Economic Voodoo and Slit Wrists
Suicide:
you have bombed me in the garden
where I spent my longest days.
I emptied the storehouse
of vanity and blasphemy,
and uprooted the weeds
just to smell the thick dirt
and huff its mineral tracks.
Yet my death, over and abound,
is a price
that no one can pay.
We gave our purses to the wealthy,
and walked the tightrope of new thought.
No one challenged authority
and greed became the most utilized expenditure.
And a ghost arose like Hamlet’s grandfather
from the ivy,
only to whisper our destiny is fulfilled.
The Ghost appearing to Hamlet -- John Austen
William Shakespeare's "The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark" opened with the ghost of Hamlet's father (also named Hamlet) instructing his son to avenge his murder. Three centuries later, in "Ulysses" James Joyce "proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself [Shakespeare] is the ghost of his own father." In doing so, Joyce seemed to take Virgil's remark in Dante's "Divine Comedy" that art is the grand child of the gods and give it a nontheistic progression from Experience to the artist to art -- Experience is thus the grandfather of art. King Hamlet's grandson is, then, the soul (total consciousness, in Aristotelian terms)of Prince Hamlet, and the soul of Prince Hamlet is the grandfather of Shakespeare because it represents his experience that generated his imagination; because Shakespeare created King Hamlet, that made him his father (and Prince Hamlet's grandfather). Shakespeare was also the father of his own soul and therefore the creative ghost of his own father. and the whole process was repeated with Shakespeare being the literary grandfather of Joyce... As Joyce remarked, "We walk through ourselves ... but always meeting ourselves."
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you brought Joyce into this. Also Wordsworth: "The child is father of the man."
DeleteIn the light of this esthetic theory, it may be apropos to quote Joyce again, later in "Ulysses": "Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of minds that have lost their balance."
ReplyDelete