Hamlet's Revenge

"Now might I do it pat, now 'a is a-praying,
And now I'll do it."

We all know the scene. Hamlet has his chance, and he does not take it, for reasons that we tend to view as springing more from ambivalence than from truth ("a thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom and ever three parts coward,"). Hamlet's supposedly frail objection is that he does not obtain true revenge unless he ensures the King's eternal damnation, and he fears that he will go to heaven if dispatched in prayer.

But is this so insignificant? He is not, like Laertes, merely a man of honor attempting to keep his "name ungored." He is a visionary, and his actions are always prompted by and directed towards spiritual ends. Hamlet's object is not to meet the formal requirements of blood feud, but the infliction of eternal spiritual torment.

When Hamlet depicted the King's guilty deeds in his staging of The Murder of Gonzago, his conscious intention was to see the King's guilt with his own eyes, so that he could finally erase any doubts about the justice of revenge ("if he but blench I know my course"). But this "Magic 8 Ball" gimmick is trivial compared to the deeper consequences of the production. If Hamlet could hear the King's prayer, he would hear:

"O wretched state! O bosom black as death!
O limèd soul, that struggling to be free
Art more engaged!"

Through the play, Hamlet has inflicted a torturous prick of conscience upon the King. The great irony is that, at the very moment when Hamlet appears to be wavering at a perfect opportunity for revenge, he has already wreaked the most thorough devastation of the King possible.

Through The Murder of Gonzago, Hamlet has stumbled across his true moral vocation: the calling to (as he later says to Gertrude), "set you up a glass where you may see the inmost part of you!" Art makes sinners their own accusers, their own judges, their own tormentors. Art, because of its conscientious, reflective, and soul-searching power, is the ultimate revenge against anyone with anything to hide. How could mere steel compare to that?

The real tragedy is that Hamlet ignored his ordination as an artisan of moral torture in favor of the shallow trope of blood feud, a mistake that proved ruinous for him and for many of his loved ones. His tragic flaw was not that he could not take his revenge upon the King, but that he could not recognize its value when it had been accomplished.

On The Lord of the Rings

In The Hobbit, the ring had been the prize of fortune and wit, a killer of dragons, and a winner of immense and happy fortunes. Now, all that has changed.

The ring proves to have been forged in evil, and distorts its bearers to evil purposes. By a twist of fate, Frodo must cling to it desperately while plunging into the heart of darkness where its power over him is strongest; only there can it be finally destroyed.

Frodo is not immune to the hypnotism of the ring. Ambushed by forces of darkness, he succumbs to temptation and puts it on, an act which makes him and his invisible enemies apparent to each other, and at the same time puts him beyond the help of his friends. In this moment of extreme vulnerability, Frodo is wounded by the dark forces: "he felt a pain like a dart of ice pierce his left shoulder."

The external mark of his wound is slight and superficial "'His wound was small, and it is already closed. There's nothing but a cold white mark on his shoulder.'" But this only serves to make its deeper influence on him the more mysterious.

After the wound, Frodo contracts what I might call a "fever of evil." This makes real life less substantial: ("Frodo's pain had redoubled, and during the day things about him faded to shadows of ghostly grey"). Meanwhile, unreal things begin to preoccupy him ("'I am naked in the dark ... and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire'", "he was very pale and his eyes seemed to see things far away.")

As Frodo slowly and relentlessly makes his way towards the most accursed place on Middle-Earth, the influence of the ring grows stronger. Neither his personal courage or his common sense can stand between him and the accursed ring:
"'It is my burden, and no one else can bear it ... I am almost in its power now ... if you tried to take it I should go mad.'" During this dark hour, Frodo comes very close to betraying the tenderest and most loyal companion any man could wish for: Samwise.

Frodo's quest, then, is a struggle to destroy a visionary attachment to evil, to put himself and his world beyond the temptation of fate, to be true to his friends, and to plant himself forever in the land of the living.

Miraculously, he succeeds in this. But the struggle takes its toll on him: "'I am wounded ... it will never really heal.'"

In brief: we must cling to a curse only so we can destroy it, certainly not for titillation or superiority over others. We must forever be wary, and never be consumed by our dark vision, for in this vision we loses sight of our friends and touch with the world. Will and work can bring us to the point of redemption and healing, but ultimately evil destroys itself, and takes a piece of us with it. Fulfilling every hope, the hero remains broken, and is doomed and blessed always to wear the emblem of his humble despair. All that remains is for him to return to his hobbit hole and write it all down. Time to leave for fairer shores.

On Jesus
It is almost impossible to hear the words of Jesus with a fresh ear. The intense and fate-filled sobriety of ministers and street corner preachers tends to make us associate him with terrible questions and fears for the survival of the soul, while the tinkling hurdy-gurdy of Sunday school instruction makes us think of him as the biggest wuss the world has ever known.

Yet with patience and penetration we can hear a voice more complex and human than the one we have been taught to hear. Let's take an example:

Jesus ... rose from supper, laid aside his garments, and girded himself with a towel. Then he poured water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel with which he was girded. He came to Simon Peter; and Peter said to him, "Lord, do you wash my feet?" Jesus answered him, "What I am doing you do not know now, but afterward you will understand." Peter said to him, "You shall never wash my feet." Jesus answered him, "If I do not wash you, you have no part in me." Simon Peter said to him, "Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!" Jesus said to him, "He who has bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet, but he is clean all over; and you are clean...

Jesus is paying his disciples a kindness, in hopes that they will be kind to each other after he is gone. Simon Peter, in a fit of zealous reverence, refuses the kindness. Then comes the line "If I do not wash you, you have no part in me." Jesus is symbolically stating that kindness is central to his message, and that to reject kindness is to reject what he stands for. At another level, Jesus seems to be just counting on Simon Peter's blind reverence for him to get him to stop interfering with the graceful service that is underway. Amusingly, Simon Peter goes from an unbalanced refusal of the ritual to an unbalanced zeal for it; he asks Jesus to "go all the way" with the ritual of washing. Jesus remains at the same time ritually correct, playfully compassionate, and utterly practical; there's no reason to wash something that's clean. Finally the ceremony can go on without interruption.

Without Jesus' balancing voice, nothing would correct Simon Peter's stuffy and overly zealous spiritual mentality. He would veer into an attitude that forgot human kindness in favor of distorted efforts to obtain salvation. I guess that about sums up Christianity today.

On the Pithy Shakespeare

"The quality of mercy is not straine'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown ....
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice."

This is beautiful and sweet instruction. Cadence, image, and wisdom commingle in it, completely united with a powerful and benign conscience. It melts the heart. No wonder we take these words away with us, use them in speeches, and write them in our commonplace books. We want to remember them all alone, unmixed with baser matter. We want to keep these words in a phial, so that we can have ready access to their wisdom.

And when we do, we miss the point completely. Shakespeare wrote this nearly divine illumination of mercy for no other purpose than to show us the hardness of the human heart. Shylock rejects Portia's plea for mercy and insists upon "the law, The penalty and forfeit of my bond." Furthermore, his pettiness and hard heartednes will reduce Portia to the worst kind of legal sophistries, and Shylock will be punished on the basis of legalized bigotry. So much for mercy.

And what about these lines?:

"Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you pick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?"

The heart pounds to hear such a visceral evocation of our common humanity with an outcast people. Our compassion builds every moment. It affirms our humane values, it is in alignment with our politics, and we feel stronger and on surer ground with the eloquence of Shakespeare backing us up.

But that is not the point. The point is this: "if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" Shylock only builds a case for his common humanity with Christians so that his basest and most driving motives can be readily understood. He is connecting with us on the basis of meannness and hatred. We know from this point forward that Shakespeare is going to be relentlessly analyzing all that is nasty, heartless, and cruel in man through the character of Shylock, and that he does not want Shylock's religion to block us from seeing how thoroughly these traits apply to us.

Shakespeare's purposes are darker and more profound than ours. Be careful when you touch his works with your shears. You cannot extract a pound of flesh from them without spilling much blood, and you do so at your peril.

On One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point."

This beginning bespeaks the worlds that are to come. We will be continually denied a fixed reference point for the narrative, but instead will be seeing memories reflecting upon and elaborating each other. The insatiable curiosity of an innocent people will lead to decadence, to politics, to capitalism, to firing squads. The story of a human life will be the story of a family. The story of a family will be the story of a village. The story of a village will be the story of the world. The namelessness of things could refer simply to a child's lack of language. But clear water and prehistoric eggs seem to point to the primordial infancy of the whole cosmos.

The world is still so recent that many things lack names. To indicate them we must point. For the novelist, writing is a concrete gesture, not a conceptual activity. His fatal curiosity leads him down mad paths of civilization and brutality, past levitational chocolate and tiny silver fishes, until finally he has "concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant." One hundred years of solitude has become a strange fruit made ripe by memory, by desire, and by agony. Now it's ready to be plucked from the bookshelf, dropped into a backpack, taken to the beach.

On Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln's mind was apparently open to premonitions. It appears that these premonitions were sometimes nothing more than dark fantasies, the result of the activity of a rather melancholy imagination:

"I tell you, Speed, our forebodings, for which you and I are rather peculiar, are all the worst sort of nonsense."
-Abraham Lincoln, February 25, 1842

And it appears that they were sometimes filled with a deadly accuracy:

"Mr. Lincoln had told me that afternoon of a dream he had had for three successive nights, concerning his impending assassination."
-William Henry Crook, bodyguard to Lincoln, regarding the events of April 14, 1865

I would like to call the reader's attention to a third category: prophetic statements that Lincoln made without sensing their premonitory nature.

On July 6, 1852, Lincoln gave a eulogy on Henry Clay, a politician he greatly admired, and probably even idealized. In his remarks about Clay's position and actions in relation to "the slavery question", Lincoln remarks:

"Pharaoh's country was cursed with plagues, and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea for striving to retain a captive people who had already served them more than four hundred years. May like disasters never befall us!"

Like disasters obviously did befall us. The war was the Red Sea in which "hosts were drowned." Lincoln was later to remark that the length and bloodiness of the Civil War were the punishment of North and South alike for the evils of slavery. As for the curse of plagues, anyone who reflects on how many soldiers died of disease in the field will instantly feel the electric tang of Lincoln's unconscious premonition.

Lincoln was a humble man, and could not have fathomed and would not have believed that he would be so key an agent in the resolution of the terrible question that was shaking and splitting the nation. Indeed, he once responded to a collector of autographs who had asked for his "signature with sentiment" by writing:

"I am not a very sentimental man; and the best sentiment I can think of is, that if you collect the signatures of all persons who are no less distinguished than I, you will have a very undistinguishing mass of names."

And yet in this eulogy, Lincoln seems to have, all unawares, a premonition of the role will play. He concludes:

"Let us strive to deserve, as far as mortals may, the continued care of Divine Providence, trusting that, in future national emergencies, He will not fail to provide us the instruments of safety and security."

Fateful prayer, to which he himself was the answer! Unconscious prophet, blindly predicting his own coming!

On Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney

"If Grendel wins, it will be a gruesome day;
he will glut himself on the Geats in the war-hall,
swoop without fear on that flower of manhood
as on others before. Then my face won't be there
to be covered in death: he will carry me away
as he goes to ground, gorged and bloodied;
he will run gloating with my raw corpse
and feed on it alone, in a cruel frenzy,
fouling his moor-nest. No need then
to lament for long or lay out my body:
if the battle takes me, send back
this breast-webbing that Weland fashioned
and Hrethel gave me, to Lord Hygelac.
Fate goes ever as fate must."

My kind of hero. How unflinching he is in his appraisal of his situation. How well he knows his enemy. How well aware he is that in seeking a name for himself, he risks not only death but, worse, being unburied: "my face won't be there to be covered in death." The ceremonies of death place us solidly within the memories of our community, and when we can look forward to them we feel preserved beyond death. Beowulf is willing to risk this in order to achieve a more lasting, shining, immortal fame.

Another danger is that he will be eaten by his enemy, become part of a horrible beast who barbarously murders good men. The warrior is always at this brink. Being a warrior is always just shy of being a monster. Many of the ceremonies described in Beowulf -- hospitality, gift giving, poetry, family loyalties, and exchanges of favors, weapons and armour -- are all attempts to make human something that could easily become brutal. Perhaps this is even more of a concern for Beowulf, because he seems to fight best with his bare hands. Like a man who eats without silverware, Beowulf chooses a more unmediated, erotic, animal struggle. Or rather we should say that he is chosen by it; his swords tend to break:

"When he wielded a sword,
no matter how blooded and hard-edged the blade
his hand was too strong, the stroke he dealt
(I have heard) would ruin it. He could reap no advantage."

My kind of hero, greeting the world with such naked power. Tools that are fit for other men are no good to him. He overpowers them.

What is true about Beowulf in his struggle with the Grendel? In short, we are all engaged in a life and death struggle with the evil that we could become, and we must prepare to lose, because there is no guarantee that we will win. This is the heroic attitude.

The alternative? We hear the story of Hrethel, whose son was killed because he accidentally murdered his brother. Having lost two sons in such terrible circumstances, Hrethel can't go on.

"Heartsore, wearied, he turned away
from life's joys, chose God's light
and departed, leaving buildings and lands
to his sons, as a man of substance will."

This choice, sweetly sad, utterly forgivable, and even spiritually fulfilling ("he .. chose God's light"), is exactly what Beowulf cannot permit himself. Mortal struggle is the path of loyalty to life's joys. Do not veer from it.