We all do it. We chunk our information so we don’t have to think more deeply about things. We get satisfied with simple reductions of complex issues because we just would really rather not take the time to understand. I thought I was better than that but I am not. Not at all.
Author: erainbowd
Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness.
It’s true. Custom, i.e. habit, i.e. routine really does change our relationships to things. Doctors and nurses do not flinch when confronted with things the rest of us cannot stomach.
Even receptionists at hospitals get habituated to terrible things. Last time I was at the emergency room, a woman in the lobby was shouting and swearing. She’d shout. Wait a minute. Then start shouting again. But the reception team did not panic. They just rolled their eyes and said it was going to be a long night.
Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making?
To the One Who Will Dig My Grave –
Please sing. Sing all manner of songs. You can sing drinking songs, songs of love, songs of hate, sea chanties, dirges, cantatas, hymns, nursery rhymes, dance tunes. Sing every song you know, if you have time. I’d hope that the notes would stick in the earth and keep me company there.
If you’re digging my grave, dig it with music.
In youth, when I did love, did love, Methought it was very sweet, To contract, O, the time, for, ah my behove, O, methought, there was nothing meet.
This song that the gravedigger sings is based on poem called “The Aged Lover Renounceth Love” by Second Baron Vaux of Harrowden Thomas, Lord Vaux. I wish we could get a copy of the Billboard Hot 100 charts of the Renaissance to find out if there was indeed a popular song of the times based on this poem. Two verses hew pretty close to the poem but the third is tailored to the gravedigger – it’s almost a parody verse. I suspect that would be all the funnier if the audience knew the song.
Like, if the gravedigger sang two normal verses of “Don’t Stop Believin’” and then added one about gravediggers.
Fetch me a stoup of liquor.
Ah yes – and here’s where knowing other plays comes in a bit handy. Because Sir Toby Belch calls for a stoup of wine – and this makes me see the clown/gravedigger in relationship to Sir Toby. Perhaps they might have been played by the same actor.
Stoup isn’t used much in the plays – it is here, with a “drunken lout” in 12th Night and two villains in the plays, Iago and, later in this play, Claudius.
I wonder if there’s some association to be made between these characters who share a common word usage. Certainly Hamlet sees Claudius as a bit of a drunken relative when he observes the drinking revel ritual early in the play.
Go, get thee in.
I made the mistake of trying to be helpful on the Feldenkrais practitioners Facebook page and was instantly confronted with someone’s hate. I think she literally used the word “hate.” And, you know, everyone’s entitled to their opinion – but when talking with strangers on the internet, it might be nice to hold back your hate. If all you’ve got to say is that you hate something, you can just get thee in. We don’t need you out here hating.
And when you are asked this question next, say ‘a Grave-maker,’ the houses he makes last till doomsday.
The first clown thinks he’s so smart – like this is the most brilliant riddle but…gravemakers don’t really “build” do they? I think there are a lot of fallacies in this riddle. The second clown’s answer is actually better. Because a gallows is built. A grave is dug. It is more an act of destruction than construction.
Cudgel thy brains no more about it, for your dull ass will not mend his pace with beating.
I’ve always heard this as the first clown calling the second a dull ass. But I think now that this dull ass is a metaphorical ass – an analogy – not specifically the dull ass belonging to the second clown – but your dull ass as a generic kind of ass.
This is supported by his use of “thy brains” but the dull ass is “your dull ass” and the generic your is a speech pattern of the clown as in “your water” and “your whoreson dead body” – neither the water nor the dead body belong specifically to the man he’s talking to – but are a kind of colloquial way to describe a thing.
I mean, yes, he is likely comparing the second clown’s brains to a dull ass – but I think it might have less to do with how stupid he perceives the Second Clown to be and more to do with ceasing the efforts of trying to think. He has, after all, already liked his wits so he’s not entirely disrespectful of his fellow gravedigger’s intelligence. Anyways – this may be a dull ass that I’m cudgeling but I think this line is often why the Second gravedigger is played as the dumb one. It’s a facile choice based on the appearance of “dull ass” in a sentence.
Mass, I cannot tell.
I think there was a Freakonomics episode about how important it was to say you don’t know when you don’t know – how we are shamed for not saying it or admitting it. So while the First Clown is about to shame the Second for not knowing the answer to his riddle, it is, in fact, the Second Clown who has been more intelligent in acknowledging what he does not know.
We see this in play in the current political moment wherein the Dumpster in Chief is constantly proclaiming how much he knows when it is stunningly obvious that he is making stuff up.
He’ll say sometimes “A lot of people don’t know X but I know X” and Seth Meyers has pointed out that this usually suggests that X is a thing that the Dumpster only just found out himself moments ago. He would never admit he did not know something – for him, if he doesn’t know it, it doesn’t exist.
Whereas the most intelligent people I know will readily admit when they don’t know something and will also actively search for an answer when they need one.
To’t.
The day this line appears is known as Indictment Day. All day on Twitter – folks have been wishing each other Merry Indictment Day. Last night they recommended leaving cookies for Mueller and looking for him in the sky as he sailed.
Today many are saying this process is proceeding the same way prosecutors normally tackle mafia cases. That it starts with the little fish and the net gets bigger and bigger until they catch the whale.
To’t, y’all. To’t.
This is the first moment I have felt even cautiously optimistic in a year.
To’t.
*
Ah, the sweet sweet hope of this moment. The indictments have come and gone and while we watched many dominos fall – none of them saved us. None of them.
The Hamlet Project 