Top 5 Things Hamlet Can Learn From Beowulf

This is a quick list. Very self-explanatory. After all, without Beowulf there may not even be an Elsinore for Hamlet to mope around...

1. Avoid the pool. People like to bring up swimming at the Danish royal table.
2. Don't look the Queen directly in the eye. She's liable to adopt you as grand protector of her wimpy adolescent children. Except when you're already related to the Queen. In that case, have your mother invite a big, bad Geatish warrior to come visit from across the sea to become your new grand protector. It'll be worth your time, trust me.
3. Swords optional.
4. Get that front door checked.
5. I am your (great-great-great-great-great grand) father!

Go Hamlet, go.

Willy Loman is not Lazy!

Tragic, yes. Despicable, yes. Pathetic, yes (just clarify connotation, please!).

But not lazy!!!

William Loman wants nothing more than to be all the things he seemingly cannot be. A good father. A good husband. To be well liked. And he pursues these things -- deliberately and with energy -- like a hamster on a wheel with a cute little fedora and matching briefcase full of merchandise. Only the hamster is able to stop whenever he wants. Willy cannot. Therein lies the rub.

Because Willy is doomed to forward motion, he is incapable of true reflection. Because he is never, ever truly alone with his thoughts. To be clear, he has full access to his memories and a host of questions, mostly self-depracatory, but he has no such access to introspective thought. He cannot slow down his self-doubt; he refuses to release himself from his own guilt. In short, he cannot actually move forward.

Revision: Willy is doomed to perpetual motion, limited to circular angles, prohibitive of forward progress. Willy is stuck. But not by laziness. Not even by a lack of morals. He cannot overcome himself. He cannot face up to the sum of all his parts. Certainly, some of these parts are rotted wood: the affair, his parenting skills, his backward sense of reputation in the business world. But taken together, Willy Loman is not a bad man.

Low, maybe. Which is what makes him tragic. Which is why we murder to dissect him and stash him away nice and neatly into a mislabeled corner. We don't like to look overlong at such a man. We may start to see a bit of ourselves tucked inside a dimple or stuck to an eyelash. So we must kick him lower than he really is, to distance ourselves.

Do not, gentle reader, seek this distance. A little grit is not a bad thing.

Cash Bundren's Great Secret

Once again I find myself leading my intrepid literary troops through William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and once again I am struck by a singular character:

Cash Bundren.

Eldest child, focused carpenter, absolute truth-teller. His first narration in AILD is nothing more than  a list, a quick how-to on coffin-making. He even fails to mention that it is for his mother that he toils. Emotion-dodging? Deflection-by-insulation? Or space case? We quickly jump to the latter, feeling (fearing?) something is a little off with the oldest Bundren offspring.

Cash, however, strikes me as having access to some secret that I am not privy to, or if I am, then it is a secret I care not to look at for longer than a moment or two. Like staring at the sun overlong. Or a car crash before the ambulance.

He knows what it means to stay on task. Whether the task is concrete like constructing a coffin or abstract like demonstrating kindness, Cash knows how to see it through, regardless of time frames.

Like Dick in Waterland or Lenny in Of Mice and Men or Forrest Gump himself, it is their vacuous nature which allows them to outstrip, in this one small arena at least, the other great men which surround them.

I must confess, I don't like the hollowness of Cash's devotion. And not because he is "slow" or a "dullard," and not because he is "simple" and "rural;" it is entirely because it is something I cannot do. It is a skill-set which I do not possess. And I am not dull or slow; I am witty and sophisticated. I read and discuss and posit great ideas and challenge the great ideas of others.

In fact, it would seem as if I am so over-burdened by my wit and sophistication that I cannot clutch a single devotion to my chest for longer than a few moments.

Was it Thoreau who claimed "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!"? I feel, gentle reader, that Cash is nodding a slow nod right about now. And he will probably continue to nod until I get it, not a moment before. Not even long after his head hurts.

Poor Grendel's Accident

Poor, poor Grendel. What, gentle reader, is this guy's (monster's...) problem? I mean, Beowulf has won, Grendel has lost his arm, and he has been clearly shown that nihilism has failed him. So what gives? Why the pouting? Why the pathetic holding-on to a miserable attitude? Why the need to act so humanly?

To quote Aldous Huxley: "Experience teaches only the teachable."

Your thoughts? Are you teachable? Can you even assess this for yourself? A dangerous notion, that. Trying to self-discover one's ability to accept teaching. Not even criticism, but teaching.

Now hold on. This is not a teacher's rant. This is not about comma rules or MLA formatting or even about how to write the bigger, better thesis statement. No, no, no. This is about learning something. About yourself. About the real world.

About being human. Why is it so tricky to join that club?

Getting What You Deserve.

According to John Gardner's Grendel, it is Hrothgar who draws first blood. And like any great reference to Rambo, it is expected that the retaliation be spectacular. Gruesome. And final.

Yes, in this story, King Hrothgar strikes first. As he stares up into a tree in which a juvenile Grendel is stuck by the ankle, he ponders some pseudo-religious reason for the tree-spirit-fungus to be angry and then, without any direct provocation, he takes a friend's war-axe and chucks it at Grendel's shoulder.

Yikes!!! Waaaa indeed, gentle reader.

So the root of all the trouble is Hrothgar's hasty turn to violence. Yet it is Grendel who sustains the destruction for twelve "idiotic" years. Who is to blame for this awful scenario, the one who starts it or the one who finishes it?

Now technically, Grendel doesn't finish anything. I mean, he's still attacking a shriveled kingdom by the time Beowulf arrives to clean up the mess. But he has ended other things, like Hrothgar's hope, the Danes' place in the world, and many, many family trees. Surely he is to blame for all the madness, right? Because he would not relent even when he could. Surely, after a certain breaking point, we allow Hrothgar off the hook?

No way. The blame stays with the king. Accountability, baby. Before you disagree and say that's too harsh, consider what it would take for you to throw a battle-axe at someone. Literally or otherwise. Perhaps this level of forethought is not optional after all? Indeed, if I was targeting such an uncertain thing with such a certain degree of poison, then I would deserve every bit of reprisal that came my way. I would not like it, but then that is not what deserving is all about.

Beowulf the Hero and the Man

The new school year has started and with it, as always, comes Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. I love this story because Heaney's poetry is beautiful and majestic, stark and blunt, big and small, like Beowulf himself. Every year, the great debate rages over Beowulf's larger than life persona and his arrogance, his self-delusion, his boasting. "Be the man I know you should be" he scolds Hrothgar. "I will fight Grendel without swords" he shouts at the Danes. "I did beat Breca" he corrects Unferth.

Is he a punk?

Sure. Why not?

Typically the discussion takes us back to different passages that demonstrate Beowulf's handle on the situation and how those around him seem to receive his boasts. And typically, he comes away fairly clean. But I say let him boast. Let him be arrogant.

Who cares!

I don't. I have decided that I want a little dirt on my heroes. Those who are perfect are also boring. They are self-serving. They are people I don't want to examine. Besides, I propose that Beowulf-as-Hero and Beowulf-as-Man can coexist in the same space. Why does it have to be one or the other, a black and white cookie-sheet cutout of a man? It doesn't. It shouldn't.

Beowulf can get away with a little arrogance here, a blatant boast there because Beowulf, Hero and Man, is made up by his constituent parts. The half moon is still a full sphere in space, even when we cannot see the other side. So too with Beowulf. If he decides to show a part of his Human self, then we still know with confidence that the rest of him, the Hero self, still resides attached, unnoticed for now, in the shadows, waiting to be reflected later. And I am glad for this assessment, that we may allow for this kind of duality. If I were assessed by such an all-or-nothing measuring stick, then surely I would be among the most despicable. Depending on when you caught me.

Beowulf is a hero. And he is arrogant. At times. And I say let him. Because ultimately, when he finally turns his gaze fully at us and we see the whole man, we understand. He is better than Hrothgar, Unferth, Wiglaf, Grendel, Hygelac, us, because Beowulf gets it right most of the time. His tally is better than ours. He is much more Hero than Man.

And even at 51%, this is a good majority.

Equations of a Great Villain

According to my Kindle, I am 76% done with Stephen King's The Stand. It is a spectacular read. A terrible, government-produced superflu is accidentally released into the world and 99.999% of everyone dies. Then the survivors find each other. Some are good, some are not. They all have dreams, and they all seem to possess different versions of ESP that either leads them to the Free Zone in Boulder, Colorado or to the new flagship of bad guys in Las Vegas (of course Las Vegas!). And who is in charge of Las Vegas?

The dark man. The Walkin Dude. The hardcase. Randall Flagg.

Randall Flagg is the devil incarnate. He is terrifyingly calm and logical. He offers all kinds of awful salvation, "all you have to do is ask." He is that perfect combination of limitless danger and unflappable calmness. Flagg doesn't get rattled. Flagg doesn't even raise his voice. He smiles and makes funny pop-culture jokes and says the things everyone is thinking but won't say and he doesn't look back.

Why are the calm ones the most terrifying? Consider:

1. Voldemort is scarier when he is NOT yelling.
2. Michael Myers is still the most unsettling horror movie monster because he never hurries. Ever.
3. Every great comic book villain has the qualities of the wise old man (think Magneto here) and lets his/her mindless henchmen do the crazy, emotional dirty work.
4. The Judge in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian dances and plays the fiddle...among other things, but that is him portrayed at his most physically vigorous; everything else occurs off-page or is implied.
5. Randall Flagg inspires fear, he does not exact it.

What is the difference?

I think the spookiest, most resonating villains are the ones who reside firmly within our goosebumps, and they get there not through brute violence or debauchery but through the cool, shivering gamma rays of control. They seem to be okay with the awful around them. They seem to expect it. Or even worse, they seem indifferent to it. No emotional reaction at all. We as an audience seem to connect our own most basic negative emotions to the bad guys: anger, frustration, violence, etc. only we understand these things on a milder level. So when we see it on the page or big screen, we cringe but relate. Not so for the big villains. They are apart from us, and that chills us. They do not connect with our visceral emotions because they do not feel them at all.

And we fear what we don't understand. A simple, but effective equation.

That is not it, at all

It has been several weeks, gentle reader. My other non-doer activities have kept me from the keyboard, but here we go again. And we go with gusto. So. I watched the apocalyptic film 2012 tonight. It's a Monday, in case you're keeping score at home. I always wanted to know what that pit of dread and (hopefully) human redemption feels like on a Monday. Much different from a Friday or Saturday. Tangier. Anyway, I was just considering that if my own ship were going down, which high theories of existence I would cling to for comfort and guidance... and which I would discard like so much flotsam. Would I turn to Carraway's boats and currents; or Hamlet's slings and arrows; or Underground Man's heroes and mud; or Candide's garden? Would I give a rip about any of it? Chances are I would simply grab my family into a suffocating bear hug and not let go. But even that is uncertain. I mean, really, who knows what the heck I would do if my toes were on the edge of the abyss. I think I would want clarity, though. I think I would want some black-and-whiteness about me. No time for gray in a moment like that, wouldn't you say, gentle reader? The term because would surely fall away into the abyss with everything else not yet nailed down. I would hope to be nailed down.

How Large Can We Be?

We read Whitman today and I breathed in some good air. We spoke, my students and I, of the yawp that Uncle Walt demands of himself, that we need to sound for ourselves. And I found myself being accused by the spotted hawk. Why, gentle reader? Because I am a gabber and a loiterer.

So was Whitman, so I suppose I am in good company. And he doesn't apologize for it, so I will not, in a vain attempt to stay even. Therefore, I feel released from my own contradictions. After all, it is legal to be many things. We are large, we contain multitudes, and if we do not, well then shame on us. I, for one, wish to carry with me the love of loafing poets shoulder to shoulder with a disgust for general laziness. Can those things calibrate?

How do we draw the line between multitasking and schizophrenia; between varied and fake; between many-layered and evermore-hollow? Do we need to? Across the pond, Wordsworth said that "we murder to dissect" and while I don't disagree with him (heck, I do it all the time!), I don't prefer it. I find no comfort in murdering or dissecting; I find comfort in the yawp.

It sounds like something Beowulf would have done quite well.

He's being mean, right?

I must admit it, gentle reader; today I got frustrated. Apparently the third "chapter" of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is a horrifying, violent, disturbing narrative of Jewel Bundren beating the crap out of a horse. Apparently he's not breaking the horse, but only hitting, punching, and verbally abusing it like so much meat.

Apparently.

Of twenty-six souls in the classroom, only one -- not myself -- had any experience around horses. Only one had actual experience in breaking horses. She spoke as an authority, describing that the process is a balance of forceful physicality and trust-building. I believed her. Her classmates did not. She must have been wrong, gentle reader, or at least that was the final position of the class.

Huh?

Why the reticence to concede? Why the obstinance, in the face of bald fact, to be right? Why the unwillingness to yield? It is not as if we are discussing personal religion or a political view. Nope. Horse-breaking. Something these students will never come within twenty miles of. Something these students will never again encounter in literature unless by accident. Something, I believe, not worth the effort of resistance. Yet we resisted.

Major premise: We fear what we don't know.
Minor premise: I don't know horse-breaking.
Conclusion: Horse-breaking scares the living crap out of me and I will reject all versions of it, both in print and on the big screen. Not until horse-breaking is presented as a rat in a cage stuck on my face will I ever concede the awful, honest truth:

I love it when Big Brother Horse-Breaks.

Somewhere, but not here

"Closing time, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here."

My students and I ran into a log-jam yesterday trying to decipher Dostoevsky's paradoxical man is condemned to creativity rant in Part 1, chapter 9 of Notes from Underground. He claims that we all want to go "somewhere, but not here." It is our deeply rooted need to go that drives our creativity and our inability to define where that condemns us. We must graduate high school to get to college to get to the job to get to the house to get to the family to get to retirement to get to death. Whew. So what, you're saying. I can define my world. I know my destination(s). And I hear you loud and clear, gentle reader. But in many tries, my students could not, and I was not daring enough to attempt it myself. Our hopeless conclusion was that the Underground Man was right yet again, and that we did not like it.

Where to go from here? Does it matter, so long as we have some defined thing to live for? Surely that is a void not yet filled by Fyodor's mad ranter. I love my family. I will go where they go, and you can keep the creativity. Is that cheating? Surely that's too simple. Probably that's the point. If Dostoevsky's target audience was his new "modern man" and these men were too sophisticated for their own good, quibbling over politics, reinventing religion, casting down tradition, then perhaps a return to the simple is the best medicine. If I had to be honest, then I would like to be considered modern and sophisticated. But if I had to be very honest, I don't really care at all about that. How can one have such a love affair with abstraction?

Going Daisy for Pizza

So. There is a new term about. It is called "going Daisy." It rhymes with "going crazy," is named after Gatsby's love interest, and they mean virtually the same thing, but the motivation which drives these two terms... well, that is miles apart.

Consider:

Tonight the worst snowstorm of the 2010-11 season rolls through my state. The roads are an impassable white fuzz due to terrible wind and incessant snow caking and crowding the lanes. Yet I wanted pizza for dinner. I love pizza, you see, but like any other sane adult, I enjoy my life, my warmth, and my car not in a ditch. But the pizza, you see. Well, drumroll please. I ordered the pizza and went out for it. Because I am a self-centered self-loather when it comes to pizza. Like Daisy. And like Daisy, I got through it scot-free. My wife, however, shoveled her back into oblivion so that I could get back into my driveway. So you see, gentle reader, there are consequences for all our actions. They just don't always find their way back to us, or worse still, they are not of us to begin with, like that terrible rain-cloud that lands on Andy Dufresne in Shawshank; or the virus of nihilism that haunts the fens in Grendel; or the friendship that claims both the mice and the men in George's life. I "went Daisy" for my pizza and probably won't think twice about doing it again in the near future because the world failed to teach me otherwise this time. I hope I get to "go Daisy" again sometime, and invite you to do the same. Just be wary of the time that such actions do claim you. Let us not be surprised. That would be just plum "Daisy" indeed.

Dostoevsky's Excessive Consciousness

Dostoevsky's Underground Man claims that an excessive consciousness is a disease that leads to a certain level of inertia. I agree! Hail to inertia! Hamlet allusions of the world unite!

Take One:
I'm rolling my cart up to the check-out aisles at Jewel-Osco. I am assessing the possibilities. I choose the self-checkout aisle because I'm a do-it-yourself (sometimes-just-to-avoid-additional-random-human-contact) kind of guy, so I sit there and debate between the two self-checkout aisles. #22 has a middle-aged woman who appears competent and nobody behind her, but she has a full cart and there's definitely a defeatist look about her; #23 has three young couples all blissfully holding hands and very few groceries. Hmmmm. I ponder, allowing three people to slide in front of me. I could glare at them, though it's not their fault. I could kindly ask the woman if she's "gonna be awhile" to better inform my decision. I do neither and go with #22.

35 minutes later I am still cursing my decision, my deliberation, my gut feelings, my instincts. The middle aged lady was literally trying to run off with her cucumbers because she couldn't properly weigh and pay. I watched her, wondering that if I offered to help, I may appear rude and impatient, which I was. So I decided to just be impatient. Should I have pondered further? All those lovebirds in #23 came and went while I stood there watching my soda go flat. I don't know. But I can tell you this, the excessive consciousness definitely doesn't help after the fact either.

Cheers.