What do you know about heyday in the blood of an older woman, Hamlet? From what I understand, the heyday in the blood is just getting started for older ladies. Certainly I don’t know either – but I felt some heyday kicking in in my early 30s that’s for sure. And from what I understand, one of the biggest problems in senior citizen communities is the rampant spread of STDs.
I don’t think you know from heyday, Hamlet.
And sadly you won’t live long enough to find out for yourself.
I hope I will – because I’m looking forward to some heyday in the future.

What Queen would? Royals may love one another but their marriages are public acts. They are diplomatic alliances, calculated political decisions. As a prince, Hamlet should have some sense of that. But maybe he’s been spoiled by the love he sensed between his parents. Maybe he didn’t get the memo that royal matches don’t tend to be love matches. Maybe that’s why he’s been messing around with Ophelia instead of sweetening up French princesses. Or Norwegian ones. Or whichever country’s princess is available and in need of Danish diplomacy.

Have you eyes The Sequel
Repetitions are usually good fun to say when speaking. It’s an opportunity to change emphasis, to get a bit of variety in tone, rhythm, timbre, intention. It’s a little trickier when writing a repetition. Especially when they’re so close together.
There are times when it allows a shift in perspective – just like in speech – but I don’t think today is one of those times.
Also, Hamlet is asking a kind of silly rhetorical question. Of course she has eyes. And of course she knows the difference between the two kings and yes she can see whatever it is Hamlet’s pointing to. But hopefully Gertrude judges her partners on more than their outward appearances.

A woman in my Feldenkrais class asked me where she should go to learn how to do comedy. She’d been told at various job conferences that she was funny and she said everyone said, “You should do stand up!”
But people SAY these things without realizing what they’re doing. People who say, “You should be a stand up!” don’t actually go and see stand up. They have no real sense of what it is or what the life entails. I’m not a stand up but I know what it takes and I can tell you that this woman should NOT be a stand up. She doesn’t even like stand up comedy. But she was considering it anyway because so many people said it. But people say things like this. If they see a kid who is cute and talented in a school play they say, “You should be on Broadway!”
Which, again, is not something I have done but I do know what it takes and 999 out of one thousand kids should NOT be on Broadway.
I wish that people could be a little less exhibitions for one another…that we could just let a funny person at a business conference be a funny person at her job or let a talented kid be a talented kid at his school.

I’ve been obsessed with this “translation” conversation this week – and I can’t help seeing this line through the lens of having to paraphrase it. When you HEAR this line – you hear Hamlet essentially calling Claudius a Moor.

While, technically, the metaphor is that Hamlet, Senior, is a mountain and Claudius a barren field, the sound of it will likely give you a double experience. You can hear two different kinds of Moors. The racial slur of Moor is a problematic aspect. If I were “translating” I’d be tempted to choose the pedestrian FIELD meaning just so as to avoid the contemporary discomfort with talking about racial politics. I’d be especially tempted to make that change to make Hamlet, the hero, look better. But I am not convinced that that would be the right thing to do.

Gratefully, yes. And I appreciate them more and more each day.
It has always been nice to see. And despite a lot of childhood ocular difficulty, I do a reasonably good job of seeing.
It is only recently, though, that I have come to think of the eyes as part of the body, as drivers of movement, as these most mobile little orbs of exploration.
My work in the Feldenkrais Method has proved how essential the eyes can be and in listening to the work of a man who healed his vision with the Method – I get an even more profound understanding of the anatomy of my eyes. To be able to sense the eyeball – floating in my skull – two little balls of honey, floating, two water lilies, two floating candles, gummy balls of receptivity.
I am very glad to have them, the sweet sensitive things.

*

And the timing of my project is funny. Because I wrote this first part probably a year and a half ago and in the last few months, I discovered that I have a rather severe vision issue. That is, my eyes are perfectly healthy (the lady with the eyeball machine said she’s never seen a healthier eye) but my brain doesn’t see accurately. It probably never has. I have convergence insufficiency and my brain suppresses all sorts of things it shouldn’t. I am only now discovering that being able to see double is a thing that most people can do. Until recently, I thought it was a metaphor.

I still, all this time later, cherish my eyes. But I cannot say I see reasonably well anymore. Nor did I ever.

Damn Hamlet, you really know how to insult a guy.
Is there anything more evocative and gross than a mildewed ear? It smells bad, looks bad and somehow has a diminishing effect, as well.
In Hamlet’s eyes, his dad is a compendium of all the gods, a mountain, entirely wholesome.
His uncle? A mildewed ear.

Sometimes I think Claudius is cast from Hamlet’s perspective – a little reedy, mousy and cagey – but it feels important to remember that Claudius is Hamlet’s stepfather, in addition to his uncle. And 9 out of 10 stepparents look horrible to the children.
Hamlet, has good reasons to hate his stepfather – being the murderer of his father, for example – but what if Claudius were a handsome devil that Gertrude was powerless to resist?

You can never really be sure what will be next. You can think you know. You can assure yourself that things will continue just as they are but things never remain just as they are for long. You can try and predict and you can have reasonable odds on things – but you can never be entirely sure.

I assume that the high of travelling abroad will fade soon and that I will slip into a sadness, and helplessness at just about the moment that the season finally turns over. But it’s possible that this shift is actually more long lasting than my usual shift. It’s possible that this trip pushed the re-set button – and I’m bounced back to the lighter self I was ten years ago – before I slipped into the darkness of graduate school and the upending worldview shift that made me wonder if there was any hope or meaning or point or whatever.

It’s possible that the sands in that hourglass made it all the way to the other side and now the whole things been tipped over again. I can only hope, I suppose. We will see what follows. Look. What follows?

Something I didn’t really draw on when I played Gertrude (age, 22) was her grief. She may have married her husband’s brother but that doesn’t preclude the feeling of the loss of her partner of many years. This is a woman who has lost someone who loved her deeply (if the ghost’s language about her is any indication.) She has lost a man who she raised her son with, who she ran a country with, a man who (if Hamlet’s description is any indication) was handsome, a man who would defend her against the wind (if Hamlet’s account is any indication.) What was Gertrude’s grieving like? She may have re-married just to push it aside. Maybe all portraits of the previous king have come down. Maybe she hasn’t seen an image of his face since his funeral. And then her punk-ass insensitive son, who has just killed a state official, shows her a picture.
If I were playing Gertrude now, I’d probably burst into tears when I saw his face.

Everyone made a big deal about Hamlet being in love with his mother. The Freudian interpretation of this scene is really hard to shake, despite the complete lack of any textual evidence for it. There is nothing in this scene that suggests an incestuous bond between Hamlet and Gertrude.
Now, if someone wanted to make a case for Hamlet being in love with his FATHER, for that, there’d be no shortage of evidence. This description of his father’s face is as rhapsodic as any lover’s atomization of their beloved. This is a man who loves his daddy. A lot. And I know he’s dead and we all tend to romanticize the dead – we look on them with a rosy colored, golden tinged retro lens. But this is a fairly extreme example. I mean, EVERY GOD had a hand in the making of his father? So many he doesn’t even name them all? Jove, Mars, Mercury, Hyperion and More?!

And, yes, he is likely exaggerating in the hopes of making his mother feel bad – but really? The ENTIRE PANTHEON? Hamlet Sr. must have been one handsome man.
Even the language about this is sensuous. “New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill”? If Hamlet wants to kiss any member of his family, (and I’m not saying he does – I’m actually pretty sure he doesn’t,) it is his dad.