Thursday, May 17, 2012

The hardest thing is writing down the first few words, I would say.  The news could distract to you to a moment of clarity bearing upon the news;  one wants to develop the thought, exorcise it.

What follows is just an example of the mind's wanderings, a dramatization of interfering thoughts that must be gotten out of the way before the real stuff happens:

Let's see how that goes, getting the news-related thing out of the way.  Someone, a woman, no less, from what may be discerned from PBS, invented a way of making financial risk less risky by creating a market for derivatives based on what is already derivative.  Great idea.  Bets are hedged.  Basically, then, how does the story go? but that, well, if I am risky, someone buys that risk, but makes clever bets so shrewdly watching things go up and down that... I still don't get it.  Suffice it to say that we live in a world that is, at least temporarily, the end product of this desire to create a new market so that banks could enrich themselves through transaction fees and their own speculations, and those speculations, definitely, being based on the mortgage debts of people offered, well, deals, or what sounded like good deals or opportunities.  And now does it not seem fairly clear that the whole world, and the whole foundation of the financial speculations of the nations that make up the Eurozone, is now connected to these perplexingly strange deals of derivatives, a shadow market.  And now, everyone wants to back away from their municipal/national debts, in a world were things are complicated and interrelated already, so that the world of investing is so... how to put it?, but that all debt seems to be possibly based on bad debts, even though that basis should have proven, thanks to the risk-free nature of derivatives, to be risk free, that bad debt should still be a source somehow to make money...  Greek debt, or default upon debt, now would seem to paralyze any investment anyone makes anywhere because of a created web based on speculative calculations and hocus pocus mathematics that allowed some people, in early, to get rich quick, then leave the stinking pile of the organic residue from that great making of money (see the 1%) for the rest of us, no, not just one investor, but pretty much the whole financial system, such that it will, thanks to this card trick, basically rot until it all is forced to come clean.  (Even J.P. Morgan, the latest infallible victim.)

See, that's stuff that occupies the mind, another example, by the way, of the poison wrought by a lack of fairness, transparency on all levels.

All that aside, the mind must admit it is hard to get the first few words out bearing upon the ideas.  And so the barman, after a load of laundry, finally goes to bed as dawn rises, for a fitful rest.  He didn't even get to anything resembling much his thoughts.  Weary from a very busy night, jazz night, at the bistro, when he wakes he's too tired to get up out of bed, and sensing he hasn't even dreamed, he tries to sleep more, dreaming finally, first of a return to the town of his birth, and then a restaurant dream of trying to put a table for an important large party together out of wobbly puzzle-piece ended two-top tables.

What a disaster, a barman's life.  The last night of the week, he's up til 6 in the morning waiting for the adrenaline to leave his system, gets up at mid afternoon feeling debauched and knowing he's out of synch.  It's a job for supermen, I suppose, who can bounce back, not let it get to them, this whole business of being 'down and out in London and Paris and Washington, DC.'  If you had something useful to say about life, well, maybe it would be worth it, but all that really seems to happen is that many should-have-been-productive years later you are still lost, not sure of what to do with yourself, didn't really try anything new, clung to writing but not professional about it, alone, poor, without a community useful to you, no family, no kids, prospects gone, no future.  But that writing it down helps unblock something, or that it allows some less conscious wheels to spin, so that hopefully the inner you will think a way out of the mess and not have to get up every day filled with regrets and the sense that you let your folks down.

Are you a writer?  What made you think so years ago?  If so, what could you do with it, so that you did make an agreeable living out of it, or are you doomed to the obscure artistic struggle?

It always seems like a tug of war, that part of the self that really truly wants to be practical, and that part of the self that finds a creative outlet, a form of expression that is more perfect than the interactions that happen directly between people.

So, there is the job side, the putting up with things with the general sense that it would be thoroughly impractical to be solely an artist/writer/poet/philosopher/musician, and then there is the opposite side which demands dedication and time for its own pursuits.

Joseph Campbell seems to have a certain view of Hamlet in his considerations of the mythological.  He places the figure of Hamlet as we know him very close to Oedipus, the guy who can't escape his mother complex and his childhood therefore balking on adulthood.  It's a hard logic to argue against, that Hamlet, as Campbell puts it in his conversation with Moyers, is not up for facing his fate and his adult life.  Why do I find that all vastly over reductive?  I see it Hamlet's as more of a story about confronting an actual crime against humanity, the murder of his father.  Yes, there is lots of psychology in it, but Hamlet strikes me as having a good amount of psychological resilience, handling the ghost's appearance, Yorick's skull, seeing through doddering old fools, etc.  The splinter between himself and the fair Ophelia is just one of those shitty things that happens when individuals attempt to put their imprint upon the pure open possibility of the great relationship between the two through advice, through meddling and deceit and the placement of outside insecurity and social complexes.  I think they would have got on just fine hadn't the same selfish forces of power and greed and vain 'honor' hadn't intervened so tragically.  Hamlet's intentions are misinterpreted, monstrously misconstrued.

For his own part of the tragedy, his putting on the antic disposition is well-aimed, except for the one tragic thing about it, which is that Ophelia gets caught in the crossfire between prince and usurper.   And even then it would have worked out alright between the two had not for brother and father, in a stance of social propriety meddled with the poor girl's thoughts.  Of course, the slaying of the old man didn't help Hamlet's case, his ability to do anything really.

I might argue that Shakespeare's great work of words, words, words captures something eternal.  How to express it?   Is he capturing the battle between what we do out of love, our deepest purest desires on the one side and the corrupting influence of social pressure, the placement of value judgments upon who people are and what they do?  Is it the battle of what is spiritual and appropriate on the one hand and all the social externals set up to control people (having a low opinion of them) on the other?  The story, then, of Oedipus is a bit different from that, back on purely mythic territory, stranger, more deeply symbolic in its weirdness.

People judge other people.  Rare to find a non-judgmental soul.  Many are the reasons people do judge, ambitions and the like.  Shakespeare's tale offers some leverage against such, as basically, like To Kill A Mockingbird, we are asked to walk around in someone else's shoes.  It's a tale that cuts against ostracism, that falls in line with the beatitudes.



In Hamlet one finds a whole list of city life, an array of peoples and behaviors the country boy found in his career in the city, the lonely, the vain, the usurpers, the anguish, the mistreatment.  He seems to be doomed most of all because he is good, because he is authentic, liked by people.  It's a simple tale of love between a young man and a young woman thwarted by pressures beyond them.  A reader can almost sense the existence of a great wall to separate the writer/observer and happy people going about their normalcy.

Perhaps Campbell is right in deeming Hamlet as someone not up for his own fate, as if he were, like the drinker, susceptible to sabotaging himself, or getting too wrapped up paralytically in his own head.  But there is the lasting sense that Hamlet is facing is tremendously difficult, and also modern, such that we feel  him to be real, a mortal, one of us, with sets of similar problems somehow.

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