The Hamlet Project

As someone raised without a religion, a nunnery always seemed a terrifying place to me. A world full of rules and religion and no men at all? Not for me. But I’ve been watching the BBC show Call the Midwife which takes place in a convent-like house, full of nuns. Suddenly it doesn’t seem so bad. This convent is hardly sequestered from the world. Its women are intensely capable and deeply involved in their communities. They have extraordinary authority and command respect that no other women seem to manage. On the show, we see a wide variety of women – unlike the rest of TV on which we usually just see 1 or 2 conventionally attractive women engaged in romance. To see a whole world full of working women of all sorts is a revelation, really.
So I start to think going to a nunnery might not be so bad.

Also, there was a period in history in which convents could sometime double as brothels so the range of experience could be pretty wide.

You end up in a convent with porous boundaries and a vibrant population and suddenly being a nun doesn’t seem quite so bad.

This sort of behavior was a source of much confusion for me in my youth. While literature (especially Shakespeare) told me again and again that women were fickle and changeable, it felt like it was always men who changed their minds.
For weeks he’d have chased after me, thrown love lorn looks at me and if I turned around and faced him, he’d deny it, claim no love at all.
Love would last a couple of weeks before he’d disappear. Sometimes a couple of months if he wasn’t local. Here. Gone. Loves me. Doesn’t. Claims to never have in the first place.
It was VERY confusing.
I see now that part of this was because of the men I was choosing. I was attracted to heartbreakers, to handsome gypsies, to moody artists who were interested in something next to me, really, not me.
I missed entirely the steady attentive, kind ones. Didn’t even notice them. If they gave me signs I missed them or ignored them. Those were the kind of men who, even when they left me, would never deny they loved me in the first place.

The self as soup. Good old stock. Boil it up, add some onions, some vegetables maybe some meat from last night’s supper – that stock will make you some high quality meals. But if you keep that stock going, as if it were sourdough bread, extended and extended, new stock and old stock at once, I imagine there might be a moment where it gets a little risky. Maybe it turns into penicillin. Maybe it just gets funky. Maybe it gets to a point where you really should just throw it out. Water the azaleas with it, see what happened to them. But the point, here, I guess is that virtue won’t be the ingredient to transform the stock. You throw virtue into your beef stock, it will remain beef stock, no matter how much virtue you throw into it.

Not when I said I was alright

Or when I told you things were going great

Not when I smiled

Or when I said I didn’t mind

Nor when I said “It’ll all work out”

Nor when I nodded slightly in tacit acceptance.

Hey, Theatre –
What’s up? I know it seems like I hate you these days. Almost every time I’m with you, I get angry and frustrated. I’ve seen you go some places I don’t like, do some thing I don’t agree with make crazy decisions, treat those that love you badly, break lots of peoples’ hearts. And if I don’t love you now, well, it’s important to remember that I did love you once. I did. And I can’t break up with you, Theatre. I think about it all the time; you’ve made my life something of a joke.
But even when I hate you, I remember how I loved you. And then something clicks into place and I don’t just remember that I loved you once, I can feel it again, now. It’s not often. It takes a shockingly good performance or a thrilling rehearsal or something like it. But it is enough to keep me coming back to you. It’s somehow enough.

Is Hamlet accusing Ophelia of being a slut? That her beauty transformed honesty into a bawd? Or that her beauty transformed Hamlet into a bawd? Is it basically the idea of someone so beautiful that you can’t help but get busy with them? Isn’t that basically many men’s explanation for rape?
The paradox – not entirely clear to me – the time giving it poof – would seem to implicate Ophelia. It’s not a direct implication, it’s like a passive aggressive way of saying a proverb that you mean for someone to take personally.

I just drew these little stick figures to help me figure out this equation. There’s honesty right, which, when beauty comes around, gets transformed into a bawd. Then there’s beauty and when honesty comes around, what might beauty be transformed into? His likeness? Whose likeness? Honesty’s?
It doesn’t add up. And that’s the point – to a certain extent – that beauty has more power to transform honesty than honesty has to transform beauty. But the analogies aren’t equivalent – his likeness – if it’s honesty or something like honesty – the transforming agent is then absorbing the transformed, which is not what happens with beauty in the previous equation. In all cases, beauty is the loser.

If I had my life to do over again, I’d probably just end up in the same exact spot. But I do fantasize about another path – like one in which I was captivated by some academic writing and became an economist or a scientist or a psychologist or something.
And in that other life, I got deeply entrenched in some curious corner of exploration and ran studies on human behavior or social groups or whatever and then I wrote fun books about it, like Sheena Iyengar, the Heath Brothers, the Freakonomics guys, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir.
And in that mythical other life, I live in a house with furniture and have bookshelves and friends over and go to the theatre for fun and I enjoy it.