"Of Experience"

“The more one reads and ponders the more one realizes that the accurate stance toward Shakespeare is that of awe” Harold Bloom

I joked in my last blog about the overwhelming power of to levitate the audience out of chaos and into bliss. I spent most of my time discussing those who cannot see the heavenly path and therefore are doomed to perpetuate in pedestrian and shadowed existence. Those things did happen, but I wanted to speak about a bit more honest material.

I’ve been reading a great deal of criticism on Shakespeare (Bloom) and a great deal of criticism on the life as a whole, (Camus, Montaigne, and Cicero). Now I must first state that these ideas are just a particular thread I’ve been following lately. I have no doubt I will contradict myself, like Whitman I am vast, I contain multitudes. The very act of discussing these points is an act of defeating them.

But, this is all for fun these ideas are have just manifested themselves in my recent reading and I thought that I’d share them.

Bloom’s quote about awe is what this matter all comes down to. Any commentary on Shakespeare could and possibly should be left at that…but oh, there’s just so much to be said.

The other day afterschool I swept into a discussion about Shakespeare and the Bahagavad Gita.  For those unfamiliar, the Gita (for short) is quite possibly the greatest epiphanic text I’ve ever come across. This is due to two main reasons: first, the apocalyptic visions comfort us in their omnipotence. I personally don’t subscribe to the belief, but there is something soothing about the notion that all that has been has been, and all that will be will be. If any of you have studied Arabic, or (more likely) if any of you have read one of the most widely read novels ever The Alchemist you may remember a word that almost summarizes this idea. Kuthub كتب: meaning: it was written.

This story however, cannot be usurped by a single word, and this brings me to part two of its power: The story. The Gita is perhaps one of the most beautiful stories out of the east, its prose is poetic, its language and vernacular is…beautiful, there is really no other word to describe it. So if you’d like to explore more on that note, please do. Check out the Gita’s wiki  GITA WIKI or read the text itself GITA

Harold Bloom seems to hold an almost Gita mentality when it comes to Shakespeare’s work.  I’m not sure if the title of his book gives it away, Shakespeare the Invention of the Human, but Bloom suggests that Shakespeare has shaped and entirely altered the world in which we live. Bloom describes Shakespeare, “a vision that is everything and nothing, a person who was (according to Borges) everyone and no one, an art so infinite that it contains us, and will go on enclosing those likely to come after us” (xxi).  Like that Gita this is a simultaneously frightening and comforting notion of our “lack of free will” as one might call it. Owen Barfield enunciates this point in one of his letters to Wittgenstein stating, “there is a very real sense, humiliating as it may seem, in which what we generally venture to call our feelings are really Shakespeare’s ‘meaning’” (13).

Now if we keep these ideas in mind, we find ourselves in a very delicate position. For if Shakespeare is both everyone, and no one we cannot by any means say that he is any one thing in particular, we also almost more heavily cannot say he is not any one thing.  There for Bloom is as was Daedalus paradoxically stuck in a labyrinth of his own creation when he attacks Jan Kott’s idea that MSND is about bestiality and sex. He is right to say that the play is not completely centered around those ideas, but he cannot without contradiction say that those ideas are not contained within the infinite circumference of Shakespeare’s creation.

So this brings us back to Blooms quote about awe, that if we must remain tongue- tied and contrived within our ascertains we can only be accurate in the overwhelming experience.

I find as English majors we often forget that we are meant to enjoy what we read. The denominator of our readings should not be the extent of our scholarly insight it should be the depth of our delight.

Reading Bloom turned me on to Montaigne, which turned me on to Cicero who states, “Nothing is worse than that assertion and decision should precede knowledge and perception.”

We have confounded our relationship with Shakespeare as an entity we must overcome rather than enjoy. Since the start of this class I have heard,( and I am guilty of uttering it myself) of this wicked phrase: “I have to read this entire book”.  What we should be saying instead is “I get to read this entire book”. 

As you like it is a perfect transition from MSND, in that we should not have as difficult a time realizing that the intent is our delight, that the moral of the story is the story.  In a MDSND one of the reasons I found it difficult to discuss act 5 is because I am of the personal belief (at least for this blog) that we are not meant to “discuss it”. This should have been clear when we looked at Theseus and Hippolyta position in the audience, they constantly criticize and comment on the play they have left no space in their minds to simply enjoy.

This is partly why—I believe—Bottom’s ballad was never included. Bottom like Arjuna has been “known” the gods, he has seen the “creation and destruction” of all things.  As Shakespeare describes the poet, his eyes gaze from the earth to the heavens. The circumference of Shakespeare contains these two points and all points in between.  The synesthesia in Bottom’s description is only fitting, because our sense cannot even conceive all things between and of the alpha and the omega.  The attempt to define such a thing is defeating and reductive, instead we should ask ourselves in Hendrix like fashion, “Are you experienced?”

Camus in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” makes concord of this discord, “For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers” (19).  I feel we are often too critical to conceive the beauty before us.  We shouldn’t ever have troubled times with Shakespeare, As you like it should give us a hint that this is a play for us to enjoy, it is…as we like it. Camus continues on this commentary of experience vs. examination, “the soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world” (20).

Again, these are just some ideas that I enjoyed running with, but it does not mean they contain or describe my ideas as a whole, Montaigne says in his essay “ ‘Of Experience’, never did two men find the same conclusion, nor the same man at different hours.”

oh.

Library in midsummer: quite possible the most boring place to be and to work. Being without IPod I recently purchased a “walkman” CD player which looks archaic and feel cumbersome bulging into my tight pocket. Depending on the day my pants cannot even contain the dated device. It sits out upon my book car for all to see and apparently criticize.

You’d think that with all the milestones of technological progress that even old equipment would be improved upon, but you’d be wrong.  Every step skips my simple cd’s song. This summer has dragged on in the buzzing heat and arid bored of summer work. Unstimulated, stagnant in the dust of unread books and abandoned interest.

Long ago I stopped listening to music and sought refuge in the seemingly endless cacophony of collected audio books. Steven Martin and David Sedaris appeased my long felt longing, occasionally summing a hearty “HA” exaggerated by my electronic deafness. Noam Chomsky had be talking to myself- constructing well supported debates that no one cares to listen to, to be, to fathom. If I can reduce the conflict to the most simple and unarguable terms: It’s genocide.

I listened to everything from Dante to The Golden Compass, exhausting everything in between.

That is, until I finally fell upon the Shakespeare collection.

I poured over and into them. Their sweet sound sauntered away my days until I almost longed for work.

One day while listening to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I stood alone in the elevator soaring upwards with my cart of books and my CD of soul. I have a funny habit of repeating words I like to say, often in particular and eccentric ways. In this case I was miming the Narrators way of “Oberon”. This infatuation with words that please the mouth and mind is almost as profound as my distaste for diphthongs and rigid word. Marlboro being one.

As I was swooning in private joy of the exhaling experience of this play, two girls get on to the elevator with me.

Now there are those airy apparitions of beauty that float through the library, those pieces of poetry to the eye that warm all the air around them. The very pages of the library books flutter, turning to and fro simultaneously too shy to look, too enamored to look away.

These girls do not apply. They were not the elusive library vixens of which I am fond.

They had a tan, but I’m pretty sure it came with a registered trade mark.

They had a figure, but I couldn’t figure it out.

Shall I compare thee to a Butte bus top?

Thou art more frequented and pedantic.

                So I my eyes are closed and I’m saying the word “Oberon, OOOBeron” over and over. I have my Walkman out and I’m having a good time. I do not realize the door is open, I do not realize the ridicule. I open my eyes finally and talk off my headphones. They ask what am I listening too, and I tell them “Shakespeare…what else would I be listening to?”

They laugh.

I do not.

I am reminded of an anecdote I’ve recently read, in a book about Bhuddism by Jack Kornfield called A Path with Heart. In which the author describes his return to the United Sates adorned in his robes with shaved head. While waiting for his sister in law at a beauty salon he hears a gaggle of girls mocking him and his attire, his posture and his mediations. They ask each other “Is he for real?”  he opens his eyes to see the bemasked women, caked in avocado paste, medusaed in hair curlers.  He responds to himself quietly, “are they for real?”

The girls get off one floor above. They don’t look fond of stairs.