Author: erainbowd

Will you walk out of the air, my lord?

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Fresh air, right? He’s suggesting a nice walk outdoors with some high quality refreshing air. Walking out OF the air complicates it somewhat but also makes it more interesting.

Because it could be about walking out of the current air, too, I suppose. Like a conference room full of smoke, or a place full of tensions and discomforts. Just walking OUT of that air could really do a person some favors.

Fresh air, though, that’s the really good stuff. Is there some scientific study on getting some fresh air? Like, what does fresh actually do for us? Is there a biological benefit to the air that we escape to, when we’ve been inside breathing one another’s air for too long? Is there more oxygen out there? Of course there would be, right? There’s more space for it to circulate and all that oxygen’s just bound to be better for us.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.

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Everything has a logic, albeit one that is not clear to the outside world. There is even an internal logic to most madness, a belief system, perhaps, that leads the mad person from Point A to Point B with astounding logic, whether that is Daisies = Mother’s Meat Hook = The Florist is trying to Kill Me. We don’t see all the steps and associations in between but the mind is inventing its own rules.

Liars are said to have more neural pathways in the brain, allowing them to more speedily invent another reality. And despite the fact that madness seems random sometimes – it doesn’t often widen the possibilities of the mad, it tends to narrow them. Movement vocabulary tends to diminish, a compulsive gesture can be repeated and repeated. A socially inappropriate phrase bubbles up on repeat rotation.

There is always some kind of method, whether it is conscious or no.
Hamlet’s madness is, of course, quite conscious in that it is not madness at all. Polonius isn’t stupid, he suspects something’s up. He’s dealing with a confirmation bias, though, so he cannot dwell on those suspicions.

For yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am – if, like a crab, you could go backward.

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1. I learned from a Smothers Brothers song that crabs walk sideways (and lobsters walk straight) so I’m not sure what this backward walking crab is all about.
2. Do the old really want to grow backwards? As much as I get the occasional anxiety around getting older (“Ack! I’m almost 40! Am I having a baby or what? It might be too late. . .”) I also don’t much envy those that are younger. The anxiety of youth can’t be beat by the experience of age. At least I don’t think it can. Or can it? See, I’m not quite old enough yet. I still wonder, still question, am still so unsure. But would I be willing to grow backwards? Only if I could take all I learned with me because if I had to go backwards without it, I’d just have to make the same dumb mistakes all over again. Would Polonius want to be Hamlet’s age again? Hamlet’s reported to be, what, 33? Polonius is the parent of similarly aged children, making him at least 53. Would he take over 20 years off of his experience to scuttle backwards like a crab?

All which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down.

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Some truths might be too painful to write or rather, they might be too painful to HAVE been written, that is, too painful to read. I was asked to write someone’s story for her, which I did – but reading it for her was hard and overwhelming and I fear may have reinforced the trauma or reignited it. Maybe she oughtn’t to have read it. Maybe it should have been for other people – the ones who need to know about it, the one who have done her wrong. But it didn’t seem right to publish her story without her permission, without her looking it over and sending it forth.
So now the story rests in in limbo doing no one any good.

for the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams:

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Hamlet making fun of old men here doesn’t really help him in the like-able department. At least not to me, today. I mean, old men can be funny no doubt. I have found that the one (almost universal) type that every student is happy to dive right in and play is an old man. It’s a release of some kind, a very clear physicality and very different from a young person.
However, there is an old man in my life, approaching a century on the planet. His face is wrinkled (no beard but his hair is white) and his legs are much weaker than they used to be. His wit, too, has faded, along with his hearing. And it’s just not funny at all. It’s painful and all I can do is be amazed how he’s survived this long. The indignities of age are such that it just adds insult to injury to mock the aged.
The self-important? Okay. But not the people already losing everything.

Slanders, sir.

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She told me a story and asked me to share it. I wrote it down for her because that is what I do. She hasn’t been able to tell it herself and when his version of their story makes its way back to her, it is always a convenient bastardization of the truth. It is the version of the story in which what he did is not so bad and was maybe a little bit justified. These slanders.

And this story did not happen in a vacuum. In telling it, the question becomes whether or not to share the names of the parties involved. Despite the fact that this story is true, she is worried that we’d be accused of slander.

How funny is it that actual slanders run rampant and truth is muzzled for fear of slander? Not terribly funny, I guess.

I mean the matter that you read, my lord.

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You can tell a lot about a person by what s/he reads. Today in my inbox. I got the reading list of my latest Goodreads friend (a friend from elsewhere but Goodreads just figured it out and made us friends here, too.) If you knew nothing else about her but that she had given MULTIPLE books by Nietzsche 5 stars, you’d know an awful lot about her. The Jane Austen and the books on symbolism probably round out the picture.
I have another friend on Goodreads whom I have never met. I have never seen a picture. I do not know where she lives or even what her name is. But I know what she reads and what she thinks of it, which makes me think that we have a lot in common. I’m pretty sure that if I met her, I’d like her.

Between who?

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There is something the matter between me and the boss. And between me and the supervisor. And between me and the business. And between me and my fate. And between me and that family member. And between me and that security guard. Maybe it’s me.

What is the matter, my lord?

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This is like a double-triple of misunderstanding and a perfect comedy nugget, obscured, perhaps by the triple confusion.

We read this sentence in this era and we might think Polonius is asking after Hamlet’s mental state as if he were upset and he were asking why.

We eventually determine that he’s referring to the content of Hamlet’s book but it is a rather curious way to ask a person what he’s reading.

Now we’d say, “What are you reading?” or “What’s it about?” or even, “What’s the book?” if we’re being casual.

So the joke might be on us, because Hamlet misunderstands (on purpose, we might assume) in a way that is similar to the way we might misunderstand in thinking of matter as a problem but he complicates it as if something the matter were only something that could happen between people.

And so Polonius breaks it down for us, for him, eventually. But for any of us to understand this now, we’d have needed this bit from the beginning.

And that’s partly the genius of the thing. If Hamlet answered as we’d expect, he might say, “Nothing’s the matter. I’m just fine. . .” or “I don’t know what you mean.”
All of which would kill any hope of comedy.
For it to be funny, misunderstanding is necessary.

Words, words, words.

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Words, written and written well – with purpose and such or words, spoken, artfully crafted and beautiful or words, sung, like a surprise or like a feeling.
I love those words.
I don’t love all the words though.
Out in life, most of the time, I wish people wouldn’t use quite so many, that they’d just shut up and stop talking so much. Sometimes I resent having to use words at all.
These words here, being famous words and such succinct ones makes it feel harder to find good ones to use in response to them. Or it. Because after all this is just one word repeated. But a famous word it is.