Hamlet making fun of old men here doesn’t really help him in the like-able department. At least not to me, today. I mean, old men can be funny no doubt. I have found that the one (almost universal) type that every student is happy to dive right in and play is an old man. It’s a release of some kind, a very clear physicality and very different from a young person.
However, there is an old man in my life, approaching a century on the planet. His face is wrinkled (no beard but his hair is white) and his legs are much weaker than they used to be. His wit, too, has faded, along with his hearing. And it’s just not funny at all. It’s painful and all I can do is be amazed how he’s survived this long. The indignities of age are such that it just adds insult to injury to mock the aged.
The self-important? Okay. But not the people already losing everything.

She told me a story and asked me to share it. I wrote it down for her because that is what I do. She hasn’t been able to tell it herself and when his version of their story makes its way back to her, it is always a convenient bastardization of the truth. It is the version of the story in which what he did is not so bad and was maybe a little bit justified. These slanders.

And this story did not happen in a vacuum. In telling it, the question becomes whether or not to share the names of the parties involved. Despite the fact that this story is true, she is worried that we’d be accused of slander.

How funny is it that actual slanders run rampant and truth is muzzled for fear of slander? Not terribly funny, I guess.

There is something the matter between me and the boss. And between me and the supervisor. And between me and the business. And between me and my fate. And between me and that family member. And between me and that security guard. Maybe it’s me.

Words, written and written well – with purpose and such or words, spoken, artfully crafted and beautiful or words, sung, like a surprise or like a feeling.
I love those words.
I don’t love all the words though.
Out in life, most of the time, I wish people wouldn’t use quite so many, that they’d just shut up and stop talking so much. Sometimes I resent having to use words at all.
These words here, being famous words and such succinct ones makes it feel harder to find good ones to use in response to them. Or it. Because after all this is just one word repeated. But a famous word it is.

Did she ever tell her parents what happened that summer? Do they know how close to death she came, in battling that conception. A few years later, she was married, that much I know and maybe the passage of time released the intolerance of her parents. Maybe, once her child was born (I assume she conceived again) she could look back on that first awful conception and find her own parents more compassionate.

I wonder about those parents who judge their daughters so harshly that they feel they must go underground, risk it all to be free of the shame or the imperious morality. I wonder about the parents of those daughters who lost their lives to coat-hangers or unsterilized instruments or perilous circumstances. Do they wish their daughters had been less afraid of them? Wish they could have supported their children instead of sending them to the knife under the dark of night?

The moment when this started to be true for the women around me, I knew we had grown up. The first time a friend happily let me know she was pregnant, I discovered that I was primed for a different response than joy. For so many years, news of conception spelled trouble – big trouble – big time – NOT a blessing. But then, friend after friend began to feel blessed with conception instead of cursed and there we were, all grown up.

Still, though, no matter what the age, many a conception can go either way so one has to read the signals carefully. One woman’s blessing is another woman’s curse.

Is the suggestion here that Ophelia is like a dead dog and that maggots will breed in her when the sun hits her? Eep. Gross. Or is it that whatever’s in her is gross and will come to light in the sun? Or that Hamlet himself has planted some maggots in her and the sun’s going to multiply them?

None of it’s very nice. Particularly to the father of your girlfriend, man.

Hamlet is asking questions he knows the answers to. You gotta figure he’s up to something here. It’s an interesting game. Polonius proposed it, really, by asking Hamlet if he knew him. Hamlet pretends he knows him as someone he is not, then brings the game around to someone that he is i.e., the father of his love interest. Now, this is curious to me. Why is Hamlet interested in toying with Polonius on the subject of his daughter? It would seem that the strategy of particularly convincing Polonius that he’s mad would feed more sensible in to Polonius’ role in the Danish Court. If he’s going to taunt Polonius about anything, the dirty jokes about his daughter, while surely designed to make Polonius uncomfortable, don’t necessarily lead directly back to the King.

I suppose this is where a study of Elizabethan madness might come in handy because both Hamlet’s feigned madness and Ophelia’s actual madness (FOOTNOTE: I assume Ophelia’s madness is actual, I’d be interested in a version of Hamlet in which hers is feigned, too) feature the crossing of sexual boundaries. Is madness in this era not really madness unless it does that? I’ve seen many varieties of madness in real life – one or two featured some inappropriate sexuality but the bulk of them did not. And maybe its only Danish madness that has to be this way. Lear and Edgar’s (actual and feigned) madnesses don’t really go so blue. Is Lady M mad? Or just sleepwalking? Who else goes mad in Shakespeare? What are the symptoms?

I’m gonna need some help with this one. I get how the sun might breed maggots in a dead dog. I mean, there’s the dead dog and when the temperature suits them, the maggots get busy and start multiplying so despite the fact that it is not the sun’s literal breeding of the maggots, their reproduction is connected to its heat. Sense made.
However – who or what is the good kissing carrion? The body of the dead dog? And is it good for kissing of the maggots? The corpse is like the romantic hotel for maggots? Is that it? I guess part of the difficulty is that Hamlet does not complete this thought so it’s not clear whether the good kissing carrion applies to what’s come before or more closely to what might come after which ends up being Ophelia and maybe the idea is that he wants to tie a breeding ground for maggots with Polonius’ daughter. Which is really shitty if you think about it.
Anyway, all I know is, I don’t know anyone who’d be into kissing carrion. Although I suppose there’s always someone. Gross.

The honest man isn’t too hard to pick out. He’s usually on his own these days and as he moves through a public space, those that know him tend to get out of his way. If a stranger should, unawares, ask him a quick, “How’s it going?” you can watch his slow edge in the other direction sometime after the third or fourth sentence of the honest man’s answer. This is usually made more awkward as the honest man notes out loud that the stranger is inching away and perhaps is not really interested in how it’s going for the honest man, upon which he might be questioned on his motivations for nodding in a friendly fashion and asking a question he did not care to hear the answer to.
The honest man met the honest woman once and they managed to struggle through a one night stand but the honest man had to ask how it was for her and she had to tell him and while they admired one another’s honesty they agreed that that was about all either of them had to offer the other and so they parted ways acknowledging that none would ever have interest or occasion in calling the other ever again.