While Hamlet is pretty directly referencing Fortune’s lady parts, I think there are likely many other secret parts of Fortune. She is always veiled. You will never really know your future. You can guess at it, receive hints but Fortune is always obscured, always behind a curtain, under a table, inside a card deck, inscribed in a palm, you can’t ever really see her. Those that reveal bits of her truth tend to veil themselves also. They drape bits of fabric over everything and themselves, secret themselves away, in hushed, curtained rooms. Fortune won’t appear under fluorescents or under the eye of a microscope. She needs her secrets.
Month: July 2014
Faith, her privates we.
I can’t help it. I suddenly pictured Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as Fortune’s labia. There’s something twinned about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and something sentinel-like about the use of the word “privates” which led me to see them as the gate of Fortune’s flower. There’s not much they can do in that position, they mostly just stand there, chatting. They can move away from each and closer but they have no authority to refuse anyone Fortune invites to pass their threshold or to invite anyone of their own. But if Fortune gets around as Hamlet suggests, they at least get to see a lot of action.
Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favors?
So many Hamlets steal the punch line from Guildenstern. They suggest that the middle of Fortune’s favors is between her legs. Now, I get that almost every Shakespeare actor that ever lived is constitutionally unable to resist a dirty joke (my non-Shakespearean boyfriend asked me, “Is there a law that says there must be exaggerated thrusting in every Shakespeare show?”) but if Hamlet makes the joke here – it is:
a) inaccurate geometrically
b) textually confused – he has just asked them if they live about her waist, which IS the middle, why would he then decide the ladyparts were in the middle? No sense.
C) stealing the thunder from Guildenstern. He makes this exchange a joke sandwich in which Hamlet gets the bread and Guildenstern gets the pimento paste in the middle. It’s also essentially the same joke three times in a row if Hamlet suggests Fortune’s middle is her mons pubis. If he is truly just following the metaphor they’ve set up, it makes the most sense that he’s truly trying to work out how they are.
They’ve said they’re not so great and not so bad and naturally Hamlet would have to conclude that they’re somewhere in between. He’s just continuing the metaphor. If Guildenstern’s “privates” line is a surprise to Hamlet, then his next line can be the surprise it seems to be, it can actually take on an exclamatory tone.
Hamlet is suggesting that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Fortune’s Belt, I think , and not her chastity belt. (Lord knows you wouldn’t catch Fortune in a chastity belt, not never, not nohow.) I’m not saying Fortune’s a strumpet but she probably gets around and there’s no one who could stop her.
Neither, my lord.
Not the button on her cap, nor the soles of her shoes, not the ribbon on her neck, nor the cuffs of her sleeves, not the stays of her corset, nor the lining of her petticoats, not the seam of her stockings, nor the pin in her hair, not even her belt. We are no part of fortune’s fashion.
Nor the soles of her shoes.
Occasionally, even Fortune needs to bring her shoes to the cobbler to be resoled. She walks a lot and can wear out a pair of shoes like nobody’s business. Those unfortunates destined to be the sole of her shoes will find that their tenure in the position will be rather short but perhaps that is a mercy. After all, the space between Fortune’s foot and the road she treads on is a small one and one that involves a great deal of pressing. On days that I feel sorry for myself, I imagine I am under Fortune’s feet but then quickly realize how much further down Fortune could bring me.
On Fortune’s cap we are not the very button.
Is this as much to say as we’re not riding too high, we’re not on top of the world just now? Someone who was the button of Fortune’s Cap would be above all else, would be the cherry on the top of the Good Luck Sundae.
I’m reading QUIET right now and the button on Fortune’s Cap at the start of that book would seem to be Tony Robbins. He would seem to be the sort of person who might greet you and tell you how on top of the world he was, how great he was doing. He could not play Guildenstern, he could only play a king and not one of Shakespeare’s Kings either, he’d need too much vulnerability for that – no, he’d have to play a fairy tale king, a Disney King. We would seem to live in a world full of buttons sitting on Fortune’s cap, which is all well and good for the buttons but the buttons would not seem to be the most interesting parts of Fortune. We’ll get to those later.
Happy in that we are not over-happy.
I wouldn’t mind being over-happy. I don’t know what over-happy would feel like and I certainly wouldn’t feel happy to be not over-happy. I’ve seen people who seem over-happy but that’s about overdoing the appearance of happiness, not an abundance of happiness.
Happiness is a bit of a sticky wicket though. We seem to be always seeking it and almost never achieving it. I’ve read a lot of the happiness studies and many of them would seem to indicate that we know very little about how to be happy. Am I happy at the moment? Nope. Not even close. And even farther away from over-happy. I try to imagine what OVER-happiness would look like and I can’t even get a sense of it. Maybe it’s a cascading series of happy events? A ride down the hill of good fortune with so much speed it turns into an avalanche? I guess I wouldn’t want to be in an avalanche, even if it was made of happiness.
As the indifferent children of the earth.
Has anyone written this sci fi novel yet? The Indifferent Children of the Earth would seem to be a big hit in the right circles. It’s probably a Dystopian story – one in which the children of Earth, at first indifferent to their mother, then become quite careless with her and then, with neglect and destructive behaviors, destroy her altogether. This is a story we read almost every day in newspapers and magazines. It is our latest narrative –the one of us, the indifferent children of the earth. It is such a popular story that many children actual children, you know, who play with toys and are cute and stuff. These actual children believe that this story is inevitable, that our indifference is inevitable, that the ultimate destruction of our planet is a foregone conclusion. And so dystopian sci fi turns to predictive text, almost non-fiction.
Do we have to be indifferent? Does Rosencrantz? It’s a weird position to take.
Do you know me, my lord?
In the show, the actress (playing herself, it would seem) declared that she knew people by their touch, by their hands. Because she no longer had use of her hearing or seeing. She could only know someone this way.
I wondered though, if I lost both my sight and hearing, mightn’t I also know someone by their smell, by their vibration? Mightn’t I sense my mother’s approach even if I could not see or hear her?
But perhaps I overestimate the other senses. Perhaps the darkness and silence is so total, there would be no feeling someone behind you. Maybe those feelings are micro-hearing or seeing sensations. Maybe when I close my eyes in an acting exercise and sense the movement around me, joining it without seeing it, I’m really hearing it, quietly, without knowing that’s what I’m doing.
The kinesthetic sense, the proprioception that feels like it leads to some understanding of the other, to knowing someone else, may be the sum total of the other senses.
Good lads, how do you both?
This is the safest way to greet a pair of people. Refer to them together and neither one gets preference.
Lads, though, you gotta be careful with lads. Here, in the hills, lads pretty much just means boys. Like, actual boys, like kids. So a greeting like this could either be condescending or affectionately familiar.
In the UK, lads have their own culture. Lad has found its way into an adjective, showing many men to be laddish – which, sure, could mean boyish but not in the red cheeked, child-like way. We might call a lad a frat boy here in the States, also a word that would suggest childishness but tends to refer to a rather boorish behavior. Lads drink too much and make too much noise at the game. They travel in packs and tend to not be terribly respectful of women.
But you know – people use both boys and lads to show affection to a group of men. My grandfather went out once a week with the Boys – even once they became the Romeos (Retired Old Men Eating Out.) I think Englishmen hang out with the lads down at the retirement home but I’ve never heard an American man talking about the lads. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard an American use the word lad without some affectation – without pretending to be posh or English or some combination of the two.
A case could be made for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern being any variety of lads.
The Hamlet Project 