When talking about evolution, eyes come up a lot.
They were a particular challenge to Darwin.
They are a particular challenge to those who would imitate what they do artificially. Nothing constructed can equal an eye and a brain.
When animals began, there were no eyes. We were all just fumbling along,
finding our way through the primordial soup towards the good and the bad.
Then slowly, we began to be able to catch light, to see shadows, to tell whether something was approaching from one side or the other.
Finding our way without our eyes required feeling, smelling, hearing
(hearing must have come before sight, mustn’t it? It comes first in the womb.)
Going toward nice things and away from the nasty.

After shaking her arm a little and nodding,
After sighing,
He lets her go.
He drops her hand,
Lets it fall back to her lap
Or perhaps her side
And then he goes
He gives up
Whatever he has hoped
She would understand
Whatever he has tried
To psychically send her
Has failed.
She has understood only
The movements of his body
Like an autistic child
Learning to understand despair
By articulating what the face does,
How the body moves
By the shapes.

And still she does not say “What’s wrong?”
Her lover comes to her, clearly distressed, he sighs, like he’s going to die, a sigh
Like the end, a sigh to shake the foundations of the soul, and she just sits there?
Hamlet: You come to me sighing like that,
I’m going to ask you what’s going on.
I’m going to get down off my sewing chair
And take your head in my hands.
If you cannot tell me where that sigh came from,
What caused it or how you feel,
I will press you against my chest and hold you
Until you can speak again.
Life-threatening sighs will not pass
Unremarked upon if you come to me, Prince.
Come here. I’ll throw this sewing aside
So you can rest your head on my lap.

I want to send Ophelia to a model mugging class.
I’d like for her to practice shouting, “No!” then kneeing someone in the groin and poking him in the eyes. I want her to know that she can move when a creepy guy sits down next to her. I want her to understand that if someone is staring at her, for longer than makes her comfortable, that she can walk away.
The self-defense movement took a great leap forward when it began to investigate why even highly trained martial artists lost their defenses in real life attacks. In the workshop I took, they told us that politeness, ladylike behavior and conciliatory gestures were the biggest open door to attackers. What got us into trouble was not going down dark alleys but not responding to our instincts when someone creepy showed up.
Women often do not move when a creepy man sits down next to us. (We don’t want to make the creepy man feel bad. So we stay.) We choose politeness over safety. We try to avoid conflict by agreeing with an aggressor. We try to nicely decline invitations rather than sharply turning them down. We smile when we say no. Even experts in self defense are liable to do these things and they are already sunk. This was a revelation to me when I learned it. Since I did, I get away from creepy people very quickly. And I will not stay and nod and smile at a person who might be dangerous. I have yet to NEED to shout “NO!” And gratefully, have not needed to knee someone in the groin or poke him in the eyes. But I’ve done it now, in practice, to a man in a giant suit that made him look like a Michelin man Beekeeper and having done it a few times in practice, I’m confident I could do it for real if I had to. I want this for Ophelia. If ever a girl needed some practice saying, “No!” It would be her. This play would have ended a whole lot differently for her if she had been able to say it, shout it or poke someone’s eyes with it.

Eyes. Nose. Mouth. Cheeks.
Sketched in, they can be lines, shadows, shapes.
When you draw a face, you draw the light on it.
An image of a face might just be aesthetic
Or the features might tell a story-
One that explains a lie or a desire.
It is a wonder that lines, shadows and shapes
Can form themselves into duplicitousness
Or obedience or fear or suspicion or ecstasy.
A face, like water, gives away every object
That drops into it. Drop a pebble in a pond, watch it shift in circles, giving away where the pebble fell.
A face, too, will shift in response to a thought, a word, a feeling dropped into it.

This is not an answer to the question of “What said he?” It is, in fact, what he did. And she does not say, “He didn’t say anything – he grabbed my wriest!” Which makes me wonder if, perhaps, Hamlet might have, in fact, said something to her that she doesn’t want to repeat to her father. What that might be, I don’t know – but a slight bit of caginess on Ophelia’s part might give her some depth. What if he said, “Ophelia. I need you to go tell your father that I’ve lost my mind. I’d very much like to take you to my bedchamber right now but your recent behavior would lead me to conclude that your dad’s got you under his thumb. I’ve got a lot going on right now, Ophelia. I think I may be seeing things. And it’s raised some questions about the morality of the people in this current administration. I’m not real sure who’s on my side. I don’t even know about you, fair Ophelia. Are you with me? Will you come with me or run and tell your father that I’m mad? I’ll stay here as long as you need to make your decision.”

Does she fear it or hope it?
There is some frisson to the notion of driving someone mad with love for you. It supposes that you are so extraordinary, so necessary, so adorable, so like the sun in a galaxy, an atom in a molecule, carbon in a fossil, oxygen in the air – that the absence of you so disturbs the universe that someone MUST go mad without you.
And in this case, what has she done to disrupt the calm of Hamlet’s sea? She just stopped taking his calls, so to speak. She refused to accept his letters and wouldn’t let him come over. It doesn’t even sound like a break-up yet. It just seems like someone without much skill at communication or relationships expressing her displeasure. She could just be punishing him for a dumb thing he said. It’s not really the sort of thing that makes a person crazy. And, still, despite her refusal to let him come over – he manages to get into her closet in this disordered state. Seems to me if a person were going to go crazy with neglected love, he’d likely have to be crazy with love in the first place. And I’m sorry but it’s AWFULLY hard to see that passion in these two. Granted, we only see them together in the midst of a breakup. Despite the nice, good, obedient girl thing that Ophelia’s got going, I think she’s a bit egotistically blind. She doesn’t ASK a crazy looking Hamlet what’s wrong, she just assumes he’s crazy with love for her.