Beauty and fear

Once again, I have started reading The Tempest, a play that seems to be assigned each and every semester to me. I can honestly say though, that until tonight The Tempest never spoke to me in the way that it does now. I never appreciated this piece of work to this extent.

The first thing that got me was the representation of the sea- this vast unknown place. It got me thinking about not only the amazingly dark, yet beautiful imagery in The Tempest, but the music that surrounds the island. I found a song, used in the movie of The Tempest, Sigur Ros "Sæglópur" (meaning: lost at sea) the song is sung in Icelandic (and also mixed with "hopelandic"- talk about imagination), from what I have gathered through translations, it is about a seafarer, lost and returning home.



Similar to Shakespeare, this music video leaves the viewer hanging on, wondering if the child was actually saved- it reflects the imagination and desire for resolution.

The sea and the storm in The Tempest depicts fear and chaos in a more imaginative way than anything else I have come across.
GONZALO:
"Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground: long heath, brown furze, anything. The wills above be done, but I would fain die a dry death."

The sea is an enormous creature with more life in it than we could ever fathom. The enormity of its waves and its ability to completely engulf us in one sweep overwhelms my mind. Miranda provides for me (at least within the first 2 acts) the most beautiful, frightening image of the sea when she says:

"If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.
The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,
But that the sea, mounting to th' welkin’s cheek,
Dashes the fire out. Oh, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer. A brave vessel
Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her
Dashed all to pieces. Oh, the cry did knock
Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perished.
Had I been any god of power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere
It should the good ship so have swallowed and
The fraughting souls within her."

Souls, lives, evils, dreams- all captured in this one body of water. I find the sea to be extremely terrifying, yet stunning all at once. It draws me to its waters, though I am hesitant. I remember this feeling when I was whale watching (I will not capture this well enough through words), the day was cloudy, the temperature within the 60's. As we went further out to sea, the wind picked up, the sky grew darker- I was so excited to be on this boat, viewing the most spectacular life that we could ever catch a glimpse of. These enormous creatures, in those vast, dark waters, deeper than I could ever imagine. Leaning over the boat and trying not to blink so as not to miss one moment, a humpback whale approached the boat within feet (I was amazed and had never even see a humpback whale up close!!!!!). Here I was looking so hard to spot a whale and he was there right in front of me. Anyways, the whale was so close, the boat so small- I thought to myself, "dear god, this whale, or these waves could swallow me up in a second". I was ok with dying in that moment if that is what it came to be. My fear became excitement and anxiety all in one. I always have said to myself that if I die, it will be doing something I love- I would have died enchanted, loving, breathless.

When I spent a month in Carmel, CA, the ocean became an escape for me. I wandered down to the beach so often to think, journal, and just be. The sound of the waves crashing were soothing. The sea doesn't speak, it just sings. A constant rhythm- back and forth. I wrote in the sand, one single word knowing that within mere seconds, it would be erased, washed into the sea- no longer with me but somewhere deeper, hidden. This became a habit for me, a therapy of sorts. There was always anxiety though watching those waves wash away a part of me, those grains of sand that my fingers ran through, creating something larger, never to be touched or seen by me again.

The personification of nature (specifically the sea and sky) never ceases to amaze me in The Tempest. There are elements of fear and pity reflected through the sea and sky and this next excerpt created an image that I wish I could draw out. It is so clear in my head and I am going to try to illustrate it this week!! The sea screams, but the sky sighs. BRILLIANT! I don't know if anyone could do imagery of the sky and sea as well as Shakespeare does in this play! I am speechless.
"There they hoist us
To cry to th' sea that roared to us, to sigh
To th' winds whose pity, sighing back again,
Did us but loving wrong."

The next lines that I really, so badly want to capture through my own, very personal illustrations are these:
"Salt of the sea and salt of tears.
When I have decked the sea with drops full salt,
Under my burthen groaned;"
We have the sea, a single tear drop. This quote speaks to me on a much deeper level than I realized until I started blogging. I want more time to really think and write about this though. I am feeling fatigued, overwhelmed with emotion and weighted down by more than I can handle at the moment. I have more to say about tears, the sea- and those two things becoming one.

The Statue

I was reading Jenny's post about the statue and the question as to whether the statue was real or not. It got me thinking about the fact that "we see what we want to see"...usually- or sometimes we see exactly what we DON'T want to see. Either way, the mind and the imagination are so complex that what we think we are seeing as real are really just figments of our imagination. Jenny also asked why Shakespeare would create such a statue with wrinkles, etc. with age comes beauty and wisdom (or so I like to believe) For me the statue represented not a perfect image but an image of flaws and imperfections (mirroring Leontes' own qualities.

I can't help but think though that Hermione and Paulina were staging some sort of clever plan to get Leontes to want Hermione. It reminds me of a really depressing country song my sister told me to listen to ("If I die young")...part of the song goes:

"A penny for my thoughts, oh no I’ll sell them for a dollar,
They're worth so much more after I’m a goner
And maybe then you’ll hear the words I've been singin’
Funny when you're dead how people start listenin’"

It's just like real life! Leontes doesn't realize her worth until she is gone (or so he thinks) and then when he sees that she is resurrected he wants her back. Does love have no worth until it is lost? That is what it seems to be, tragedy or comedy. Love has to become nothing before it really becomes something.

Tying back to my previous post, I am thinking about how much a statue stands for remembrance. We have a statue to remember a person by, yet we also have this disconnectedness through the aging process- she is both known and unknown. This helped me to create my own vision of the statue and allowing room for imagination to flow. Is it real or not? Why is she imperfect? Let's see how far our imaginations can go...

Another part I loved, that could have blown right past me:
"she thrice bowed before me,
And, gasping to begin some speech, her eyes
Became two spouts"

There is such a fine line between dreams and reality. Dreams foster imagination, they show us what is both real and not, creating these false emotions in what I like to call "the other life". To me, my dreams are my other life. I am there in them, I especially felt this in the summer when I dreamt of something absolutely horrible, something I had never experienced and wish I hadn't. Just 2 hours after I woke, this horrible "dream" was a reality. To feel such emotion and disturbance through dreams is something I will never truly be able to explain.

So, I continue to ask, what in Shakespeare is real and what is not?! I can never quite tell. Thankfully, shakespeare is a supporter of dreaming and imagination so I will continue to wonder and create while reading his works.

Remembrance and distance

"You have issues, don't you Lisa?" I don't think that anyone has really ever come right out and said that to me. So, thanks Dr. Sexson for at least giving me a good laugh. My "issues" brought me to the act of remembrance because I think that is really all they are. Remembrance has become my issue. In discussing remembrance in "A Winter's Tale", Dr. Sexson points out that Shakespeare distances us from the recognitions so that we do not see them. I have been pondering why Shakespeare would distance us from this remembrance when usually it is directly in front of us. I would like to think that Shakespeare is doing this to not avoid the remembrance but show us that though it may go unseen or unsaid, it is still unavoidable. No matter how much we attempt to avoid remembrances, we really can't.

Another thing that caught my attention during class was this mention of art and "piedness". While this is an extremely distant connection, it sparked some interest in me- "pied" in french, means foot. Then I started thinking about art, feet, french- nada. The connection was brief. As I wandered lost in thought later that night though, I began thinking about art and feet...the DANCE. So many of Shakespeare's plays contain the act of dancing (well, the ones that I have read) and this circled me around to T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets:

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where."

The dance is remembrance itself. That is what my mind was connecting. Dance. Remembrance. Distance. Time past and time present.

The Vale of Soul Making in Keats and Shakespeare

I have been throwing around a lot of ideas for my term paper which is of course involves John Keats. Because Shakespeare is about showing and not telling as we have discussed much in class, I thought that Keats would be a great tie in. Much of my focus though will be on remembrance and negative capability. Remembrance is greatly driven by images in Shakespeare, for example through stars and flowers (especially the cowslip). Tracing back through the real (the social world) into the mythological (where we have ecstasy, insight...rhapsodic). I am considering looking at negative capability mostly in response to Shakespeare's sonnets and letters, in which words are used to thread the soul together. This circles back around to remembrance as well, of course! I have a lot more to say about Keats and Shakespeare but at least wanted to post my "small" ideas thus far! I am excited to once again focus on Keats' amazingly intricate ideas and tie them into Shakespeare. Two men with amazing talent and a way with words like none other, with this I begin (or am i ending?)

Sonnet

I decided that my spring cleaning must also consist of "cleaning" my to do list....a long, long list of assignments. Blogging- I need to get going...so here is my sonnet that should have been written long ago. My creative writing class inspired me. I know the rhyme scheme is correct in regards to a traditional sonnet, it's almost an ode to a traditional sonnet, But the rhythm is a bit off. It was easier for me to write a sonnet than i thought, it really takes a different sort of focus to write a sonnet- it's amazing! I was skeptical when Dr. Sexton said writing sonnets when you can't sleep is soothing, but its true, it helps for the time being, it inspires. For me an ode to the past. I am inspired not only by Shakespeare and his sonnets, but by T.S. Eliot (of course) and the four quartets. This is obvious though, i didn't even need to mention it,


Tear drops fall like rain
Letting go, I take a deep breath
This is the paper where words reflect pain
No longer "us", memories treated like death
Do I cry and run or dance and sing?
No- I'll turn and sigh a breath of relief
Like a bird in the sky, my freedom rings
What we had was love though it was but brief
I could feel it burning like a fire
Your love, my wings. I could fly.
Singing loudly, our love ringing out, it was it's own choir
Why then? Why now? All it comes to is goodbye.
You were the fire. I was the rose.
Or so I guess, that's how the story goes.

It's all out of love...

Growing up with an older brother and 4 older sisters there was a lot of flyting going on in the household. Survival of the fittest. I had to laugh when Dr. Sexson asked who the favorite in the family was...I don't think my parents had a favorite, honestly we all drove them nuts! I have to give my sister brianna (the middle child) the most credit for her witty flyting. I think she gets worse as she gets older. When i was little though, if my sisters were teasing me I would respond with a question, "are you deaf or dumb?" they were usually so dumbfounded that they left me alone, Brianna would try to ponder the question seriously....that's how I came to the conclusion she was simply dumb. She can come up with some very creative insults...colorful to say the least though extraordinarily vulgar and inappropriate.



Sadly, my four year old nephew also is into flyting now. Poor addy, his sister, just 4 months old and he will insult her constantly telling her:
"no one wants to talk to you stupid baby" and "addy, keep your noises to your own self"...she never responds obviously but he sure is pro at flyting even with me!

I hate to say that as we grow older, the flyting only gets more cruel, but absolutely humorous. We get "catty" and we get even, but we also get over it. It's all out of love.

What do any of us really need?

When Dr. Sexson asked us to answer the question, "What do you really need?" I immediately whispered "nothing" to myself. But now that I sit here with my coffee (which I am delighted to say the barista has named "alice in wonderland" for me) I wonder..What do I need FOR WHAT? To live? to die? To breathe? to be delighted? Well....that one's answered, a special mocha with a fabulous name!

But really, this question could not have come at a better time for me. I journal every day, multiple times a day, convey thoughts and emotion through letters, create pieces of art every week expressing something. I think I "need" all of these things to stay whole, "get it out" and live more fully. But do I? Do I need counseling at $45 a session?! Goodness, I am rethinking everything here and I want to scream in answering this question. This is normally something I would reflect on in my personal blog but I suppose I will make an attempt to answer or explain and connect it to Shakespeare...?

I would usually come up with some artificial answer that satisfies my lifestyle. But right now I am going to go for the raw answer that no one wants to face. Call me a cynic if you will but here it is:

Do we need Love? No.
Friends? No.
Family? The die off.
Fun? Optional.


What do I need? Really need?
A little water, maybe some food every now and again. That's what I would need to just stay alive.

I am getting more frustrated by the minute thinking about this question. I can't really explain why but all I have to say is- I don't need anything. Nothing. No one.

Maybe I will carry on as I ponder this but really...

By having nothing I have everything right?