Beyond words, the successes of Shakespeare

Shakespeare excelled in this area of word's meaninglessness, or rather, the inability of words to form a solid and lasting logic by which a character could assess, describe and compute his or her or a situation. The words are so apt and so well-put together because they cannot touch, with any accuracy, what a person is thinking, feeling or trying to achieve. The person, the character, is himself confused, because he is acting not on word and logic but on dreams and deeper impulses. Shakespeare's characters are speaking in the moment. They are who they are. Thinking without the ability to think clearly, because words aren't the best logic or science, but of course, there's nothing any better.

Only when we realize we cannot judge Lear, Othello, Iago, anyone else, does the matter of our brains become clear. Shakespeare, therefore, did a wonderful service for us in showing that our brains are runs of nerve, passion, electricity, animal urges, basic needs. The wonder of the words of the Elizabethan play such as he, Shakespeare, gives us, are worthy by showing us the animal reaction, the gut feeling, the human being in his animal cloak. "A sight for sore eyes," is one recording of humanity's personal needs, for instance.

Hamlet comes with a whirlwind, properly, fitting, of energy. A gentle touch, a kindness, an emphatic intellectual scholarliness beyond the scholastics of Horatio (most admirably broad), as if we were to see some of the trade routes of thoughts that run in the considered life, Beethoven accessing Eastern thinking concerning the illusion of self, being a recent example. Hamlet turns his mind everywhere, brilliantly, and yet, he does not claim any precise understanding. He does not claim a worded response (and this same thing was Kennedy's great moment in the Missile Crisis, saying the few things one knew and not making more of them, keeping the thoughts clean, unencumbered. Kennedy, of course, went on to say some other things with a clarity beyond words, and after him, his brother did the same, in a way to show the world, as if for once and for all, how to take thought back to the very basics. And how odd that the younger brother too... as if the individuals who comprise the public, prior to reading the great political thoughts of natural rights John Locke, don't tread on me, don't tread on you, etc., cannot handle this stripped-down basic clean math of thought, as if the public member would rather spend an excess hour prevaricating upon the complications and possibility for argument, then thereby enact them, rather than boil something back down to the clarity someone like a Lincoln had his awful and beautifully clear access to.)

Shakespeare gives us his characters through the limitations of careful considered thought. The poetry comes from the mouths of confused persons, of persons brilliant and thoughtful enough to accept the possibility of not understanding something clearly enough to be able to take any action but further thought and consideration and talk. (A good review in the NY Times of an actor bringing us Polonius better than we've had him of late.) The best, as in a Donne poem, are when the speaker throws up his hands, or is left to state clearly what his obviously unrealistic thoughts might be clearly, so that they are ready to be opened.

Tonight we, at the wine bar, tasted two wines, both from the Graves appellation of Bordeaux. Organic wine-making. The white, sauvignon blanc, semillon, and a small but immediately noticeable percentage of muscadelle, no oak, resulting in white flowers closest in our palates to acacia, and the red, half and half, no need to guess the grapes, some oak, but not new oak. The red, an '05, and nothing to complain about for the price and the name. The white to sip for a red drinker who's tired of puffed headaches and a dry mouth and an inability to sleep and wake well.

It is right that those who speak the cleanest and most well thought-out thoughts are the grave diggers, the fools at the edge, who, by some happenstance of wit, seem to speak for the crowds gathered at the foot of the stage. Hamlet: a brilliant thinker, as he is able to encompass digestively the thoughts of the grave digger, the body of the normal rank and file person that grows increasingly rare even as the very same exists in abundance, selfishness and a lack of art de vivre coming between.

Clarity, if we are to have any meaningful discussion, is at odds with clarifying words. We can't speak of anything really without trying poetically and gently touch upon an animal situation far beyond any policy and fiscal math. We'd be better off reading aloud Eliot's Preludes at the beginning sessions of our democracy.

This is why it is never tiresome to read a good writer, like Shakespeare, while the seemingly necessary gritty details of a current issue, dreadful as the issue can be, are not understood by shades and contours of detail, but by the basic understandings all, by being live creatures, have within, easily brought forth to good effect, were one to have faith in them.

Shakespeare had the trick. It's why we still listen to him today.