Tag Archives: Hamlet

Hamlet, Depression, and Boundaries

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I quote from Hamlet more than any of Shakespeare because I identify so much with him.  For example, my momma too could have said when I was young and moping about the castle, “Look yonder.  The poor wretch comes reading.”  And, I too am full of thoughts and ideas the sum of which “if quartered, would be one part wisdom and three parts cowardice.”  I am also very violent, as was Hamlet, but like he…in reference to his mother…”will speak daggers to her, not use them.”

Hamlet had serious boundary problems.  If I’d have been  his therapist, I would have diagnosed him with “depressive disorder” but only because I tended to be cautious when possible and avoided the “major” label to diagnoses.  But he simply suffered from “porosity of boundaries” as one psychiatrist I worked with once said of a patient, meaning that his boundaries were “holey” and “stuff” got through which did not get through for most people.  And it is no accident that there is an incest them in the play and boundaries are always skewed for every member of an invested family even if they were not the “victim.”

As Hamlet moped about that castle at Elsinore, people began to talk about the young prince and expressed worry.  Hamlet caught ear of these whisperings and at one point said, “My heart has in it that which passeth show. These are but the suits of woe.”  He was saying, “Oh, sure I’m depressed.  But heck, you don’t know true half of it!.”  He was saying that they only saw the outward “suits” or appearances of his emotional torment but inside he the unmitigated, nameless anguish, “that which passeth show.”  For, when boundaries are impaired, feelings that all of us experience are experienced more intently and his step-father noted at one point, “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”

The most striking theme that I see in Shakespeare is his emphasis on the depths of the heart, the sub-text of life, which most people meticulously avoid. Most people see only the “show” and dutifully live out the “show” or play their role on the stage of life while the heart is never delved into.  But, unfortunately this “Ozzie and Harriet” existence deprives them of the meaning in life, a meaning which is found only by “Diving into the Wreck” of the heart’s ambivalences.  (“Diving into the Wreck” is the title of a book of poetry by Adrienne Rich.)  And let us not forget the admonishment of Jesus who asked, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?”

Emily Dickinson’s Cloistered View of the World

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I love Emily Dickinson. I love her cryptic, almost awkward use of words to describe the human predicament and reveal her own complicated, conflicted soul. She lived her life cloistered in her father’s attic, preferring the solace of her intricate verbal world over the “dog-and-pony-show” of her day. I identify myself with her cloistered view of the world but my “cloistering” has mercifully been metaphorical.

One of her poems that has always grabbed me was about attention, the tendency of our “soul” to fashion a world that it is comfortable with and then “close the valves of our attention like stone.” I love that image and can almost hear those valves “closing like stone.”

Here is the poem:

The Soul selects her own Society,
Then, shuts the door;
To her divine Majority
Present (or obtrude) no more.
Unmoved, she notes the Chariots
Pausing at her low gate.
Unmoved, an Emperor be kneeling upon her mat.
I’ve known her from an ample nation choose one
Then close the valves of her attention like stone.

I had often come up with the same observation about life but until I read this poem I could only offer “we believe what we want to believe”, not having the gift of poetic expression as Dickinson did. And, though this insight came with the price of “detachment,” I’m glad to have paid that price as it has helped me to remember to appreciate and value my perspective on life but to remember that everyone’s “valves of attention” creates unique viewpoints.

And in this poem note the soul’s response to her stately “visitor”. This soul, comfortable in its own private little world, turns its nose down at a visitor who should be graciously welcomed. It makes me think of Hamlet’s pining to escape his “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” by “fleeing to a nutshell” where there he could be “king of infinite spaces.”

This poem reveals that Dickinson knew she lived detached in a private world and the body of her poetry suggests that she found a comfort there in her solitude. Emotional isolation can easily be a “private hell”….as it is when one is the “king of infinite spaces”…but the gods can afford comfort there if it happens to be one’s lot in life. And without Dickinson’s acceptance of her “lot in life”, our world would be deprived of her poetic riches.

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Showers of Blessings!

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When I awoke this morning, lightening, thunder, and blowing wind greeted me. I peeked outside and found that this time the weather forecast had been accurate and a generous rainfall was coming our way. I then got to do one of my favorite things—take my laptop and cup of coffee to the open garage and watch “Showers of Blessings” visit me again.“ Showers of Blessings” is an old hymn that I loved in my youth and in the past couple of years as drought as beset my part of the country I have employed the image as I feel and express my gratitude for refreshing rainfall that breaks the drought occasionally. This is part of a new emphasis of my life these past few years, experiencing and voicing gratitude for the many blessings that come my way, so many of them usually taken for granted. And this experience and expression of gratitude is no longer perfunctory but now has an authenticity it used to lack as I truly “feel” grateful.

Another dimension of this experience…of this “awakening”…is that I pay better attention to the whole of the world around me, the social world but also the natural world. The entirety of the world “speaks” to me in a way to which I was once deaf; for I am less guilty of “having ears to hear but hearing not, having eyes to see but seeing not.” This parallels another important discovery of mine—the “Word” of the Judeo-Christian tradition is more than these “squeaks of ours” that we usually think of as the only means of communicating. This “Word” is found in the whole of Creation such as was suggested in the Old Testament when the writer declared, “The heavens and the earth declare the glory of God.”

I used to take this “Word” business literally and how could I do otherwise when at that time I took “words” literally, taking the word to be the thing-in-itself, mistaking the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself. But now I see words as being inherently ephemeral just as are we humans that use them. But grasping this ephemeral nature of human experience and of the world, I now see and feel how powerful these words are as they can do more than merely denote, but can connote…or better yet, evoke. Words can reach into the heart and evoke a response but only if they come from the heart and only if there is a heart to receive them. If they are merely those “well worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness,” they will only denote and will never evoke. It all depends on having a heart and having one that is alive. Shakespeare, in Hamlet, described a heart that was dynamically alive as “full of penetrable stuff,” not “bronzed o’er” with the “dull speech of habit,” those aforementioned “well worn words and ready phrases.” A heart full of “penetrable stuff” can be “penetrated.”

A key issue is merely paying attention, being “mindful” of what is going on around us and in our own heart. We have to have awareness of the capricious “monkey mind” which so often holds us captive, imposing a template on the whole of our experience and keeping us from paying any attention to anything but the template itself, which is to say, to anything but our self. This insight allows me to glory in the trivial things I used to ignore—a summer morning rainfall, a beautiful flower, lovely birds cavorting in my yard, or two lovely dachshunds arguing with each other over who loves me the most!

 

Do We Dare Let Go of Guilt?

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Huffington Post offers a very insightful article about dealing with guilt and escaping its clutches. (Huff Po =— http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/01/dealing-with-guilt-iyanla-vanzant_n_3472594.html)

How do we let go of any emotion that has tyrannized us such as guilt has. Sure, I accept the notion of the forgiveness of God offered in the story of Jesus, for example. But that comes to us first as a rational, conceptual “idea” and does not necessarily burrow into the depths of the heart where the “real” guilt abides; for the “real” guilt is in the affective domain which controls how we use our rational mind. Thus, our guilt can make us “guilty” believers of any stripe which will always make us so fanatical and legalistic that people who come across us will want to put up the “sign of the cross” when we approach and run away. For, guilt-ridden faith offers no “human” quality and therefore has no “godly” quality to it. It is just an “idea” devoid of any experience; or, better yet, it is an “idea” devoid of any Spirit, as in the “letter of the law killeth but the Spirit maketh alive.”

Guilt so often is so intrinsic to our being that we can’t fathom living without it. Letting it go would make us feel like a duck out of water or a fish on dry land. It would be scary and even fatal in a sense in that our ego would definitely be threatened by the loss of this core element which allows it to cohere. My dear friend, brother, spiritual mentor, and soul mate, Bill Shakespeare said it so eloquently, noting in Hamlet that we would prefer to “cling to those ills that we have, than fly to others that we know not of.” Our guilt is so comforting because it is the only thing that we have ever known. And, we are validated daily for living in this guilt as it is guilt (and shame) that binds our world together in the dog-and-pony show that the Hindus’ call Maya and fundamentalist American Christians call, “Well, it’s just the way things are.” And many faiths depend on guilt as without guilt attendance of their churches, synagogues, and mosques might decline, worship palaces fall into disrepair, clergy go underpaid or unemployed, and its constituents left with the challenge of dealing with Reality…which always requires faith in a Beyond which I often label our Source. And, I am of course referring to a transcendent deity who is, paradoxically, immanent; and the appreciation of this powerful truth requires ability and a willingness to hold contradictory notions in the mind at the same time. In other words, this notion “ain’t makin’ no sense” to many people and it never will!

But, there is always “method to our madness,” individually and collectively. The best we can ever do is muddle through and believe fervently that there is a “wisdom that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.” (Last two quotes from “Bill”)

 

To “Be” or “Not to Be”

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This observation by Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines and the subject of being vs non-being was a recurrent theme of the Bard. On one level the issue in this famous soliloquy was merely that of physical existence, The morose young oedipally-conflicted neurotic was serotonin-depleted and questioned that it was worth it to toil on against those “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” rather than opt for the “bare bodkin” (knife)

But a more substantive issue for Shakespeare than physical life or death was “being” itself—-“what does it mean to ‘be’ as opposed to ‘not be.’ This is best illustrated in Sonnet 146 when he lamented a “poor soul…pining within…painting thy outward wall so costly gay” while disregarding that inward estate which he saw as the real, concluding that we should instead “within be fed, without be rich no more.” (See http://www.artofeurope.com/shakespeare/sha6.htm)

Shakespeare saw that humanity had lost his way and was immersed in the ephemeral, making the mistake that John Masefield described as “like a lame donkey lured by moving hay, chasing the shade and letting the real be,” the state of affairs which C. S. Lewis later described as sin, “misplaced concreteness”. (For Masefield sonnets, see http://www.sonnets.org/masefield.htm)

The issue is an “external” reference point which…and here things get complicated…is not really “external” but “spiritual.” But to delve into the “spiritual” we must first use language…most of us anyway…and so we must use words like “external” to evoke images. Shakespeare was merely saying, “Hey, there is more to life than meets the eye!” and that is a message that humankind has always been averse to as it takes him out of the comfortable little orbit of his ego-bound day-to-day life. But, in spite of this aversion, there is still “more” out there and we ignore it at our own peril.

 

Change Means “Mangled Guts Pretending”

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Ann Voskamp, writing from a conservative Christian viewpoint, reflects great depth stemming from having endured great loss in her life. And she notes in her book, “One Thousand Gifts” that, “awakening to joy awakens to pain”, and describes joy and pain as “two arteries of the one heart that pumps through all those who do not numb themselves to really living…Life is loss.” She also interprets Jacob’s wrestling with God as an inner spiritual battle that we all risk if we desire to change into the expression of our inner essence that so many of us fear. She describes the quest for wells which hold living water, noting that these wells don’t come without first seeking them with desperation and that “wells don’t come without first splitting open hard earth, cracking back the lids. There’s no seeing God face-to-face without first the ripping…It takes practice, wrenching practice, to break open the lids. But the secret to joy is to keep seeking God where we doubt he is.”

But, now I want to share the same truth in the words of someone from a vastly different perspective, Tony Kushner, the noted playwright and author of “Angels in America” and more recently author of the screenplay for the movie, “Lincoln.” A character in “Angels in America” poses the question, “How do people change” prompting the following answer:

Well, it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out…and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching. And then you up you get. And walk around. Just mangled guts pretending.

Wow, that is intense! “Mangled guts pretending!” Notions like this is enough to deter anyone from changing, to opt for the status quo, personally or collectively. Or, as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, to, “cling these ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.” (Shakespeare, in Hamlet)

And I can’t help but apply this to our country in its current turmoil. As Bob Dylan sang decades ago, “The times they are a changin’” and it is producing great political and social turmoil. And one point made in the brilliant movie Lincoln was the tremendous social unrest that Lincoln knew the country faced when he broached the subject of the 13th amendment.

 

The Neurological Roots of Experience

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I am fascinated by the neurological dimension of our lives. For years I have read about the neurological “god spot” which some have posited as an explanation for our religiosity. And more recently I have shared re the neurological components of our political belief systems. Very recently I have met NeuroNotes  in the blog-o-sphere who has whetted my appetite for this subject and also a local neurologist who suggested some interesting reading material for me.

As I delve into this world of science I am also delving more deeply into the spiritual realm and in the recesses of my mind I am teased with the notion that religion and such scientific speculation cannot co-exist. “Why these scientists are trying to tell me that God does not exist, that God is just some result of neurological wizardry, and that I should grow up and just forget about all of that “God stuff.”

But, I find that my faith deepens the more that I read and study. For, I discover that “God” is much more than a rational construction, that ultimately He is a mystery that lies beyond the grasp of my rational, conscious mind but is nevertheless present in some inexplicable fashion in even in this very intellectual/spiritual curiosity of mine. Even the Bible teaches us that God is “the author and the finisher of our faith” and that He is in us, “both to will and to do his good pleasure”. Though we struggle we discover that ultimately is God at work in our heart all along the way. And I quote Leonard Cohen so often, “O bless this continual struggle of the Word being made flesh.”

In some sense we are all merely a blob of protoplasm, a mere animal, a “poor, bare forked creature” (King Lear) but one who is blessed with an intentionality, a spiritual intentionality to achieve some purpose beyond himself. That intentionality is the breath of God’s Spirit seeking to lead us in the direction of “peace on earth and good will toward all men.”

Let me share a verse from the Bible that I feel is relevant and then close with a note from Shakespeare.

Jeremiah noted:

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.

And Hamlet said:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling
you seem to say so.

Richard Rohr on Intimacy

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Once again, I must note that I should merely post each day, in big print, “See Richard Rohr’s blog.” For, he says everything I could ever say and says it much better. Either he and I listen to the same Source or perhaps we read the same books! Actually, it is probably a combination of both. I share with you today the his post from yesterday’s blog on the subject of intimacy. This reflects his grasp of spirituality as a Divine revealing which is present in each of us. Yes, even in those that disagree with me and approach things differently. The key is to allow a “discerning spirit” to be present in our heart and allow it to expose those barriers that we have formulated, probably early in life, to protect us from “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” (Hamlet)
So how do you communicate to others what is inherently a secret? Or can you? How can the secret become “unhidden”? It becomes unhidden when people stop hiding—from God, themselves, and at least one other person. The emergence of our True Self is actually the big disclosure of the secret. Such risky self-disclosure is what I mean by intimacy, and intimacy is the way that love is transmitted. Some say the word comes from the Latin intimus, referring to that which is interior or inside. Some say its older meaning is found by in timor, or “into fear.” In either case, the point is clear: intimacy happens when we reveal and expose our insides, and this is always scary. One never knows if the other can receive what is exposed, will respect it, or will run fast in the other direction. One must be prepared to be rejected. It is always a risk. The pain of rejection after self-disclosure is so great that it often takes a lifetime for people to risk it again.
Excerpted from Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self, pp. 168-16

Paul Tillich and “The Courage to Be”

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Change is hard. Change is so hard that most people solve the problem by opting
to not change, clinging to the routine of their life even if it is most painful.
People prefer to follow the admonishment of Hamlet and “cling to these ills that
we have than fly to others that we know not of.”

This is true individually and collectively. Social scientists teach us that
during times of social transition anxiety is very intense sometimes the
society’s adaptations are not ideal. Paul Tillich, a noted theologian from the
20th century, declared in The Courage to Be (1952) that the anxiety arises from
the threat of “non-being” and that this threat is found with conservative and
liberal extremes.

It is significant that the three main periods of anxiety appear at the end of an era. The anxiety which, in its different forms, is potentially present in every individual becomes general if the accustomed structures of meaning, power, belief, and order disintegrated. These structures, as long as they are in force, keep anxiety bound within a protective system of courage by participation. The individual who participates in the institutions and ways of life of such a system is not liberated from his personal anxieties but he has means of overcoming them with well-known methods. In periods of great changes these methods no longer work. Conflicts between the old, which tries to maintain itself, often with new means, and the new, which deprives the old of its intrinsic power, produce anxiety in all directions. Nonbeing, in such a situation, has a double face, resembling two types of nightmare (which are perhaps, expressions of an awareness of these two faces). The one type is the anxiety of annihilating narrowness, of the impossibility of escape and the horror of being trapped. The other is the anxiety of annihilating openness, of infinite formless space into which one falls without a place to fall upon. Social situations like those described have the character of both a trap without exit and of an empty, dark, and unknown void. Both faces of the same reality arouse the latent anxiety of every individual who looks at them. Today most of us do look at them.

Non-being is merely the emptiness that we find when we lose the “fig leaf” (or “ego identity”) that we donned in our Garden of Eden.  And those “fig-leaves”, be they conservative or liberal…or at any point between the two extremes…are very difficult to let go.

 

Confirmation Bias and Epistemic Closure

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I learned a new word today…or pair of words—“epistemic closure.” Julian Sanchez used this term two years ago in conjunction with another term I recently learned and shared here—“confirmation bias.” To summarize, this refers to the human tendency to choose to believe what we want to, seek confirmation for that perspective, and shut out anything contrary. (See Sanchez’ observation at: http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/04/07/epistemic-closure-technology-and-the-end-of-distance/)

Sanchez noted also that this is a human problem and not the exclusive province of any group or any ideology. But he did opine that it appeared to be a particularly egregious problem with the conservative movement in our country at that time; and, he would certainly agree that the problem is much worse in the intensity of this election campaign. This is becoming even more obvious in the past week, with Mr. Romney experiencing an hiccup in the polls, and the conservative press attacking the polls themselves, even Fox News.

The problem with this view of reality is the insularity. Feedback from the outside is discouraged and even in the greatest extremes forbidden. This always leads to madness. No, I’m not saying the conservative movement is mad; but I am saying there is madness on its extremes and these extremes have had too much influence on them. Even Karl Rove himself dismissed these extremists as “the nutty fringe.”

Emily Dickinson knew something about an insular life and her adaptation to this anguish was poetry. Here is an example:

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.
Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.
I’ve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.
The image of closing “the valves of her attention” is intense and vivid, cold and brutal. The person who does this has shut out the world and, like Hamlet, retreated “to a nutshell” and there comforts himself in “being king of infinite spaces.” Mental illness is a reference problem. When we have closed off all reference to the outside world, we are nuts. And on that note, Hamlet asked, “What is it to be mad but nothing else but mad?”