ways of understanding psychology, economics, sociology, political science. Still, we always eventually come to the place where we cannot fit our handle or make a new handle that would not require destroying the entire system or structure of understanding that this knowledge is founded on. The problem cannot be overcome, but it can be acknowledged. It’s the problem of using language to understand the world. It’s the problem of the way language understands the world. And that is certainly an effect of the structure of the human brain, which is an effect of the way it evolved and what it evolved to do, which was not primarily to understand the universe. (I say “not primarily” because I am not convinced that understanding the universe is not, to say it tendentiously, why evolution itself was invented.)

If the goal is understanding, and if understanding is understood in the philosophical sense, the discursive sense, without emotional, intuitive or spiritual sense, in the way that we understand a math problem, in the logic of the pieces, in the way computer can be trained to write code without any possible interference by love or beauty or desire but concerned merely with efficiency and accuracy, then the procedure is always the same: to identify the pieces, to construct (changing metaphors) concepts that pen in each discrete piece and, monitoring, describe the interactions among the pieces. Great progress was made in evolution, and then came the platypus.

Thinking of spirituality or fiction or poetry or music or any of the arts (including those not yet created or defined) or emotion (in the Romantic sense) or any of the experiences of the body as forms of knowledge, paths to understanding, helps but by no means solves the problem. Each of these is also a thing toward which understanding is directed. And each leaves us finally unsatisfied.

Today the President

Today the president pronounced another good woman too ugly to fuck.
Today he buddied up to another world-class tyrant.
He lied his way through cake today.

And I thought how hard it must have been in New York City in 1863
when the yellow newspapers used the poor
who couldn’t pay their way out of war
as matches for lighting buildings, black babies,
Lincoln supporters, and the draft board ablaze.

Over in Pennsylvania they’d just interred the last of the Gettysburg dead.

On Broadway and in Union Square they scared up Lincoln-hating mobs
whose coffee was cut with sawdust whose sugar was half sand
who were informed as to how if they let themselves be dragged into Lincoln’s war
big strong stolen slaves, menacing and beautiful, would steal their jobs (though few actually had jobs),
seduce their wives, and rape their daughters.

With no one there to stop them,
inflamed mobs consumed four days in murderous riot,
transportation lines,
freed men,
the buildings where they lived.