Happens all the time, my man.
All. The. Time.
All of those bankers who got rich on the bubble that collapsed the world’s economies?
Are they on food stamps now? Nay.
There were a couple of cursory slaps on the wrist and some tiny fines – but essentially they said, “Oh, oops. We’re sorry.” Families lost their homes, people lost their jobs and the arts markets dried up like a salted fish in the sun. Doesn’t seem to be a problem for a lot of people to get a pardon and also get to keep the spoils of the crime.

There it is.
That might be enough to convict you in a court of law.
“I did the murder.”
It’s buried in there a little bit
but it is clear.
And not only do we have the confession, we also get the motive, or motives.
I’m interested in the distinction between his crown and his own ambition. How might those things be different than each other?
Are there things Claudius wants to accomplish as king? Does he have ambition to overhaul the Danish Health Care system, for example? Is he wanting to build some roads?
Get some buildings named after himself?
I might have thought that the crown would be the end result of ambition but perhaps there’s more.

Getting closer, Claudius.
Getting closer to confession.
But when you put your possible prayer in quotes, when it has a layer of impossibility in it, when you’re almost making fun of yourself for pretend asking for forgiveness for a murder…well, there’s not a whole lot of responsibility being taken.
If you’re theatrically asking for forgiveness but not actually asking, it doesn’t really count. It implies your guilt, sure, but it’s not the same as saying:
“I killed him. I’m sorry. I’d like to be absolved.”

I do wonder about the qualification of the murder.
This one’s foul but maybe he has some other ones, one’s that are, less foul –
ones he doesn’t need to be asking for forgiveness for.
I don’t really think he’s killed others
but he does have the personality for it.
And he has access to poison –
and several varieties, too.
Which raises a question for me.

Who is mixing these poisons for him?
Who puts the poison in Gertrude’s pearl, for example
and who gives him the goods for the regicide/fratricide?
Who is Claudius’ Apothecary?
[I want to write a story called Claudius’ apothecary –
and the whole of Hamlet is told from his point of view.]
Is Claudius his own apothecary?
Was that what he was up to while his brother was busy being the king?
I picture Claudius in a dark room of the castle, potions in glass bottles bubbling in the dark, a cloud of smoke still hangs in the air from a previous combination that went wrong. There is the occasional crunch of glass underfoot from the failed experiment. He has an ink-stained notebook where he keeps his unction recipes. He tests his work on the animals in the courtyard. Farmers eventually stop bringing their livestock in. He’s a dark scientist, awaiting his window.

I’ve wondered this, too, sometimes
Because I don’t really pray
But the impulses to do something like it comes over me on occasion.
There is the dancing prayer
The singing prayer
Right now I’m doing the writing prayer.

The first fault is, sure. The one where you killed your brother.
But all the subsequent faults continue to stack up on each other
Like bricks on a very solid sin house.
Did you or did you not
Just set Hamlet up to be killed
By both his friends AND the King of England?
Aren’t you in MID-fault now?
Listen – I know it’s a little like “I am in blood stepp’d in so far”
But that’s a sunk cost fallacy.
You know what that is, right?
Where you keep going on a thing
Just because you’ve been working on that thing for a while
Or invested a lot in that thing
So you don’t want to quit
And waste all your previous efforts/resources?
It’s convenient to see your fault as past
But it continues.
Yes, you already dropped the boulder in the pool
But the ripples that are still rippling from that aren’t just ripping from the initial drop,
No, you keep dropping more rocks,
Throwing stones and pebbles in the orbit of that first throw.

He’s talking about heaven, I know.
About looking toward his better angels.
But I take it, for myself, for this moment
As a call to look up.

I’ve learned from my work with the Feldenkrais Method
How the legs get heavier when we look down.
Walk with your eyes to the floor and the weight of yourself will increase significantly. Walk with your eyes to the horizon, floating straight ahead and your legs will float as well.
This works on a metaphorical level, too, I’m finding.
In the last few years, I have been looking down, feeling the weight of myself and my choices, seeing the worst, not feeling any lightness – but now, I’m learning to look up again, as I did in my youth – and it is easier to lift everything,
Especially my spirits.

What’s interesting about this line is that it takes us back to the possibility of Claudius deciding not to murder his brother. It would seem to reference the idea that prayer might have prevented his crime. To be considering a reality in which the crime was prevented, is to express a kind of regret. To be thinking: “Maybe if I’d prayed BEFORE I murdered, I might not have murdered” – but, of course, the other face of this line is the wish for pardon after the fact.

The desire for pardon makes good sense for someone who is currently facing the circumstances of having committed a crime.
But to think, for a minute about forestalling it – preventing it – by calling his fratricide a fall. . .well, it gives some weight to this pardon he wants.

A lot of pardons are of the “I wish I didn’t have to endure the consequences” school, rather than the “I wish I hadn’t done it” school.
You see these sorts of pardons requested in schools round about grading time.

Right?! I mean – what is mercy for but to challenge the worst horrors? It is hard not to be moved by people who lean into mercy in the most horrific of circumstances. Whenever I hear of parents who advocated for the killers of their children – or of the way the Amish responded to violence in their community, I am always touched to the core. Not everyone has the heart for that kind of profound grace – but those that do are tremendous role models.

I don’t think this line is quoted much.
I get the sense that there’s not many opportunities for mercy out in the world of quotables. Mercy can seem dated somehow
But it is beautiful.

So we’ve got a curséd hand here, the hand of the king.
The proposition is that blood on the hand is thicker than the hand itself.
That it is, let’s say, twice as big as the hand.
Like, if you took the brother’s blood and pressed it into a hand shape, then put the hand made of blood next to the king’s curséd hand, the hand made of blood would be bigger.

But, we know, of course, that the hand is curséd because it is already covered in his brother’s blood, metaphorically – so the actual proposition here is that there’s more layers of metaphorical blood than there already are.

Maybe the idea is that it’s more than one brother’s blood – layering one after the other – making him an even worse murderer than he already is
and the idea being that, even if he were the shittiest shitty brother murderer, there’d still be enough heavenly mercy in the form of metaphorical rain, to be forgiven.

Which is a nice perk of believing in this sort of thing, especially if you’re a murderer.

Double Business Binding
is a syndrome I know well.
It is as familiar as breathing
– to feel pulled in two directions at once
– to know I need to do one thing
and simultaneously another
and while I stand there looking between them
trying to decide which one to do first
I lose the name of action
and neither one gets done.

If I had a publishing company
I’d call it Double Business Binding.

And now when I’m paralyzed between paths of action,
I will name it Double Business.
I will say to myself, as my head looks first at one, then the other,
“Ah, it’s Double Business.”
And perhaps it will help me choose.

Double Business also makes me think of this idea we talk about a lot in Feldenkrais wherein we try to do two things at once in the body, often in contrary ways. So while I want to reach forward with the arm, I end up pulling myself back with the pelvis – therefore creating two contradictory movements. Double business – going forward and going back.

In Feldenkrais, we call it cross motivation – but now I will call it Double Business and somehow that will make it easier. How, I’m not sure. But it will. Maybe I’ll just geek out and quote this line the next time I teach a Feldenkrais class – colliding my worlds!