It would be very cool if our brains could actually coin money. Like, if you could just think yourself solvent? Manufacture dollar coins by picturing them? Or, more efficiently, gold ones you could sell?
So many traditions try and convince us we can think ourselves into wealth.
Just picture your bank account growing.
Just create a vision board
Just chant enough times a day
Just believe hard enough
Just be grateful for what you have – cherish every penny that comes into your possession
But to actually be able to coin money with your brain? That would save you a whole lot of trouble.
Look where he goes, even now, out at the portal!
And now it’s time for questions about Danish architecture – or rather questions about English architecture with a Danish lens. I think of a portal as being:
First: a submarine or cruise ship sort of window
Second: an inter-dimensional space/time travel door
But this portal is obviously neither of those. Unless it’s sort of the 2nd.
I assume it’s a window – or a gap in a wall – but it’s a very specific word to use –
Not one of Shakespeare’s regularly used window/door references.
It’s not even a casement.
There is only one other use of portal in all of the plays – so I feel like it’s a little bit unique. It’s not just a regular door. I think it MAY be that Shakespeare’s suggesting that the Ghost has made a rather metaphysical exit here. (The portal In Venus and Adonis has a similar flavor.) It could be that he’s floating out a window or a special Danish castle door or somewhere that’s just a bit more specialized than just a bit more specialized than just turning a handle and walking out.
My father, in his habit, as he lived!
How do the ghost authorities decide what clothes the ghost will do his haunting in? In this case, he gets his war outfit, including armor and helmet. One assumes this is not the ensemble in which he died. (Unless Hamlet Sr. liked to take refreshing naps in his orchard fully armed and armored up.) It’s probably not even the clothes they buried him in. For a king, one might be more likely to go with a crown and royal mantle.
But these ghostly authorities, like the Queer Eye for the Dead Guy, said – “For this one, I think, metal! Let’s go with a war theme, everyone. I mean, you looked good in everything, King Hamlet, don’t get us wrong. We could have chosen your nightshirt and you’d have looked majesterial and fabulous – but I think your best look was always the warrior one. Don’t you guys think so? And wear that beaver up. It shows off your eyes.”
Look how it steals away!
The ghost is all he, him, his – a person, Hamlet’s father in all his fatherly power and terror. And then suddenly – he is an it stealing away. I’m very curious about this transition from subject to object – from personhood to an “it” and an “it” that steals away, no less.
I assume that when Hamlet calls the Ghost “it” he is thinking of it as “ghost,” as the thing he is and when he calls him “he” or “my father,” he is thinking of him that way. Perhaps it functions as a kind of reminder to himself that the ghost is the ghost of his father and not his actual father. Maybe. I’m just curious about it.
From he to it. That’s our journey, huh?
Why, look you there!
There’s something about teaching Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement that has me thinking a lot about how we direct people’s attention. When we tell them what to look for, the mind becomes slightly less open than when we tell them where to look.
Here, for example, Hamlet is directing his mother to look in a particular location. He’s leaving it open. He’s allowing for her to see whatever she might actually be seeing. He doesn’t start with what or who. He starts with where.
I try to do the same in teaching. I try not to tell people what to look for at first – because if they DON’T see it, they can get into a space wherein they get anxious that they’re doing it wrong. It’s a looking there first. Look you there at your heels! Then more information. See if you can sense them moving. If you can’t – no big deal. Just look around down there.
Hamlet does the same. He starts with the open question and then goes to the specifics after.
No, nothing but ourselves.
Others have houses and cars. They have children and rooms to put their children in. They have basements full of things they don’t really use but aspire to one day. They have vacations and trips to the country for the weekend.
All of which seems wondrous – and yet I recognize that all of those things could be mine, as well, should I choose them. I choose something else – something to the side – something that I didn’t realize was to the side when I chose it – but I recognize it now. I choose art and a kind of wild integrity to who I am. I choose a continual realignment with my values. I choose only that which leads to further integrity and better art. It’s probably crazy. And probably that is nothing. But I choose it with another artist who has made similar choices in life and so here we are with nothing but ourselves. But ourselves are not insignificant.
Nor did you nothing hear?
I was listening to a podcast about early childhood education and part of it discussed what happens when babies get cochlear implants. They hear for the first time but not right away. For a little while, it’s just noise. It takes a while for them to sort out one noise from another. Because we don’t hear with the ear, with the technology – we hear with the brain. So the nothing that babies hear at the beginning means that their brains don’t know how to listen at first. They don’t know how to go from nothing to a whole lot of something.
Yet all that is I see.
In the transcript of one of his eye lessons, Dr. Feldenkrais talks about the ways we habitually limit our vision. We tend to only look at things from angles that are familiar, so we are always getting a partial view. We improve our vision by expanding the possibilities of movement of the eyes. We learn to see more, to see the middle, to see where we typically skip over, see what’s been hiding in our blind spots.
We see more and more and more.
Expanding our potential with each layer of seeing.
To see it all, truly, instead of just thinking I see it all, would be powerful.
Nothing at all.
I had a world of things I meant to accomplish. There were emails to write, social media to manage, grants and jobs to apply for, postcards to make, decisions to settle on. You know what I actually accomplished?
Do you see nothing there?
We were watching a TV show in which the characters can leap into one another’s worlds at will – but they are invisible to everyone else. When two of these characters who’d been flirting with one another for some time finally hooked up and made out, it was almost inevitable that someone was going to turn up at one location or the other and see the person making out with the air. It’s a joke too impossible to resist. We predicted the wrong location and the wrong observer but we knew that there would be an interruption of some kind. No one asked this question – the invisibility of companions had already been well established but – the seeing nothing was a funny something.
The Hamlet Project 