Some people have an ideal reader. You can feel who they’re talking to. I read a novel recently that was definitively written to the author’s mother.
I’m not sure who these Hamlet writings I do here are for.
The audience changes every day.
Some days it feels like I’m writing to a friend.
Some days I’m arguing with a scholar.
Some days I’m talking to my family.
Some days – most days – it’s some unknown listener – some particular friend to whom I could explain it all at once.
Then what I have to do Will want true color – tears perchance for blood.
I imagine a war in which, instead of trying to shed each other’s blood, warriors just tried to make one another cry. They’d suit up with tissues and arm themselves with onions and sad movies. They’d head out into the field and instead of slicing each other open with blades and bullets, they slice open their emotions with stories like Old Yeller. On the field, they leave behind watery trails of tears.
Then, a special kind of battlefield plant evolves, that thrives on the saltwater of tears. All over the world, you could recognize where battles were fought due to the fields of these special tear flowers.
Children pick them to decorate the graves of all the men who died of old age.
Do not look upon me, Lest with this piteous action you convert My stern effects.
Is Hamlet’s father’s ghost looking at his son with love? Is that what his piteous action is? Is it compassion? Is it regret?
Whatever it is, it touches Hamlet in such a way that he fears he’ll lose his edge.
But why does he need his edge right now? He’s with his mother and the ghost of his father. Can he not let himself soften a bit with the two people who made him? Apparently not.
And it is, sometimes, funny how children steel themselves to be with their parents. There is a stiffening of the body, a contracting of the muscles, a holding tightly to one’s self that can happen – especially with adult children. Whatever self we form, whatever patterns we have, they kick into overdrive with the family of origin.
I write this on the week of Thanksgiving and I expect my Feldenkrais clients to increase significantly due to the all the ways they go home and deal with family.
I’ll see stiff necks and aching shoulders. I’ll see immobile pelvises and aching ankles. I wonder if we all have a little Hamlet in us that doesn’t want our parents to convert our “stern effects” – that is, we don’t want to be shaken from the selves we’ve tried so hard to cultivate since we left home.
His form and cause conjoined, preaching to stones, Would make them capable.
It’s too bad that that’s not how this ghost chooses to spend his time. Like, if he were just out talking to stones – just being like, “Hey, stones – I’m a ghost. And I’m back from hell to tell you, this shit is real. Get to moving, fellas. It’s time for a stone dance. Let’s go.”
And instead of crying out for revenge and ruining, not only his son’s life, but his wife’s as well – not to mention destroying his entire kingdom – well, instead of doing all that, he could just make a bunch of stones VERY religious. And okay – even if he still wanted revenge on his brother for his murder, maybe he could just get those stones to take care of it. They rise up, become capable, and then off they go to bash Claudius’ head in. No other deaths required. Done. Clean. Efficient.
Look you, how pale he glares!
Um…sorry…this doesn’t make any sense.
It makes sense metrically.
But can glaring be pale?
Wouldn’t it make sense to punctuate this: Look you, how pale! He glares!
Have any editors made this shift?
Because there’s something a little bit funny about it.
I mean it sounds good for sure.
This line has never popped out at me in hearing it this way…essentially I get all the ideas in it out of “Oh him. Look. Pale. Glare.”
So it’s fine.
But – for meaning, if I had to play the part, it might want a little separation of the ideas.
And sure, I could say, “Look you, how pale he glares!”
No problem.
But for meaning? Look you, how pale. He glares.
On him, on him!
The show today wasn’t our best. Partly because we were a little rusty. Partly because I was very much onstage to run sound and it’s generally not a GOOD idea to have the director on stage with improvising performers. I generally do my best to get out of the way – and when I’m off to the side, I don’t interfere – but from the close proximity we had today – it was so hard not to jump in. I wanted to refocus, re-organize, come up and shout, “No, no, no!” I wanted to aim audience eyes like a camera, “On him! On him!”
But, in fact, having me so close created some of those problems, because they cannot play for me or to me. They just have this whispering maniac making sound in their midst.
Now – months later, I see that I could have just leapt up and taken over. I could have played the role of director, as the director. That might have helped actually.
Whereon do you look?
This is good question to ask of someone who is seeing things you cannot see. It makes me think of a story my zen friend told me about a girl who believed she was covered in snakes. She was convinced that snakes were writhing all over her despite the fact that no one else could see them. They called doctors, who tried to show her that there were no snakes there. They tried any manner of healers who all tried to show her that there were no snakes, that she had nothing to be afraid of. Finally, someone came in – probably a zen monk, given the source of this story – and he says, “Tell me about the snakes. Help me see them. Describe them to me Let’s get to know those snakes.”
And of course, they disappeared.
O gentle son, Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper Sprinkle cool patience.
It sounds like patience is a bit like rain. When sprinkled on fire, it has the potential to quench flame.
It would be great if we all had our own little patient rain cloud we could call upon when times were tough. You could feel your heat index rising, your face flushing, rage building in your belly – but rather than set fire to the tinderbox of fury, you call in the cool patient rain and the cloud comes to hang over your head, raining down on you just when you need it most.
I would very much enjoy having my own personal rain cloud. If it rained water in addition to patience, I would use it on hot days when there feels to be no relief in sight – and when I’d come in wet, people would say, “Is it raining out?” And I’d be like, “Just a quick local downpour” and smile mysteriously.
Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep, And, as the sleeping soldiers in th’alarm, Your bedded hair like life in excrements Start up and stand on end.
What does the Queen know about sleeping soldiers in the alarm? Why does the Queen know what soldiers startled awake look like?
It is a curious image to use. Or rather, it is a curious image for a Queen to use. Did she go on to the battlefield with her husband? When he was out sledding the pole-axe, wearing his beaver, doing his dread war-like duties – was she there? Was she in his tent to help dress his war wounds upon return? Did she see sleeping soldiers startled awake by the surprise attack? She seems to know exactly what their hair looked like.
Alas, how is’t with you, That you do bend your eye on vacancy, And with th’incorporeal air do hold discourse?
And with incredible elegance, Shakespeare makes it clear that while Hamlet and the audience can see this ghost, Gertrude cannot. He doesn’t have to put in an explanatory stage direction like (The Ghost is not visible to Gertrude.) He just has her say this gorgeous line about what she sees instead. This is what someone talking to a ghost that you cannot see looks like. This is what an absence that feels like a presence to someone else looks like.
The Hamlet Project 