It’s funny how delusions are almost always of grandeur. When someone thinks they’re someone else, it’s almost always a famous person, historical figure or a god. When a person loses their wits, they almost never think they are a plumber or a receptionist. No one is ever hospitalized for thinking they are a clerk at Walmart when they are, in fact, a CEO. Likewise, people don’t imagine the people around them with delirious of – what’s the opposite of grandeur? Diminishment? Delusions are like the water under boats, they raise everyone up. Not to say that everyone raises up good. Delusion can cast your mother as a demon or the crossing guard as a mass murderer but it doesn’t really cast a president as a crossing guard or a movie star as a barista.

He thought I was very proper, like a librarian.
“All business,” he said.
He knows better now but it’s funny how those first impressions linger. He can take himself back to that vision very easily, remember me as the proper business lady, while simultaneously understanding me and a multitude of my quirks better than anyone before him.

What is the origin of this expression? Is it related to the harp? Because of all the relentless instruments to choose from, this one would seem to be the least intrusive. I’d have thought still bag-piping on my daughter, or trumpeting or drumming (where we get banging on about my daughter, perhaps) or dijereedoo-ing on my daughter or even bassoning on my daughter. But harping, well, a harp evokes a quiet, melodic sense, repetitive, possibly, by not so’s you’d really notice.
Unless it’s a jaw harp. Those things are relentless, repetitive and irritating.

I have surely said this before but I don’t know when nor can I remember how, but this is the sort of line I particularly love. It is simple in its construction and its meaning. It’s easily understood but it’s got some STYLE. It feels like an utterly unique way to express “What do you think of that?” or “How ‘bout this?” or “What do you say about that?” or “Whaddya know?”
And it has a rhythm that rolls right off the tongue even in the midst of a very prose-y section of the play. It’s a sentence I feel like I could say 10 times in a row and still be enjoying it on the 11th.

I have tools for these moments when I look at the prompt for the day and begin to balk. When the voice kicks in and starts shouting, “Why are we still doing this stupid project that no one cares about but YOU?! This line is impossible, they’re all impossible lately and when have you ever written anything interesting in this context. . .” and so on.
I have things I can do.

First I started drawing my spirals. (The voice says, “You always do these spirals now. You think this is going to help?!”) I did them with more discipline today, the lines closer to each other, the lines steadier. And I thought of Lynda Barry who I learned them from (indirectly, through my friend, Matilda.) I saw Lynda Barry’s course on-line this morning. It’s on Neuroscience but it features doodling and drawing and it looks amazing. I loved the pictures that her students colored as they listened to the scientist talking. I can feel the wax on the paper when I look at them, silly though they might be. When I get home, I might do some coloring. That’s one of the tools.

Mostly, I prefer the mythical, the magical, the mysterious but I have been dabbling in non-fiction on my other blog. It is a place where I have been striving to tell the truth as rigorously as I can. It is, of course, only my own truth. And for many years it was a little like a truth tornado in a box, spinning and spinning in on itself, with the occasional viewer from the outside. Then my truth went viral and suddenly there was a world of affirmation for my truth.

Then last night, I had the opportunity to do the same for a truth sharer whose tornado had just burst forth from her box and stirred up a great deal of dust. The circle of support is necessary. It is sometimes important to know you’re not alone in your truth.

I read David Foster Wallace’s article about John McCain’s 2000 election bid. It is 2013 as I write this (and 2014 as I post this) so a lot of time has passed, both since 2000 and since 2008 when McCain was the actual nominee, not just the contender. It was an extraordinary look INSIDE the political machine, how things got done, what gets done and how it changes the people that are part of it.
There was a thing about honesty – a thing in which McCain sold himself as The Candidate who would Tell you the Truth, and in the beginning , in taking aim at uncomfortable truths about his fellow politicians, he did, in fact, seem to be doing that. But DFW points out that as soon as it became clear that McCain could win, he suddenly had something to lose and what was “the truth” began to seem a lot muddier. So what began as the campaign of an outsider telling truth to power evolved (or devolved) into the campaign of selling the image of a man telling truth to power, while getting closer and closer to that power himself. The Straight Talk Express was the name of the bus and “Straight Talk” the cloak that that political speech got cloaked in.

Not I, my lord.

Does Hamlet actually know any fishmongers? I don’t imagine the Prince of Denmark has a lot of call for fishmonger interactions. He probably doesn’t go out for shopping for fish too often. Or ever. He may have never seen a fishmonger. Maybe they do look like Polonius in his imagination.

Do you know me, my lord?

In the show, the actress (playing herself, it would seem) declared that she knew people by their touch, by their hands. Because she no longer had use of her hearing or seeing. She could only know someone this way.
I wondered though, if I lost both my sight and hearing, mightn’t I also know someone by their smell, by their vibration? Mightn’t I sense my mother’s approach even if I could not see or hear her?
But perhaps I overestimate the other senses. Perhaps the darkness and silence is so total, there would be no feeling someone behind you. Maybe those feelings are micro-hearing or seeing sensations. Maybe when I close my eyes in an acting exercise and sense the movement around me, joining it without seeing it, I’m really hearing it, quietly, without knowing that’s what I’m doing.
The kinesthetic sense, the proprioception that feels like it leads to some understanding of the other, to knowing someone else, may be the sum total of the other senses.

How does my good Lord Hamlet?

I’m trying to work out why this line seems patronizing. Is it inherent in the language? That either good or lord would do but both seems excessive? I’m not sure. If Horatio said this line, I think it might seem affectionate. But in Polonius’ mouth, in this moment, I cannot read it without a layer of disingenuousness. On the train just now, I was reading this essay about language by David Foster Wallace. In it, he was explaining how there are multiple languages within a language, how Standard Written English is only one among many varieties of English. He uses the example of “a 53-year-old man with jowls and a comb-over” coming over to some kids hanging at the mall and asking if he can chill with them for a bit and just kick it.
I don’t think Polonius is trying to “kick it” with Hamlet here but there is a flavor of an older man making an effort with a younger here and not doing it terribly well.