Author: tedoned

Long live the king!

Posted on by tedoned

Dear Blue,

Despite being asked a question in the first line of the play and hearing a command in the second, the corporeal self we use to “be,” the one that might speak or obey, does neither.

What makes us "there" in the world outside of the theater does not exist here when we are part of an audience.

(And yet the drama of recognition means that we live as if on stage of someone who can see that we see them seeing us.)

By not answering, standing, or unfolding we divide once and again from ourselves and move further into our ghostly selves.

Not an easy thought, that we grow more solid as ghosts. 

Or is it that we grow more solid in our role as ghosts?

*

As we move further from ourselves the people on stage move further into the selves they pretend to be.

That is, had we answered Bernardo's question or obeyed Francisco's commands then the two figures on stage would have turned toward us rather than toward one another.  The authority of pretend, so to speak, has held.

Now the question for those on stage is, "by what authority will we, the figures in this world, recognize each other." 

Unsurprisingly for the world of Denmark in 1400, that authority is "the king!"  In essence, for the moment, both of these figures agree to acknowledge the same authority so they can move on to re-know each other as something other than enemies.  

But as I just  began to suggest at the end of the last post, authority is much less "solid" than we sometimes think.

You could, for instance, rewrite the third line of the play so that Bernardo does not say:

Long live the king!

But says instead:

Long live Simba!

or,

Long live the Avengers!

or,

Long live Hogwarts!

Or even,

Long live ALA!

We might think any of those rewritings odd but you can quickly imagine the various worlds which would demand strangers reach out to these authorities to prove to each other they belong, rather than reaching out, as these guards do, to a guy who wears a crown. 

Authority can shift and this can be a troubling and complicated idea. 

There is a similarly complicated idea connected to this, which is that words are often placeholders.  (I introduced this idea when I asked if I should have used the word "scripture" to discuss the authority of theater and have given an example of how words can be placeholder by shifting Simba into the place Bernardo says "king.")

And yet as I set out to pursue how authority is a kind of role and words can be placeholders, I must also admit that not all authority can shift altogether and that not all words can be placeholders for all other words. 

For instance,  I can say anything I like, point to any idea I might think up with words:

2+2=5,

Ice melts fire

Down is up

But while I can write these things, if I cannot point to them in reality.  Reality has some authority words cannot change. 

Another is that if a fire starts in the theater, then the authority of oxygen and heat will threaten everyone, those on stage and those in the audience.  We would all need to recognize that we are in danger.  The authority of being dead rather than being alive is about as absolute as any there is. 

(And yet watching Hamlet, we are in the theater, not dead, and yet not exactly alive either.)

Nor will it do for any word to replace any other word.  Long live Simba might have enough contextual charge to provide what two people who do not recognize each other to begin a Disney drama.  But while it is possible to say

Long live cottage cheese!

Or,

Long Live shoes!

Or,

Long Live asdfghjkl;!

At a certain point, we can longer accept the thing the word

By doing so I implied that the authority here can be measured against the authority of a scared text, The Bible or The Koran say.  You might take offense at that or just not like the idea that a silly play operates in the same realm as holy books.  You object, in essence to how I play with the

Indeed the authority of "should" comes, you might say from just those books

But often authority is what we make it, the role we give it.

In the drama of identity, as played out in these situations we often feel like no one because that is what we are, papers to be stamped, not people to be known.

And any such reduction is part of the drama of life.  If the authority of customs says "be a passport," you know how the authority of school says "be a grade" or how the authority of your parents says "be good."

It also suggests how silly sometimes authority can be.  Isn't there a point at which your life story should get you on that plane?

But mostly the point is that authority differs in different contexts. The authority of pretend says "be a ghost." You might argue these different contexts or stages do not change who you "are" but surely your answer to Bernardo's question differs in each space, if only slightly because of what you wear or what you must present so that others can identify you.

Now, as it turns out, neither Bernardo or Francisco are spies.  Both are guards.  But if one were a spy they would need to know how to say "Long live the king!" in the right way to be "recognized" by the other. 

One thing happening in the world we share, the world of stage and audience, is that now these two people pretending to be people they are not are now confident enough that none of the ghosts watching them will speak that they can speak to each other in their pretend roles.  In a sense, the play starts with this line about wanting the king to live long because now the drama of recognition can begin.  And to some degree any drama 

How do you makes sense of how words hold a place in a space that does not exist unless the words are there?. 

Some things we point to with words, things like "ghost" or "guard," or"person" might be pointed to in pictures instead of words.

Other things like "democracy" or "justice" or "identity" are more difficult to convey in pictures, they are too abstract or, in a sense, only exist because we can create them from words.

You could say that this barrier, like democracy, justice, identity, does not exist until you use words to point to it.

Since words fail to point to things exactly we often use words as placeholders in meaning.

For instance, who's there? and "what's there?" differ rather little in a practical context, make as little a difference in the everyday as "who are you? vs ‘who's there?"

And yet the place some words hold can become battleground as well. . 

But let's look at the authority on stage for a moment and consider the pretend going on there too.

But let's talk about the word "king" as a placeholder for "authority," one that allows all of us to "recognize" or "re-know" one another.

 

At the same time, if you follow my "make too much of it" teacher mode, the play is calling attention to both the way words point to things and how they can be placeholders.

I've suggested the latter concept by suggesting that "should" and "can" might both sit in the same sentence about scripture, hold a certain place, and yet do so with a great difference for you.

Can I refer to Hamlet as scripture? 

Sure.

Should I refer to Hamle as scripture?

Well, that raises all sorts of questions based on how you view your stage and the authority that governs it and you.

You might imagine that with

Long live the king

 

 

We protect Bernardo from the person pretending to be Bernardo and Francisco from the person pretending to be Francisco.

 
 
 
 
 

as

 
 

Nay, answer me; stand and unfold yourself.

Posted on by tedoned

(The drama of recognition)

Dear Blue,

Hamlet begins with a person who pretends to be a person named Barnardo--"a guard”--whose opening question—Who's there?—we all hear.

The world where people pretend to be other people divides from the world where people pretend to be ghosts, the line that divides a mirror of selective reflection

Anyone in the audience might well answer but, instead, we stay silent, instead we guard the authority of pretend, instead we look through the mirror because that is how we get it to refect. 

Who is the first sentry of this world?  Bernardo or us?

Who is first to

Meanwhile, a person pretending to be Francisco says:

Nay, answer me: stand and unfold yourself.

Francisco is also ‘a guard.'

First a question and now these commands: Answer . . . Stand . . . Unfold.

And still we do nothing.

To obey Francisco's commands would mean what? That I say my name and then get up from my seat?  Even though I just sat down?

Unfold myself? As from a chair?  Like a flag?  As a map?  Some kind of paper? 

Unfold yourself? Isn’t that another way to describe life?

Who's there?  The person with this map of who I have been?  Who I am . . . a kind of answer to "who are you?"

The authority of pretend and our role as ghostly-guards established in the first line is reinforced in the second. 

Any "act" (speaking, standing) that crosses the barrier between our world and the world of Barnardo and Francisco would violate the scripture of theater.

How do you feel about the use of the word scripture in that sentence?

On what ground do you object, if you do.  That Hamlet was obviously not written by god?  That's a fair objection.  That the theater is a place for the profane, not the sacred?  

For the god of theater to matter to us, we cannot let our own matter get in the way. 

Our own matter must not matter. 

*

On stage, Bernardo and Francisco work to identify each other.

Since Francisco asks Bernardo to stand, we might imagine Bernardo sitting. But that would be odd.  Most likely, "stand" here means, “present yourself.”

(If you were Bernardo would you wonder which self to present? The self you use with your friends? The one you use with your family? Maybe the one you use when taking a test.? Your brave self? Your guard self? If this is the kind of situation where an enemy might kill you and so end your self, which self should you unfold and present?

*****

An unfolding self is the self we bring to the drama of recognition, which is what Bernardo and Francisco are dealing with in the most “literal” sense.

But the drama of recognition is also a drama you and I live with every day.

If Shakespeare did not exactly invent the drama of recognition, he is its chief explorer and his plays map this drama extensively. As the drama of recognition is so central to the “who’s there?” problem, it will make sense to talk about it at some length. 

When we see someone across campus and wave at them and they wave to us we say, casually, that we "recognize" each other.  But to "re-cognize" someone, as a closer look at the word reveals, means less to know than to re-know.
Tomison, for instance, can recognize Sean on Tuesday because he knew Sean on Monday.

Yet now imagine if Sean looked like himself on Monday and then, on Tuesday, looked like Simba or The Hulk or Harry Potter.  In that situation, Tomison would need quite a bit of convincing to believe Sean is "there."  Luckily, Sean is not likely to change so much in how he looks in just a day and the fact that we more or less keep our physical form during our lifetime makes it possible to manage reality and to ‘re-know' one another from day to day or even year to year.

Overall it is a good thing that the atomic particles that hold the world together don't suddenly re-shape everything all the time.  This is one of the ways the limits of reality offer an advantage over the limitlessness of art.

(On the other hand, if those atomic particles were always reshaping everything all the time and we always lived in a clean slate then we would never produce the history and traditions and culture which become a source of the ghosts we feel haunting us when we are with another person or look in the mirror or are alone wondering how we can best guard ourselves against dangerous influences.)

Our solidity in time generates agents of matter-less-ness that both tie us together and divide us.

As it happens, the drama of recognition, and the struggle to know one another do not (usually) come about because of fantastic physical changes like Sean suddenly undergoing a metamorphoses and looking like the Hulk or Simba.

What if, for instance, on Monday night Sean got rejected from university?  Or accepted?

Now, who's there in Sean's body on Tuesday? Not Simba, perhaps, but also a different Sean, one that must be "re-known" by Tomison.

Now you see someone across the quad who looks familiar but also different: l

Look at the way that guy is hunched over as he walks?  Is that Sean?

Look at the way that guy is walking with his chest puffed out?  Is that Sean?

What does it mean to be Sean now?   Ashamed and hunch or proud and tall?  Which self of Sean is unfolding now? 

Who's there in the moment before he got the news about university and who's there the moment after?

Who are you?  Sean, always Sean.

But . . . who's there? The guy feeling unhappy or boastful about college.

Do I need to tell you how complicated this drama can get if you see Sean acting a little more hurt or a little more arrogant than you think he should?  As someone you might now see as a player? Do you say something like this? "I barely recognize Sean since he heard about college."

And . . .

And, what about you?  What about how you see the world and so see Sean?  Has he changed in the wake of his news about college or are the eyes you look through shaded or ill-focused or fated to see what you want them to see by your pity for or jealousy of Sean?

You say you barely recognize Sean but maybe he can't "act" like himself around you because he feels you looking at him as a failure or with envy?

"Ever since I heard about college,"  says Sean, "you see me differently . . . or don't see me as who I am now, as I am . . . here.”

What I am calling the drama of recognition becomes especially powerful and tricky because you are not only seen by some other person, you also see how other people see you.  You see them seeing you.

In life, you see people seeing you.

*

If you do not think seeing others seeing you is a formative part of life, let's imagine another scene, one as reductive as Sean and university: You are twelve years old and you go home with a bad grade on a test and tell dad you got an "F."

Do you see him seeing you with shame and thus feel humiliated or do you see him seeing you with love and feel O.K.?

Or maybe you got a great grade on that test tell Mom you got an "A."

She says "good job" but you see in her eyes that your good grade is still not good enough.

But wait, we’ve just begun to deal with this drama.

Is mom’s reaction “real” and “authentic” or what you imagine you see? Is your mom always so demanding (you think) that you cannot help but see her as seeing you as “not good enough?” Is there anything you can do to impress her

Perhaps you are so desperate to see mom seeing you with approval that nothing she does will ever make you feel the pride and love you want to feel from her.

You have become convinced she is never going to give you the praise you want so that just like the friend who looks at Sean with too much pity or jealousy you look to your mom with more need and desperation than she can ever satisfy.

*

You may say this has gone on too long, but I am afraid we have only started because while the simple or obvious or “literal” version of “Who’s there?” is easy enough—Fransisco saying "stand" or Sean feeling bad about college or you with you “A”—the psychology (and history and tradition and culture) of the drama of recognition is almost endless or, at least, can be seen as such.

*

There is not enough love in the universe for even a single child, Freud says, or should have said.

Our need to be seen and known is bottomless and we want to be known and re-known with just that much bottomless love every moment of our lives. 

Indeed, let's return to the script of you and your good grade, your “A” and Mom and this bottomless need for love we all carry with us.

As it happens, on the day you tell mom about your "A," a friend—let’s call this friend Jimcale—has accompanied you home. To Jimcale you complain: “My mom never celebrates my accomplishments.”  “Really,” replies Jimcale in surprise, “she smiled and said ‘good job.’ I sure wish my mom would be that effusive about my accomplishments."

You see something absent in how your mom sees you.  As a result of this you react with longing.  Yet Jimcale sees your mom seeing you with surplus.

The problem is not in how your mom is there, seeing you as never good enough, but rather in how you see her seeing you.

Why does your mom unfold one self for Jimcale and another for you?  Because those selves differ or because you see them differently?

Obviously no single such moment shapes us forever and for the sake of example these scenarios are simplified. They are placeholders meant to suggest actual scenarios.

Yet despite how many steps I build into the drama of Sean and Tomison or you and your mom, there are actually many more, since how we see ourselves being seen happens at the speed of light.

Still, such moments shape who we "are," how we see, and how we see ourselves being seen, with our being re-known in one moment shaped by and shaping how we have been known in another moment, or all other moments.

You could say our heated debates about “identity” are just another way of trying to capture (to hold a place for) all the ways we have been seen and want to be seen, a way of answering: Who’s there?

*

The drama of recognition gets still more complicated when you add in the limitlessness of imagination.

For surely as you go home with that "F" or that "A" and before you tell Dad or Mom about your grade, you imagine how they will react, how they will see you.

You may imagine with great fear your dad's scowl or with desperate hope your mom's smile.  You are so in your drama, imagining it, that whatever happens may be secondary, even unbelievable.

Your imagination of what you fear or what you hope for as you walk home with your test informs (or pre-informs) your reality to such a degree that you can't possibly see dad or mom accurately, may even doubt Jimcale when they give you an audience-like view.

Jimcale says you mom seemed happy and you say: What? Didn’t you see her offer faint praise?

How, you say to Jimcale, can you be my friend if you do not take my side? How can you fail to see my drama as I see it?

Indeed, maybe your friend does fail to see what you see.  After all, you know your parents better than Jimcale does.  But then maybe their eyes were not clouded by your knowledge and imagination.  Does the theater in your head keeps you from seeing as clearly as someone who is watching the drama unfold? 

Jimcale, to say it again, just knows your parents where as you re-know them, or fail to re-know them, because of how you see them knowing and re-knowing you.

Who has the best hold on the reality of all this? Mom? Dad? You? Your friend?

Is it more informative to be the actor involved in the drama of recognition or the observer (almost a ghost), trying to know that drama?

Back on campus what I have been saying might--might--sound like:

I just know Sean will be unbearably proud if he gets into college . . .

I won't be able to see him without resentment  . . .

I will see him seeing me as "less than."   . . . As a result I will act distant and resentful towards him. 

Except that if you can think all this ahead of time you are much faster and more self-aware than any actual human.  Because such back and forths, such, recognitions of our self in the drama of seeing and being seen are rarely this clear to us.  They happen too fast and ‘matter' too much.  As we all know, as we all “recognize.”

*

Hamlet (as all art does to some degree) freezes this light speed back and forth so that we can consider it.

We can lay out the map of knowing and imagining, see ourselves looking through the eyes of a character, haunt their world without being known, go back over it as many times as we wish.

If we go slowly enough, as I am trying to do, we may yet hang on to some part of what comes with knowing, being known, and being re-known. Another  opportunity to grasp the infinite.

Because, "Nay, answer me" can be understood as:

Who are you now that you see someone here who can see you . . .see you there?

And,

Before I bring to you the whole drama of how you might see me or how we might imagine ourselves seeing each other . . .

"Stand, and unfold yourself."

Unfold the flag you wave from across campus so I can see whether you walk with pride or shame.

Unfold the map of where you have been every moment of your life--parents, school, friends--so I do not disappoint you, nor you me, in how we see each other.

Unfold the script that has been written for you up to this point and which we will, now, write together as our future.

*

Life does not allow us to step back altogether from the drama of recognition. 

Art does.

It is a theater of the head we can walk around in, study, learn from, and enjoy.

*

The friend who sees me seeing how I am seen by my dad or mom—my Jimcale—enters the drama of my stage.  They are less a ghost than we are now, in the audience, watching Hamlet.

More matter. Less a ghost.

In the theater, where we cannot be known by those on stage, we will not be re-known as someone we are not. We are free to not exist.

In reality, where we exist and are known, how we know and re-know one another will depend on the authorities we appeal to and create.

More on this, should you be there, next time.

--Mr. Ted 

On stage, Bernardo and Francisco work to identify each other.  They begin the drama of recognition, a drama you and I live with everyday. 

When we see someone across campus and wave at them and they wave to us we say, casually, that we "recognize" each other.  But to "re-cognize" someone, as a closer look at the word reveals, does not mean to know but rather to re-know.

Tomison, for instance, can recognize Sean on Tuesday because he knew Sean on Monday.

Yet now imagine if Sean looked like himself on Monday but on Tuesday he looked like Simba or The Hulk or Harry Potter.  In that situation, Tomison would need quite a bit of convincing to believe Sean is "there."  Luckily, Sean is not likely to change so much in how he looks in just a day and the fact that we more or less keep our physical form during our lifetime makes it possible to manage reality and to ‘re-know' one another from day to day or even year to year.  Let us say it is a good thing the atomic particles which hold the world together don't suddenly re-shape everything all the time.  This is but one of the ways the limits of reality offer an advantage over the limitlessness of art.

But just because Sean has not metamorphosed physically does not mean all that much to the drama of recognition as we actually live it.

What if, for instance, on Monday night Sean got rejected from university?  Or accepted?  Now, who's there in Sean's body on Tuesday? Not Simba, perhaps, but also a different Sean, one that must be "re-known" by Tomison.

Look at the way that guy is hunched over as he walks?  Is that Sean?

Look at the way that guy is walking with his chest puffed out?  Is that Sean?

And what does it mean to be Sean now?  Who's there in the moment before he got the news about university and who's there the moment after?

Who are you?  Sean, always Sean.

Who's there? The guy feeling disappointed or proud about college.  

Do I need to tell you how complicated this drama can get if you see Sean acting a little more hurt or a little more arrogant than you think he should?  Do you say something like, "I barely recognize Sean since he heard about college."

And what about you?  What about how you see the world?  See Sean?  Has he changed in the wake of his news about college or are the eyes you look through to see him shaded in their own way by pity or jealousy? You say you barely recognize Sean but maybe he can't "act" like himself around you because he feels you looking at him as a failure or with envy?

"Ever since I got rejected from/into college,"  says Sean, "you see me differently . .  .or don't see me as who I am now."

Surely you know this sort of drama, know that the drama of recognition becomes especially powerful and tricky because you are not only seen by some other person, you also see how other people see you. You see them seeing you.

To clarify how seeing others seeing you is a formative part of life, let's quickly imagine another scene, one as simplified as Sean and university: You are twelve years old and you go home with a bad grade on a test or, if you like, a good grade on your test.

You tell dad you got an "F." 

Do you see him seeing you with shame and thus feel humiliated or do you see him seeing you with love and feel O.K.?

You tell Mom you got an "A."

She says "good job" but you see in her eyes that your good grade is still not good enough.  Or that's what you imagine you see and now you wonder if there is anything you can do to impress her.

Let's even extend the script of this second scenario a bit  . . . perhaps you are so desperate to see mom see you with approval that nothing she does will ever make you feel the pride and love you want to feel.  You have become convinced mom is never going to give you the praise you deserve so that just like when you look at Sean with too much pity or jealousy you look to your mom with more need and desperation than makes sense.

Indeed, maybe you are lucky enough to get a clue of your own distortions when you go home with a friend.  You tell mom about your "A," and then complain to your friend that your mom never celebrates your accomplishments.  Now your friend says, in surprise, "really, she smiled and said ‘good job' and I sure wish my mom would do that about my accomplishments."

You see something absent in how your mom sees you.  As a result of this you react with longing.  Yet your friend sees her seeing you with surplus.

As an audience member to your drama--a ghost--your friend exposes the problem not in how your mom is there, seeing you as never good enough but rather in how you see her seeing you.

For the sake of example, these scenarios are reductive and obviously no single such moment shapes us forever.  But such moments shape who we "are," how we see, and how we see ourselves being seen.  No wonder our being re-known in one moment is shaped by how we have been known in another moment, or all other moments.

Despite how many steps I am building into this drama you know there are actually many more, since all of this happens at the speed of light and since it happens through the prism of imagination too.

For surely as you go home with that "F" or that "A" and before you tell Dad or Mom about your grade, you also imagine how they will react, how they will see you.  You may imagine with great fear your dad's scowl or with desperate hope your mom's smile.  You are so in your drama, imagining it, that whatever happens may be secondary or unbelievable, as I have tried to suggest.

Your imagination of what you fear or what you hope for as you walked home with your test informs (or pre-informs) your reality to such a degree that you can't possibly see dad or mom accurately, may even doubt your friend when they give you an audience like view.

How can you be my friend if you do not take my side, see it as I see it?

Is your friend failing to see what you see?  After all, you know your parents better than they do.  But  hen maybe their eyes were not clouded by that knowledge or by the imagination you have developed around or because of what you know.

Your fried, to say it again, just knows your parents whereas you re-know them, or fail to re-know them.

Who has a better hold on the reality of the mom or dad who is there?  You or your friend?  The actor involved in the drama of recognition or the ghost, trying to know that drama?

Back on campus this might sound like:

I just know Sean will be unbearably proud if he gets into college . . . I won't be able to see him without resentment  . . . I will see him seeing me as "less than."   . . . Thus, I will act distant and resentful towards him.

Except that if you can think all this ahead of time you are a more enlightend than the average human.  Because such back and forths, such recognitions of our self in the drama of seeing and being seen are rarely this clear to us.  They happen too fast, matter too much.  As we all recognize.

As I describe it, any moment in life is a kind of atomic bomb, one second of recognition exploding into all the rest.

You know it is not quite so severe nor quite so "dramatic."

And yet listen to the conversation in the learning center or dining hall or dorms and you might hear people trying to understand or trace back or tolerate such moments.  This talk is often called "gossip" but gossip can also be thought of as a map back from or lens forward into the drama of recognition:

Who did she think she was there when she  . . .

Who do they think they are saying they will . . .

The gift of a play, Hamlet in particular, is to freeze all these light speed back and forths so that we can at least consider them.  We can lay out the map of knowing and imagining, see ourselves looking through the eyes of a character, haunt their world without being known and so, for these few hours, be free ourselves of the drama of recognition.

If we go slowly enough, as I am trying to do in these posts, we might grasp some part of what comes with knowing, being known, and being re-known. 

In this way the lines of the play put handles on the infinite.

Because, 

Nay, answer me:

Can be understood as:

Who are you now that you see someone here who can see you there?

And, . . . before I bring to you the whole drama of how you might see me or how we might imagine ourselves seeing each other:

Stand, and unfold yourself.

Unfold the flag you wave from across campus so I can see whether you walk with pride or shame.

Unfold the map of where you have been every moment of your life--parents, school, friends--so I do not disappoint you, nor you me, in how we see each other.

Unfold the script that has been written for you up to this point and which we, now, will write together as the future. we share and make, together.

Life does not allow us to step back from the drama of recognition.  Art does.

In the theater, where we cannot be known, we will not be re-known as someone we are not. We are free not to exist.  

Bernardo and Francisco look out to the world and it reflects on them as our own world reflects on us, as a mirror rather than an eye. They do not see us seeing them.

As ghosts, rather than friends or parents or Sean or Tomison, we are the black at the back of the glass, that which cannot be seen beyond or seen through.

And yet perhaps these guards, like us, feel something looking at them . . . who?  Or feel that something . . . nature, history, god . . . is behind or beyond everything that is, that infinite thing that calls out for us to grasp. 

This is to begin to suggest another big idea, that our remove makes us not only guards and ghosts, but a threat to all authority.

But we should talk about authority more generally first, which we can do by looking at the third line of the play, next time.

I hope to see you there,

--Mr. Ted

Who's there?

Posted on by tedoned

Dear Blue,

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, is a play about division and solidarity.

It begins with a question: “Who's there?”

‘Who’s there?’ is asked by a person pretending to be a person named Barnardo.

Barnardo is “a guard.”

And we are "an audience."

*****

Who's there?

The question divides the who from the what, those ‘there' from those not.

*****

Each of us in the audience is a who.

All of us--every who--hears this ‘who’s there?' question.

It would be understandable, then, if one of us responded in our usual who way:

“Oh, hi Bernardo.  It is I, Nduta, from the land of audience.”

Or,

“Hey, Bernardo, Sizo here."

Yet Nduta and Sizo stay quiet.

They say nothing.  As we all do.

No one not on stage answers the person pretending to be Barnardo

All we whos say nothing.

Instead, we pretend not to be  . . . "here."

*****

Nduta and Sizo have become guards.  They guard against their presence.

All of us in the land of audience now play this role.  Our stage of now is divided from the now up there where that person pretending to be Barnardo just asked a question.

We patrol the border that divides two worlds, ours here and that one there, where people pretend to be other people.

To play our role our answer to the "who's there?" question must be, ‘not me,’

‘not us.'

We commit to pretend.

We pretend not to be a who.

We pretend not to be.

We all do this. 

Together.

United.

Solid.

*****

The line that divides the world of audience from the world where people pretend to be other people is a mirror.

Barnardo guards.  We guard too.

The person pretending to be Barnardo pretends.  We pretend too.

There is a ‘there' there and a here ‘here.'

We all wonder what we are looking at.

We all all ask, "how does this world reflect on us?"

 

Barnardo looks into time and this reflects on on him just as it does for us when we

We look into timelessness. 

*****

What would happen next should Nduta or Sizo or you or I answer Barnardo?

We cannot know.  Maybe confusion, maybe a new play, maybe even a play better than the one we came to see.

But whatever that other play might be or become, it would not be Hamlet.

Hamlet takes place in a script.  In that sense it is exact.

This script tells a guard named Barnardo to ask, "Who's there?"

In response, we mirror Barnardo and become guards.

We also become ghosts.

We haunt this space, Blue.

Like ghosts we are there but not, here in a place that does not exist.

Also . . . In about forty lines (which is still right at the start of the script) a ghost enters the play and appears on stage for Barnardo and others to see.

Because there is a guard on stage I cast us guards.

Because a ghost shows up soon I think of us as ghosts.

I am learning from the mirror of the play into which I look, learning from its future. 

What does the future teach?

*****

The ghost is the ghost of the former king who died less than two months ago. Barnardo (and Marcellus and Horatio, who we will soon meet) will all see this ghost. They will all decide the ghost matters, or matters enough, to report what they see to someone.

And how much matter does a ghost have?

The person they will report seeing this goes to is Hamlet.

Because the king was also Hamlet's dad.

*

The ghost is the ghost of "the father."

*

On stage we see a person divided.

The person is divided between themselves and the person they pretend to be.

This person pretending to be someone else--a person named Barnardo it will turn out--knows who is there: Us, the audience.

Yet this person asks: "Who's there?"

Thus this Barnardo person must not know we are there even if the person pretending to be Barnardo knows it full well. 

Otherwise, Barnardo would say:

Oh hi audience, it is I, Barnardo, a guard of my land.

Instead, Barnardo asks: Who's there?

Being Barnardo means not knowing one totally obvious answer to that very question.

 

It is as if our roles come with responsibility.

Forgo guarding the line between our "here" and that "there" and the script is lost.

We save a world by not being part of it.

Forgo being ghosts and Barnardo can not come into existence, cannot be whole and solid, whatever that means.

We secure a soul by being impossible to believe in.

We permit a person to pretend they are somone else, help them leave their true self behind.  

We keep the faith that all the other whos in our land of audience will remain on guard, will choose to matter as ghosts, solid in our committment to not be "there," together.

(Could, somehow, Barnardo, imagine an audience of ghosts watching him?  Maybe . . . possibly . . . we should consider this later as we consider the contest between knowledge and imagination but think of it here this way: Say your father dies and your mother remarries and your now have a step-dad. [This is what happens to Hamlet.] Do you you feel the ghost of your dad looking at you?  You "know" he is not "there" and yet in his abscence, perhaps especially as you see your mom or your step-dad you imagine that he is present.  Say your mom dies and your dad remarries? How much matter does the memory of her have?  Does it haunt you?  Do you sometimes imagine you see her when you look at your father?  Or your step mom?  Or a sibling?  Does she or that memory haunt you?

We don't know enough about Barnardo yet to know what haunts him or what he imagined but in asking: Who's there? He looks to be adressing those who might inhabit his world, not those he can imagine and certainly not us, those who guard the world as if we have no matter. )

For now, in this moment at least, to be whole and less divided, Barnardo must be an unbeliever in us, an unknower of us, perhaps not even capable of imagining us.

How good are we, Blue, at imagining ourselves?  And without the ghosts of matter? 

 **** 

The ghost is the ghost of “the father."

In what way is "Father" is not the same as "Mother." 

****

As I said, Hamlet's dad died recently and Hamlet's mom remarried soon after.  None of this pleases Hamlet much and before Barnardo and Horatio and Marcellus return to stage to tell the person pretending to be Hamlet they have seen a ghost that looks like the king, Hamlet's dad, we see Hamlet express distress about life twice, once in public and once in private.

In private, when Hamlet says. 

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Weary.  Stale.  Flat.

Not energetic.  Not fertile.  Not energized.

Only we ghosts hear Hamlet say this (or think it). 

But before that we watch the person preteding to be Hamlet on stage with people pretending to be Hamlet's mom and step-dad.  We see them all "at court."

Here we learn much of the business about Hamlet's family and we also get a sense of hamlet's distress.  We get this in part because, when Hamlet's mom asks him to accept the common knowledge that at a certain point you have to stop grieving, Hamlet "act" badly.  That is, we see that Hamlet is either:

A) Terrible at pretending

or

B) Great at pretending

And though I want to get into this scene more as we go, you might best understand what I mean here if we see it as the kind of event that happens often in "teenage" life.

You come home from school and one of your parents says: How was your day?

You say "fine."

Your parents don't quite believe this. You don't believe it either.  But you pretend (or hide) until you are alone or are talking with a friend when you think (or say) that everything is weary, stale and flat.

It is a strange kind of interchange.  On the one hand you are absolutely being yourself.  "Leave me alone," you are sayng.  "My life is too complicated and loaded for you to understand," you are saying.  "What I have to say to you is too comlicated to say to anyone, especially my parents," You are saying.  You are saying something like that or maybe a hundred other things which these phrases I am inventing for you serve only as placeholders. 

And yet any audience to this scene between you and your parents will know that whatever you are not saying hides all sorts of possibilites. 

In a way your parents are asking you, "Who's there?" and you are saying "someone who prefers to be like a ghost to you." 

Now Hamlet does not say "fine" in the court scene. (Again, we will get into this scene a bit more next time.)  But it would be hard to imagine anyone who has ever been a teenager or a parent who would fail to see that Hamlet is not saying, "Oh hey, Mom and Step-Dad let me tell everything about how I am feeling and all I am thinking." 

And you do not need to know to have seen the play more than once to think that maybe Hamlet, who has yet to hear anything about the dad/ghost king walking around is imagining dad/the previus king when mom/the current queen keep saying, in essence: how was school? 

All of which means that whether Hamlet is terrible at pretending or great at  pretending and what Hamlet acually feels (and what best reveals this feeling) will depend on what you think matters to this Hamlet person, what it means to have "an audience" of your family if not the ghosts your family lives with, and how good a job the person pretending to be Hamlet does at pretending to be someone who is pretending to be "myself" when everyone can clearly see that is the one thing you are not being.

 

The ghost is the ghost of “the father."

****

"Father" is not the same as "Mother."  Those two words point to different things.  But I hope you will agree they have more to do with one another than either has to do with "bus" or "factory."

(Intermittently, we will need to think about how words work because, as I have already suggested about the script and the world, Barnardo is made of words.  As is Hamlet, as is the ghost. [This distinguishes them from the people pretending to be Barnardo, pretending to be Hamlet, pretending to be the ghost. All those people--the players--are, like you and me, made of more than words.  The people pretending to be other people and you and I are made of flesh and blood as well as words.] But words are also a chief way--the chief way--we understand and interpret and explain life, the tool we most often use to measure and justify what matters.)

So let me start here: Words are arrows

By saying words are arrows, I mean to suggest two interrelated functions words perform.

First, words point to things like ‘father' and ‘mother,' as I said, and second, words are like the arrows you shoot with a bow.

I write "father" to point to a man with children and "mother" to point to a woman with children.

But those words must go from one place to another, fly from me and this screen to you. 

Now before they go flying, we should see that some things are easier to point to (and so perhaps be more likely to hit their target) than others.

For instance, if I write "bus" I point to a big vehicle people ride in to get to school or work. Using those three letters "b-u-s" is easier than drawing a picture of such a vehicle, but if required I could do that instead.

We could draw lots of things in the world: factory, phone, tree, apple, shark, bed, and on and on.  We could probably draw a mother and a father as well.

It is unlikely, then, that if you and I shoot the arrows of these words back and forth at one another there will be too much confusion.

It is, however, more difficult to draw things like “justice” or “democracy” or "colonialism" than it is ‘bus' or ‘factory' or ‘phone.'

You might be able to draw a scene of colonialism but it is hard to draw that concept.

(Indeed, how would you draw the thing the word “concept?" points to?)

Now in my pointing here to how words work I aim for understanding.  What I am writing here will, I hope, carry the ideas I have in my mind to wherever it is in your brain you say "I understand."

And yet, try as I might, the case may be that the words I shoot land not in the "I understand" part of your brain but rather (or also) that part of your brain that says "I'm bored" or "you repeat yourself too much" or, perhaps, "Mr. Ted, despite these words and understanding them to one degree or another, I see you pretending."

It is true that I am often a poor marksmen. I try to hold too many ideas together at once.  I over use images.  I try too hard at times to be exact and at others do not try nearly enough.  And it would be easy to see me pretending to be cleverer than I am.  

But if I often draw my bow poorly, can I say that because you are human, you are not always an easy target?

Maybe you've been distracted by your phone or are daydreaming about something more compelling to you than Hamlet or are only reading this to see if I use your name, as I have Nduta's and Sizo's.

And maybe, if I write "bus" but do not say "yellow school bus" and so you think of a red city bus instead.

Or, while I do not mean "yellow" and "uncomfortable" to land in your brain at all, that's what you think of when you see "bus" because in children's books, busses are often shown as yellow and because the bus you took to school had uncomfortable.

Maybe I presume yellow because most school busses in America are that color and it does not occur to me they are a different color where you grew up.  Now, you have a suspicion of anything or everything I say. 

If these confusions and or lack of exactitudes in meaning do not matter all that much with "bus" what about with  "justice" and "democracy" and "colonialism"?

All I am saying here is that on difficulty we have is that the meaning we each make of the words shot our way depends at least a little on our own personal experience, on the gost of our past if you will, and how that shapes us as targets for new meaning. 

Whats more, words are imperfect tools because we so often want more than mere understanding, we want the magic of resonance.  

I have a funny image for the way words often get mangled mid-flight but also how they sometimes resonate magically and that is to picture our word arrows not just flying from one person to another but flying through a forest of meaning too. 

It is as if the words we shoot back and forth cannot help but pierce leaves of meaning as they fly.

By the time any arrow gets to its target it not only carries the word it points to but includes other words--leaves on the trees--it pierces along the way.

In one sense this is a terrible problem. How can I possibly know "bus" pierces  "uncomfortable" for you?  But in another way it is an opportunity to try and jangle leaves in the forest of meaning so that meaning resonates within us.  Now, we do not just say "I understand" but we also feel a pluck in our heart and soul.

As an example, here's a line of poetry written from Warsan Shirer and recommended to me by Mr. Dash.

 
 

A

 

I have my mother's mouth and my father's eyes
on my face they are still together.

There is resonance in that, Blue, or so I hope you will feel.

A string plucked is for most of us, since we cannot help but be divided from mom--she's someone else after all--and from dad, who is another person too, and yet made solid by them in that relaibly imperfect way which twists up in each of us as our family drama, the one that rarely fails to  stamp our face with who they are or were, or were to each other.

And what is it but our face we present to the world when it asks us: Who's there?

Artists like Shakespeare and Shirer want words to resonate in a way that is memorable or moving.  They shoot an arrow or two through the forest of meaning and give us a sense of everything, as if they scratch every tree and ping each leaf.

A hamony of meaning you could call it or, if you like the meta, a way to become aware of the forest itself.

* * * *

For now, let's acknowledge a few more things about words.  First, words can act as placeholders.  "Who" and "What" sit in the same space grammatically, are similarly shaped leaves, and may resonate across or against the same frequency.

A more real world version of what I mean by place holding is that you can often understand what someone means even if they are speaking another language and speaking it poorly.

Plane? Go there? 

Will likely get me to where I need to go even if those are the only words in English I know and even if what I mean to ask you is "Is the airpot in this direction?" You can understand my question well enough to point me along my way, to draw it out in real space.

(At least thsi is true for those few languages I know something about, which are romantic languages.  But I presume there is some equivalnt of how words and the things they point to can serve as placeholder in Arabic and Swahili and the many languages you know about which I know nothing.)

In terms of placeholders I ‘ve also ‘begun to use your names to suggest "a person" or "people in general." 

Does that honor you or ghost you?

Or is being a ghost honorific in its way, as I mean it to be, by being fun?  By playing?

And will it haunt you to suggest words are ghosts as well as arrows?  Can you see something haunting your forest of meaning, like a rumbly bus, because your parents speak themselves into you?  Because your culture has message for you?  Do you agree that this part of our ghostly past often matters more to us than whatever is happening on our stage of now?  Or, more likely, that the words of our parents and culture often make that stage look a certain way for us?  Somtimes clear, sometimes anything but, and sometimes a place where--we think--we must pretend? 

* * *

(In the distance of what Wallace Stevens calls my "Final Solliloquy" I sense a ghost: 

Who's there?

Mr. Ted, it is I, Tomison . . . here to object.  You overwork these images of a forest of meaning and of strings in our hearts and the ghosting of me and the audience and words. 

Or, to what degree is this interaction where I think I am overdoing it going on in the theater of my head?")

***

Words are two kinds of arrows. 

Words carry extra words (or additional meanings) as they fly from one of us to another of us. 

Words can be placeholders.

Words can resonate and, in so doing--rumble up our humanity.

Another thing to say about words is that with words anything can be said about anything:

Two plus two equals five

The last shall be first . . .

Ice melts fire

Robots love history

The ghost of my mother matters more than all the factories in the world

These things are backward or silly or paradoxical but perhaps true and may resonate despite (or because of) their being false or untrue, not adding up or not being easy to point to.

But because you can say anything about anything you can stretch the bounds of meaning, sense, and reality with the words you use.

It is as if you grow new trees in the forest of meaning and find new notes with which to play on the strings of the heart.

This capacity to say anything about anything means our communications  operate between brackets of the impossible.   

In communicating to you I want specificity.  I ask, "who's there, Blue?"  And I want to target that part of your mind which says "I understand exactly" such that you feel undivided from all other thoughts, as if there will be no missing answers to your questions.

Who's here?  Me and only me.  Solid and clear and whole at the center of creation. 

I will fail at this if only because you can conjure up an impossible number of  questions, far more than any marksmen, let alone one as clunky as I, can target.   

Yet what's more, I also want what I say to hold a place every person can feel  solidarity with, find a grammer that suggests each and every thing we can all point to, a forest in which we all know all the leaves on all the trees such that we say, together, "I speak this language too, this forest is our home." 

And at this too I will fail, not only--again--because of a colossal deficit of skills, but because you (like all of us) are already in conversation with too many ghosts to join--on the stage of now--all the rest of us.

All that has been, all that is, and all that will be can gather together, but not at once. 

Now matter what I do about the theater in my head it will never fully be exportable to the theater in your head.  Not even the word "everything" will point to what we are all trying to hold in our hand. 

Something like this is why Wallace Stevens does not say,

God and the imagination are one.

But, rather says,

We say, God and the imagination are one . . .

God and the imagination nudge up against those brackets of the impossible, give us close to what we can say as a species . . . not divided . . . solid . . . one.

* * *

When it comes to words, it is worth knowing that for a long time, the most famous words in Western Literature came from Hamlet.

These are the words:

To be or not to be, that is the question.

(The emphasis on “the” is mine.)

[Famous? Is that what I mean?
Or do I mean these words haunt other words? Matter in the forest more than most?  Come to look like leaves we cannot miss?]

You could say

To be or not to be, that is the question

has fathered countless other words, thoughts, appreciations and considerations, including these words which I am putting here on this screen and on your stage of now.

Why fathered and not mothered?

Hamlet says “To be or not to be” in the middle of the play at a point when many of us ghosts watching from the audience will hear the troubled prince as thinking about suicide.

As an audience, we still stay silent.  We will still pretend not to be.

We point at nothing.

Do we matter?

Yes.

Without us being ‘not there,' there is no script to inhabit, no world to be in up on stage, and no way for the person pretending to be Hamlet to be the Hamlet who thinks: Maybe I should not be.

In real life, you would know full well how to respond to this ‘to be or not' question.

That is, if Hamlet were your friend thinking such thoughts you would say: “Don’t kill yourself.”

Your friend's life is worth guarding. This is clear.

The most famous question in Western Culture, I am saying, has an obvious answer:

Hey friend, if your question is to be or not to be then you should definitely be.

But we, who are not being, cannot say this.

As it happens, Hamlet does not commit suicide.  He dies at the end of the play, fatally injured by a poisoned sword.  (Much later I expect to say something about the "suicide-like-ness" of this, but is it certainly different than "killing yourself" as we usally think of it, as we point to it or would draw it.)

When we are first alone with Hamlet (after we see him pretending in front of his parents at court and before Barnardo and crew show up to announce they saw the ghost of the father), Hamlet says:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

Well before ‘to be or not to be,' in other words, Hamlet laments

. . . that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!

But Hamlet's flesh stays solid, it does not resolve itself into matter-less dew and neither the person we first meet nor the one asking the question acts on "self-slaughter," at least not exactly. 

In any case, at both points Hamlet explictly seems to mention suicide, something—god, fear of god's ‘everlasting canon,' a desire to go on in life, ‘conscience,’ a ghost-like angel, a script that will not bid adieu to its title character yet, something else--protects Hamlet, keeps this charachter from finding the resolve to not be.

Some ‘thing,' not some ‘who.'

Some of these things I say might be guarding Hamlet, Hamlet says explicitly, some are implied and others I guess at.  But I would defend my guesses on the grounds that even early on meeting when Hamlet (or anyone) we know something about the theater of their head and that one of these things are why they do not casually slaughter themselves and that they put a high premium on choosing to be rather than to not be.

Including "a script that will not bid adieu to its title character yet" in my list of reasons may not have anything to do with why, from Hamlet's perpective, Hamlet continues to be, but it is surely why the person pretending to be Hamlet has a role to play.  Just as an audience of ghosts may be impossible for Barnardo to imagine, that I do not kill myself now because a script writes out my next moves might be hard for me to believe.  (In fact I, Mr. Ted, do not believe that.)  And yet if the person writing the play wants the person pretending to be Hamlet to continue in that pretence, wants the play to go on, then Hamlet will continue to be.  And if Hamlet never says, "I must continue on because the script demands it," for reasons we will get into, it is not so far-fetched to imagine Hamlet as someone who sees more of the ghosts out there in the audience than does, say, Barnardo.  

Often we are like Barnardo: We can see that there is no audience of ghosts out there in front of us.

We are also often like Hamlet, wondering how to be inside the script of fate, wondering what the ghosts will demand of us to keep us playing on our stage of now.

* * *

If the question is “to be or not to be?” there is really only one answer: be

(If the question is "Who's there?" The answers are infinite, or infinute minus one, but we will get to that in a bit.)

To be . . . or if I can just write “be,” . . . is the easiest and hardest word to point to or shoot on its way through the forest.  While you can draw a bus, how do you draw--or not draw--the idea that we “be” or are “being?”  And yet how can you avoid it?

If we do not be, what's the point of riding the bus?

If I say, “Here comes the bus” I must ‘be’ in order to say that and you must ‘be’ in order to hear it.

Even if I draw a stick figure I convey the idea of being.

Is there anything we do, think, or experience that does not imply or presume we "be?"

(Maybe be, like “I” and “You” and a few others falls into that group of words that are primal in the sense that they are always part of the forest of meaning. We don’t think about them any more than we do the absolutes of gravity and oxygen but they are invariably there and become instantly notable if they are not.)  

In any case, look at how fast "be" expands if we add a few qualifiers, words which are also primary, or almost.  

How be?

Where be?

When be?

Or, to make it a little more as it sounds when we talk to ourselves in the theater of our head:

How can I be happy, not sad?

Where do I want to be?  Cape Town or Tunis?

Will I be at university a year from now? Should I be a grandparent thirty years from now?

(A moment ago we only needed “to be.” We were stick figures. Now our emotions, a whole continent, and the family we have yet to give birth to have been conjured. Words are an odd spirit.)

But something is missing in my three examples of how we talk to ourselves.  In those examples, there's not much of a sense of how we might be or could be or should be:

I want to be happy in Cape Town . . . I can only be happy in Cape Town . . . I must get to Cape Town . . . how can I get to Cape Town.

But I have to be at school, working hard to be a good student because my parents put so much pressure on me . . .where is my freedom, the "I" I want to be?

If only I had been born twenty years earlier and was a super genius and looked like a movie star and did not have to be here, being unhappy me at school, studying instead of being happy me in Cape Town or the happy me I know I will be when I have children and grandchildren.

These examples are reduced and silly.  Probably you do not sound much like this when you talk to yourself.  But they have more of the desire, expectation and doubt that confuse and energize our thinking than did my first examples.  

Because our thinking comes with emotional costumes we drape over the words we use to explain ourselves to whomever it is there when we talk to our self. 

Our inner voice has tone and character.

For instance, most people I know have a voice in their head that judges them harshly, a voice that acts as an inner critic.  (This is why Mary Oliver's primal words--You do not have to be good--are such a relief, such a counter-commandment.) Maybe you hear your inner monologue more as a friendly support than a harsh judge (I hope so), as a supportive parent or sibling.  Maybe this voice sounds like a friend or, at times, is no more empty and unresponsive.  

However you hear yourself, though, or might characterize this voice, surely your inner monologue is not made of matter and is, in this sense, less like a factory or bus and more like a ghost. 

And even if we love the voice we hear in our head we still might enjoy the relief of going into a theater to spend a few hours pretending not to be, to be free from the voices playing around inside the theater of our head as we live on our stage of now.

And . . . and  . . . even if we know nothing about Barnardo we expect this person to have some sort of analogous theater in his head too. That’s about as absolute to being human as is the gravity that keeps us here.

Like my earlier guesses, I can know that if Barnardo is a person, not a robot or machine, he has a theater in his head. 

***

Now, what’s going on in the theater of Barnardo’s head?

We do not know. 

Maybe the sound Barnardo hears, the one out there that sounds like a who, was only imagined or made up, exists only “there” in Barnardo’s imagination..

But likely Barnardo, a guard shouting out, is not doing all the aburd over working of words and ideas I am doing here.  My games are exactly the kind we do not play when we are guarding against something physicaly dangerous. For instance, if a fire starts in the theater and all the oxygen starts to go out of the building the person pretending to be Barnardo will stop pretending and run and those of us pretending to be ghosts will do the same.  The time for play of any kind--at theater, at word meanings, at the philosophies that might come from these--is over.  Now it is time to find the exit.  This is primal.

But if anything can be said about anything then we can, using words, move with imaginative power through the forest of meaning, ping ourselves off leaves primal and obscure and try to parse the here and there of the past and the now and the future that make up the theater of our head and its determining of, and by, our stage of now. 

As you are already getting used to, though, this work comes through and with the problems and possibilities of words. 

Like, when I think of my now deceased mother as she was thirty years ago is she here?  No, she's not here like the bus I sit on or like the factory I am headed to.  But she is somewhere, to me at least. 

And yet now she is outside the theater of my head too and here on this screen.  

Are you imagining her?  An old white woman looking, once again, with disapointment at her son? .  

Will you believe me if I tell you she was an angel?  What if I say she was a devil? 

If, now, I think of Keabetswe and Ladouce on the quad, or Fred and Fadekemi in class they are not here either.  Nor than they are there.  They were there, like  my mother, ghosts I drum up first in the theater of my head via memory and imagination and then offer to you.  

Is it easier for you to see your peers than my mom?  Which of them are more “real?”  

What I am saying now is, actually, my way to get into a problem I have in writing to you about all this, one I know I will struggle with.

And that problem is the “realness” of angels and demons.  This is not quite the same as talking about the realness of god, but it is similar.  

First, let me make a distinction between fake and true. 

My mother was not fake in the sense that she had bone and blood.  That is true of Keabetswe and Ladouce, Fred and Fadekemi, you and the person pretending to be Barnardo too.  Anyone who needs to run out of the theater if it catches on fire is real.

But if the theater goes up in smoke, the next night in another theater someone pretending to be Barnardo can walk out on stage and ask “Who’s there?”   Barnardo is not real. 

Barnardo, like Hamlet, and like my mom (or like any of us) can speak (or show or represent) the truth or speak (or show or represent) lies.  

But we are real and they--the pretend people, maybe including the people t/here only in memory--are not.  We bleed and die and gasp for air in a fire.  If they do any of these things it is in the world of pretend only.  They are there, where everything--no matter how true--is fake. 

I know some of you think some of books like Harry Potter are a danger to you.   You fear they will influence your thoughts and beliefs, perhaps especially in your relationship to god.  They will be, that is, the source of the wrong kind of haunting, a place from which demons spring. 

For you, as I understand it, you want to be on guard against a force as real as a fire in the theater.  That sounds smart and I want to avoid the debate about whether demons and god are real and just say, for now, they are real enough to point to in words.  (Can I say that we all know what it is like to feel we have demons, not angels, acting in the theater of our heads?)  If I am moved by thinking of my mom--there she is in my minds eye--I know it is possible to have bad thoughts (demons) in that same space and that such images can even be dangerous. 

Now if demons are real and pretend--the false--is a source of them, then you need to play the guard differently than if they are not.  As a cultural thing you can see this in action in the way Christians will offer paintings of Jesus and god but Muslims will not.  In my accounting this is a difference not of what’s true or not but how we deal with what’s pretend and what’s not.

But this all get somplicated because words are, after all, pretend. 

Bus?  This is just pixels on a screen, not a vehicle you can ride in. 

Gravity is true and real.  I’d urge you, whether you are a deep believing Christian or Muslim or a completely non-believing athiest to not challenge its force.  Do not jump of a building.  Be.  And yet how often do we--even those of us who do not believe in any god let or the “reality” of angels and demons--take a leap of faith about our ideas or our loved ones or even a football team we follow?

What I am trying to say to those of you who think Harry Potter is corrupting and demon-like--and remember, I said I would say this badly--is not that there are not bad influences but that there is less of a difference between how we patrol--as guards--the world of pretend than we may think AND that patrolling this line in the theater of our head--where nothing is quite as real as a bus or a factory--may gain, rather than lose, education by practicing as a ghostly guard in a real theater.  

I hope you will see that I am not making a case for or against any book or telling you what to read or avoid.  I am saying that there is a lot to consider when you are alone with yourself exactly because you are never exactly alone.  You are always haunted in ways good and bad by your mother or father (or agents like them) and maybe too by whatever haunted them.

Let me put this all a different way or restate it or complicate it further with more questions:

Where does the line between good thoughts and bad thoughts exist?  Is it real? 

Where should you patrol in order to guard your "self?"

Is that self something we conjure? The way we conjure memories of our parents and friends?  

What would your grandparents say about the theater in your head?  Or are they in there already, as ghosts, telling you what to patrol?

And if you can account for, say, your grandmother as an influence in the theater of your head, can you also account for the person she pretended to be?  Or the people who haunted her?  

What about her demons? 

Even if, as I hope, she is an angel for you.

**

‘To be or not to be’ is addressed by Hamlet to Hamlet.  No one else is there, on stage. 

Of course, we, the audience, are there.  

And it could be, as the person pretending to be Hamlet speaks Hamlet's words, those words include the ghost of grandparents and parents and all the words (or ideas or impulses or conglomerations of history) that make up an internal monologue, what we sometimes call a conscious.

By contrast, “Who’s there?” is addressed by Barnardo to someone beyond, someone on stage, a being in Barnardo’s world. 

Barnardo hears something (senses something, imagines something) that suggests a who is out there.  A footstep on a branch?  A cough?  A breath?  That feeling you have when you think you are not alone? 

If the answer about whether to be or not is binary--I will be or I will not be--the possible answers to “Who’s there?” are infinite.  Or, rather, infinite minus one, as I said before.

To begin to clarify what I mean by this, I want suggest that as a question, ‘Who’s there?’ differs slightly from the question: "Who are you?"

**

At school, you are person who is late for Mr. Tait’s class or you are the person who did well on Miss Lisa’s test.

Are you popular on campus? Are you someone the popular student can trust or like or love?

Are you Ayomide?  Are you Samkelo?

In these ways the world is asking “Who are you?” All the time.

‘Who are you?’ and, ‘Who's there?' differ, though, in how much (or what kind) of history (and culture and mannequin/ghosts) you operate with.

Who are you when you dance?  Who are you when you take a biology test?  Who are you when you play a football match?  Who are you if you fight?

You are Houcine or Melanie or Marubini or someone who fights.

Who are you as you try to be on time for class, do well on your tests, be popular and lovable? You are you.

But who's there at the dance?  Well, that could be anyone.

At the dance, you might find the suave and the cool, like you and your friends, or the uncool and unsuave, like me and most adults.

Who's there in class?  Your friends or peers you have not met.

Who's there on your team?  The skilled or the novice.

Who's there in an army? The brave and the frightened.

To oversimplify: Who you "are" cannot be changed but who's "there" allows for all sorts of changes because every place changes the context, offers us a new stage, a new world for us to be a different person than who we “are.”

"Who are you?" Asks you to identify the person who walks around with a theater in their head. 

"Who's there?"  Asks  you to identify yourself as someone on the stage of now. 

And that means, as often happens, on the stage of your friends you might be relaxed and happy and, the next moment, on the stage of a big test, you are worried and stressed. We change who we are . . . there . . . in each of those situations.

And depending on which stage we find ourselves, all of us act, or can act, differently.

And if we ask a question like:

Who (will be) there at the the test or the dance or the match?

The imagination powers our thinking in terms costumed by hope and desire and expectation:

I will be the best student  . . . I will be the coolest dancer  . . . I will be the most impactful player.

You are who you are on each and every stage or, if you like, are the collection of whos you have been “there” on every stage of your past and might be who you can imagine yourself being “there” on every stage of the future.

But how do you actually be on those stages?  Will you need to be on guard and patrol who you are?  Will you confident going into the test, extied for the party, nervous before the game. 

Or will you pretend to something you are not? 

On campus you have a name for people who manipulate too actively the stages we all live on. That is, when someone pretends to like teachers to get a good grade or pretends to like you to get your vote so they can be elected as Chairperson or even says sweet things to you so you will kiss them, they play (or ‘act’) based more on where they are rather than who they are.

Here they are one person, there another.

When a person does this too often or in too extreme a fashion, you call them “a player."

And ‘player’ is, as you will recall, what Shakespeare calls an actor.

What actions will you take, Blue, on the stages life offers you every moment?

Who will you be there? 

* *

In life you have to choose between Cape Town or Tunis.

You might desire to go to the moon or Mars, but you do not expect to meet lots of people from either place.

On campus we see a world that follows lthe aws of nature we understand will be true anywhere on earth and exist for as long as we are alive.

The world of pretend, however, does not need to obey the laws of physics or biology. 

For instance, most animals do not talk or sing as they do in The Lion King, in the world of art we can accept such "reality.”

Who's there?

Oh, hey, look, it is Simba.

While it might be quite surprising if the The Hulk or a dragon or a wizard turned out to be the answer to Barnardo's "Who's there?" question, in the world of Marvel or Game of Thrones or Harry Potter, the answer could be any of these.

Given the rules of the everyday "real" world, this will never happen.  In the world of art, it happens all the time.

When we look into the mirror of a movie or a book or, as is the case of Hamlet, the stage in front of us, we see a world projected/reflected there that allows reality to stretch no less than do words and imagination where anything can be anything.

Here’s a strange stretch. Suppose the answer to Barnardo’s question were “Barnardo?”

Have you ever seen a movie in which someone who looks and acts exactly like the main character shows up. A clone? A spy? An alien with shape shifting abilities?

The elastic rules of pretend mean the answer to Barnardo’s question could even be another Barnardo. 

Who's there? Asks Barnardo.  And the answer comes: It is I, Barnardo.

(How often we feel that the ghosts in the audience of the theater of our head adopt our name.)

Anyone, I am saying might be there for Barnardo, even another Barnardo. 

Anyone except us.  

Even if a perfect replica of Mr. Ted shows up as who is there for Barnardo--again a possibility that art allows--I know that replica is not me.

The possible answers to “Who’s there?” is infinite, but unless I answer Barnardo it must be reduced by at least one. Whoever that it is it there, it is not me. 

In the same way that pretending not to be clarifies the line that demarcates  here freom there, this truth that I cannot be part of what is fake, up there on stage, offers containment to a world in which anything can be anything. 

Now we have a bracket on everything, a handle on the infinite.

It means, to correct myself , that anything can be said about anything . . . almost.

Because I cannot be there for Barnardo I must be me. It turns the question "who's there?" into an equally important and (almost) unlimited question: Who's not there?

Who’s not there? Nduta is not there. Sizo is not there. The audience is not there.

In the case of these few moments in this theater, to not be is to be.

To not be Barnardo is to be me.

At the root of the question “Who’s there?” Is the reminder that I am not you, that we are not each other.

*

Well, thanks Mr. Ted. You've made me read all of this only to say the most obvious thing ever. Let me speak for all kids everywhere and say “Duh, I am not you, you are not me, is not exactly new or useful information.”

Right you are.  We might've started there.

But this cornerstone of knowing is harder to expose than you might think.  Or maybe some things are too big to see.

While we know every moment of our lives that we “be” inside the body we have and not some other body, that we are fundamentally divided from all others, we pretend that we are united with others in all sorts of ways: as family, by friendship, by religion and country and so on.

Some of that pretend is true and crucial.  Some false and dangerous. And that is true even if all pretend is false. 

Hamlet explores the space between the world of blood and bone and the ghost world of art by giving us people who, like us, attempt to understand, justify, and interpret the theater in their heads as they answer the question the stage of now they see themselves on asks them "Who's there?"

And maybe, like us too, everyone in this play--especially Hamlet--answers this question totally and completely wrong.  The play navigates a space of infinite mistakes or, again, infinite minus one since, here we are (or I am anyway) still trying to learn from it, still thinking that for me, something worthwhile is here.

And for you too. 

But all that is for later mediations. 

For now, we can ask if the possibilities and paradoxes of language are more likely to unite or divide us.

And is the certainty I am not you a foundation of hope or a canyon of trouble?

Or is it something else?

And how should we think about questions like these?

And do they matter?*

More about all this as we enter into the drama of recognition . . . next time.

See you then, and there,

--Mr. Ted

We guard our side of a line that is also a mirror.

This line only exists because we all see through it. 

Those up on stage see through it into the unknown, into the emptiness of space, into the infinite possibilities of an impossible to anwer question: what will happen next?.

We see though it to see those seeing the world as we see it when we are not ghosts. 

What reflects on them is  reflect on them, but not before they can do anything about it. 

They will reflect on us, what we will do with their image still to be determined. 

****

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Hamlet says. Weary.  Stale.  Flat. Not energetic.  Not fertile.  Not energized. But we know the history of Hamlet's recent past because before we get to be alone with Hamlet, we watch the person preteding to be Hamlet on stage along with people pretending to be Hamlet's mom and step-dad.  We see them "at court." Also, after we watch Hamlet pretend to be clear at court and after we hear Hamlet express distress about family and life--I am clear about everything except what to understand, think, and feel given that everything is stale, weary and flat--Barnardo and the others who agreed to tell someone they saw a ghost come onto stage to report what they saw to Hamlet. Because the ghost of the king they will now claim to have seen is also the ghost of Hamlet's dad.

And there Hamlet pretends not to be upset about recent events or, at least, snaps back at mom when she says that maybe there is reason not to be acting all sulky

Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity. HAMLET  Ay, madam, it is common. QUEEN  If it be, Why seems it so particular with thee? HAMLET  “Seems,” madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.” We could spend a lot of time with the differnce between things that ‘are" and  things that "seem" like they are.   But what I want to say about our introduction to Hamlet on stage with others is that this person is either:

A) Terrible at pretending

or

B) Great at pretending

And what I mean here will best be understood if we take the kind of event that happens often in "teenage" life. You come home from school and one of your parents says: How was your day? You say "fine." Your parents don't quite believe this.  You don't believe it either.  But you pretend (or hide) until you are alone or are talking with a freind when you think (or say) that everything is weary, stale and flat. Now Hamlet does not say "fine" in the court scene.  Instead we get "know not seems," about which there will be more to say next time.  But for now we can say that whether Hamlet is terrible or great at  pretending--that what Hamlet acually feels and in what way it reveals it--will depend on what you think matters to this person we are meeting for the first time, what it means to have "an audience" (not of ghosts but of your family), and how good a job the person pretending to be Hamlet does at pretending to be someone who is pretending to be "clear" when everyone can clearly see something else is going on. Is that clear?  Does that clarify?

Dial In Kindness, Dial Up Anonymity.

Posted on by tedoned

Somewhere Coach John Wooden says you should do two kind things each day, and do them anonymously.

If your job--provost, headmaster, teacher--is to design a program, make a schedule work, or navigate a class that moves people forward in life, teach them to do the above too, as best you can.  And do the same yourself.

And make it fun to do, if at all possible.

The future we want? Surely it includes more kindness, less ego.

Posted in Ivy

Harvard? Stanford? Can I ask You A Favor?

Posted on by tedoned

Dear Harvard,

Wanna change the world?  For real?  Require applicants to know how to grow a green pepper or demand they know how to change a bike tire.  Tell the world you will give preference to kids who ride public transportation.

Because if you really want to offer terra firma an upgrade, that's all you need to do.

As you often like to imply, you run the system.  You are #1.  Cool.  Good for you and a big congrats.  Branding that makes even Google and Hollywood jealous is no small accomplishment.  But being an icon means that far beyond the thousands of kids who apply to Harvard and do not get in are tens of thousands who do not apply (but might) and millions who don't really know what the Ivy League is but nevertheless attend schools that mold themselves implicitly or explicitly to serve your admissions process.

Might you shape them into something that helps us all sustain our world? Since students are a product moving on the assembly line you engineer, could you please engineer them towards behaviors our whole world needs?  Please?

The world needs a population that lives on less, that cools rather than heats.  (It is the research completed by your brainiacs as much as any that shows this, is it not?)  Make it clear, then, that a Harvard student will begin their career as a person who does those things a sustainable world demands.  Make sure even the geniuses can tend garden and the future Nobel laureate will get around town by something other than a Mercedes.  Insist on a minimum standard for all your applicants of those activities that make today better, a day a hundred years from now possible.  Force those tiger mom's now picking up their kids in SUV's to tell their kids that Harvard expects them to be biking home instead.  Let's see what that does for truth and light.

The above requires nothing more of you than a willingness to say it out loud, to use your unprecedented place in the system to turn your dial one degree.  Easy.  

 If you really wanted a challenge worthy of your greatness, it would look more like this: Put tents up in Harvard Yard for your freshman class and give their dorm rooms to the homeless who overpopulate Harvard Square. 

True, this will not look sexy on the alumni report, even if the high school seniors who knew this was gonna be the deal when they applied would be an especially resilient crop, might even help you churn out leaders who can serve the world from refugee camp-like conditions. 

Still, to align all the brilliant adults in your employ, all the ultra-capable kids you can pick from each year, all the money at your disposal and take on a single problem, lowering the refugee population in the world by 5% in ten years, say, would be worthy of you as "the best."

Or try this: Close up shop for five Cambridge minutes and then re-open as a school only for girls from Kabul.  Let your world-class faculty and top-notch facilities and ocean of cash be put to use educating only those whose empowerment is most obviously connected to a more peaceful world.  Sure, the logistics, the visas, the vetting, and the risk would be staggering, to say nothing of how you stay afloat without keeping your brand what it is as the place that sends kids to Apple and Goldman.  But if you can't overcome such hurdles, who else can?

Besides, what might such a shot in the dark mean when it is taken by an institution the whole world watches?  Your flare sent into the night sky of a crumbling planet? What might that signal as a way to say: we must change?

Or is that the role of others who have less to risk, whose buffer for failure is tiny when compared to yours?  Let those on life support model risk, you might say. Your role is the status quo.

Real leadership?  I wonder what Stanford is up to these days.

 

 

Posted in Ivy

Dear Writing Teachers: No More Essays

Posted on by tedoned
Dear Teachers of Writing . . .
No more essays in schools.  Writing yes.  Essays not.
From now on kids write letters.  Essays too?  No.  Not.
Letters from blue states to red and red to blue, rich to poor, black to white and back again.  And–by fiat–young to old.  (Because the old will scrawl back to the young.)
Does the world suffer from a lack of the critical thinking English teachers claim essays teach?  Sure.  Yes.  Affirmativo.  You don’t get to Trump and Putin and The Fake News Follies nor to the average car advert or this summer's pre-sequel without catastrophic failure of critical thought.
But? And?
If one-day argumentation, persuasion and rhetoric defeat the forces of untruth, brutality and ill-reason because essays help distinguish the righteous from the all-spin zone, that would be sweet.  But Sacarmuci?  Gorka?  Bannon?  DeVos?  They all wrote essays.  All got promoted.
We've confused essays with "thinking" in exactly the way Robert Frost would  have us not do when he says: "Thinking is not to agree or disagree, that's voting."
Essays did not weave together the global village because of the quality of the thought therein, but because they were offered up across lines of divide, the division of secular from believer in particular.  And getting into college or getting a good grade from you is not a divide, just a stamp of holy nothing, a way to practice agreeing or disagreeing before casting a vote in anger or ambivalence.
So please, my dear Teachers of Writing, claim not that Montaigne’s art thrives in the prose of our students.  It just ain't so.  Yes, for many kids words matter.  Some challenge their beliefs in what they write and can register measure with measure.  But getting into Yale drains most kids of eloquence, as you well know.
A contest of ideas?  The mind in dialogue with itself? The triumph of a sentence well-formed?  For that get your students some paper, an envelope, and a stamp.
What did you have for breakfast?  What series did you watch last night?  How often do you fart on a bad day? Do you like or dislike flatulence jokes?
In the letters Paul Auster and J.M Cotezee write to each other, for instance, they exchange thoughts about politics and economy and sport and family life and tradition and work and fame and sex and some dozen-score other subjects.  Isn't that what writing an essay does anyway?
And perhaps the value of writing a letter on a real piece of paper to some other person is something we can sell to students as good for their selfish future.
Write 100 letters in high school English class and develop one or two meaningful correspondents and thus, maybe, a future mentor or business partner.
Learn how to approach a future employer or investor or donor tactfully in the doing of this targeted writing.
Or maybe–here’s some seriously wishful thinking–it will be harder to firebomb people with whom you’ve corresponded.  (That dream, however hallucinatory, is not wilder than the idea that some “good essay” will sway Breitbart. )
Besides, such real letters will bring students offline a bit more and perhaps help reset the confusion of “likes” with depth, clickable friends with real ones, and force kids to consider what someone writes to them over the few days of snail-mail back and forth rather than the immediacy of online exchange, the speed of which undermines true contemplation.
And not to worry teachers, you will still have plenty to do.  More, in fact. “Is that what you want to say to your future ally?  To the person you hope will at least respect you? To someone whose sofa you might sleep on someday?  How can you write a cleaner sentence? How might you show yourself more as who you are to this would-be friend?” All the usual questions and advice will be yours to ask and offer.
With maybe less to grade as well.
Yours,
Ted