The Hamlet Project

No cards
No feet
No Three Card Monte
No shell game
No exchanging of one item for another.
None of it up here.
None.

How do we know?
I mean, sure, it would be nice to imagine that the after life features justice and fairness – that the good will be rewarded and the evil punished – but what if it were just as corrupt?
Maybe they have a different currency – it’s, like, feathers or something. Angel Feathers. And the more angel feathers you have, the richer you are, and the richer you are, the more ability you have to bend things to your will.
I mean, if heaven is full of humans, it would stand to reason that it would be just as full of human behavior as the earth is.

But it’s God’s house, you might say – he wouldn’t let it be corrupted. Really?
And isn’t this earth under his eye as well? If he has the ability to keep corruption away from his children up there, why doesn’t he do it down here?
Is the idea that this earth is the Rumspringa for humans? The place where we can go crazy and do drugs and be corrupt or whatever and heaven or hell is the committed life. This is the practice life and that’s the real one?

The more things change
the more they stay the same.
What’s interesting about this particular take on corrupt organizations is that the person talking about it is highly corrupt. It’s like Bernie Madoff talking about the corrupted climate of world. I suppose, though, that the corrupt often find justification in the corruption. They create by saying, “Look – it’s everywhere. Everyone’s doing it. I’m not the problem – the corrupt currents are.”
As if people don’t make the culture
or organizations
as if action upon action doesn’t stack up to make
the water what it is.
It is remarkable, though, that these words are as true today as they were in Shakespeare’s time. Money can still buy you out of trouble can still manipulate the law.

UPDATE 2016:
I responded to this line, probably a year and a half ago. Wrote this down a year and a half ago. The world has changed rather a lot since then. My thoughts about this have not changed. But now the example is much more immediate. I would not use Bernie Madoff today. No, the best example is the man who cried and cried about corruption in politics while being the most corrupt politician imaginable. I mean… it’s laughable now. If it weren’t so horribly current.

Happens all the time, my man.
All. The. Time.
All of those bankers who got rich on the bubble that collapsed the world’s economies?
Are they on food stamps now? Nay.
There were a couple of cursory slaps on the wrist and some tiny fines – but essentially they said, “Oh, oops. We’re sorry.” Families lost their homes, people lost their jobs and the arts markets dried up like a salted fish in the sun. Doesn’t seem to be a problem for a lot of people to get a pardon and also get to keep the spoils of the crime.

There it is.
That might be enough to convict you in a court of law.
“I did the murder.”
It’s buried in there a little bit
but it is clear.
And not only do we have the confession, we also get the motive, or motives.
I’m interested in the distinction between his crown and his own ambition. How might those things be different than each other?
Are there things Claudius wants to accomplish as king? Does he have ambition to overhaul the Danish Health Care system, for example? Is he wanting to build some roads?
Get some buildings named after himself?
I might have thought that the crown would be the end result of ambition but perhaps there’s more.

Getting closer, Claudius.
Getting closer to confession.
But when you put your possible prayer in quotes, when it has a layer of impossibility in it, when you’re almost making fun of yourself for pretend asking for forgiveness for a murder…well, there’s not a whole lot of responsibility being taken.
If you’re theatrically asking for forgiveness but not actually asking, it doesn’t really count. It implies your guilt, sure, but it’s not the same as saying:
“I killed him. I’m sorry. I’d like to be absolved.”

I do wonder about the qualification of the murder.
This one’s foul but maybe he has some other ones, one’s that are, less foul –
ones he doesn’t need to be asking for forgiveness for.
I don’t really think he’s killed others
but he does have the personality for it.
And he has access to poison –
and several varieties, too.
Which raises a question for me.

Who is mixing these poisons for him?
Who puts the poison in Gertrude’s pearl, for example
and who gives him the goods for the regicide/fratricide?
Who is Claudius’ Apothecary?
[I want to write a story called Claudius’ apothecary –
and the whole of Hamlet is told from his point of view.]
Is Claudius his own apothecary?
Was that what he was up to while his brother was busy being the king?
I picture Claudius in a dark room of the castle, potions in glass bottles bubbling in the dark, a cloud of smoke still hangs in the air from a previous combination that went wrong. There is the occasional crunch of glass underfoot from the failed experiment. He has an ink-stained notebook where he keeps his unction recipes. He tests his work on the animals in the courtyard. Farmers eventually stop bringing their livestock in. He’s a dark scientist, awaiting his window.

I’ve wondered this, too, sometimes
Because I don’t really pray
But the impulses to do something like it comes over me on occasion.
There is the dancing prayer
The singing prayer
Right now I’m doing the writing prayer.

The first fault is, sure. The one where you killed your brother.
But all the subsequent faults continue to stack up on each other
Like bricks on a very solid sin house.
Did you or did you not
Just set Hamlet up to be killed
By both his friends AND the King of England?
Aren’t you in MID-fault now?
Listen – I know it’s a little like “I am in blood stepp’d in so far”
But that’s a sunk cost fallacy.
You know what that is, right?
Where you keep going on a thing
Just because you’ve been working on that thing for a while
Or invested a lot in that thing
So you don’t want to quit
And waste all your previous efforts/resources?
It’s convenient to see your fault as past
But it continues.
Yes, you already dropped the boulder in the pool
But the ripples that are still rippling from that aren’t just ripping from the initial drop,
No, you keep dropping more rocks,
Throwing stones and pebbles in the orbit of that first throw.

He’s talking about heaven, I know.
About looking toward his better angels.
But I take it, for myself, for this moment
As a call to look up.

I’ve learned from my work with the Feldenkrais Method
How the legs get heavier when we look down.
Walk with your eyes to the floor and the weight of yourself will increase significantly. Walk with your eyes to the horizon, floating straight ahead and your legs will float as well.
This works on a metaphorical level, too, I’m finding.
In the last few years, I have been looking down, feeling the weight of myself and my choices, seeing the worst, not feeling any lightness – but now, I’m learning to look up again, as I did in my youth – and it is easier to lift everything,
Especially my spirits.

What’s interesting about this line is that it takes us back to the possibility of Claudius deciding not to murder his brother. It would seem to reference the idea that prayer might have prevented his crime. To be considering a reality in which the crime was prevented, is to express a kind of regret. To be thinking: “Maybe if I’d prayed BEFORE I murdered, I might not have murdered” – but, of course, the other face of this line is the wish for pardon after the fact.

The desire for pardon makes good sense for someone who is currently facing the circumstances of having committed a crime.
But to think, for a minute about forestalling it – preventing it – by calling his fratricide a fall. . .well, it gives some weight to this pardon he wants.

A lot of pardons are of the “I wish I didn’t have to endure the consequences” school, rather than the “I wish I hadn’t done it” school.
You see these sorts of pardons requested in schools round about grading time.