Tag Archives: William Shakespeare

Make The World Go Away.

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I was recently going through a difficult time, experiencing multiple stressors, most of which could be attributed to having been out of my daily orbit, away from the comfort of hearth and home. I had done some traveling abroad and though I enjoyed it immensely, it had been stressful. Upon my return home, I was heading into town to get a new driver’s license (to replace the one lost when my wallet had been lifted in Rome) and I was contemplating several other stressors in my life that had accumulated as a result of the trip abroad. A line from Hamlet flashed through my mind, “Oh, if I could be bound in a nutshell and there be the king of infinite spaces.”

I knew what he meant. I wanted to retreat to my “nutshell”, which would have been my hearth and home, and if I could never, never, ever, ever leave those safe confines then all would be well. I could amuse myself with caring for my lovely dachshunds, my lovely wife, taking care of my yard and garden, feeding the lovely birds which deign to visit me each day, then all would be well. I would need no more! As some old c & w song goes, “Let the world go away…”

But, “mindfulness” immediately visited me and I noted what was going on, noting the lunacy of retreating to any private world, any “nutshell.” Escapism is never anything but escapism To be a human is to be engaged in the world and thus to be subject to the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir too” (Shakespeare). Retreating is always tempting but it is not reality

Yes, the world is ugly. But if I retreat to my “nutshell”, I am still face-to-face with a profound ugliness—my own. I’m reminded of an old bromide from decades ago, “A man who lives by himself, and for himself, will be spoiled by the company he keeps.”

An afterthought—I think the home-schooling people need to be aware of this issue.

The Hamlet Syndrome

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I love Shakespeare. I think he is the profoundest individual I have ever come across, demonstrating more insight into the human imagination and heart than anyone else has even approached. And of his work, I prefer the tragedies and especially Hamlet.

Hamlet was a very depressed young man who was stymied by indecision. This indecisiveness stemmed from obsessive thinking, a thoughtfulness which he noted, “if quartered would be one part wisdom and three parts cowardice.” Shakespeare valued thoughtfulness but realized that being lost in thought was as much a problem as being incapable of thought.

In his famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy he concluded “thus conscience (i.e. “consciousnessness”) doeth make cowards of us all and the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought; and enterprises of great kith and kin, in this regard, their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.”

Shakespeare realized that excessive “self-awareness” was merely a ruse, an escape from the nitty-gritty of the day-to-day grind of life. He realized I’m sure, that self-awareness was critical in life but needed to be balanced with a willingness to plunge head-long into the fury of life, to make a commitment in action.

Hamlet’s indecisiveness has given rise in the past few decades to the clinical conception, the “Hamlet Syndrome”, describing young men…usually they are young men…who are similarly stymied and incapable of taking the plunge into life.

And I close with a relevant observation from W. B. Yeats:

God, guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He who sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow bone…

Or perhaps, from an anonymous source:

The centipede was happy quiet
Until a toad in fun, said,
“Pray which leg goes after which?”
This through his mind to such a pitch
He lay distracted in a ditch
Considering how to run.

Redemption in Marriage

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Boundaries are so important. I think that the concept of boundaries is relevant to every problem that mankind deals with, even on the biological level. Even cancer is a boundary problem as those bastard cells are running amok and will devour everything in sight. And certainly on an emotional/spiritual level, boundaries explain most if not all of our maladies.

One simple clinical intervention I used when in practice was to try to teach some simple little boundary for a client to set in his life. This could be something as simple as planting a flower and caring for it, this simple act of “caring” being one bit of order in a life that often had little structure.

And then I like to think of marriage as a boundary setting on a grand scale. I see marriage as an imposition of order on chaos, two disparate individuals with their own whims and fancies about life, choosing to commit to the “arbitrary circle of a vow.” (W. H. Auden) If this vow can be honored, marriage can be a container in which two individuals mature together and resolve many of the interior haunts they brought into the union. In short, marriage can be redemptive.

Let me close with an excerpt from a poem by Edgar Simmons entitled, “Bow Down to Stutterers”:

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

Hell on Earth

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Shakespeare’s sonnets might be his finest work. He could put into just a few words volumes of knowledge of the human spirit. In the following sonnet he grasped the essence of hell, that waste land of desire of desire, hunger for hunger, that endless quest for the “lost object” (if I might speak Freudian!) I’m not for sure where this quote came from but someone described this person as “pursuing the object which recedes from the knowledge of it.” This person is portrayed in mythology as the ouroborous, the snake swallowing its own tail.

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

And I conclude with the quote from the Ibsen play which I used just days ago about the self-intoxicated self:

Its here that men are most themselves, themselves and nothing but themselves sailing with outspread sails of self. Each shuts himself in a cask of self, the cask stopped with the bung of self and seasoned in a well of self. None has a tear for others woes or cares what any other thinks….Now surely you’ll say that he’s himself. He’s full of himself and nothing else, himself in every word he says himself when he is beside himself…Long live the Emperor of Self.  (Ibsen, Peer Gynt)

And yet, we are so wont to pontificate about the horrors of hell in the hereafter when if we were honest enough, discerning enough, we would recognize that this hell abounds in our day to day life. Perhaps we should seek salvation from this hell.

Stuck in a repetition compulsion

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I sometimes think I should rename my blog to some variant of “Shakespeare”.  I quote him so often.  And there is no need to quote anyone else.  No one said more.

On the subject of change, he explained why we resist it so much, noting in Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy that we, “cling to these ills that we have rather than fly to others that we know not of.”  To put it in plain red-neck English, “Hell, as bad as things are, if I fool around and make changes, things are gonna get a whole lot worse.”

This is best illustrated in a standard psycho-dynamic explanation of why a woman stays in an abusive relationship.  She usually has such low self-esteem that unconsciously she feels she deserves nothing any better.  In fact, if she manages to extricate herself from one abusive relationship, she will end up in another one very quickly.  Some unfairly and unkindly opine, “Well, that is what she asks for.”  But she is merely caught in. or trapped in, what Freud call a “repetition compulsion”,  repeating a pattern of behavior which recapitulates an emotional trauma that she lived through.

Scott Peck said in The Road Less Traveled that neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering. He was suggesting that suffering is a basic part of life and that enduring pain from time to time is just part of life. Failure to do so is to get blocked or “stuck” in life.

The key to gaining release is always to “feel” the pain, the avoidance of which keeps one locked in a maladaptive behavior pattern. Or. to use a popular bromide, “No pain, no gain.”

Prayer and humility

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I have discoursed several times re prayer and its meditative function. I don’t believe that God sits “up there” waiting to bestow “stuff” on us when we want or to bail us out of a mess we have created with our life. I think prayer, like all dimensions of spirituality, is ultimately a mystery. I don’t know definitively how it works but I do believe that it is important that we pray.  So I think you should pray as you are inclined to pray. You know as much about this mystery as I do. But I hope that you will consider the perspective that I offer from time to time.

Rabbi Adam Jacobs made an interesting point in the Huffington Post that I would like to share. He noted that in the Hebrew language the word “to pray” is a reflexive verb, something you do to yourself. And the root of the word means “to judge”, “rendering the actual translation of prayer as something more akin to self-evaluation. Therefore, when a person stands before God to communicate, she is taking stock of her capabilities, current level of spiritual consciousness and willingness to accept reality for what it truly is. The deeper notion is that we are willfully trying to integrate the inescapable fact that we are utterly dependent on the Creator.”
The upshot of this observation is that humility is an essential element in prayer. And humility always comes hard to those of us who have been educated into “humility.”  And I close with my favorite Shakespearean observation re prayer, King Claudius on his knees in prayer, offering the following observation, “My words fly up.  My thoughts remain below.  Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

Communication Perils and “Penetrable” hearts.

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“Let go of your mind and come to your senses.”  This 70’s era bromide, from Fritz Perls I think, is very astute.  Perls was encouraging us to discover our ability to forego our comfort zone—that safe cognitive haven we have created—and enter the world of sensual experience, the world of feeling.  That “cognitive haven” is the egoic consciousness that Eckhart Tolle has popularized.

And, I admit that this is easier said than done, especially for us who are so firmly ensconced in the cognitive domain.  I practice meditation but it is very hard to quiten that “monkey mind” that the Buddhists speak of—that mind that is always shrieking, chattering, and cavorting about, absolutely unable to embrace the present moment, Tolle’s “Now”.

Shakespeare recognized the need of feeling and its primacy over cognition.  In the famous scene in which his mother is compulsively wringing her hands, he admonished her to “cease wringing your hands and I will wring your heart.  And so I will if it be made of penetrable stuff, if damn custom hath not bronzed it o’er so that it be proof and bulwark against sense” (sense-experience, or feeling).  Here Shakespeare is noting how cognition, one dimension of that “damn custom”, tends to “bronze o’er” the heart and make it “impenetrable.”  When the heart is open to the feeling mode, it is full of “penetrable stuff” and communication can take place.  But when this “damn custom” or cognition predominates, there is only a robot-like exchange of data.  It makes me think of the scene in the movie Rain Man where two autistic men are engaging in a conversation.  But the “conversation” consisted of each man delivering a spiel to the other only to have the other respond with a spiel of his own, a spiel having nothing to do with the other spiel.  I’m reminded from a line from one of T. S. Eliot‘s plays, in which he describes people locked in formulaic, rote conversations as “people too strange to one another for misunderstanding.”

And note the lyrics from the beautiful Simon and Garfunkel song,  “Sounds of Silence”:

And in the naked light I saw

Ten thousand people maybe more

People talking without speaking

People hearing without listening.

And I close with the words of the Psalmist (Psalms 115:4)

They have mouths but they speak not:

Eyes have they, but they see not;

They have ears but they hear not.

 

 

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.”

“Wind me up and watch me be…”

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Last week I posted re this Shakespearean note:  With devotion’s visage and pious action we do sugar o’er the devil himself.  I then paraphrased this wisdom into, “Wind me up and watch me be pious.”  I’m going to elaborate a bit.

This “wind me up…” concept can be applied to the whole of our life.  We are all “wound up” with a core identity and the verbal/ideological template that goes with it.  For example, I am again today saying with my thought and behavior, “Wind me up and watch me be…for want of a better term…a liberal.”  Many will be similarly wound-up today.  Then there are the conservatives.  “Wind me up and watch me be conservative”.  There are many of them too.

For, we are all “wound up” with some core identity, some template that we impose on the world and this template is usually not given any attention because asking someone to pay attention to his/her “template” is like asking fish to see water.  And then we have the human tendency to affiliate ourselves with other groups who subscribe to some similar template, thus shoring up our otherwise tenuous identity.

This problem is so apparent in our government.  Our leaders seem to be very smug, very rigid, very sure that the other side is wrong.  There is limited, if any, capacity to realize that the perspective of the other side deserves respect.  And corresponding with this arrogance is the all-too-human tendency to demonize those that view the world differently than ourself.  So, today go watch the news and watch the dog-and-pony show continue—-people saying, “Wind me up and watch me be Democrat” or “wind me up and watch me be Republican” or “wind me up and watch me be a Tea Partier.”

This is a deadly trap and this is a spiritual problem psychologically/emotionally.  And ultimately this is a Spiritual problem.  This reflects a fundamental problem with our culture.  We are all “wound up” and cannot, or will not, consider the possibility that all we have to trot out each day of our life is a mere perspective, it is not the ultimate grasp of reality.  Those people that we heap into the category “them” deserve a modicum of respect at least.

I conclude with the relevant wisdom of two of my favorite poets.    Conrad Aiken noted, “We see only the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which likes the darkness.”  Our challenge, individually and collectively, is to venture “into the darkness” and offer respect to someone else today.  And W. H. Auden accused us of dwelling safely “on the heath of the agreeable, where we bask, agreed upon what we will not ask, bland, sunny, and adjusted by the light of the collective lie.”

Unaccomodated man/woman

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When President Clinton was being impeached, he became famous for his splitting of one hair in particular.   In answer to a particular question, he responded with great deliberation, “Well, it depends on what the meaning of is, is.”  I intend to continue this vein of hair-splitting here regarding the same infinitive, “to be”.

I feel that the best we ever get from our various spiritual perambulations is “to be.”  We get our “is-ness”.   Now, I have always had a spiritual streak about me.  It was my endowment from my community and family.  The role I was to play was, anthropologically speaking, “a holy man”, some conservative Arkansas variation of a shaman.  However, in this particular little corner of the world, my title was “preacher”.   Writing now five decades later, I recognize that I wanted a whole lot more than mere “is-ness”.  I wanted an identity, I wanted a place in that little back-water village, I wanted respect, and I wanted a career.  And what this meant was that my brief ministry was, in the words of an evangelical preacher of the day, “a platform on which to display my carnal abilities.”  It was a “work of the flesh”, to borrow a concept from the New Testament.  It was all about me.

So there I illustrated a basic problem with spiritual aspirations—the ego. The ego is not satisfied with merely “be-ing”, it prefers to shine, to “strut and fret” its hour on the stage and have people admire its holiness, its piety—“Wind my up and watch me be pious!”  And though my spiritual ego has today a degree of subtlety about it….I want to say…I still find myself from time to time really proud of how pious I am, something akin to the Pharisee’s pride in how broad their phylactery was.  (See Matthew 23:5)

AND, that is ok.  For, at that moment, sometimes the wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh comes to the fore and I practice his “half smile” and prayerfully breathe the word, “mindfulness.”  I then go on with my day to day life.  There is no need to beat myself up, no need to bemoan my spiritual immaturity, no need to flagellate myself with, “Oh what a rotten sinner I am.”  There is only the need to be “mindful” and to then continue to “chop wood, carry water.”  For, no matter how spiritually “refined” we might become…or think we have become…we are going to find a hefty dollop of ego always ready to manifest itself.  And that is always going to be present.  I have a suspicion that this is some part of what the Buddha had in mind when he attested that “mara” was always with him.  And Jesus was always beset by Satan and I’m sure that ego was one of the seductions that Satan had even then in his repertoire.

The goal is to glory in our mere be-ing, in our “is-ness”, in the fact that we exist, that we “are”.  To recognize and experience that we have been “thrown into being” by some force or presence (and I like to say Presence) far beyond the grasp of our feeble minds.  It is to recognize as did Einstein that at the depths of our existence we find merely a mystery, and incomprehensible mystery, that some of us choose to term “God”.

But it requires joining King Lear out on the heath, “unaccomodated”, naked, pelted by the same “pitiless storm”, bereft of our kingdom and family, shorn of the trappings of our egoic consciousness.  It is to experience our emptiness which came to us in the New Testament in the doctrine of “kenosis”, merely meaning, “the emptying of ourselves.”  It is to experience our solitude, our “Dark Night of the Soul”. (St. John of the Cross).

Now the nice thing about this is that it does not have to leave us so “unaccomodated.”  This spiritual process merely loosens the attachment to our “stuff”.  No longer does our “stuff” have us.  We have seen and experienced our true self and that will be the core of our identity, not the piling up of earthly treasures, or the acheivement of success, and certainly not the acheivement of “spiritual” success.  We know that essentially we have only our “is-ness”, we have it only for this brief sojourn in this parenthesis of time before we return to our Source.  And in the mean time, we can have and enjoy our “stuff” but hopefully with less obsession and with an increased proclivity to share some of it with others.

Several weeks ago I quoted Shakespeare’s 146th sonnet and I conclude with an excerpt:

Oh soul, the center of my sinful earth

Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array;

Why doeth thy pine within and suffer dearth,

Painting thy outward walls so costly gay.

(And he goes on to conclude with:)

Within be fed, without be rich no more.