I spent today in DC, watching the Shakespeare Theatre’s production of Twelfth Night. Anyone who’s read the play knows that its an over the top ode to love, as well as a comedy of twins, mistaken identity, and practical jokes. Apparently its supposed to be one of Shakespeare’s silliest plays, and yet it too has its moments where one must pause and simply marvel at Shakespeare’s genius.
But for me that genius doesn’t come out as much in Twelfth Night, even though certain lines such as Olivia proclaiming, “Oh Time, thou must untangle this, not I; It is too hard a knot for me to untie” stick with me long after watching or reading the play. Personally I think that if I want to get at what exactly I personally mean by Shakespeare's genius, its best done using his play Hamlet.
First I want to show that Shakespeare is quite a poor storyteller when we judge his work in the usual way of literature. Why? Because he never takes a stance on what the good news is and what the bad news is. Take Hamlet. His father has just died. He’s despondent. And right away his mother marries his uncle, who he hates. So Hamlet is pretty low when his friend tells him there is this thing on the parapet that might be his dad. And of course this thing says, “I’m your father. I was murdered by your uncle. Avenge me.”
Well was this good news or bad news? To this day we don’t really know if that ghost was Hamlet’s father. If you have messed around with Ouiji boards you know that there are hundreds of spirits floating around, most of them malicious, liable to tell you anything. And you shouldn’t listen. But Hamlet decides to check it out. He puts on this play to trick his uncle into confessing. It flops. Neither good news nor bad news. So he goes to talk to his mother, and sees the drapes moving. Hamlet, now tired of being indecisive, sticks his sword through the drapes and kills our good friend Polonius.
A quick aside. Most parents think the advice that Polonius gives his children is good advice that every child should hear. Shakespeare regarded him as a fool and quite disposable. It’s the dumbest advice possible, and even Shakespeare thought it was hilarious. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” Um, what else is life but endless borrowing and lending, giving and taking? “This above all, to thine own self be true.” Be an egomaniac??
Again, neither good news nor bad news. Finally Hamlet gets in a duel and gets killed. Did he go to heaven or hell? Quite a difference, and we don’t know. Neither good news or bad news.
So all in all, a pretty poor storyteller. But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in their stories. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is. Despite what we may think at the time, things have a way of coming full circle in ways we could never expect.
When I die, I’d like the opportunity to ask someone up there, “So what was the good news and what was the bad news?” Because despite what we may think at the time, things have a way of coming full circle and ending in ways we could never predict.
I also came across one other line years ago that I now realize in a single sentence describes life as lived by human beings so completely that no writer after him need ever have written another word:
"All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Thursday, December 25, 2008
My Rock
John M. Barrie once wrote that “the life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.” Now I know what you’re thinking. That couldn’t be more gay if it was bold, italicized, and written in pink. What a way to start a blog.
Well in my defense, it does serve a purpose. First, its about the extent to which this first post will serve to explain the existence of this blog. I like to jump right into things, I apologize if I’m breaking from tradition. Second, it raises an interesting question about life – and what its all about. Not that I am attempting to answer that question, but I do find myself intrigued by the circular nature of it. How despite how much time may have passed, every once in a while we find ourselves contemplating the same themes from a new perspective. So what are we supposed to take from this? I like to think that others have tried to leave us with the answer to that question…
Homer, the ancient Greek poet, tells a story about the mortal Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain, where the stone would fall right back to the bottom because of its own weight. This was his punishment, an eternity of redoing the same, seemingly pointless task over and over again, with no real hope of success. They had thought with some reason that there was no more dreadful punishment than this futile and hopeless labor.
If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of a simple laborer. Perhaps I’m alone when I say that I see no contradiction in this.
Opinions differ as to the reasons why Sisyphus became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of stealing the secrets of the gods. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by the disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He knew about the abduction, and offered to tell the father about it on the condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. Of all the things Sisyphus could have asked for, he preferred water. And for this he was punished in the underworld. Homer also tells us that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto, who could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire, dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.
You have probably already grasped that Sisyphus is a tragic hero, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise a huge stone, the shoulder bracing the unforgiving mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the only human security of two simple hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is finally achieved. Then, at that exact moment, Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world where it started, waiting for him to push it up again toward the summit. And so he goes down to the plain.
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. Here is where I feel that I can relate most to this tragic hero. I see Sisyphus going back down to the fallen rock with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That walk down, that moment of reprieve, that moment of breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of his consciousness. At each of those moments when he is able to leave the heights and gradually sink toward the lairs of the gods, he is finally superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
If the myth is tragic, that is because the hero is conscious. If we are different from Sisyphus, it is because we have choice. We too work every day of our lives at the same tasks, and perhaps this fate is no less absurd. Except our stones are of a different nature. And at least my moment of reprieve is harder to notice.
But I too enjoy that moment of reprieve. Sisyphus used it to rest before starting his task again. After all, he did not have a choice. Each time I find myself at a new stage in my life though, I find myself rethinking everything I once believed. I find myself facing the most difficult choices of my life. I find myself a product of forces out of my control. I find myself falling victim to my own stones. I find myself defeated.
But it is at these moments that we face the most difficult choices of our lives. Do we try again? That fact that we have this choice however reminds us that in that respect our fate is worse then Sisyphus’s, and at the same time infinitely better. For every time we do face our stones again, we enjoy the simple pleasures of resolve, hope, and being the conquerors of our fates – pleasures that Sisyphus can never have. Where is the torture after all, if at every step the hope of succeeding upholds us? Sisyphus, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition; it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. He surmounted his fate by scorning fate itself.
If the descent back to the rock is therefore sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This world is not too much. I was asked once, why I do not give up. It seems simple now. Its because its never been about what I’m expecting to get. Its about what I’m expecting to give – which is everything.
Sisyphus became the master of his fate. But he is at the foot of the mountain again. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches us the higher faith that negates fate and raises rocks. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. I must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Well in my defense, it does serve a purpose. First, its about the extent to which this first post will serve to explain the existence of this blog. I like to jump right into things, I apologize if I’m breaking from tradition. Second, it raises an interesting question about life – and what its all about. Not that I am attempting to answer that question, but I do find myself intrigued by the circular nature of it. How despite how much time may have passed, every once in a while we find ourselves contemplating the same themes from a new perspective. So what are we supposed to take from this? I like to think that others have tried to leave us with the answer to that question…
Homer, the ancient Greek poet, tells a story about the mortal Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain, where the stone would fall right back to the bottom because of its own weight. This was his punishment, an eternity of redoing the same, seemingly pointless task over and over again, with no real hope of success. They had thought with some reason that there was no more dreadful punishment than this futile and hopeless labor.
If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of a simple laborer. Perhaps I’m alone when I say that I see no contradiction in this.
Opinions differ as to the reasons why Sisyphus became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of stealing the secrets of the gods. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by the disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He knew about the abduction, and offered to tell the father about it on the condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. Of all the things Sisyphus could have asked for, he preferred water. And for this he was punished in the underworld. Homer also tells us that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto, who could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire, dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.
You have probably already grasped that Sisyphus is a tragic hero, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise a huge stone, the shoulder bracing the unforgiving mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the only human security of two simple hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is finally achieved. Then, at that exact moment, Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world where it started, waiting for him to push it up again toward the summit. And so he goes down to the plain.
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. Here is where I feel that I can relate most to this tragic hero. I see Sisyphus going back down to the fallen rock with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That walk down, that moment of reprieve, that moment of breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of his consciousness. At each of those moments when he is able to leave the heights and gradually sink toward the lairs of the gods, he is finally superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
If the myth is tragic, that is because the hero is conscious. If we are different from Sisyphus, it is because we have choice. We too work every day of our lives at the same tasks, and perhaps this fate is no less absurd. Except our stones are of a different nature. And at least my moment of reprieve is harder to notice.
But I too enjoy that moment of reprieve. Sisyphus used it to rest before starting his task again. After all, he did not have a choice. Each time I find myself at a new stage in my life though, I find myself rethinking everything I once believed. I find myself facing the most difficult choices of my life. I find myself a product of forces out of my control. I find myself falling victim to my own stones. I find myself defeated.
But it is at these moments that we face the most difficult choices of our lives. Do we try again? That fact that we have this choice however reminds us that in that respect our fate is worse then Sisyphus’s, and at the same time infinitely better. For every time we do face our stones again, we enjoy the simple pleasures of resolve, hope, and being the conquerors of our fates – pleasures that Sisyphus can never have. Where is the torture after all, if at every step the hope of succeeding upholds us? Sisyphus, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition; it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. He surmounted his fate by scorning fate itself.
If the descent back to the rock is therefore sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This world is not too much. I was asked once, why I do not give up. It seems simple now. Its because its never been about what I’m expecting to get. Its about what I’m expecting to give – which is everything.
Sisyphus became the master of his fate. But he is at the foot of the mountain again. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches us the higher faith that negates fate and raises rocks. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. I must imagine Sisyphus happy.
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