Who does not have nature in him, in her?
We are nature. Nature streams through us
No matter how hard we attempt to suppress it.
Nature grows out of us like grass
Through the cracks in pavement –
Like grass making those cracks in pavement.
The more tightly we box it in,
The more violently it will leap out.
I’m thinking of Rosalind in As You Like It when she talks about woman’s wit –
the part where, if you close the doors on it, it will head out the window, if you close
the window, it’ll head out the chimney, close the chimney, it’ll seep through the cracks.
In a sense – Rosalind’s wit IS her nature –
You cannot remove it, it will grow and thrive
No matter how much concrete you place around it.
The only person who has no nature in him
Is one without life – so the Ghost here
Has set up a pretty clear directive to bear it not.

Are images coursing through his imagination?
Is there one and then the next?
One horrible? The next, more horrible?
The third, the most horrible?
What does the ghost’s mind’s eye see?
Is it memories? Is it the past?
Could unseen demons be intervening –
Showing him images of his past or his present?
Are they pulling on his body?
Pulling his ghostly body to pieces?
Is this the beginning of a dissolution of the body?
Morning comes soon. Does it pull one part from another?
Scattering the self into the dawn?

My grandparents have, for as long as I’ve known them,
Had a framed cartoon of Hagar the Horrible hanging in their den.
It’s signed by the artist and dedicated to my grandfather.
As a child, I was confused by the title of this cartoon.
Why was this Hagar so horrible?
He seemed pretty harmless.
Mostly he seemed to like to sleep and eat.
Was there something wrong with sleeping and eating?
I didn’t understand irony.
I didn’t understand history.
The whole thing seemed like one big mystery to me.
Every time I’d return to my grandparents’ den for a visit, I’d reexamine the cartoon.
At some point, I realized it was meant to be funny and each subsequent visit,
I’d try and work out why. By the time I understood what comedic tropes might be at play,
I didn’t find it funny.

Only family can make you exclaim like this
Or if not actual family
Then the people close enough to qualify as family.
Betrayals this close are that much more horrible –
Particularly since you’re stuck with them.
Even a brother who murders you
Is still your brother
Even if you’re dead and a ghost,
Watching your kingdom fall apart from the other side.
Interestingly, it’s not the flames of hell that make him cry “O horrible”
Nor the Being doomed for a certain term to walk the earth –
It seems to be the pain of his brother sleeping with his wife
That really makes him exclaim. Murder: awful. . .But –
The ghost instructs his son to take care of the royal bed.
He has slipped from Revenge his foul and unnatural murder
To breaking up the Queen’s new relationship.
Perhaps because it is the betrayal that continues to sting
Whereas the murder is already over.

The sin had been planted some years ago
A little seedlet of sin dropped into the earth
It lay there dormant in the dark earth
Until one day it shot out a little
Green shoot of a root.
The rain had rained a particularly pertinent rain
The sun had warmed the soil to a perfect temperature
The earth shifted a bit in its placement,
Minerals stirring up into a nutritious mud
A potent ground for a little root of sin to shoot out and take hold.
It grew down and up, at once –
Getting bigger and longer and stronger
Not really yet a plant
Just the idea of one
One that could be nipped or upended at the slightest disruption.
It shot out of the earth
Green emerging from brown
More green everyday
Budding, growing
Becoming a flower.
Becoming the fullest expression of itself
Blossoming, opening and exposing
The heart of the flower, of the sin.
Had it been allowed to progress,
The flower would have fallen on its own
And winter would have stepped in and buried it in snow.

This corruption of the case of the body
Is the final indignity. To lose the texture of yourself suddenly –
(When all your life, you’ve discovered the world with it and through it.
The first thing we know of ourselves is how we feel – the smoothness of our skin being
a way to know ourselves even as we age and lose elasticity.)
Is to lose a way of knowing suddenly.
When your liver fails
It is no doubt a terrible betrayal and a deep loss
But it is a secret one, a stealthy hidden betrayal.
But this
A bark, a crust suddenly encasing every part of you
As you watch yourself disappear –
This is the last straw. And it is the last description of his death.

We talk about blood curdling screams but this literalization of the phrase, the illustration of it, really lays out what that means. This scream of the blood curdling sort would turn the red liquid moving rapidly throughout the body to lumpy red cheese and I can see how a sudden change in the blood’s texture like that could very quickly kill you because no bloody cheese like substance could pass into the heart or out of the heart into the lungs or out of the lungs. Maybe you could watch, horrified as a little lump of cheese moves from the end of your finger through your palm, up your wrist, your arm, your shoulder, but as soon as it attempts the openings of the most crucial organs, you’re a goner, you’re a ghost and the horror of your blood’s transformation is one of the few things you have left.

One story in one sentence.
It travels quickly and directly, perhaps with the precise trajectory of the poison. It begins slow and sleepily but before a body has had time to take a breath, suddenly the hebona with its quicksilver flows through, shoots through the somatic transportation system, faster than a bullet train.

As far as long sentences go this one must be the fullest. Image after image, it is the summary of a betrayal as well as a death.

For someone without a physical body, this ghost has some of the most embodied language in the play.

I have heard and read this line many many times before but just now I read it in a way I’d never understood it before, which seems extraordinary given the obviousness of the idea. Always, I’d had the feeling that this was somehow spoken to tormenting demons or the morning itself – a request to be left alone to tell his story. But damned if it’s not a whole hell of a lot simpler. Polonius says something pretty similar in a subsequent scene. Just reorganized – let me be brief. In short – to sum up – to make a long story short:
I was poisoned in the ear.

Ghost, interrupted by a smell.
Having become more animal than human, his sense of smell has become more acute.
The smell of morning comes upon him as swiftly
as the sudden strong odor of an explosive sulphuric fart, sudden and strong.
It stops him in his tracks – makes him shift away from the rant he’s just fallen into. Extraordinarily, the smell of morning arrives before morning itself.
Before light, before dew, before sound.
Only for the diuranlly sensitive.