The Hamlet Project

I had a Book on Angels years ago. I was in my late 20s and feeling very lost. I bought this book about angels and did all the exercises. I had a notebook in which I wrote to the angels and the angels wrote to me. I remember crying a lot because it felt like my angel said some things that really touched me and made me feel comforted and hopeful. I had, though, a simultaneous experience of feeling like I was probably just writing to myself and making myself cry by comforting myself in just the way I needed comforting. And I thought, well, I’ll just believe this for now – because it is helping me – and if this is a fiction – it is a fiction that will help guide me out of dark period.

I am still grateful to that angel, though. From this distance I feel, more than ever, that it was just a part of me, a wiser part of me, that the idea of an angel could help me understand.

It works this way for so many things, doesn’t it?
The harder we try to be free, the more bound we become. The harder we push, the less freedom we have.

The more fiercely we resist our fate, the tighter its hold on us.
Surrender is loosening the ties that bind us.
I feel this all the time in my Feldenkrais work – just trying and trying to get the movement right until I finally surrender and just rest a moment, then things click in to place. Or they don’t – and I do – and I don’t mind as much. Win win.

Claudius is an interesting villain.
He’s not an Iago or an Aaron, unrepentantly enjoying being a bastard. But nor is he a redemptive villain. He’s a guy who does a lot of terrible things and tries not to feel them or acknowledge them but he does have a conscience. It’s such a suggestible conscience. It gets stimulated by a show and then suddenly he feels his bosom as black as death.

In a way Claudius is the most contemporary villain in the canon. He does terrible things – is in relative denial about them – and then doubles down on his terribleness after a crisis of conscience. If this play were written today, he’d be the center of the story. He’d be the Walter White, the Nucky Thompson, the anti-hero of Renaissance Lit.

Why do we not put an accent over the ed in wretched?

I mean. I know, it’s just how we pronounce wretched in general – in anything. But in Shakespeare – to get the pronunciation of wretched, we put a little clue – a little accent to indicate its extra syllable sound – one that this word has naturally. However – with that rule in place, it makes me wonder if the absence of an accent in this scenario might be an indication of a different pronunciation of wretched. A one syllable version, for example.
How would an editor indicated an unpronounced ed – how would one indicate an un-emphasized syllable in a word that we usually emphasize?
Is there a symbol for that?
Probably, But most of us wouldn’t recognize it.

That’s the thing, right?
If you can’t do the thing, there’s nothing the thing can do for you.
If you can’t believe, belief can do nothing for you – no matter how much you hope to believe – if you can’t … you’re SOL.
If you can’t repent, repentance is useless.
To you, anyway. It might really pay off for some actually penitent person.

Claudius is thinking himself into a tight spot – circling around himself on a question he could not possibly answer. What can repentance NOT do? Many things, I imagine. But that’s the trouble here. Trying to figure out what you’re going to get out of repentance is not really the way repentance is meant to work. What can it not?
It probably won’t make your King or get you a bride. It won’t bring you fortune or fame.
Repentance probably has no tangible rewards.
Its rewards are on the inside.
It might set you breathing again – breathing more fully – it might remove that knot in your stomach – it might bring you peace. But if those are things you’ve ignored all along to become king – it will be hard to value them now.

That’s the thing – you can’t expect a guarantee with repentance. You can’t be like – Before I repent, I need to know exactly what I’ll be getting out of this deal. You can’t make a contract and specify line times. You just need to give it a shot.
Try it.
Repent just to repent.
It can’t just be included on your goals for the week.

He wrote a piece of music for their wedding.
He thought through all the details for the processional, all the things they’d need and designed it to finish in such a way that it led perfectly into the ceremony. It was an artful, well-crafted, beautifully conceived piece of work.
And then the bride decided she wanted a pause in it – a pause – to give her a little something before her entrance.
And not a pause like a rest –
not like a breath –
like a full stop
like pressing the pause button on a recording-
it would have been awful
it would have sounded like a mistake
and was such a profound misunderstanding of the piece
as it was built
as if the piece were just audio wall paper
as if it were just atmosphere
as if it were a decoration you could just change the color of.

There was something about turning 40 that made me feel like my life was pretty much done. For reasons both cultural, gendered and personal, it felt like an ending. As a childless woman over 40, I figured I had a few years of invisibility to enjoy before the end.
Then I realized how long a life could be. Approaching my 20 year college reunion, I thought about how much had happened in 20 years, which made me realize how much MORE could happen in the next 20 years. And in the 20 years after that, I have lifetimes of life ahead of me.
I have a client who just celebrated his 80th birthday and yesterday, he told me that he’d fallen in love for the first time in his life.
This world is full of surprises –
you really don’t know what will be next –
especially when you think you do.

I’m curious about how this compulsion works.
So, the guilty sinner arrives at Saint Peter’s gate and instead of reading him his sins as is often represented in popular culture – Saint Peter goes, “So, anything you want to tell me?”
And the sinner shakes his head, trying still to hide his sins. And Saint Peter says, “Really?”
And then maybe, for fear of what might come next, or for fear of adding lying to the list, he might spill.
But there are likely some very intractable sinners – ones who’ve convinced themselves their evil deeds were all for the good or who’ve sublimated their ill works and forgotten them or who’ve been lying so long they simply cannot stop. . .
how does Saint Peter extract his evidence?
Does he bounce a tuning fork off their teeth that rings back truth?
Does he put one finger on the forehead that shakes forth all the ill deeds from the wind and sends them shooting from the mouths of sinners?
There are people in the world that are hard to lie to – maybe Saint Peter is an extreme version of that – where just his presence inspires confessions –
People confess to me all the time.
But I’m not hard to lie to, either.
No, saint Peter, I!