Born to Polonius and his wife (I’ll call her Moira because I’m tired of all the mothers not having names) his daughter is tiny, red and screaming like many daughters. She is the second child, (probably) and her parents one exhausted and proud to see her tiny scrunched up face. They fall in love with her instantly. Polonius goes around handing out cigars, beaming with delight at this new development in their lives – a daughter, a daughter. His son is toddling around, delighted to see someone smaller than himself and Proud Papa Polonius can not stop beaming. Even when the little girl screams and screams, he smiles and makes funny faces at her. He is an expert coo-er. He sings all the old songs from his university when he runs out of lullabies. He is an expert at peek-a-boo.

Beat Beat Beat Beat Beat Beat Beat Beat
What’s he doing here? Unfolding the letter? Untying ribbons? Searching his pockets for the evidence he is about to produce? Putting on his reading glasses? Searching for just the right passage? If we take the verse seriously here – this is a long damn pause after a whole lotta talking.

After the losses, the storm-battered shores, the hours in the dark, the confidence shaken, there is a glimpse of what remains – a flash, really – but the kind that gets in and makes a difference. What is left is concern, is human empathy, is love, really. And how terrible the cliché that love sits at the center, drawing love around love, making circles both smaller and larger at once. Me? I got magnetized, feeling the presence and the absence of all the people I love, no matter how far – and my family – miles and miles away, felt closer somehow and I wanted to gather them to me – the friends, the family, tie them all up in a mesh-bag, like the kind you put your delicates in, in the wash. . .and protect them somehow – that as the world spins them around, they will roll, safely together in their delicate bag, untorn by the outside world. Then, too, I became more concerned with strangers. How did that clerk in that luxury goods store get to work? Do they have power at home? Was it 3 hours of waiting to get out of Brooklyn to get there? If I were to go into that store, I can almost guarantee that this same clerk I am worried about would, look me up and down with a withering, “You don’t belong here” stare. But I’m worried about her anyway.
When the losses tip back toward gains, we might all forget this little cone of kindness but it remains in there. It remains.

Rap this one, or sing it. It is a delight for the mind attracted to sound, to repetition, to a sort of sestina in a sentence sensibility. Gallop apace you rhyming metered words! Ba dum bad um your way to the next line!

Here’s a funny thing. I have heard this line a multitude of times and never once have I noticed that he’s talking about cause and effect. I think everyone I’ve heard say this line has said E-ffect –with an eeee sound – and putting the emphasis on the E. I suppose to rhyme it more Effectively (!) with defect in the next line. But pronounced in the usual way, effect has its emphasis on the 2nd syllable, fitting it more precisely, exactly into the meter. So it’s curious that so many Poloniui choose to obscure the relationship of the effect to the cause and to disrupt the meter. Rhyme is pretty sexy, though and we’d more readily understand E-ffect than be able to make sense of a defect in this case. Defect and defect meaning such different things.

What a lovely grant! Did Hamlet have to fill out a 14 page application in triplicate to get this one?
Dear granting committee, please can you give me some madness?
Here are the other grants I’m applying for (craziness, insanity, twitchiness, anxiety) so you won’t be the sole supporter. If you give me this madness, I will fulfill the foundation’s mission and be a fully granted madman.
Here’s evidence for my previous experience with madness and why I think I deserve to be mad. Also, included – my CV (Prince of Denmark; Student at University of Wittenberg) and personal statement (Actually a lot more questions, then statements.)

But seriously, I had never put together the way grants and granting and “I grant you” and “Let us grant him” and such were all connected. What was the first usage of grants? Was it first a verb? When did it become a noun? And when did the gifting of grants – as in, “I grant you clemency, freedom or this sack of money” become granting small amounts of money as a reward for mounds of paperwork?

I must be an addict because I could not forswear the use of art. Farewell to art? Not possible. I wish it were sometimes. Certainly, my addiction has led to a lot of choices that might be thought foolish or impossibly, stupidly risky. I have lost friends to art.
Have you seen these ads?
Art is definitely habit forming. The high it gives you when you first start, the way you have to keep doing it, more and more to increase the intensity of experience. It can leave you broke and friendless. It can send you to neighborhoods you would never otherwise enter. It can lead you to associate with unsavory characters. Even if you end up at rock bottom, staring at the nothing art has left you with, you will look to art to set you free. Just one more shot of art – maybe this time art will save me.

Polonius, playing with language. He cannot help himself, it would seem. There are moments where toying with repetition like this is a good idea. While writing lyrics, perhaps. Or when making a speech at an academic banquet. One instance in which it might not be appropriate would be while talking with the royal family about the nature of their son’s illness. In that instance, it would seem a certain gravitas might be called for.

There’s a line – or a chapter maybe even – in Backwards and Forwards, that boils down to “everybody’s lunacy about Hamlet.” It’s about the question of whether Hamlet is really crazy. There are those who believe he is. They’re little Poloniuses- little Poloniui – asserting that Hamlet goes crazy in this play. They seemingly look at the play through Polonius’ eyes by seeing that:
1) Hamlet acted a bit crazy towards his daughter
2) He does act crazy every time he talks to Polonius. That whole camel/whale/fishmonger bit.
Now that I think of it, most of Hamlet’s crazy scenes seem to be designed for Polonius’ benefit. He puts his antic disposition primarily for Polonius, who falls for it, hook line and sinker.

Where has the art of speaking hidden itself away? No one I know has practiced styles of rhetoric or analyzed speech – at least not in the verbal sense. I know a lot of people who do movement analysis of speeches. They can tell you how that politician tilts his head and make a guess about what it suggests symbolically. They can look at the hand gesture and break it down into components – catch the arc and the torque. But that is an art of analysis, not an art of creation. I suppose that those who write or make speeches might still dive into the art of them. Maybe those speech and debate clubs in high school taught them rhetorical turns that they pepper into their sentences.
But I think we do not trust someone who is obviously artful in his speech. If we catch him at it, we imagine him too crafty, too calculating – like a villain with a master plan. But if he’s truly artful, he can probably hide his skill a bit and we never see him do it. There are those who are artful conversationalists, too. They’re more improvisers, working with the material before them – saying “yes” to the people with them to create a meaningful, memorable moment for everyone involved.