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.
****
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
orB) 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?