Tag Archives: Hamlet

Shakespeare and hypocrisy

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I love Shakespeare with a passion. He is perhaps the greatest gift that the gods have offered us to date, with due respect to the holy men and women who have also graced our lives.

He was a very spiritual man and thus had a critical eye re “spirituality” and astutely took we “spiritual sorts” to task for our innate tendency to be hypocritical and insincere.

For example, in King Richard III the King confesses:

And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With old odd ends, stol’n forth of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.

And then my favorite observation on this note was: With devotions visage and pious action, we do sugar o’er the devil himself. (Hamlet)

And I close with one of my favorite lines from Goethe’s Faust: They call it Reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.

Gilgamesh and The Shadow

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I finally got around to procuring and starting to read a book that has been around a long time—If You Meet the Buddha On the Road, Kill Him:  The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients.  (Sheldon Kopp, 1972)  This is a must-read for all psychotherapists and psychotherapy clients.  It delves elegantly and eloquently into the essence of therapy and the intricate boundary complications between a therapist and his/her clients.

One of my favorite anecdotes from the book is his discussion of the Gilgamesh myth and an early example of the shadow.  He describes how Gilgamesh was an oppressive tyrant who became so overbearing that his subjects consulted a goddess, Arura, and asked her to intervene.  Arura, displaying feminine wisdom, knew that the answer was to create a double for Gilgamesh who would wrestle with him and teach him that he too was a mere mortal.

And that is what our shadow does—reminds us that we from the dust of the earth like all people and creatures.  We want to think that we are noble far beyond the herd but if we openly acknowledge our shadow when we look at “them”—those people who embody all the things we loathe—we have to humbly confess, “There go I but for the grace of God.”  Or to quote a favorite bromide of mine, “What we see is what we are.”

Let me quote Kopp:  Each of us has such a shadow from which he flees.  Each man is haunted by that specter of a double who represents all that he would say “no” to in himself.  To what extent I deny my hidden twin-self, you may expect to see my personality twisted into a grotesque mask of neurotic caricature.

And here are a couple more gems from Kopp, “All of the significant battles are waged within the self.”  Or, as W. H. Auden put it, “We wage the war we are.”  And then Kopp notes re a client of his, “He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.”  Shakespeare put it this way, in Hamlet, noting that we prefer to “cling to the ills that we have, than fly to others that we know not of.”

More “mangled guts pretending”

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Earlier in the week I quoted from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America re the difficulty, the gut-wrenching pain which can accompany change.  I would like to elucidate a bit further on this score.  Kushner concludes this description of the intense pain of change with the observation, “And then up you get.  And walk around.  Just mangled guts pretending.”  His point was that at some point in your suffering you must “get up” and “walk around” even if it involves a lot of pretending.

It is very important that we “walk around” but not in the sense of wandering around aimlessly.  It is important that we act with purpose and meaning, that we act productively, even in the midst of our suffering. This can be as simple as getting up from bed and getting the kids off to school, or cleaning the dishes, or watering the plants, or visiting a friend.  And you won’t necessarily “feel like” doing these things.  But it is imperative…if at all possible…to muster up the energy to take action.  This can be an effective antidote to the actual abyss of depression which is a debilitating inertia.

Shakespeare in Hamlet noted the importance of action.  Hamlet declared, “Assume a virtue, if you have it not.”  He then elucidates, though with Shakespearean wordiness, “That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat, of habits devil, is angel yet in this, that to the use of actions fair and good he likewise gives a frock or livery, that aptly is put on.”

And in Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy he notes that great ambitions and plans are often “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” and in the process “lose the name of action.”

“mangled guts pretending”

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Playwright Tony Kushner’s HBO mini-series (2003), “Angels in America” is one of the best things I’ve ever seen on television.  Starring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson it was a poignant portrayal of 1980’s gay culture in America as it dealt with the AIDS issue.  It was beautifully written and acted.

One of my favorite lines has to do with the question, “How do people change?”  The question is posed rhetorically in a museum and a pioneer woman mannequin comes to life and answers:

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.

The point is, change is difficult.  And Kushner writes poetically and thus overstates the issue.  We all find change painful but, mercifully, not that painful!  But we prefer be-bopping through our life, mindlessly following some script that we subscribed to in early childhood, not deigning to apply “mindfulness” to our lives.  To do so inevitably exposes themes in our lives, basic assumptions, that are maladaptive to say the least.  As Adrienne Rich noted once, “Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.”

And for some, gut-wrenching change is in the cards.  “Just mangled guts pretending” is their lot.  By this, I think Kushner wrote of the excruciating pain of acting purposefully when their lives have been torn asunder by “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” (Shakespeare, Hamlet) or some particular devastating “shock.”  It takes real to courage to act, and to act purposefully, when our lives have been torn apart.

I now have a youtube clip of the above scene:

Prayer and Presence

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Prayer continues to be an essential part of my life.  And for me it is “meditative prayer” which continues to be a challenge because of that “monkey mind” which squeaks endlessly and jumps around….hmmm….well, like a monkey!  The goal is focus in which our hearts and minds are wholly open to God and not given to distractions.  Shakespeare best described this prayerful dilemma when Claudius (in Hamlet), kneeling to pray, lamented, “My words fly up.  My thoughts remain below.  Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

I also try to choose my words wisely in prayer.  I try to avoid, for example, saying, “Come Lord Jesus.”  For, he has already come and is present in all of our hearts.  To say, “Come Lord Jesus” is to speak of Him as if he is out there, not reflecting an awareness of his inner presence.  He is always here.  In fact, he is intrinsic to our very being.  In fact, without Him we would not even have “be-ing”.  This is relevant to the famous words of Paul, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I,  (my emphasis) but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.”  Paul was recognizing that his “not I” was now prevalent in his life–Christ.

When I pray for healing, I don’t pray, “Lord, please visit “x” with your healing power.”  I pray, “Lord, may “x” become aware today of your healing presence.”  For God’s presence, including his “healing presence”, is always with us.  All we have to do is get out of the way, let the ego’s grip on our life dissipate a bit, and the Spirit of the Lord is waiting.

slippery slope of spirituality

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“With devotion’s visage and pious action we do sugar o’er the devil himself,” noted Shakespeare (Hamlet).  Spirituality is a perilous journey for it so easy to become “humble”, failing to recognize that one is just being smug or arrogant.  As I like to put it…and this comes from personal experience, “Humility comes hard to the humble.”  Eckhart Tolle’s concept of “egoic consciousness” is so relevant to spirituality.  And this pseudo-humility, this “devotion’s visage and pious action” usually stems from taking oneself too seriously.

If honesty intrudes on us, we will often have to admit that our spirituality is just a song-and-dance which serves the purpose of assuaging our lonliness and isolation.  It is part of the aforementioned (in an earlier post) effort to “spin a veil to hide us from the void.” (Norman O. Brown)

Read here how John Masefield summarized this matter:

 

How many ways, how many different times

The tiger Mind has clutched at what it sought,

Only to prove supposéd virtues crimes,

The imagined godhead but a form of thought.

How many restless brains have wrought and schemed,

Padding their cage, or built, or brought to law,

Made in outlasting brass the something dreamed,

Only to prove themselves the things of awe,

Yet, in the happy moment’s lightning blink,

Comes scent, or track, or trace, the game goes by,

Some leopard thought is pawing at the brink,

Chaos below, and, up above, the sky.

Then the keen nostrils scent, about, about,

To prove the Thing Within a Thing Without.

 

“penetrable stuff”

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Hamlet, here speaking to his mother:

Leave wringing of your hands. Peace! sit you down,
And let me wring your heart; for so I shall,
If it be made of penetrable stuff;(40)
If damned custom have not braz’d it so
That it be proof and bulwark against sense.

Hamlet felt he could not communicate with his mother, that she was unreachable, because her heart was not made of  “penetrable stuff”.  He then explained why, blaming “damned custom” for having “braz’d” (or, “bronzed”)  her heart so that it be “proof and bulwark against sense” (or feeling).  Hamlet lamented that his mother had been so enculturated with the thought-forms and ideologies of the historical moment that there was nothing else there, there was not any “feeling” which is necessary if there is to be any communication.

“Damned custom” insulates us from feeling, from our bodies, and thus from experience.  In fact, it is “proof and bulwark against” feeling.  “Damned custom” is an internalized world view, an “introject” (if I might borrow a term from psychoanalysis) which serves a useful purpose in that it allows us to function in the “real” world.  The problem lies only in failing to mature at some point and realizing…and feeling…that there is another dimension to life that is being missed.

If I might make a bit of a leap, let me quote e e cummings:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

Or, a further leap, to the words of Jesus:

“What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul, or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”