meaningless meaning

Before getting into King Lear, I wanted to write a reflection on my final or overall thoughts on Hamlet. Mainly Hamlet made me reflect on life as suffering, what it means to suffer, and why humans endure horrific emotional and physical suffering. Many people at our age (of course there are exceptions) have not encountered pain that is chronic, either emotional or physical, but those who have are probably the ones who find it most difficult to explain why we go on living if it means continual suffering—unless possibly they have come out the other side of suffering. And “the other side” is not to say that the pain stops or lessens, but that it ceases to become suffering because we have found a reason for it. In Victor Frankl’s book “A Man’s Search for Meaning” he says something like ‘humans can live with any kind of ‘how’ if they have a ‘why’. What Hamlet never found was a meaning for his pain. Life is unbearable not when it is painful, but when it is meaningless. Grief is not the hardest to endure during the rawest moments of separation following the loss, but during the “unending absence that follows: the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself” (Joan Didion).  If I apply our class’s continual concept of the “the low being closest to the high” then the meaninglessness of life must be close to the meaning of life. Throughout Hamlet I was also continuously thinking about why it is important to develop a tragic sense of life (though I’m not sure it can be developed without experience). Tragedy, in life or Hamlet (same thing?), must help us to understand why we are alive by forcing us to confront life’s meaninglessness and therefore, bringing us as close as possible to the meaning of life.

My Sonnet

Can I only love you in time ago?

When nature’s breath still blessed your fragile heart

And I knew not the rhythm’s beat of woe

For youth does think it safe from life’s depart

But then I lost your pulse one winter night

I searchéd every inch from pole to pole

To find you’d gone beyond my mortal sight

And so despair did pulse within my soul

Until I listened closer to the sound

For grief is but the cry of love set free

From earth’s constraints, no longer is it bound

And now I know, for you, my heart’s decree.

    The beat of love transcends your mortal breath

    Unmuted by the roar of time nor death

Hamlet: Act II, Scene II

I like the soliloquy by Hamlet in Act II, Scene II that starts out with "Now I am alone." That first statement seems almost an echo of the first line of the play (“Who’s there?”), or perhaps a beginning to the answer of that question of identity. And notice the line following -- he declares himself a rogue and a peasant slave. This negative self-view is echoed throughout the soliloquy..

Another interesting line in the soliloquy is the one in which he refers to the play which he had requested the player to give a speech from – “What's Hecuba to him, or him to Hecuba//That he should weep for her." (line 557). The line is a reference to a play by Euripedes in which Hecuba’s husband is murdered (note that the Euripedes play also begins with a ghost). Hecuba’s response to the death of her husband ("life on earth has no more charm for me") is a stark contrast to Hamlet’s mother’s seemingly nonexistent grief.

The line, “what’s Hecuba to him, or him to Hecuba/ That he should weep for her" questions the nature of grief: from the weeping of the player who gave the speech at Hamlet's request, to the absence of the Queen's grief, to Hamlet's own grief. In the one case, a player is caught up in the part he plays, and becomes an emotional reflection or action of that part ….versus Hamlet’s grief -- over his father, mother, his own position?-- in any event, REAL grief, and yet Hamlet cannot act on this real grief  as the player was able to act on an imaginary grief. ("Yet I, // ...unpregnant of my cause,//And can say nothing!"). The nature of real grief demands to be expressed internally—whether Hamlet respects that or not.

Interesting last line, about the catching of conscience... ambushes and traps sometimes catch more than the intended prey?

Questions for Shakespeare

I've been experiencing blog block for the last couple weeks so I've decided to take Rilke's advice and "live the questions" instead. Here are a few questions I have for Shakespeare from studying him thus far:

• If life is a stage, who or what are we acting for?

• Are the lowest characters in Shakespeare’s plays closest to the highest characters because the wisdom of this world is futile in the eyes of the divine?

• Does Shakespeare suggest that we are closest to the “high” when we are in the realm of dreams?

• If sunlight is the light of reality and moonlight the light of imagination, what then is darkness or the absence of light?

The Human Condition: Width vs Height?

Today I was reading an introduction by Randy Malamud to T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land. Malamud explains that the prominent literary allusions in The Waste Land come from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dante. He goes on to quote Eliot as having said in one of his critical essays on Shakespeare and Dante that “gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and exaltation.” And thus, Eliot concludes that Shakespeare provided the greatest width of the human condition while Dante provided the greatest altitude and depth.

I cannot refute or support Eliot's claim as I am not familiar enough with either Shakespeare or Dante at this point, but I am engaged in the question as to whether it is more important to understand the width of the human condition or its height. First, what is the human life/condition? And then, can one understand without experiencing? My understanding has come from experiencing; and while I have experienced the depth of some parts of my humanity, I have (of course) only surfaced or never even touched others. While I lack knowledge and growth of all that I do not understand to be part of my humanity, my identity has been formed from the (nonphysical) places through which I’ve felt most intensely what it means to be human. Therefore, because I’ve reached the depth of my human life as the source of my (albeit unrounded) identity, I will confidently conclude that the depth of the human condition is more important than its width. 

Mindful Movement

The concept of the mind carrying the weight of the world in Turner’s essay immediately made me think of Ayn Rand’s philosophy. In her novel, Atlas Shrugged, she shows how the world falls apart when the men of reason/the mind decide to not carry the weight anymore (when atlas decides to shrug). Without the men of ability and effort, the world would be immovable. It is an impossible weight for man to lift (or impact) with his body or his emotions or any other device besides his mind.  It is also necessary to apply that concept to the individual. When one’s mind is idle instead of engaged, his or her life will lack movement.  

I’ve been thinking about how to redeem my time, how to apply a quality consciousness to each moment of my finite interval creeping along in this petty pace. Shakespeare’s writing is clearly the product of an elevated consciousness and by studying it I can only hope that the quality of my consciousness sharpens so that I can carve my time in my own words some day.