Category: Hamlet

'Tis now struck twelve: get the to bed, Francisco

Posted on by tedoned

(This is especially tricky, that as you walk home with your "F" you feel sure your dad will see you in one way or another.  The reality of who he is, "who's there" as your father is skewed by your own imagination.  And so, as sometimes happens, you go home with a friend to who you say, "You see, that's how my dad is, always getting angry at me."  And your friend says, "wow, I didn't see it that way.  Are you sure you are not being over-sensitive and imagining his anger?")

Understanding each other can be tricky because even if I write or say something "clear" like "bus" and ask you to close your eyes and imagine what I mean, you might see a school bus or a city bus or perhaps the letters "b-u-s?"   Admittedly, these distinctions won't matter much if I start to cross the street and you see a big vehicle headed my way and yell "BUS!" at me as a warning.  But that's using words to survive, which is to say that yelling at me is more effective than drawing a picture of a big vehicle about to run someone over and waving it around in my direction from the sidewalk.

Yet after I dodge the bus and get out of the street and want to tell you how frighted I was and thankful to you I am, you and I will no longer be using words as tools of survival but as tools to understand life and how it feels, what it means, as we often say, to be human.

But we can only do this if we speak the same language.  Just the intonation of how you yelled bus at me might have gotten me to jump out of the way.  But If I speak English and you speak Shona, our conversation after I am safe will be limited.

and that were the world being presented on the other side of the barrier that divides audience/ghosts from people pretending to be people they are not.

For This relief

Posted on by tedoned

Two guards talk to each other.  Or rather they ask each other to identify themselves.  That's all that has happened thus far in Hamlet.

Yet from that I have drawn, or perhaps overdrawn, ideas about how this meeting also meets us with implications about division and solidity, presence and identity., the nature and meaning of matter, and the problem with the words that make places for all such implications.

In doing this we make these figures "solid," give Bernardo and Francisco life.

In doing this we make these figures "solid," give Bernardo and Francisco life.

To perhaps over-extend this point and make it "matter" too much (as teachers are want to do), let's try a thought experiment using Bernardo.

Imagine the person pretending to be Bernardo is exactly like Bernardo in each and every way such that in their personality, physical make-up, spiritual characteristics and all other traits too. Say that every X and each Y of the player and the guard this player plays makes such a seamless graph of "identical" that under any inspection and every view, even God's, the person pretending to be Bernardo and Bernardo can not be divided one from the other, as if the role and actor were utterly 'solid.'  

And yet Bernardo must not and cannot know we, the audience, are "there," must be divided from the person pretending to be Bernardo in this if in nothing else.  

Actor and role are, in this experiment, one and the same, can be absolutely the same except in knowing/not knowing someone like Sefa or Jimcale is there too, watching them, seeing them "be."

For Bernardo may well believe in God or ghosts or angels or the Hulk or singing lions, may well be open to any of art's possibilities as answer to the question: Who's there? Indeed, if Bernardo's thoughts move to the pretend as mine do and as I bet yours do too, a sound late at night when alone could easily prompt our imagination to move to the unreal:

 

The question asked by Bernardo, I am arguing, calls attention to the authority of pretend and the context of the contextual.  Since the first few words of the play remind us that we are in the audience and reflects on how Bernardo/the person pretending to be Bernardo's is on stage you might hear in the opening question a statement that sounds like, "Look at me, I am on stage" or as the players on stage and we the ghosts in the audience begin to pretend together, questions like:

What does it mean to be a who when a who can be anyone? (Or almost anyone?)

And,

How can you be a who here if "here" might change from moment to moment?

Or,

How will we play out our lives?

But more likely right now you will simply say: Enough

Give it a rest, Mr. Ted. "Who's there?" and "who are you?" are the same in everyday, normal life and a person standing on a stage asking a simple question does not suggest most of what you have argued.  Can't we just get to the next line of the play already?

Yes, in a moment.  First, though, let me say that you are indeed correct.  In most situations, the distinctions I am drawing do not matter at all.  Unfortunately, though, I see each of the next four thousand lines of this play as trying to answer Bernardo's initial question.  So while it is time to get to the next line of the play, making too much of the difference between things like "who we are" and "who's there" has just begun.

And I would defend this too-much making of mine, in part, by saying that neither the play nor all I might make of it can ever measure up to all it means to be you, as you are, in whichever "there" you find yourself.

Because the world asks you "who's there?" every second of your life, every moment you appear on its stage. And about that we can never say enough.  About each of you too--in certain contexts--much could and should be made.

Making too much of Bernardo's question, in other words, only hints at the expansive territory and endless difficulty of being alive.  To overwork things is my way of asking you to consider the play as a guide to that territory, a balm to the difficulty of being something other than a ghost.  To make less of it is to make less of you, to make less of all of us.

And not just that, I wonder aloud too if we--old and young, white and black, teacher and student--can get to a point where matters of pretend can unite us rather than divide us, where we might sketch out that map back from tragedy I mentioned in my introductory note.

Towards all this, and how the play helps us consider the challenge of being one's self, let us begin to discuss the drama of recognition when we turn to----finally--the second line of the play next time.

See you then, and there,

--Mr. Ted

 

The Drama of Recognition

Posted on by tedoned

There are two more things to say about the drama of recognition.  First, that you can also see yourself being seen by others.  That is, how will Sean see himself being seen when he tells people of his news?  Will he see others seeing him with pity?  With jealousy?

The other is that we can imagine how we might be seen. For instance, between hearing his news about university and telling others, how does he imagine he will be seen by them? Who's there?

Indeed, on-campus some people are more defined by their context--their there--rather than who they "are." (We all have this feeling sometimes, right?  That we are preforming rather than being?) But people who do this in a  a manipulative way.   Yet from moment to moment, time, if not context does change, define us or even over-define us.  You may feel comfortable and yourself, that is, on the stage of a classroom or football pitch.  But on the stage of a dance or that of a fight you may have to "pretend," to"act," to "play."  

(Shakespeare calls actors on stage "players.")

Time and context--our stage, the one we are, in one sense, always on--can divide us from who we are and wish to be.  (This is our first foray into the drama of recognition, about which there is more to say.)    

 

Let's imagine Sean much younger and try another stereotypical scenario to explain this again.

Sean takes a test at school and gets the top mark in class.  Or he fails the test utterly.  And now he goes home to tell his parents.  His parents will "recognize" him in so far as they will see his body and face,  know who he is and his name.  But Sean still has to look into his parent's eyes and see there--in their eyes and facial expressions--how he is seen as Sean reknown, the young man with his top mark or his failure. As he walks home isn't Sean thinking something like this:

Will mom and dad see me, Sean might with the pride and joy I want them to see me with?

Or

Will mom and dad see me with disappointment and shame I fear?

My guess is you all know the drama I have given Sean know how rich and complicated it can be, know such thoughts can be as complicated and frightening and involving as anything Bernardo and Francisco go through as they demand recognition from one another.

For if we freeze this moment for Sean or you or any of us, you can quickly descend or explode into a whole lifetime of possibilities.  Because the moment you tell your parents about your success or failure and look to see how they see you impacts and is impacted by (or can be) the whole life around it.

For instance, with that top mark do you dance home to tell them of your triumph only to have them say "Good job, now what about tomorrow's test?" in a way that stings because it does not honor you enough?

Or having failed the test do you slink home fearful of their admonition only to have more and day say, "It's O.K." such that you feel relieved and love them even more?

And--and again, this is where things get complicated and imagination a fascinating problem maker--is what you see on their face or hear in their voice what's actually there or just what you imagine what's there? And is not your imagination shaped by all the times this scene has played out before?

For instance, you presume your parents will show a lack of sufficient pride because they have done that in the past so now you look for it too hard? Want it too much?  Indeed, imagine you come home with your top mark and with a friend who also hears your dad say, "good job," and sees your mom smile too.  You complain to your friend that your parents never get excited about your successes and your friend--and audience to the scene--say, "wow, I wish my parents were ever as positive about what I do as yours are about your good tests score."

Or maybe you don't tell your friend how you feel because you fear they will see you as a complainer or, dare I say it, "a player' who just wants their sympathy?

Because we can see how others see us, imagine and over imagine what our being seen by them means, and because we can do this before we are seen, as we are seen, and after we are seen too, the drama of recognition goes on all the time and endlessly and at the speed of light and thought we might take pleasure in a moment when the drama gets frozen for us:

The drama of recognition is more than just someone knowing your name and can be understood better if you think of yourself seeing how someone sees you.  For instance, if you see that your parents look at you with pride rather than with shame, this will influence how you feel and what you do next and earning one kind of recognition rather than another may determine a whole series of events and understanding, lead us into the many measures of "if."

What makes Hamlet compelling and difficult and, at times, irritating comes from how it plays with philosophical and psychological and aesthetic underpinnings of recognition, like when Hamlet offers his 'buzz-buzz' dissing to that older man (Polonius is his name) who, you can say Hamlet sees seeing him not as his dad might or even as his uncle does, but more as a placeholder for those men, as if Hamlet can see Polonius not as a mirror but as a placeholder for a mirror.   How Hamlet--the play and the character--does this turns it into a map of extraordinary power and value.

Black, white, young, old, female, male, born African or born American, this is just a short list of the placeholders we use as we appear on each other's stage, as we reflect on each other and ourselves.  The difference between seeing each other as people, or even as mirrors and, instead, seeing each other as placeholders for mirrors and so as markers of the path back from tragedy will deserve more thought.

With these first remarks now concluded, let's take up that difference next time,

 

 

 

In Hamlet, the person asking "Who's there? is a guard named Bernardo and he asks it of another person, Marcellus, also a guard.   All measures of if--the incomparable magic of art--are now available to us.

If who's there is an enemy or a friend then that's one kind of situation or another kind of situation just as would be if who's there is not an enemy but your parent, not a friend but your lover  And, also, if who's there is--as is the case in some forms of art you may know--a dragon or superhero or a robot, then that too is one thing and not something else if only the kind of art in which dragons and superheros and robots do not--or do--appear.

Try it this way: Imagine yourself the person who must write a play from line two onward and the first line says: Who's there? 'Hmmmm,' you might say to yourself, 'it could be friend or enemy or parent or lover or dragon or superhero or robot or, wait,  what if . . .'

. . . If . . . and what if your goal is to make your play most potent and alive on grounds as relative as this: you are not me, maybe.

Of course you may be disappointed that instead of a dragon or lover or robot this other person, the guard  Marcellus says only, "Nay, answer me; stand and unfold yourself." since that means, at least thus far, we are not in the world of Game of Thrones or Marvel or a Korean soap opera or the plays of Athol Fugard, are not, if you will, 'there' which may be places you would rather be than where one lame guard says one thing, another another and all that happens is there is a lot to say about it, so let's go back back to the play and forget all this buzz-buzz and and just see Bernardo as a guy doing his job, finding out if the guy he approaches is who he is supposed to be, which what is what guards do, how they be.

Well, then, the fact that these two do not know each other--do not yet recognize each other despite doing the same kind of work, wearing the same uniform, and serving the same king--sets the scene of uncertainty and trepidation and foreboding that informs the whole play.  "Trouble lurks" or something's amiss" or "huh" says the big sign in the corner of your brain

if,  your brain reads as do most peoples when it is night and That is, if you were not the author of this play asked to write it from line two onward but were, instead, the director asked to stage these first two lines, knowing that they come on a platfom before a castle late at night, you would not be likley to tell the actors playing the guards to sing and dance as they preform these lines.  And for later posts in this series it is worth saying now that you would not be likely to direct them to sing and dance whether you were born in Boston or in Bamako.

reminds us that however much life distortion it may cause to chase recognition as an engineer  in our father's eyes when, in our own, we wish to be a painter, recognition even just for our uniform can be a source of assurance and comfort.

 

But Bernardo is also a character being played by an actor, someone who speaks not only to Marcellus but to those of us sitting in the seats.  We hear his question too and that means "there' just got iffy.

Because, in a sense, these are guards guarding their own stage as a place where each can play as actors (acting, in this case not as lovers or friends, robots or super-heroes, but as guards) without interruption from the authority that any of us may have over their action.  While they have enough authority over each other to demand recognition as lliegemen to this ground (that's the next line, baisically) they have not enough authority to get us to do what they demand, which it to answer for them who's there, to stand, get out of our seats, and unfold ourselves.

And thank god.  In the first place the only way to  answer's Bernardo's who's there questionthis way: the audience.  And yet the only way to actually give that answer is to say nothing, to stay at rest, be in silence.

We have been asked--commanded might be a better word--to say who's there and have not.  We have been commanded--urged at the very least--to unfold and answer and we do not.

Are we there?  Who are we now?

Since if any one of us were to do that the world we are in--the world of art--would be made not immortal.

Now we inhabit a world in which we cannot act.  This is to say we are ghosts and that is not the same as saying we lack influence.

And while that all sounds interesting and clever and full of the philosophical, if we are all ghosts together, that means maybe you are me, and I am you, or at least the conditions have been set in which the one solid defense we had against the problematics of 'if' seems already to have been lost.

Being recognized can and often does mean seeing how you are seen, means taking in the moment the person seeing you answers for themselves, about you, the question "who's there?   If dad's eyes read with disappointment," you may never get over it.

hough it may be to say that we are in a play not just about a couple of guards in front of a castle but also  being, and so being there.

Like all art, this is the world of art; unlike all art, this art wants to call attention to its status as art and call attention to that status in ways profound and, yes, iffy.

But let's take that up in the future and return, next time, to division and solidarity and say a little more about what it all this might mean in the historical context of people who are and are not from Africa, who are black and who are not who are you as who are me.

Until then,

Mr. Ted

He.

Posted on by tedoned
This entry is part [part not set] of 1 in the series Hamlet

The force of this post is to ask a question which, in an odd way would have been less controversial or more absurd sounding one hundred years ago than it is today.  The question is this: What if the line we were looking at here was not "He," suggesting that Bernardo was a man--a human being of male gender--but, instead "she."

Just as it makes historical sense that two people living in Denmark a thousand years ago might well have used the long life of the king as way to identify one another, that same history suggests that someone guarding a castle late at night would be a man, not a woman.  And yet if art can imagine anything--Hulks and singing lions and kid wizards--it could certainly imagine women guards.  (Wonder women?)

I want to get into something delicate here, which is how language makes us who we are and how systems of pwoer and systems of thought inter-relate because of how language works.  But it may do, before saying more about that, to be direct on a few subjects like gender first.

As you know, the roles of women and men are a hot topic nowadays, far more so than when I went to school.  On your campus, I would say the most heated and uncomfortable conversations were, first,  the existence of God and, second, the role of gender.  Many of the boys told me that women

 

and so let me preface this by talking directly about the

 

It will not surprise you to learn that when I taught at your school many of you called me "Sir" or "Mr. Ted."  I wanted you to call me "Ted" but almost all of you refused and those of you who insisted on calling me Sir struggled when I asked you not to do so.

You said calling me "Sir" was a sign of respect and courtesy.  This I appreciate to a degree.  I don't mind having the respect of people around me if it is deserved and I think courtesy and manners have their place.  I would rather you call me "Mr. Ted" then, for instance, "shit head" or "Mr. Jerk."

And yet calling me "Sir" in the context of you being a student and my being a teacher differs presumes I deserve respect for what I am not for who I am.  In a sense, even before we can re-know one another you have decided to know me as someone above you or, in the classroom at least, with authority over you.  Perhaps that is fine.  Perhaps like the person asking for passports at the airport, that authority makes sense.  Still, as in the airport, the system simply told you that older men who come into a classroom where you were a student are to be called by a designation of respect.  It is noteworthy too that after many of you rolled your eyes at my odd teaching methods, you still called me "Sir."  While I don;t think any of you actually wanted to call me "Mr. Jerk" I feel sure plenty of you wanted me to get serious and that whatever respect "Sir" was meant to connote had long since been lost.

Again, as with someone checking your passport at the airport, the power I have over you as teacher and the way word "Sir" points to that may only be a function of the stage we are on--the airport or the classroom--together.

But let's imagine a different stage for a moment.  You pass me in the street and see that I have dropped my keys.  Kindly and politely you say to me, "excuse me sir, I think you dropped something."  In this case you do not know my name nor, really, what your relationship should be to me.  But the stage, and your own kindness tells you what to do.

That is true because I am old and have white skin and you are young and have dark skin.  Such markers are of great importance in our every day and, as I have already tried to suggest (and as you would know anyway) in the history that may shape how we see each other--how we recognize or "re-know"--those we share the world with and who appear on the stage of our lives.

f you look back you will see that I have not used any gendered pronouns in relationship to Bernardo or Fransisco. Sometimes causing odd articulations, I have not written, "When he asks, who's there? Bernardo . .. "

Given that I am from the land of the plays future, this might be odd.  After all, I was willing to use the names Bernardo in a way only someone who had already  arrived at the fourth line could know, why not draw on the knowledge of the fifth line too?

But--and I know this will annoy some of the boys out there--I want to suggest that

I want here to raise a few of the thorny issues of identity and gender but also, if possible, distinguish those from

that have been much more part of the cultural conversation in the last fifty years than they were before that.

Fifty years ago it would have been odd to see a black man play either of these charachters.  Now, not so much.  Odder still to see a women play these characters?  Maybe less "historically" accurate, but if ALA were preforming Hamlet no one would get upset if were playing a male role.  Again, just as the authority of pretend prevents us from joining the people on stage, it also allows Hulk's and Simba's to appear or woemen to play men, men play women.

But for all that, the way I want to get to he is as a second stake in knowledge, and not one of history, but one of language and identiy.

Bernardo, is that you . . . .

Rather than saying "yes, it is me" it is enough (and everything) to say "he."

It woudl be no less defining to say "she."

Now I imagine that if you asked every person on earth to get to this point in the play, before this line, almost all would say: "Bernardo is a dude."  And if you asked them again, which gender do you think people expect this Bernardo character to be. an even higher percentage would say: Bernardo?  A guard of a castle?  In the Denmark of 1000 years ago?  That's definitely going to be a man.

All true, all fair.  Like the argument I made suggesting that Bernardo is more likely to be frightened than Simba, all our evidence--historical, cultural, experiential--would have led us to expect that Bernardo and Fransisco would be men.

But art has its own rules.

First of all, sometimes people set Shakespeare's plays in contemporary settings.  And while male guards may still outnumber female guards, if the set we saw behind us were not a castle but rather ALA's campus, it might be conceivable that one or both of these characters were female.

Secondly if Hamlet were a different kind of play--one more like Wonder Women, women would have to be the guards.

Three points at least should be made here: First, these placeholders of who we are always impacting how we relate to and understand everything--think of what you presume if you walk into a room of woman rather than of men or if you know everyone around you is from your country or no one is--and

But back (or forward? ) to the first line of Hamlet, that question: "Who's there?"   A question which, again, differs from, "Who are you?"

Who are you implies a kind of continuity: At the dance, in biology class, on the pitch,  you are always Houcine or Melanie or Nduta.

Who's there? Well, that could be anyone.  Anyone could be there at the party, there in class, there on that team.

The party includes the suave and the cool (like you) or some others, the uncool say, like your teachers or parents.  The class includes your friends or strangers, the team fields the skilled or the novice.

In the right fashion or outfit or uniform, you can fool someone who does not know you into thinking you belong someplace you otherwise do not.  How do you sneak into the fancy party?  Wear a ball gown or a tuxedo.  How would some friend of yours who decided, for whatever reason, to pretend to be an ALA student for the day or a week?  Well, it will help to have a uniform.

People in armies, to give another example, recognize each other primarily by their dress.  A major knows to obey a general solely because of the general's uniform.  That understanding does not require any previous history between the two of them, necessitates no knowledge about who they each "are."  In the right uniform, you can sneak into a place you do not belong and cause chaos, as often happens in spy movies.

If your friend sneaks into ALA and pretends to go to school there I hope they will cause love rather than chaos.

It seems true that if you answer "Whose there?" In a particular way, you can fool people about who you are.  We want people to see us "there" in a particular way.   How wonderful to be the cool person, the best player, the general in charge? While that might be fun in a spy movie, in life it is more treacherous because we often fool ourselves as much as those with whom we interact, feel that the right outfit does not make us cool,  winning the game stamps us only so well, being in charge a kind of charade.  Even if we can answer: who's there? With the honest response of  "the cool" or "the winner" or "the leader," that does not guarantee we are those things,  does not ensure we feel we are.

In the last post that the play is about division and solidarity (which was sort of true, sort of a lie, since the play is really about everything and nothing) and also said that we are not each other.  I have called this post "Who's there #1 because we will keep returning to how we are two people at once: the role we play and the person we are playing that role.  Because life is often an affair of this division, we imagine ourself chasing unity when really we are many people, one person in the "there" of class, another, say, when we are "there" at the party.   Often we think that being the same person--being authentic--is the goal.  We dislike 'players' who show up as act only and who are two-faced in one way or another.

And yet it is also true that we cannot help but be "there" differently not only in different settings but almost from moment to moment.   This reality is not one to which we can always pay attention.  If every moment of every day we asked ourselves, "who am I here?" we could never get out of our rooms.  Still, in some philosophical sense that is what we must do, what the world demands because--at the philosophical level at which everything is always about everything and nothing and is always happening all the time--you can see the world always saying to us: "who's there?"

In one sense, we can say that being 'who's there' and also being who we 'are' is both a way to be divided and solid, as if dividedness and solidness both come from knowing that whomever I see in the mirror as Mr. Ted, I do not see there Jimcale or Melanie.

And yet . . .

More next time.

In a sense, what's happening is that those on stage are becoming more solid as other people and we are becoming more solid as ghosts.

If you can imagine such a person you might think you have the perfect person to "play" Bernardo.  After all, this person is exactly like Bernardo in every way.

And yet Bernardo must not and cannot know we, the audience, are "there," must be divided from the person pretending to be Bernardo in this if in nothing else.

Can Bernardo imagine a world that looks like Denmark but is actually a universe of ghostly people watching everything people guarding a castle do?  Maybe.  After all, what constitutes any individuals knowledge, and where that knowledge becomes--by the nature of imagination--silly or insightful is a tough thing to determine.

But we have reason to believe that Bernardo is less likely to think the who that is there is The Hulk or an audience than it is some as yet unidentified person.

And that reason to believe comes from where?  From our spending time on the stage of our lives in which, over and over, when we ask some version of "who's there?" we do not get answers from Marvel characters or from ghosts who appear out of nowhere. We know nothing about Bernardo but because we see a human form in front of us we make assumptions based on our experience about how this figure thinks and lives.

We are not each other.

That is true because I am old and have white skin and you are young and have dark skin.  Such markers are of great importance in our every day and, as I have already tried to suggest (and as you would know anyway) in the history that may shape how we see each other--how we recognize or "re-know"--those we share the world with and who appear on the stage of our lives.

Three points at least should be made here: First, these placeholders of who we are always impacting how we relate to and understand everything--think of what you presume if you walk into a room of woman rather than of men or if you know everyone around you is from your country or no one is--and

But back (or forward? ) to the first line of Hamlet, that question: "Who's there?"   A question which, again, differs from, "Who are you?"

Who are you implies a kind of continuity: At the dance, in biology class, on the pitch,  you are always Houcine or Melanie or Nduta.

Who's there? Well, that could be anyone.  Anyone could be there at the party, there in class, there on that team.

The party includes the suave and the cool (like you) or some others, the uncool say, like your teachers or parents.  The class includes your friends or strangers, the team fields the skilled or the novice.

In the right fashion or outfit or uniform, you can fool someone who does not know you into thinking you belong someplace you otherwise do not.  How do you sneak into the fancy party?  Wear a ball gown or a tuxedo.  How would some friend of yours who decided, for whatever reason, to pretend to be an ALA student for the day or a week?  Well, it will help to have a uniform.

People in armies, to give another example, recognize each other primarily by their dress.  A major knows to obey a general solely because of the general's uniform.  That understanding does not require any previous history between the two of them, necessitates no knowledge about who they each "are."  In the right uniform, you can sneak into a place you do not belong and cause chaos, as often happens in spy movies.

If your friend sneaks into ALA and pretends to go to school there I hope they will cause love rather than chaos.

It seems true that if you answer "Whose there?" In a particular way, you can fool people about who you are.  We want people to see us "there" in a particular way.   How wonderful to be the cool person, the best player, the general in charge? While that might be fun in a spy movie, in life it is more treacherous because we often fool ourselves as much as those with whom we interact, feel that the right outfit does not make us cool,  winning the game stamps us only so well, being in charge a kind of charade.  Even if we can answer: who's there? With the honest response of  "the cool" or "the winner" or "the leader," that does not guarantee we are those things,  does not ensure we feel we are.

In the last post that the play is about division and solidarity (which was sort of true, sort of a lie, since the play is really about everything and nothing) and also said that we are not each other.  I have called this post "Who's there #1 because we will keep returning to how we are two people at once: the role we play and the person we are playing that role.  Because life is often an affair of this division, we imagine ourself chasing unity when really we are many people, one person in the "there" of class, another, say, when we are "there" at the party.   Often we think that being the same person--being authentic--is the goal.  We dislike 'players' who show up as act only and who are two-faced in one way or another.

And yet it is also true that we cannot help but be "there" differently not only in different settings but almost from moment to moment.   This reality is not one to which we can always pay attention.  If every moment of every day we asked ourselves, "who am I here?" we could never get out of our rooms.  Still, in some philosophical sense that is what we must do, what the world demands because--at the philosophical level at which everything is always about everything and nothing and is always happening all the time--you can see the world always saying to us: "who's there?"

In one sense, we can say that being 'who's there' and also being who we 'are' is both a way to be divided and solid, as if dividedness and solidness both come from knowing that whomever I see in the mirror as Mr. Ted, I do not see there Jimcale or Melanie.

And yet . . .

More next time.

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Bernardo?

Posted on by tedoned

Dear Blue,

The start of Hamlet, I have been arguing, draws attention to the authority of pretend and the nature of authority generally.  If you push it a bit, as I certainly have, and see the first few lines as not just uttered between the characters but also to the audience then our not answering Bernardo's question and our refusing to act as Fransisco demands confirms our status as ghosts, divided from the voice and the body we normally use to be "there" in the world.  Yet we all share this division, are all unified in this and by an authority that asks us to guard what we watch by maintaining, together, our separation from our selves.

In calling attention to what is,  in its way, true of drama, Hamlet  ask us to see what is not.  Though, being addressed, we are not there.  In the process we also become a mirror to what is on stage.  We guard guards and, like them, wonder what's going here may just as well ask them: "Who's there?"

To be clear, none of this would have crossed my mind the the first time I saw the play.

"Hey, look at that guard-person who does not recognize that other guard-person.  What's gonna happen now?"  Some version of that is, no doubt, what I was thinking the first time I saw the play, if I was thinking anything at all.

When I make these suggestions about the play it is less as if I come to you from the land of teachers, where we make too much of everything so as to sound clever to our students, and more because I am from the future, the one you will enter into should you read or watch the play.  I may be old and you may be young, but when we read the same book we are suddenly the same age, contemporaries in another world.

One thing my coming from the future means is that I have been comfortable calling the two figures on stage Bernardo and Fransisco.  In the theater, as a first timer though we would have no certainty about the names of these two figures on stage.

As if an agent conjured up by our need for information, Fransisco moves us away from uncertainty and towards possibility:  "Bernardo?"

Bernardo . . . question mark . . . is that you?

To discuss this line--a name and a question mark--I wish to offer three iffy assertions about how we are "there" when Fransisco utters it.  Perhaps, though, rather than calling these assertion I should call them "spiritual images" or "private impressions."  For my take on this line of the play surely says more about how the world feels to me than it does what my coming to you from the future or from the land of teachers ought to offer.  Indeed, much of what I am about to say lacks what you will have learned in Writing and Rhetoric class any such assertion demands: evidence.

(If I claim Bernardo is likely anxious and frightened, there is evidence to back this up.  It is late at night.  The question "Who's there?" conveys confusion.  Fransisco responds with tense commands rather than some form of relaxed, "O hi-ya Bernardo."  Thus I can claim these two people meet one another under the specter of fear and concern rather than safety and ease.  If, by contrast, I claim Bernardo is Simba the singing lion you should rightly wonder what is wrong with me and would be right to ask, "Mr. Ted, where's your evidence?"  While what I am about to say is not quite as wacky as 'Bernardo is Simba' neither do I have great evidence for making the assertions I do.  But this may lead us to some consideration of what makes evidence "evidence" in a world of imagination.  But before getting to that let me return to e make them and then see if I can justify, if not their veracity, the value of my making them.)

Let us see:

Bernardo?

As three things:

  • A stake of knowledge in the geography of time and space.
  • A closing door--or gate--in the wall of pretend that divides players from audience.

And, upon seeing the first two:

  • The point at which those on stage become, for lack of a better word, "real."

About the stake of common knowledge . . .

Up until this moment everyone is lost.  Bernardo, Fransisco, all of us in the audience . . . no one knows where we are or who is who.  There is some form of "there" taking shape and some manner of "who" present but nothing else is defined enough to know, let alone re-know.  Yet now, at the time of this name--Bernardo?--guards and people pretending to be guards, those who ask and answer, any who unfold or would have the king live long, as well as those who come as ghosts of now or ghosts from the future can see this marker. established.  We have moved from a question formed in fear and uncertainty to one of hope and possibility.  An anchor, a cornerstone, a stake in what is happening: the figure who first asked "who's there?" might have a name we can return to  . . . Bernardo?

About the door--or gate--in the wall of pretend . . .

If we were invited to enter into the world of those on the stage via the play's first few lines, if there is some doorway (or gate) between what we see up their and our world in the audience, it is closing now as these two figures turn their backs on us and address each other.  If we were ever going to become part of the happenings in their world that opportunity is now passing.

Some forms of drama, as you may be aware, juggle the authority of pretend and let the actors address the audience.  In those plays the barrier between the world of the stage and our world is permeable, or more permeable than the one of Hamlet.  For that matter, in a few of Shakespeare's other plays characters speak directly to us to set the scene at the beginning or to ask for applause at the end. Thus it is possible to imagine a play that takes place after Nduta answers Bernardo or the rest of us stand to obey Fransisco.  But clearly that play would not be this play and that world entirely different from this one.

Bernardo, if we go back, addresses an empty universe and the universe of the imagination too, that space even the Hulk or Simba might inhabit.  With Fransisco "there" the universe shrinks and goes from a place where anything can be anything to where some things are known or potentially re-knowable.  Bernardo and Fransisco may still be afraid of one another or of not knowing who the other is,  but rather than a world in which hulks exist or lion's sing, sounds and shapes you think you can identify even in the dark as belonging to people do indeed belong to people.  And all of this reminds us that though the play starts with "who's there?" that question is, in fact, a few steps down the logical progression of sensory experience and "re-knowing."  Bernardo does not say, "what's that?" which would leave open Hulky and Simba-ish possibilities and would, anyway, be the kind of thing one does not say out loud.  Instead Bernardo's question is built on information and presumption that comes having lived in the re-knowable world.  That sound?  It sounds human. Some person must be making it . . . Who's there?

One difference between a door and a gate is that even when closed you can often see through a gate and gates also often come with guards.   Or, at least, a gate with a guard differs from a door with a guard.  But let's talk about whay I have refered to what is closing here as both a door and a gate in the next post and move on now to my third belief about this line Fransisco utters trying to identify the other person on stage as, Bernardo?

 

About how the stake of tentative knowledge and the door--or gate--through which we might have entered into the world on stage begins to close suggests Bernardo and Fransisco can now become real or, perhaps, become real "there."

To push this last impression forward let us conduct a thought experiment and imagine that the person pretending to be Bernardo is exactly like Bernardo in every way: personality, physical make-up, spiritual characteristics.  The actor and the character share every X and each Y of who they are to make a seamless graph of "identical."  Under any inspection and every view--even God's--the person pretending to be Bernardo and Bernardo can not be divided one from the other, as if the role and actor were utterly 'solid.'

And yet unlike the person pretending to be Bernardo, Bernardo can not know we, the audience, are "there."

Actor and role can be absolutely identical except that the person pretending to be Bernardo knows full well that Nduta or someone like her is watching from the world of audience.

Were Bernardo to know that Nduta is there, then the question "Who's there?" will be asked with entirely different implications.

Who's there that is not from the audience?  Who's there that made a noise that sounds human but not the human noise you make when you are settling into your seat to watch a play?  Who's there who will not remain a ghost but will act like a real person?  (Oh, hey person pretending to be Fransisco . . . )

To think that I am not in the "real universe" and discover that, instead, it includes wizards like Harry Potter would be a shock.  I would be deeply surprised, late at night, to realize the cause of the noise I heard was a big green monster.  Yet just as those ideas must exist in some human mind, must have existed at least in the minds of those who invented them it is possible that late at night, not knowing anything about what is going on, I might imagine the unreal at work.  It may not calm me much to see someone I cannot identify rather than some thing I can not identify, but now I am out of the world of imagination and into the world I know.

 

 

It is an odd fact of how perception, imagination and language work that if I perceive Bernardo as more lion like than anything else or if my imagination leads me to wonder how Bernardo might sound as a singer, language allows me to say something that is clearly not the case anywhere except in my thoughts and my expressions of those thoughts.

To say it differently: Because they are fake, words allow us to point to things that are not true: Two plus two equals five, up is down, fire is cold.  As you can see, I've written things that are not true but I have done so in using the same  pixels I would ti write two plus two equals four or up is not down or fire is hot.  Whether I write it with a pen on paper or print it a book or use these pixels, the symbols which make up "2 + 2 = 5" are no more or less "real" than those which make up an equation that is true.

Because the same word-symbols we use might express an obvious untruth we might be better off drawing pictures for each other of what we mean rather relying on language.  Maybe, if I want to meet you by a tree I should draw you and myself and the tree I mean so we both know what I mean.  But in addition to all that drawing being kind of a hassle, many things--democracy, justice, decency, love, god, experience--are hard to draw.  Deep in the falseness of words and language is the way in which they make an imaginary--even fake--world for us.  After all

If this makes words and symbols dangerous, it also makes them powerful.

There are lots of times when to communicate accurately  and yet matter in our relationships to one another exactly because we have to work to define them together.  These things have no actual matter (like a tree) and yet matter to us far more than what is "real."

In a sense, when I write:

Bernardo is Simba

I use language to put a ghost of an idea into the world.  That there is no evidence for this idea does not mean that words cannot point to it, as I just have shown.  Now the idea that Bernardo is Simba exists not only in my thoughts but in the words which I present to you just as if the idea itself does have "matter."

In part, the idea that Bernado is a singing lion now exists in its ghostly form is evidenced by the fact that you know it is not true, are able to deny it.  If that sounds bizarre, try something different:

Simba night lion Bernardo to Fransisco

Together, in this form, these words do not cohere even into the misty ether of an idea we know as wrong.  As an idea it is not even a ghost.

To say,

Bernardo is Simba,

is to something stupid, something silly, something psychotic, something random.

To say,

Simba night lion Bernardo to Fransisco,

while using recognizable words of the kind I might use to be dumb or playful or hallucinogenic or free-form lacks the coagulative property we need so that pretend might occupy an empty theater or such that you and I might debate an idea based on our assertions and evidence.  Despite using words made by human beings, "Simba night lion Bernardo to Fransisco" does not enter into "human" activity, even the human activity of being silly or wrong or conjuring ghosts.

So while what I wish to say here about "Bernardo?" may only come across as conjectures based on a belief too private to be anything more than silly or ghost like, they are at least not nothing, not not even a ghost.

This leads to an obvious question: How can I argue (assert, claim, imply) without evidence?

One immediate answer to that question is that I cannot or, rather, I cannot do it well.  Without more evidence than I intend to bring to my reading of "Bernard?" you have no reason to accept what I will assert, claim and imply.

But this also moves us into the territory of what words can and cannot do for us and since we are watching people on stage pretending to be real as we pretend to be ghosts

Maybe what I have to say comes from private belief rather than from publicly available evidence and about this I should say a little more before getting to my three iffy assertions because it brings

 

 

 

To think:

I wonder if that sound was not a person but a monster or something impossible like a singing lion?

May or may not be more or less imaginative than

I wonder if there is an audience out there watching me?

But both possibilities, wherever they exist on the fringe of one's imagination, are far easier to push away than to embrace when the reknowable world appears in the form--a sound, a shape--you can re-know enough to ask "who?" Rather than "what?" is there.

The steps of knowledge and presumption and expectation which a life without seeing the hulk or feeling an audience is watching you is the one we are dropped into here.  Because it is art, it might have gone otherwise and a play in which Harry Potter casts a spell or the audience speaks to the actors might have been ours to watch.  Instead, now, the pretenders become who they are.

A few more things to say about all this:

We are the divider that makes the thing (Bernardo) whole, solid, extant by not being there.

We are the ghosts which divide the person from the person pretending to be.

We are the pretenders who make Bernardo real.

They are the fake that makes us time travelers and able permeate what does (not) exist.

 

But that play would not be Hamlet.  The world in which Hamlet takes place disappears if we cross the invisible barrier between the universe Bernado calls out to (the one of imagination where we sit as ghosts) and the one of reality, the one even an unknown figure who may or may not believe in the same kingly authority, who may or may not be identifiable, now answers.  Almost a ghost too, Fransisco is more real than any of us by a degree, but now, as that degree increases--Bernardo?--and ours fades, the two figures can go about the business of being "real."

What is not there (us) and what is there (pretend) both contribute to the absolutely permeable absolute division a door--or rather a gate--which now swings shut.

 

This stake in the geography of time is not surbrisinlgy, perhaps, a a name, since names offten form such stakes themselves, contain or suggest travels past and into the future in a fashion I  suggested discussing the first line of the play.  That is:

Who are you?  Marubini, daughter of . . .

That's history as it gets recorded.

Who's there?

I can only know once we know (or re-know) one another and make a history together.

And the fact that the best Fransisco can do is offer a question, not a certainty, "Oh hey, Bernardo, great to see you," may be worth stopping over since it points to yet another kind of knowledge and way of being.  We've had total confusion (Who's there?) and the wall of certainty that often counters confusion (Nay, answer me) and the suggestion we might have something in common (the king) and now a guess towards togetherness  . . .. Bernardo?

If you think that kind of back and forth is not part of the drama of recognition and life consider the kind of conversation, or thought, that happens with a friend, or in your head, before you ask someone out:

Do you think s/he/they likes me? 

You should definitely find out.

Long live

To say Bernardo is Simba, which makes no sense in the context of the play itself, is one degree less sensible than to say something that makes no sense anywhere because it simple fails as language: "Bernardo night who lion ask."

To say Bernardo is like Simba because . . .

Will be difficult to

class in which we met.

Could it be you . . . question mark . . . who will love me?

But let's take up that more when we talk more about words as arrows and placeholder

For That is a game--a denial of knowledge on the actors part which mirrors the lack of imagination Bernardo, and all of us share.

 

For a moment we might have

My forced suggestion that for a few lines the person we hear first from stage is someone pretending to be Bernardo and now, once named, that person becomes Bernardo "in reality" takes us back to the what we have not done, the world in which we do not exist, and how the authority of pretend governs the space where we are not and where we are.

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.

 
 
 
 
 

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