I reread Hamlet the other day. It had been a while. Maybe as much as twenty years.
This particular Shakespearean tragedy’s protagonist has been called the first real existential (anti)hero in literature, with his anguished vacillations and the crushing burden of responsibility he feels, trapped within his profoundly lonely dilemma, lacking divine guidance or any other means of moral support. A “perennial student,” as one of my college professors called him, Hamlet suffers from that most modern of disorders, overthinking. You can imagine why I might be interested in reading about that.
For the bulk of the play, too, he falls back on passive-aggressive tactics rather than instigating any kind of confrontation. (Not that I can identify with that!) When we meet him, he’s muttering double-edged responses rife with undetected hostility to the cheerful queries of his loathed uncle-turned-stepfather. Why the cloudy countenance, Hamlet? asks uncle. “Not so, my lord; I am too much i’ the sun (son),” Hamlet snarls. Later, Hamlet uses a traveling troupe of entertainers to act out his father’s murder, publicly demonstrating to his uncle I know what you did while leaving everyone else in the room clueless. Only when all hell has broken loose and his own death is imminent and absolutely certain does he act directly and decisively. Consequences don’t matter anymore; the game’s over.
**
You may remember these lines from one of the play’s most famous monologues:
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
The fact that most of us aren’t operating under the terrifying onus to personally avenge a murder, vigilante-style, doesn’t mean that Hamlet has nothing in common with us. Au contraire. It’s far too easy to lose one’s resolve and be sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought whenever one considers embarking upon an insecure venture or risk of any magnitude. The more one thinks, the more spooked one can become. There are always a million possibilities for failure, for unintended consequences, for doing exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. Second-guessing can turn into ninth- or tenth-guessing, and suddenly one is completely paralyzed. An acquaintance of mine who now lives abroad with her Portuguese boyfriend and organizes writers’ trips to Paris and Rome recently wrote in her email newsletter, “If you overthink it, you’ll never do it.” I guess she would be one to know about that.
Of course, as a friend recently put it (regarding a work-related confrontation that did not go well), sometimes we’re “not eager to touch the stove again.” Like the proverbial rat in the cage who just got a painful electric shock, maybe we’re reluctant to step on that lever one more time — no matter how badly we want the cheese. After a lifetime of the “thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to,” actually, we may be tempted to just lie down on the floor and whimper like the dogs in Martin Seligman’s learned helplessness experiments.
**
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. T.S. Eliot’s poem became an immediate favorite of mine the first time I read it in high school. J. Alfred Prufrock, whose name alone is not exactly that of a hero but more like that of a comical character out of P.G. Wodehouse, stands vacillating in his upstairs hall, wondering Do I dare disturb the universe? He frets and fusses and makes dozens of “visions and revisions” before going downstairs for “the taking of a toast and tea” — where he loses his resolve. A somewhat clownish figure like Brazil’s Sam Lowry (whom I talked about in this post), with a head full of impractical dreams and longings, he is all too aware of how he must appear to other people. (“But how his arms and legs are thin!”) More like Polonius, Hamlet’s resident fool, than its title character, he is, perhaps (to quote from another earlier post), too small for what brings him alive.
Alas, poor Prufrock, I know him well. As a fellow clown, I’ll let him wear this little red nose I’ve got that honks when you squeeze it. The kids love it! Once we’ve done our Kabbalah homework and burned off that desire to receive for the self alone, we won’t feel so sorry for ourselves…
I do remember being a little shocked when I read somewhere that the J. Alfred Prufrock poem was a favorite of Monica Lewinsky’s. Then again, who said she was stupid? Intelligence and judgment aren’t the same thing. No, what strikes me as so incongruous is that she exhibited a confident recklessness so utterly contrary to that character, and utterly foreign to anyone remotely like him. This chubby, giggly kid fresh out of school flashed her thong at not just some sought-after schmoe like the most popular guy in her senior class, but at the leader of the free world. She (as well as the rest of the country, and maybe the planet) might have benefited from some overthinking in this case (!), but I’ve got to hand it to her for sheer unmitigated chutzpah. She may forever live on in infamy, but she sure didn’t allow herself to be paralyzed by the prospect. That’s probably a weird thing to admire, but methinks Hamlet could have used some of that quality a bit earlier in the play.
**
Ah, where is that happy medium? Is there one? I could, for example, go crashing into one of my staff meetings like a baby elephant, flattening everything in sight; I could sit and wait and say nothing, trusting or at least hoping that things will work themselves out. Sometimes delicacy and forbearance are warranted in times of upheaval. I’m reminded of a book written by a widow that we used to carry in the grief section of the bookstore where I worked — Don’t Ask for the Dead Man’s Golf Clubs. Obviously, she had encountered some staggering obtuseness from acquaintances so preoccupied with their individual agendas that they lost all sensitivity and respectfulness regarding the situation, all awareness of her needs and feelings. I never want to be that person. I’ve been told, however, and by more than one individual, that I actually err too much on the side of the needs and feelings of others, that I defer to the point of virtual nonexistence. Hell, I’ve run down the wrong side of the field clutching the ball, and bounced the rival team’s touchdown triumphantly in the end zone. (Rabbi Berg and his Kabbalists, of course, would say this is a good thing.)
The problem for me and Prufrock and Hamlet and all our existential kin is that we just don’t have a clue what the right course of action might be, or when to take it. There are pitfalls at every step…contingencies…unforseen complications…wild cards…timing may be of the essence…what was true yesterday may not be true today…and there’s no one else on whom to pin responsibility but ourselves. My mother reads the Bible and prays, and trusts that whatever does or doesn’t happen is her interventionist God’s will. (As Dana Carvey’s church lady used to say, how convenient.) The ancient Greeks had a whole pantheon of gods to intervene in their affairs, and occasionally during a drama one would pull a deus ex machina and make a cameo.
(Hey, gimme a deus ex machina over here! No, seriously!)
Much of what we believe as human beings seems to me to be an effort to insulate ourselves from a lack of control over our surroundings. I often think of what poet David Whyte said about the way people talk about “enlightenment” — he opined that very often you could just as easily substitute the word “safety.” Lord knows, much of this strenuous soul-searching I’ve done over the years has been performed in the hope of attaining relief (safety?) from suffering and determining what, exactly, is in my power. All those manifesting gurus are so, so very seductive to me because they promise that the sky’s the limit — yet they can also enrage me with their blithe assessments of other people’s disappointments. (Oh, I’ve had faith, mister. About two hundred times. I’ll show you the scars to prove it.) If you think I’m a cynic, well, remember that inside every cynic is a romantic idealist beaten to within an inch of her life.
Verily, gentle reader, if my dearest wishes came true tomorrow, I would drop down on my knees and give thanks unto any deity you chose. I would believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and Tinkerbell. You could tell me the moon was made of cottage cheese, and I’d believe you. Virginia Woolf was extremely astute to have a character in To the Lighthouse surmise that the prickly intellectual in her company must never have gotten to go to the circus. What are we, after all, but children walking around sad because we didn’t get any candy? It may be no more complicated than that. I don’t think I’m any more complicated than that.
**
But back to the question of action vs. paralysis. These are not the only choices; I seem to have overlooked the proverbial “third way.” Now, there certainly would have been far less of a drama to watch if Hamlet had stepped back with zen-like serenity and let his uncle the king work out his own karma, but it’s possible the latter would have promptly hanged himself with his own rope (literally or figuratively), the way the McCain-Palin campaign has in recent weeks with no help from a calm and smiling Obama.
The one spiritual teaching to which I keep returning, over and over again, is the one about nonresistance. It’s the Tao, the wisdom of water, which yields in all gentleness to whatever is in its path, and always flows downhill. We all know you can’t push the river — but good luck stopping it! Perhaps the wisest ones among us have learned to cease the tiresome and anxious struggle for control, and to simply accept whatever happens to be here. (Without all that stressful obsessing, who knows — the “right” course of action might become clearer.)
While this may seem counterintuitive to both the existentialist and the born-again Christian (not to mention the Secret disciple), it may be the most appropriate response to the most accurate assessment of our condition as humans. We are likely not the omnipotent creators of every facet of our experience. It’s doubtful that we’re ever going to be totally “safe,” and Jesus is probably not going to appear in the bathroom mirror and tell us His Plan while we floss. We definitely don’t have power over other people and their choices — nor should we. What we do have a say about is whether we’re going to resist or reject the way things stand (and fret over it endlessly) or whether we can surround whatever-is like water, and go with the flow.
Dude.
Really, that may be why surfers are like that. They spend a lot of time in the water, riding the waves.
Now there’s an adaptation for you. Hamlet, Prince of Malibu.
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