I love when Hamlet gets all horror movie. He’s best known for intellectual philosophizing – but this part of him often gets ignored. The version of Hamlet that is the most Vincent Price, the most gothic, the most macabre.

It’s kind of a great impulse – to be personally wound up – to have your uncle’s crime confirmed, to finally tell your “friends” where they can stick their pipe – and rather than say ANY of that, just set the scene for a dark story.

It feels to me like someone who’s just gone through something dramatic and instead of dealing with that thing, sits down at a desk and writes, “It is a dark and stormy night…”
And then, from there, of course, go on to drink blood, like any good vampire story.

As Royalty, of course, Hamlet has the authority to dismiss people at will. Of course, he will use that authority when he has to.

But there’s something about this particular dismissal – something slightly disingenuous about calling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern “friends” at this point. Something that is highlighted by the preface of “Leave me” to “friends.” It’s like – “Get out of here,” and the “friends” doesn’t soften the effect of the order. It just makes friends slightly sarcastic. Even if he doesn’t say it that way or mean it.

It is, too.
Though not often said these days.
I’m trying to think of an instance of it that isn’t in an old movie or song, or play, for example.
“In the sweet by and by…” a song, I think.
And it’s one of those phrases that if you elide it a little bit, it starts to sound very odd. Nor would it be entirely clear what it meant if you didn’t speak English, I imagine. Or just never heard this expression.

Hereafter means essentially the same thing but “by and by” has a sense of lackadaisical ease to it that “hereafter” lacks. And hereafter breaks down to the elements it is when you look at the words. It’s – here – after.
But “by and by” – one of these “by”s on its own would be meaningless – and it doesn’t break down to any sense at all.

But it is easily said.

As soon as I am explicitly summoned, I start to drag my heels. When someone calls me and demands I call them right away, I do not. In fact, I call them even later than I might have had they not demanded an immediate response. If I call them at all.

If someone says, “I need you down here right away!” My first thought is, “Oh yeah?” And then, slowly, if I feel like it – I’ll give a response like Hamlet’s here.

I don’t take orders well.

The things I have tolerated from good performers!
And almost always the male ones.
“I need them!” I think.
“He said he’ll show up.”
“He said he’d be there.”
“I know he’s an asshole but he’s so talented!”
“I had a feeling about him but I think it’s going to be fine.”

It almost never is.

The stacks of headshots we’d get in the mail would break our hearts.
The pile of women would be measured in feet.
The pile of men – in inches.

Men with credentials that would get them tossed to the side if they were women were called and auditioned.
And some of them, we cast.
And some of them were great.
But some of them were not.
And I let them fool me
Because I was desperate.
And then they made me crazy.

 

The journey of a life feels like a kind of coming and going. At first, there is only the coming to mother – because there is only mother. There is no self.

Then you pull away, to start to understand you are someone different.

It is a rubberband independence wherein you walk away only so far before you spring back again.

As we age, it’s not that we lose the rubberband – it’s just that it gets longer and longer. We can wander farther.
Or for so long it may seem as if there were no rubberband at all.
But you will return. In one way or another.

I saw an article on the internet about a sign on a gym entrance that asked, “Do you want to be a whale or a mermaid?” Presumably this is designed to be motivation to lose weight but someone posted a response.

The centerpiece of it was how awesome whales are and how mermaids don’t exist.

Our whole lives we’ve been led to believe that being called a whale is an insult – which is not only insulting to us, but also to whales.

After reading that little rant, I will, from henceforth, take being like a whale as a compliment.

They are intelligent, gentle, kind and social creatures. And they sing beautifully, too.

I have very little sense of what an actual weasel is. It’s an animal that gets much more play as a metaphor than as an actual animal.

Is it like a ferret a little bit?

Or is ferret another name for a weasel- weasels having developed such a bad name.

How did weasels become weasels? Are weasels particularly weasely? Are they sneaky and duplicitous? What did they do to deserve such an unsavory reputation?

I’ve been thinking a lot about camels. I’m writing a book in which a camel plays a significant part. I have a sense of what a camel is like because I’ve seen photographs and video. I have seen camels on screens, if not in person. I’ve put together a camel in my mind from books, TV shows, movies and cartoons.

But where did Shakespeare get his sense of camel?
From books?
Paintings?
There weren’t camels in England.
Or Denmark for that matter.

I suspect that camels got a lot of the attention they got mostly from the Bible. They show up there. . .so camels take up some space in people’s imaginations – despite never having seen one.

The shape of a camel likely became quite significant to those who went to church.
It makes a real animal somewhat mythic, I would think.

The shape of a camel always seen as a painting or stained glass or illumination or drawing. A unicorn might be as real in this scenario.

I have a Feldenkrais client who doesn’t really get it. She doesn’t feel anything when I give her a Functional Integration lesson and wonders what she should feel. There’s something about her questioning that makes me feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. It zooms past my experience with her and out into my whole identity as a practitioner, then as a person.

Then today, I had a client who, the moment I touched him, began to thank me and did not stop the whole rest of the hour. Everything I did seemed to him just the right thing and he let me know, affirming it all with words.

This is generally a bit of overkill. It’s not up to my client’s to give me affirmation. But today – it was much appreciated. To have such a graceful accomplished gentleman find everything I did to be remarkable, went a long way toward repairing my shaken confidence.