Wait what? You come exactly when you were suppossed to and yet all this confusion? To say nothing of all these absurd connections to indentiy and recognition and authority and words Mr. TGed has forced me to read thuse far? Are you kidding.
Is that you? Are you who is there?
Yet in the same way that the authority of the land in which Bernardo and Fransisco meet is the king, the name used to identify this person now makes sense, this person would be no less or more a person if their name Fransisco called out was Temi or Melanie. A person by any name is still a person.
Because words are arrows, symbols we use to point to things to identify and recognize not just people, but ideas and values too.
“I love chicken” must leave my brain, pin meaning to the world, and arrive in your brain in some serviceable way. In that service some substitutions can take place while others can not.
Let’s look at two sentences:
I love beef and hate chicken.
You hate beef and love chicken.
You can see that “the place” of feelings and things are being substituted in a way that makes sense where as, for instance,
I chicken beef
or
You beef love
Makes no sense.
Yet since, I can say “bus” and may mean a school bus but you may hear that word or read it and think, or picture, a city bus, it might be better for me to draw pictures of what I mean rather than use words. Indeed, for like a rock or, lion or tree learning to draw really quickly could be an advantage. But what if I want you to understand what I mean by injustice, or decency, or authority? Pictures will not do as well there. For those things, we understand that what the arrow points to is both much larger than the arrow itself and needs, label
If you look at these two phrases
Can I refer to Hamlet as scripture?
And.
Should I refer to Hamlet as scripture?
You see that ‘can’ and ‘should’ occupy the same space grammatically,. Still, you will say, |so what? The two sentence mean discernably differnt things, they point to issues of ability and appropriateness and that distinction is clear, the target of meaning these sentences mean to hit pinned clearly enough by the arrows they use.
But let’s try this:
Can I refer to Hamlet as a fish?
Should I refer to Scripture as a whale?
Words, which after all are just symbols, allow for almost anything to be held “in place” of anything else. And thus I can write something you know to be utterly wrong, like 2+2=5 or clearly backwards like “up is down.” All the symbols in those sentences point but they miss the meaning and the place held by them feels “wrong” rather than debatable.
What lies between what we can do and what we should do, on the other hand, is often up for debate, as you know and some of that debate, I am saying, becomes complicated because of how pretend works.
With all that in mind, and knowing there is more to say, let’s turn to:
Well, there’s more to say about that and about how quickly things unfreeze into
Yet the drama we watch begin now includes reference to the tools by which it is, itself, constructed: words.
Because if we can have different kinds of authority, in one country a king in another a vote, in a church or mosque God, in theater theater pretend, a passport before you get on a plane, then, as I tried to suggest last time, authority and words become kind of placeholders.
Now I know some of you will say that God is no placeholder, and you can’t just substitute, say, a passport for the authority the figure of god represents for you. And we might also say, you can’t substitute gravity for a king. One tells you to go fight in aware or bend you knee and the other keeps you from flying off into space.
But
L
Imagine you were walking across campus and Mr. Tago said to you:
Stand and unfold yourself.
Pointed to in the first line by our not answering the barrier between those present on stage pretending to be people they are not and those pretending not to be present is solidified in the second with our refusal to speak or stand. Demarcated in the first action, this barrier is solidified in the second as we divide once and again from our “self,” or at least that corporal self that might talk or move. As the presence of what is invisible becomes “clear” we move further into our ghostly self.
(Not an easy thought: I am growing more solid as a ghost.)
Does it make it easier to think: Now I am growing more solid in my role as a ghost?”
They will act like people. We will act like not people.
And yet as we grow less present Bernardo and Francisco move further into each other’s presence. We drop out of their world so that they can establish that world available only here and only now, that place where they cog-nize each other.
, why, that is, being alive so often causes us to descend into (or perhaps explode out with) the potency of words, those placeholding tools which can only ever hold onto what “is” temporarily.
How strange would it be if Bernardo said
Using the perfectly reasonable way Bernardo says “Long live the king!” as my rather thin evidence, I have pressed the idea that authority differs in different contexts. After all, when some one says to you at the airport, “passport please,” they are not saying “and what is the nature of authority and do you see it as interchangeable just because here we ask you to have a document to board a plane?” And yet something like this is how I am suggesting you should see what Bernardo says. It may all sound flimsy indeed.
Since I wish to move forward to make what may seem a similarly thin argument about words, let me first go back over a little of the territory we have covered with the intent of adding a little girth and weight to my claims about the interchange. But I ask your patience in doing this as I have two rather serious digressions to move through on the way.
S
And not only that it was not Bernardo being approached but Bernardo approaching? As if he was headed to the dining hall five minutes after lunch starteded and was shcoked to find a line there? Yeah, O.K. it is dark and late at night and (we will learn) cold and all this tells us of what we will also learn: things are kind of a mess in this country.
But come on, you wak along the path to the place where you do your guarind everynight and then, this night too, yu discover Freansisco exactly where he is meant to be and you freak out. What the?
Hamlet is a fmaous play and as sduch, as one of those thingsd handed to you by your teachers it is easy to think “it is great” and I will argue it is. But it is great because
One critic claims Shakespeare invented you, invented being human, a claim that would also mean he (Shakespeare) or perhaps his type–white, English, male, 1600–would also have invented the type of European who became King Leopold, became the French, German and Portuguese whose soldiers and clergy and teachers murdered, enslaved, and dehumanized your parents grandparents or great-grandparents, all this making Shakespeare play poisoned fruit growing from a poisoned tree, its pages slimed with the blood of your type. That said, I will argue the play can free us from our type-ism, save us from history, undo the nature of tragedy.
Even as they come to life in front of us Bernardo and Francisco remind us our not being there is what gives them life. Shakespeare, who is easily the atheist’s best weapon in an argument against theists is also the theist’s best exemplar of how a God might be working. More on this as we go.) And because both guards on stage accept the k
ing (and to the audience accepts not being there) we can move on to the drama, get on the plane as it were, begin our flight.
And here are ten things–some review, some looking forward–meant to clarify and provoke.
This line makes me crazy. Indeed, it ought to make you quite angry too, given that it undoes everything that has been said so far. But before explaining that, and how that can help us see Shakespeare as a writer of great skill, let’s go back too and review. I also wish to add some points that I might have made erlr but which, given all that needed to be dealt with initially, would only have been a force feeding.
Now the two characters on stage mirror one another but how we reflect those on stage goes from each of us to Bernardo to all of us to these guards. What was one to one and group to one now becomes group to group as well..
- When you meet someone and you want them to identify or recognize you, one thing you might do is offer up a kind of flag. Usually, that flag is a name. “Is that you Sean?” But you do that, as Francisco does when by asking “Bernardo? You might ffer up some common point of allegiance. You could, if you like, imagine Bernardo saying, “Look at my ALA uniform.” Look, in other words, at the fact that you and I belong to the same group.
- Teachers like me (that’s who I am in this context, on this stage, the figure who’s here/there now) often like to make too much of things, to make them “matter” more than seems “cool.”
- In these posts, as I have said, I want to argue that as a play about division and solidarity, Hamlet offers us a map back from the tragedy we might use to re-think race and identity. Yet thus far we are only two lines in and you might be saying that I am making everything “matter” too much, that I am reading far too much into the few words that start the play. I am saying those words put those on stage and those watching them on either side of a mirror as ghosts to one another and as guards to some other. You will say, “it is just a play.”
- All theater, all art, depends on the authority of pretend, some acceptance that a fake thing is real, or real enough to spend time with. The first two lines of this play draw attention to that.
- The first two lines are two words followed by three words followed by four words, as if to suggest that one word or even sound, began all this. After all, something alerted Bernardo to Marcellus’s presence.
- Should is a word to consider. It is not a major word in the play, but it is a big one in life and the play is about life. What does the word “should” divide for you? Thought from action? Author from authority? Guilt from ease and rest? (There is more to say about this.)
- We have begun here the drama of recognition. Bernardo is not sure who’s there. So far Marcellus and Bernardo do not “re-know” each other. (To recognize means to cognate again, to re-know.) There is much more to say about this drama.
- Language can be suggestive and often what is suggested is more accurate than what is said. For instance, Marcellus says to Bernado, “Stand and unfold yourself.” In actuality, this makes no sense. Bernardo is almost certainly standing already. So this must mean something more like “stand forth and show me who you are. “Unfold yourself makes even less literal sense. It makes more sense directed to us, those who have just folded ourselves into the seats of the theater. Except of course to unfold oneself is to be “recognized” for real It also suggests the idea of both a flag and a map.
- When I say we are “not there” for the people of the play, you know that as living, breathing organisms we are “there.”
- One element of language is to point. Words are arrows. That is mom. This is dad. Black and white, old and young, we point at these with symbols.
- And words are fake ad about arrows and fake we have more to say as well.