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!

I can’t really pray either
but in my case, the inclination is not so sharp.
The closest I get is the occasional, “Please, could I get this thing I want?” or
“Please can I avoid this impending thing?”
But I’m not sure that’s really prayer
particularly since it’s not to anyone in particular.
It’s just a general (probably) fruitless bargaining with the universe.
But – maybe that’s how religion got invented.
From general pleading for things to go our way.

I listened to a story told by a guy who grew up religious and then began to question. He talked about how he couldn’t talk with his parents about anything because the first thing they always said was, “Have you prayed about it?”
He said he said, “Let’s assume I HAVE. What’s the next step? What steps can I actually take to fix this thing? What would you do in my situation?”
And his parents’ only answer was prayer.
Poor guy was in a little bit of a similar situation as Claudius but for a very different reason. The impulse to pray being deeply embedded in him but at a certain point, no longer useful.

It’s probably not an accident that the first murder in the Bible is a brother’s killing a brother. While definitely not a good idea, fratricide doesn’t have the stamp of horror that murdering your mother or father or child might have. In a way, it’s primal in the sense of it going down deep – that we are perhaps, at our core, fundamentally at odds with our siblings – that murdering that person with whom you’re compelled to share so much – might just come naturally.

But this is really a Biblical reference, not just “primal” – it’s the “primal eldest” – that is Cain. Cain killed Abel…and presumably Claudius is the younger brother (by virtue of not having been King at first) so here the Danish Cain gets killed by Danish Abel.

It’s funny, too, that the offense has a curse upon it. Not, I don’t know, the man himself? It’s like Claudius is disassociating himself from his crime. It’s his offense that has the primal eldest curse upon’t. He didn’t do it so much as he’s in possession of the things that did. He doesn’t say, “I am rank. I did a terrible thing. I really screwed up and now I feel guilty.”

No, he does not. This is as close to a confession as he gets until the end of the speech – when he says, “I did the murder.” Of course, even in that context the sentence structure is such that the murder is an afterthought. It’s just a description of the things he got (i.e. he got them because he did the murder.) It all feels as though Claudius just can’t take responsibility for his own actions, even in his confession.

I’ve always read this line as something so smelly that the odor could reach up to heaven, that the reach of the stink is so long, the distance so great.

But I just realized it could also be a personification of heaven. That is, maybe this deed doesn’t stink to anyone on earth but in heaven, it smells abominably- like the way certain smells smell good to some people and awful to others. There are a lot of perfumes like that – wherein the wearer thinks it smells great and some people AROUND them would disagree.