She is archvillain Gertrudis – King Killer, Brother Seducer.
It’s hard to get this sort of archvillain reputation going – there aren’t THAT many kings one can marry and kill – or kill and then marry – or any combination of the two. The best bet would be to marry the 1st born of a family of 12 – that way you could work your way through the lot of them and it would be ages until you ran out of brothers.
I picture her all in green – glittering jewels encrust her gown and cloak. She gets up to some really dramatic make-up and wears snakeskin shoes. Like a crocodile – all tears. Green tears. When she needs to read a brotherly love note, she puts on green teardrop glasses.
She has a very good archvillain laugh – one that rings out each times she kills a king. You don’t want to mess with her.
A bloody deed –
The day this line comes up in my writing practice, it is the 14th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It feels apt. That was an extraordinary bloody deed – though blood, somehow, wasn’t the dominant image. Destruction on that scale becomes less about blood and more about fire and ash.
There was blood, certainly.
And so much blood was volunteered that the Red Cross let us know they didn’t need anymore.
There was a surplus of blood
A surplus of blood offered to help
There was more blood on the constructive side
Than on the destructive side –
Which really does help with the feeling of horror – to know that while humans can do terrible things like fly planes into buildings, they can also turn up en masse to give literally of themselves.
It helps to know that so many people wanted to help that they had to be asked to stop.
O, what a rash and bloody deed is this!
I played this line a little impersonally, I think.
I thought of it a little like looking at my kitchen someone made a mess of. Horrified, regretful and a little astonished.
Now I think, if I were to play Gertrude again, I might play with finding how Gertrude scolded Hamlet in his youth. It occurs to me now that there’s a way that parents rarely stop trying to school their children – no matter how old they are.
I taught a class for senior Citizens and there was a mother and her daughter in the class – both senior citizens – and while I did not witness any schooling between those two – I imagine that it is very possible. The 90 year old scolds the 70 year old for how she replaced the salt or something.
And this line – this line could be that primal parental response to seeing a horrible mistake made by your son. She might say it in the same tone she once discovered magic marker all over the bathroom walls.
Is it the king?
Despite the fact that so few countries have kings anymore – the idea of Kings is still so powerful. Every child understands what a king is and why you might want to be one. Sometimes even why you might NOT want to be one.
Kings are now (mostly) archetypal figures rather than actual rulers. This is probably a good thing. Kings as playing cards or checkers or chess pieces or puppets or stuffed toys or cartoon characters or literary figures or fairy tale villains or fairy tale heroes or rewards for fairy tale heroes or rewards for mythical heroes.
Probably we play with kings as children because almost all children are potential tyrants. We play at being king to see what it’s like to be at the top of the heap, to indulge all of our wildest desires or most arbitrary rule-making.
“I’m the king. I say everyone gets candy at 2:03 every day.”
But pretty much every group of subjects will eventually push back, no matter how docile or obedient. It’s never as fun as it seems at first. I picture a child given a new toy figure and this as his first question, “Is it the King?”
Nay, I know not.
In Greek, the word for yes sounds a lot like “Nay” and in Greece, people say it a lot. It keeps feeling like they’re being vehemently negative but then you realize that they’re being vehemently positive instead. It can turn your whole perception upside down.
I hardly ever heard anyone say “No” in Greek (it’s “oxi”) and it made me wonder if the extra syllable of the word discouraged people from using it. Does the language help these folks tilt toward the positive?
How influential is language on the personality of the speakers?
English has an unusual number of monosyllabic words – does that make us inclined to be briefer -shorter – more succinct?
I know not.
O me, what hast thou done?
I checked my email. Or rather, I tackled the task of my inbox. I’d been away from my computer for almost two weeks and I had a thousand messages. Most of them just needed to be deleted but it’s amazing how long deleting a bunch of emails can take. And in the process I tried to answer the most pressing, the things I hadn’t responded to that I needed to. There wasn’t anything too awful in there- mostly just a lot of business maintenance. But somehow the whole process kicked in an anxiety that I had left behind for the two weeks I was gone. And all the thrilling inspiration of travel and ideas and otherness started to dissolve into the mundane tasks of a life. I had hoped the high of my voyage might sustain me through jumpstarting a few of my projects…that it might help me focus on what is truly important to me before it all disappeared in the daily grind of life here.
I could have fed the muse.
I could have put off those emails for one more day and JUST focused on the dreams and ideas –
Only done things that advanced them.
But no, I had to clear my inbox.
I had to respond and respond and respond.
O, I am slain!
I was just writing a piece about inspiration – and now, in reading this line, it occurs to me that inspiration can feel like this – but in a good way. Like an orgasm feels like a good little death, inspiration feels like a good murder.
It feels like something powerful that’s done to you that changes you irrevocably
If only for a moment
And it is always a tremendous surprise
Even if you were kind of expecting it.
You look down and suddenly there’s a sword through you
It glints in the light
It feels foreign and odd
But full of awe and wonder
Dead for a ducat, dead!
A friend and colleague was interested in making a puppet show based on Notes of a Ratcatcher – an historical text about the craft of ratcatching. In it, the Ratcatcher lays out many of the tricks of his trade as well as how much money he could make per rat or bag of rats. Depending on who was paying him, he might deliver the rats dead or alive. It is a fascinating document for a lot of reasons – not least for what it reveals about the historical period.
I don’t know if my friend ever developed this piece – he moved on to other things and moved back to his native land – but this line makes me think of that document. Like, Hamlet is assuming the role of a Ratcatcher here and killing a rat in the expectation of the ducat he might receive for doing it.
Because a dead rat was worth a lot more to the one trying to get rid of it than a live one.
A rat?
In the Natural History Museum of Iraklion, we saw a little rodent, native to Greece. It looked a bit too much like a rat to me, though it wasn’t one. My mom thought it was cute. But then, she doesn’t have the rodent phobia that I do.
This room also featured quite a few snakes so it was chock full of things that give me the willies, even when they are behind glass.
It’s interesting to be in a room full of things I am afraid of with my mother. I think she doesn’t know how twitchy I get with snakes and rodents – because they do not bother her and we have my whole lifetime of her trying to show me not to be afraid.
But my boyfriend is highly attuned to how much a rat or a snake would be something I’d wish to avoid. It’s funny.
Rats are not funny, though. Not at all.
Not mice, either. Or snakes.
Unless they’re all cartoons, in case, fine –
Funny as hell.
How now?
We always give these two words equal weight when we say them.
But what would happen if we weighted the How? Or even more heavily the Now?
There’s a way that these are usually said that makes them seem like “huh?”
Like a two syllable “huh?”
What could be done with how now that might be more than stalling words?
The Hamlet Project 