Tag Archives: William Shakespeare

“Come Out Ye From Among Them and Be Ye Separate”

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The biblical admonishment to “Come out from among them and be ye separate” and to be a “peculiar people” received strong emphasis in the church of my upbringing. And, looking back, God must have been proud of us for we certainly accomplished this, though with great (unconscious)  irony. We just had no idea how different we appeared, how “peculiar” we were! And, well….now, with hang-dog face and shamed faced…I have to admit, “Yep, I probably accomplished that more than the rest!”

There are so many anecdotes I could share to illustrate things we did to do maintain the illusion of this separateness. A common bromide was to never, “drink, smoke, chew, or go with the girls that do.” On the drinking part of that bromide, the onset of canned soft drinks in the ‘Sixties posed a problem as if we drank a soft drink in a can, it might appear to others that we were drinking a beer! One young adult I knew pointed out with pride that at office parties, he would drink a coke…from a bottle and with a straw…to make it clear to all parties that he was not imbibing.

This obsessive need to be the “peculiar people” of the Old Testament reflected a core identity problem . For, people who have a secure identity do not have to make a show of who they are in any respect to any dimension of life, certainly faith. They can merely “be” and have confidence that their “be-ing” in the world will suffice. These people of faith who are secure in their identity do not have to be ostentatious with their faith as it will not be a suit of clothes they wear, but merely be part and parcel of their life, a completely natural part of that life. They do not have to announce with word or deed, “Hey, world! I am a Christian, or Buddhist, or Hindu, or whatever!” Their faith is very personal and is not for the purpose of show.

Now a person of faith will certainly stand out in an important sense as their life will reflect values different than most people have. Their focus will not be on the ephemeral, but on Value itself. In our culture, they will not be so obsessed with “stuff” though they well might have plenty of “stuff.” The roots of their heart and soul will not be in mass culture. they will not subscribe to the adage, “He who has the most stuff at the end of the game wins.”

Shakespeare described this ostentatious faith as that of “hollow men” who have to “show their mettle…like horses hot at hand.” When I watch a televangelist or some smug, oily Christian who is “strutting his ‘Christian’ stuff”, I often pictures a team of wild horses pawing the air, shrieking to anyone interested in looking on, “Hey, lookee here! Lookee here! See me! A’int I pious?”

And T. S. Eliot wrote a powerful poem entitled, “Hollow Men.” Speaking of mankind as a whole, not just with respect to spirituality, he described shallow, empty, “hollow men…stuffed men leaning together, headpiece filled with straw.” His poem beautifully captures the futile emptiness of alienated lives bereft of any spiritual connection to self, others, the world, or God.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

A Hand Reaching Across the Abyss

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I’ve invited some blog-o-sphere friends over this morning to play and you too are welcome! I asked momma last night, “Can I have some new friends over Saturday morning” and she said “Yes, as long as you are nice to them this time.” So, ya’ll come on over and we’ll play in the back yard, making mud pies, playing house, playing church, playing tag, wrestling, and such. AND, this time, I’m gonna try to talk one of you cute little girls into a private moment of, “I’ll show you mine, if you’ll show me yours!” (No, I actually never played that game but kind of wish I had’ve!)

This little reverie is a thought I have already shared with a couple of my readers and reflects what a delight it is to meet kindred spirits from around the world. Discovering you makes me feel connected even more to the world, appreciating the power of words and imagination to reach across the abyss that separates us all. And this power is useful with all relationships, cyber as well as real-time.

And, as I start each day now I often think of it as “another day on the playground.” I start it with my favorite friend (my dear, lovely wife Claire) and the second runners-up for that honor, Ludwig and Elsa, the two most beautiful dachshunds that ever lived. But then I go to work, or go to “Wal-marts”, or visit with friends, and still it is “another day on the playground”, this lovely world that God has given us.

And, according to Shakespeare, with mere thought, we can escape the bounds of space and time and commune with each other. For, “If the dull substance of my flesh were thought, injurious distance” would not separate us! The Bard had in mind something relevant to an Archibald MacLeish observation, “Winds of thought blow magniloquent meanings betwixt me and thee.”

If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way;
For then despite of space I would be brought,
From limits far remote, where thou dost stay.
No matter then although my foot did stand
Upon the farthest earth removed from thee;
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land
As soon as think the place where he would be.
But ah! thought kills me that I am not thought,
To leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone,
But that, so much of earth and water wrought,
I must attend time’s leisure with my moan,
Receiving nought by elements so slow
But heavy tears, badges of either’s woe.

 

Poetic Thoughts re Intense Emotion Running Amok

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In Hamlet, Laertes knows that his daughter is “palling around” with that wastrel Hamlet and cautions her, knowing something himself about masculine rapacity:

Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister,
And keep you in the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire.

Laertes did not want his daughter to give into emotions, but to “stand in the rear” like he did and keep her distance. For, he feared that letting go of that detachment would lead to overwhelming emotion and take her totally out of control, just as he feared it would do to him. Laertes was speaking of an “observing ego” which he knew monitors our impulses and keeps them from running amok.

For, Shakespeare knew that “feelings know no discretion but their own.” (W. H. Auden) When feelings predominate…and begin to tyrannize…they cannot submit to “monitoring” and insist on fulfillment of their own needs and desires. Adrienne Rich wrote of this immersion in emotion when she said, “when we enter touch, we enter touch completely.” And e e cummings agreed with Rich, noting that, “since feeling comes first, he who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.”

I suggest some balance is needed. (Yes, my “observing ego” is doing its magic today!) We need intense emotion, we need to be “carried away” with passion, but the “balancer” must not be discarded. When this “balancer” or “observing ego” is discarded, or lost due to neurological impairment, Shakespeare might note of us, “The expedition of his violent love outruns the pauser reason.” Or, to put it in my words, “expression of his passionate intensity outruns the pauser reason.”

 

Living in the Past must be Past

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It is so easy to live in the past, our life story being a litany of the various misfortunes that have fallen our way. And no doubt there are misfortunes and worse, the Shakespearean “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” But at some point we have to make an effort to let it all go and accept responsibility for our life, to live in the moment and recognize that we can make choices in the present that can mitigate if not eliminate the impact of past experiences. And I admit that I feel it is mostly going to be “mitigation” rather than elimination. Read what Marianne Williamson said last week on a Facebook post re this subject:

There is nothing about your past that determines who you are in the present, unless you yourself choose to drag the past with you. That is why the Light — our connection to God, Christ, Buddha, by whatever name we call it — is our salvation: it’s the eternal remembrance of who we really are, unencumbered by any false beliefs within ourselves or others. Now, in this moment, you are who you have always been and will always be. All spiritual practice — forgiveness, meditation and prayer — is for the purpose of training the mind to see through the illusions of a world that would convince you otherwise.

And then, of course, Shakespeare always has wisdom to offer on everything. Here Macbeth wonders why a physician cannot purge the mind of Lady Macbeth of the demons that haunt her, only to be informed that ultimately only the individual can do that:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuf
Which weighs upon the heart?

The Doctor responded, “Therein the patient must minister to herself.”

Embracing Internal Contradictions

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We are such complicated creatures, replete with hypocrisies, contradictions, dishonesties…and virtues! Add them all up and we are reduced to mere be-ing. We simply are. We have the gift of life and have that gift for just a brief moment. Yes, it often appears to be merely a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing” but even the author of that pithy observation (Shakespeare) reflects in the whole of his writing that our paltry efforts reflect value, quality.

The clinical term for this myriad of contradictions is “ambivalence.” Learning to acknowledge and even experience the torment of this ambivalence is one of the most critical lessons in life. It is always so tempting to not take this spiritual adventure and cling to the dogmas of our youth. But we yield to this temptation at the peril of our own soul.

Someone said…and it might have been Karl Jung…that one step toward maturity is when we can learn to tolerate in our heart these ambivalences, to embrace the presence of impulses and presences that are mutually exclusive. Read the following poem by May Sarton:

The Angels And The Furies

1
Have you not wounded yourself
And battered those you love
By sudden motions of evil
Black rage in the blood
When the soul premier danseur
Springs towards a murderous fall ?
The furies possess you.

2
Have you not surprised yourself
Sometimes by sudden motions
Or intimations of goodness
When the soul premier danseur
Perfectly poised
Could shower blessings
With a graceful turn of the head ?
The angels are there.

3
The angels, the furies
Are never far away
While we dance, we dance,
Trying to keep a balance,
To be perfectly human
(Not perfect, never perfect,
Never an end to growth and peril),
Able to bless and forgive
Ourselves.
This is what is asked of us.

4
It is the light that matters,
The light of understanding.
Who has ever reached it
Who has not met the furies again and again:
Who has reached it without
Those sudden acts of grace?

(This poem was shared weeks ago on the blog by Blue Eyed Ennis.)

Marriage and Boundaries

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Boundaries are one of the essential lessons of life. Sometimes life does not afford us stable families and so learning to set boundaries takes us decades and decades. It often takes many difficulties, many failed relationships, and even incarceration at times. I have had clients before who thrived when incarcerated and were able to make good choices upon their release. I’ve known others who can only make good choices when they are incarcerated and frequent incarcerations are part of their life. I’ve known other young people start to thrive when they get into the work place and discover the reward that comes from fitting into the structure of the work place.
Marriage also can provide a ‘container” in which boundary issues can be addressed. Yes, some wits might even think of it as “imprisonment! If two people can make a commitment, and somehow honor that commitment through the vicissitudes of day to day married life, many of an individual’s “rough edges” can be smoothed off.

Edgar Simmons put it this way in a poem:

Proofrock has been maligned;
Hamlet should have waived revenge,
Walked with Ophelia domestic corridors,
Absorbing the tic,
The bothersome twitch.

If Hamlet could have endured the tedium of “domestic corridors,” the routine of “hearth and home”, he could have avoided his madness and premature tragic death.

I now include the whole of the poem from which the above excerpt was extracted which might make it more meaningful to you.

BOW DOWN TO STUTTERERS
By Edgar Simmons

The stutter’s hesitation
Is a procrastination crackle,
Redress to hot force,
Flight from ancient flame.

The bow, the handclasp, the sign of the cross
Say, “Sh-sh-sheathe the savage sword.”

If there is greatness in sacrifice
Lay on me the blue stigmata of saints;
Let me not fly to kill in unthought.

Prufrock has been maligned
And Hamlet should have waived revenge,
Walked with Ophelia domestic corridors
Absorbing the tick, the bothersome twitch.

Let me stutter with the non-objective painters
Let my stars cool to bare lighted civilities.

 

Carl Sandburg & “The Passionate Seizure of Beauty”

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I live and I write on the surface of things. My heart yearns to swim in the depths of life’s mysteries but that does not appear to be my calling. I know about these mysteries but I know about them with detachment; or, to borrow a line from Hamlet, I “stand in the rear of my affection, out of the shot and danger of desire.” I am not diminishing myself. I am what I am. Or, as Popeye put it, “I yam what I yam!”

But as I meet dear friends in the blog-o-sphere, I deeply admire those of you who have such creative power and can write with such elegance and poetic brilliance. You are at home in the “sounding foam of primal things”, you “dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible”, and you know “the passionate seizure of beauty.” These lines are borrowed from a Carl Sandburg poem which I now share:

WHO AM I?

My head knocks against the stars.

My feet are on the hilltops.

My finger tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.

Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.

I have been to hell and back many times.

I know all about heaven, for I’ve talked to God.

I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.

I know the passionate seizure of beauty

And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading, “Keep off.”

My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.

Macbeth and the Unconscious

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Macbeth confessed, “My dull brain is wracked by things forgotten.” Thus, he admitted that he was haunted by things his brain had “forgotten” which is to say his “dull brain” had not really “forgotten” them. In other words, he was beset by his unconscious.

Such is the human lot. We cannot escape the haunt of our unconscious depths, those unseemly fears, anxieties, and beastly impulses which civilization does not permit. And they have this unearthly way of slipping out when we are least expecting it. For example, I can’t help but speculate what led Michelle Bachman to select the term “deep penetration” recently in reference to her perceived infiltration of our government by Muslim extremists. Or, perhaps I’m just a dirty old man!

And the unconscious has a collective as well as an individual dimension. For example, note the present conservative emphasis on drawing boundaries between “us and them”, most obviously in their emphasis of building a fence to keep the Mexicans out. Yes, I do think they over emphasize boundaries. But, I readily acknowledge that we liberals are too prone to not set boundaries readily enough, that we are too quick to trot out the Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” and attempt to do too much to assuage the public ills.

 

Handling Intense Emotion

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I recently posted about intense feelings and quoted the following poem by Marianne Moore.  Today I want to emphasize one line from this poem, “He who feels strongly behaves.”  Intense emotion is often an excuse to not behave and indeed tense emotion at times makes “behaving” impossible.

Shakespeare said of one of his characters, “He cannot buckle his distempered cause within the belt of rule.’  “Distempered cause” refers to a basic life force which I construe to mean energy or feeling.  Shakespeare was saying that regardless of how we feel we must keep it within “the belt of rule”  I think art and music are two means whereby this intense emotion is kept within the “belt of rule”

What Are Years?
By Marianne Moore
What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt,—
dumbly calling, deafly listening—that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs
the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.
So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.

Shakespeare and Self Restraint

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“There’s nothing good or bad but thinking  makes it so.”  This is one of my favorite lines from Shakespeare.  He recognizes the role that reason had in ascribing value to our behavior and formulating social parameters so that we did not ever retreat to our violent, primitive past.  (Oh, let me be honest!  He saw that we could with reason sublimate our nastiness and pretend that we are civilized!)

Where would we be without this filter, though  I’ll take sublimated violence any day of the week over murder and mayhem.  I heard someone quip recently that the U.N. ought to solve recurrent outbreaks of tribal violence by giving th0se tribes N.F.L. franchises.

In another one of Shakespeare’s plays he attributes the beastly behavior of one of his characters to having his passions “outrun the pauser reason.”

And I’ll admit that my “pauser” has not always been operative and it has sure led to some poor decisions.