O Ophelia
I wish for you
To discover duplicity.
Your father has it in spades.
He will send a spy to get the truth about his son
He will hide behind an arras
He will say whatever it takes to get himself placed
He is a political creature.
His son, likewise, will later allow himself to bend his sense of honor
To poison a sword in secret
To shift his alliance from one side to the next.
But you, Ophelia, just keep right on doing as you say you will.
I know you have to tell your father “yes” but I want you
To go right out of those doors and do the opposite.
I want you to deny someone else
Instead of yourself.

Will you give a face to your words?
The face, so full of non-wordy words –
Words without words -Ideas, truths, hidden secrets.
We believe more when we’re young, right?
Before we know that people can lie to us
That they can mold their faces into masks
To hide what they really feel.
I may have learned this later than most or earlier.
I think of myself as too trusting but at the same time
I was always able to read faces
Able to understand feelings without words.
I was both.
We are all contradictions.

What are the rules for honorable love?

Not that stupid “rules” book, those are rules

For game playing and manipulation, but

For love in honor, honor in love?

It is an honor to be loved, to receive it,

An honor to love, an honor to feel

An honor to share love, to see it, to hold it, to be it.

I cannot say I have ever been importuned

With love or importuned at all

Particularly in honorable fashion.

It’s a curious word choice.

It makes me feel like Ophelia is really her father’s daughter.

This is the sort of word he’d make up

To make what he was talking about sound

More official

More business like

More important.

On the radio today I heard a story about a corporate executive who became an artist. She told the story of a life of doing what she was supposed to – of doing what was expected, of doing the right job, in the right place, with the right husband. A lifetime of being told what to think had left her lost. When she discovered a form in which there was no right way, in which there was nothing but difference, in which her own thinking was the thing to explore, she almost had a breakdown.
An astonishing number of people want to be told what to think. It seems easier, I suppose. I suppose it is easier. It is easier to follow the lines laid out in front of you than to choose which direction to go. It is easier to color in a coloring book than to decide what to draw but the consequences of a lifetime of coloring in what has been set out for you, are probably dire. Perhaps if Ophelia weren’t concerned about what she should think, she wouldn’t be dead by the end of the play.

Yes, I do think
Something has been touching the Lord Hamlet –
Something like the softness of your body.
Maybe your fingers have been ranging all over the landscape of the Lord Hamlet’s body.
Maybe your lips have touched him quite a lot,
In many places and with varying urgencies.
Maybe your breasts have found their way to touching the Lord Hamlet
Or your belly or your butt or you’ve found a way to touch
The Lord Hamlet from the inside of you, to take a piece of the Lord Hamlet
Into yourself and touch him quite intimately.
Something is touching the Lord Hamlet.
Sometimes in secret.
Sometimes baldly.
Sometimes a combination of the two.
You will touch and touch the Lord Hamlet
As much as you can with
Whatever is close at hand.

The safest way
To keep a memory clear, to keep it as it was, not what you make it
But as you remember it –
Would be to lock it away and forget
You ever had it.
Every time we revisit a memory
We create it anew
So that the next time we remember it
We remember the memory.
This is how the brain stores what it knows. This is the science
Of remembering – the synaptic reinforcement of one connection to another. I was wearing a dark blue dress
No, it was more a purply blue.
I was wearing a purply blue dress that day.
I remember. I was wearing a purple dress.
Remember?

This is the most amount of backbone
We will ever see from Ophelia.
After listening patiently to an extremely righteous sermon,
She subtly but pointedly points out the possible hypocrisy
Embedded in it. Very probably, Laertes has his own intemperate affairs
And has not employed a watchman to his heart.
I wonder if he thinks she doesn’t know.
He dismisses this idea rather quickly and swiftly
Such as did not previously seem to be his style –
And then tries to make a hasty exit.
I think she’s on to something here
Laertes is certainly puffed (see this speech prior)
And reckless (see his impromptu attempt to seize the throne)
And his father thinks that he might be running around with prostitutes
And if he were, that might not be the worst thing, he thinks,
As he’s charged his spy to ascribe that fault to him.
Laertes probably thinks Hamlet’s a dog because he’s something of a dog himself
And surely his sister knows it and can call him on it.
It’s too bad no one can really reck his own rede in this play.
Poor dears, they all end up on that steep and thorny path and most of them fall down it.

The watchman of my heart
Is a portly fellow
With a big brass pocketwatch
That he consults while he rocks back and forth on his heels.
He has a jaunty hat and a round face under it.
Sometimes he’s a little over zealous in his work –
He’ll keep something or someone out if they don’t provide exactly the right paperwork
And sometimes he falls asleep at his post and misses the black-hearted villain with a sharp weapon walking by.
He sings jolly tunes
When no one’s nearby to hear him
And sometimes he’ll even do a jig
At the entrance.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Ophelia. I guess this is the line to confess that –
Because this is her second line.
It is also four one syllable words
And also a question
That evades and leads Laertes into more speech.
Ophelia herself is just a responding machine.
The men around her boss her around,
Pass her around to boss between themselves
Brother to father to Hamlet and so on to her grave.
No, no – I do have sympathy for Ophelia.
She’s got nothing of her own really –
No real language of her own
No life.
She just bounces back balls that are served to her.
But I don’t like her.
I want her to put something on the table –
Shock them all by pulling out a steak knife
And embedding it near someone’s finger. I want her to say something in this play.
But she doesn’t
And she won’t –
Not til she goes crazy
Which, you know, I do, I sympathize.
I feel bad for her but I can’t understand why Hamlet loves her.

I can’t help feeling that one of the actors
Printing the text
Just left off a sentence here
So that they could make the page.
I think this sentence is longer.
Do you doubt that the letters I have for you aren’t already written?
Do you doubt that I love my brother?
Do you doubt that the winds will give good sail and create quick and speedy correspondence for us?
This is Ophelia’s first line and I am struck by the “doubt” in it
As we are made to believe that Hamlet
Wrote to her regarding her doubts,
Imploring her to doubt all of these other things
But to never doubt his love.
It’s a rather flimsy little verse
From one the most articulate
Intelligent characters in the canon
But it’s a connection between doubt and love.
So is this line.