Here’s a funny thing. I have heard this line a multitude of times and never once have I noticed that he’s talking about cause and effect. I think everyone I’ve heard say this line has said E-ffect –with an eeee sound – and putting the emphasis on the E. I suppose to rhyme it more Effectively (!) with defect in the next line. But pronounced in the usual way, effect has its emphasis on the 2nd syllable, fitting it more precisely, exactly into the meter. So it’s curious that so many Poloniui choose to obscure the relationship of the effect to the cause and to disrupt the meter. Rhyme is pretty sexy, though and we’d more readily understand E-ffect than be able to make sense of a defect in this case. Defect and defect meaning such different things.

What a lovely grant! Did Hamlet have to fill out a 14 page application in triplicate to get this one?
Dear granting committee, please can you give me some madness?
Here are the other grants I’m applying for (craziness, insanity, twitchiness, anxiety) so you won’t be the sole supporter. If you give me this madness, I will fulfill the foundation’s mission and be a fully granted madman.
Here’s evidence for my previous experience with madness and why I think I deserve to be mad. Also, included – my CV (Prince of Denmark; Student at University of Wittenberg) and personal statement (Actually a lot more questions, then statements.)

But seriously, I had never put together the way grants and granting and “I grant you” and “Let us grant him” and such were all connected. What was the first usage of grants? Was it first a verb? When did it become a noun? And when did the gifting of grants – as in, “I grant you clemency, freedom or this sack of money” become granting small amounts of money as a reward for mounds of paperwork?

I must be an addict because I could not forswear the use of art. Farewell to art? Not possible. I wish it were sometimes. Certainly, my addiction has led to a lot of choices that might be thought foolish or impossibly, stupidly risky. I have lost friends to art.
Have you seen these ads?
Art is definitely habit forming. The high it gives you when you first start, the way you have to keep doing it, more and more to increase the intensity of experience. It can leave you broke and friendless. It can send you to neighborhoods you would never otherwise enter. It can lead you to associate with unsavory characters. Even if you end up at rock bottom, staring at the nothing art has left you with, you will look to art to set you free. Just one more shot of art – maybe this time art will save me.

Polonius, playing with language. He cannot help himself, it would seem. There are moments where toying with repetition like this is a good idea. While writing lyrics, perhaps. Or when making a speech at an academic banquet. One instance in which it might not be appropriate would be while talking with the royal family about the nature of their son’s illness. In that instance, it would seem a certain gravitas might be called for.

There’s a line – or a chapter maybe even – in Backwards and Forwards, that boils down to “everybody’s lunacy about Hamlet.” It’s about the question of whether Hamlet is really crazy. There are those who believe he is. They’re little Poloniuses- little Poloniui – asserting that Hamlet goes crazy in this play. They seemingly look at the play through Polonius’ eyes by seeing that:
1) Hamlet acted a bit crazy towards his daughter
2) He does act crazy every time he talks to Polonius. That whole camel/whale/fishmonger bit.
Now that I think of it, most of Hamlet’s crazy scenes seem to be designed for Polonius’ benefit. He puts his antic disposition primarily for Polonius, who falls for it, hook line and sinker.

Where has the art of speaking hidden itself away? No one I know has practiced styles of rhetoric or analyzed speech – at least not in the verbal sense. I know a lot of people who do movement analysis of speeches. They can tell you how that politician tilts his head and make a guess about what it suggests symbolically. They can look at the hand gesture and break it down into components – catch the arc and the torque. But that is an art of analysis, not an art of creation. I suppose that those who write or make speeches might still dive into the art of them. Maybe those speech and debate clubs in high school taught them rhetorical turns that they pepper into their sentences.
But I think we do not trust someone who is obviously artful in his speech. If we catch him at it, we imagine him too crafty, too calculating – like a villain with a master plan. But if he’s truly artful, he can probably hide his skill a bit and we never see him do it. There are those who are artful conversationalists, too. They’re more improvisers, working with the material before them – saying “yes” to the people with them to create a meaningful, memorable moment for everyone involved.

I told a story this morning about a man I drove cross-country with. In fact, I told a story about telling a story. The first layer of story is the one that happened when we were rehearsing and performing Hamlet. It’s a story that was potent at the time. It was the story I told because it was still working in me, because it was still warm. It’s a story I told when I trusted people, when I was willing to be vulnerable. So I told this story to the man I was driving across the country with. He had some Buddhist inclinations, this guy, he seemed a live-and-let-live sort of person. But he heard me tell this story, probably still wet with pain, and he got mad. There was some moral turn he objected to, some rule he felt I’d broken. And he didn’t speak to me for the rest of the night. Because of my story.
And today I told the story of telling the story and it seemed a little crazy, that guy’s response. In retrospect, it seems clear that my story struck a nerve, something in him. I think something had happened to him that mirrored what had happened to me and so the story struck a match. But I find I don’t have much need to tell the original story or the stories around the story. Sometimes the journey of a life is letting go of stories.

It’s very easy to SOUND deep and philosophical, isn’t it?
Just ask with the right tone and you’re on your way –
“But what IS time, really?”
“What IS a juice box really?”
“What does madness really mean?”
And if you answer that answer with the same answer – bonus points for sounding like you’ve said something while saying nothing at all.

All day I’ve been doing my best to remain neutral about a show that I have a strong opinion about. When talking about art with young people, I try not to color their experience with my own too much. It seems the best way to help them toward their own experience of art. But remaining neutral when my emotions are hot takes work. It takes a kind of discipline – a steeling of self – a pulling back of my will. While I’m busy remaining a neutral, impartial facilitator – inside me, there is an imperious little girl standing on a table, shouting, “This show is craziness.” She points at the show in a “J’accuse” fashion and shouts, “Mad call I it! And I do not care who knows it!”