Bramble, hurricane, vine, tornado, undergrowth, cyclone, lion’s roar, dervishes, naked man in a cave with his beard grown down to his waist, circle wind, cats the size of bears prowling through the trees, stainless steel beaters whipping one thing into another, sweet berries nestled among leaves that hide their treasure from view, pirouette, things with horns and teeth and claws, gears without their pins, even the most civilized under the moon with desire building in the body, a light bit of plastic caught by the wind.
Author: erainbowd
You, as your business and desire shall point you, For every man hath business and desire, Such as it is, and for my own poor part I will go pray.
Every woman, too, hath business and desire –
Or at least, every woman I know. I can’t make sense of a person without some business even if it’s only to wash the dishes. Taking on one’s business and desire seems to be the task of adulthood. You start taking care of business – sometimes in the name of your desire. Sometimes you chase desire with all the ferocity of business and sometimes desire comes upon you like the scent of Jasmine on an afternoon walk, all business, when, poof! Desire wafts by without warning.
Even so, it requires tending to just like business.
Prayer, though, that’s like a step out of the striving of both business and desire. Hamlet sends his friends back into the business of the world while he sets himself up to have that moment out.
Why, right, you are in the right And so, without more circumstance at all, I hold it fit that we shake hands and part:
The woman they’ve brought in to be my boss has so little social grace
That I had to ask if I could shake her hand after she’d come in in a flurry, all
Mad about something that she seemed to think was my fault, but was entirely hers.
This is how she introduced herself to me, by spinning and spitting,
then sitting behind me. I had to turn around and say, “Can I shake your hand?”
To which she assented (so gracious!)
I wish I had the authority to say this line instead – to simply acknowledge that there need be no more circumstance, no more stilted negotiations, that we shake hands, this once, then part. No need for any more than that.
I think there are some organizations wherein the workers get a say as to who becomes their boss. When universities hire tenure track professors, they ask the students. But they never ask. And if they do you really have to lie.
If they’d asked me in this case, I would have happily acquiesced to whatever they needed me to say, told them they were in the right and then found a way to shake hands and part.
There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave To tell us this.
Ghosts would start to become tiresome
If they were popping out of their graves regularly to state the obvious.
Fog, midnight, big production, SFX, to emerge from the mausoleum and say
“A little chilly out, isn’t it?” or “Love can really do a number on you, can’t it?”
It would get to the point where you’d do anything to keep the dead from rising –
Banalities just don’t suit the no longer living.
In a way, banalities are what make life, life like.
There’s never a villain dwelling in all Denmark But he’s an errant knave.
Horatio’s response to this line
Seems to suggest that this is something of a cliché’.
Perhaps it’s an old adage, adapted.
“Villain dwelling in all Denmark” has a heightened sense of musicality
That might indicate an old nursery rhyme form
Or if not an old adage, the analogy might be an obvious one, as in,
“There isn’t an asshole in all of New York
That isn’t a son of a bitch.”
My edition puts a dash between
The “if” and the “then” of the analogy
Which might indicate a disconnected thought,
That Hamlet starts to say one thing and ends with another.
As if he were correcting himself, first calling Claudius a jerkwad, then realizing Jerkwad was too good for the assface that Claudius is.
Ay, by heaven, my lord.
I’m sorry. But I’ve got nothing here. As we approach the end of Act I, over a year into this project, (or is it two?) I’ve finally run out of responses. Partly, it’s the repetition. I’ve thought about heaven some and “my lord.”
Ay, perhaps, I haven’t quite dived into Ay.
But Ay, yi.. . . what is there to be said?
Perhaps, though, I’m up against a feeling of futility in my art already and it’s all magnified today. A line like this fails to inspire on an uninspiring day in an uninspiring week.
But you’ll be secret?
Locked up tight.
Key, squirrelled away to someplace dark and inaccessible.
I can keep a secret
But sometimes I don’t –
Usually when I have not realized I was meant to box up some revealings
When I didn’t know I shouldn’t say and said.
Secrets are best secreted when they are known to be secret.
Would heart of man once think it?
This one baffles me. If I weren’t attempting to read closely, I’d probably sail on by a mystery like this. Sandwiched as it is between “How say you then?” and “But you’ll be secret?” you can sort of elide the thought to just continue the line of “Can you keep a secret?” but I don’t see how it connects when I pull it out. Is it a sort of call back to what he just experienced? Are the ghost’s words so unfathomable that the general heart of mankind should not even be able to consider it? Or that the secret could be revealed?
Is “How say you then?” to the ghost, then? Then, the next line perhaps actually questions the heart of man, given the ghost’s position in the earth. As we’ll shortly see, the ghost might have more direct access to the heart of man than the living standing upon it. Or Hamlet could be questioning his own decision, checking in his own man’s heart before confirming the secretness of his friends.
The general heart of man contains quite a lot. I find I can really only truly know the heart of one.
How say you then?
This sentence structure reminds me of the way non-native English speakers ask for a definition. Of course, the meaning is nothing like this, actually – but it calls to mind for me, the many time I’ve heard: “How call you the thing for the rain?”
“What you say to stop someone?”
“How say you the word for wonder?”
“Can you splain me this?”
“What this say?”
“Mean what this?”
Nor I, my lord.
I feel like leaving out the space
Between “Nor” and “I” and throwing a funny
Surrealist wrench into this scene.
Instead of discussing ghosts
And secrets, Marcellus suddenly has a craving for sushi.
The Hamlet Project 