As the Animals Like It

We used to have two cats: Cat and Pepper. They were strays. Pepper was a tabby with speckled coloring. We found her when she ran up to our mom as we came out of church one Sunday morning. Family legend has it that she leapt into my mom’s arms. Cat was a stray that used to live under our porch. My brother Ian built him a house out of chicken wire and hay. I don’t know where he got a hold of chicken wire or hay, but we used to put a bowl of milk in the little house, so Cat slept in it. Cat was a big gray fluffy thing with a white chin and chest. His full name was Claude Cat, but when i was a kid I thought it was Clawed Cat.

We must have had them for about 9 years and they died one winter within a few weeks of each other. Pepper first, and then after a month or so of declining health, Cat died too. In our family we know that Cat died of a broken heart.

In As You Like It Rosalind disguises herself as a man and goes into the forest of Arden to escape from her uncle with her faithful cousin. Either her man’s dress or being in the woods gives her the liberty to demonstrate her sharp wisdom.

While in disguise she runs into Orlando, a wrestling ex-pat from the same city as her and the object of her affections. Orlando is in love with Rosalind and has been writing bad poetry about her and hanging it on trees all over Arden Forest. Rosalind can't reveal her true identity to Orlando for fear of jeopardizing her and her cousin's safety, so she tells Orlando that she will tutor him in how to overcome his love by pretending to be Rosalind and behaving irrationally until he falls out of love.

During one of their lessons he says he will die if he is rejected. Here is Rosalind’s response:

The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause... Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot mid summer night; for good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and being taken with the cramp, was drowned, and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies: men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. (4:1)

I’ve been watching that BBC series Life, which means for the past few weeks, I’ve been watching animals have sex in the craziest ways. There are these Darwin Beetles with gigantic jaws. The female of the species waits at the top of a tall tree and the male has to climb up the tree and battle all the other males, knocking them off the tree on his way. When he has vanquished all his foes he gets to the top, mates with the female and then throws her over the side and off the tree too.

It’s like this in most of the animal kingdom. Battles over mates culminate in pain and agitation… but even in the cruelest natural locations, denied love usually doesn't end in death.

All the wisdom of pop music instructs me that love hurts. And all the romantic endeavors I’ve braved over the years have left contusions, some gravely injurious, gashing wounds with sloppily-healed scars atop. But some injuries are barely detectable, of surgical precision, and the great affliction is an absence. A stolen organ – whose previous operation was suspect anyhow.

Rosalind teaches Orlando the truth. No person ever did die from love. But even her organs are susceptible to affliction. When she first learns that Orlando is also roaming the woods, she curses her male disguise and asks her cousin about him. Her cousin tells her “He was furnished like a hunter.” Rosalind’s response:

O ominous! He comes to kill my heart! (3:2)

There are river dolphins in the Amazon that get in fights with one another and become covered all over their bodies with bright pink scar tissue. The more glorious pink they are, the more astonishing they are to the female of the species.

Rosalind is treated to a lesson in the nature of love herself later on by Silvius, the shepherd.

Phebe: Good shepherd, tell this youth what ‘tis to love.

Silvius: It is to be all made of sighs and tears…

…It is to be all made of faith and service…

It is to be all made of fantasy,

All made of passion and all made of wishes,

All adoration, duty and respect,

All humbleness, all patience and impatience,

All purity, all trial, all observance (5:2)

The way the play finishes up all of these characters land on their feet (they always do in Shakespearean romantic comedies). Sylvius loves Phebe and although he suffers her denials of love for most of the play, she is tricked into marrying him. Orlando and Rosalind have to suffer too, but eventually Rosalind’s male disguise is taken away and they marry in bliss.

There is some virtue in suffering for love – both for pink dolphins and for the comic heroes. They are toughened and beautified by the trials of it. The right to mate is a hard-won battle, courtship is treacherous. And only the happiest of cats find that their lives have no meaning when they're sundered from their partners. At least that's what we believe in my family.

Julius Caesar and the Cruelty of Children

When I was maybe eleven there was another kid around my age named Nick who lived on the corner. One day he came over to play with me and my friends. I didn't like him. He was new to our street, his older sister drove a Honda CRX and his mom was a single mom. I had gotten it in my head that he was a bad kid. So when he came over to play with us I threw pinecones at him. I didn't say anything, just threw pinecones. One after another after another. He started to yell, he didn't throw any back, he just yelled for me to stop it. He got angry, he was almost crying and then he went away. He didn't come over to play with us anymore, which is what I wanted.

I wish I could go back and punch myself in the face for being such a little asshole. I was an older kid on the block too, and I'm sure most of the parents thought I was a good kid, a role model. But I was cruel. I was insensitive. I was just as stupid as every other kid in the world.

Brutus is a character of high moral standing in Rome. But when he’s recruited into the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar, he lends righteousness to the cause. As Caska points out:

O he sits high in all the people’s hearts:

And that which would appear offence in us

His countenance, like richest alchemy,

Will change to virtue and to worthiness. (1:3)

When Brutus stabs Caesar, the famous line “Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar” (3:1) is a recognition on Caesar’s part that if even noble Brutus is against him, then he must have deserved it.

Marc Antony admits that if Brutus can give him good reasons for Caesar’s assassination, then he will accept it.

If Brutus will vouchsafe that Antony

May safely come to him and be resolved

How Caesar deserved to lie in death,

Matk Antony shall not love Caesar dead

So well as Brutus living. (3:1)

Brutus even convinces the Roman mob that it was necessary, that Caesar was guilty of ambition, which is dangerous to the republic.

There is tears, for his love; joy for his fortune;

honour, for his valour; and death, for his ambition.

…

I have done no more to Caesar than you shall do to Brutus. (3:2)

They’re appeased until Mark Antony comes out and with his “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” (3:2) speech he turns the mob against Brutus and the conspirators. Brutus should have known that it would happen. Before the assassination was carried out, he hesitated:

Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar

I have not slept.

Between the acting of a dreadful thing

And the first motion, all the interim is

Like a phantasm or a hideous dream:

The genius and the mortal instruments

Are then in council, and the state of man,

Like to a little kingdom, suffers then

The nature of an insurrection. (2:1)

“Genius” here means the spirit, or the mind. “The mortal instruments” are the body or guts. I think his guts told him not to do this thing and the chaos that follows Caesar’s death shows that Brutus should have listened to his mortal instruments. Cinna the poet is torn to pieces by a mob, civil war erupts.

In the end, Brutus is forced to pay for his misjudgment by thrusting himself upon his own sword and dying. He gives his life in apology, realizing to late the folly of assassination.

Caesar, now be still

I killed not thee with half so good a will. (5:5)

It was a mistake, and his death, along with the deaths of the other conspirators was an action that might set Rome right again.

I wonder if the real Brutus felt this way. Was he contrite? Maybe in real life he didn't get a chance to kill himself in redemption, maybe he never had the opportunity to apologize or make up for his mistake. Maybe it wasn't until 1599 when Shakespeare wrote the play that Brutus ever had the chance to say he was sorry. It's pretty late, but at least it got said.

Back then I even thought I was a good kid. I thought the things I did were right. I thought Nick was bad and that I was doing the right thing by keeping him away from my other friends. I needed someone to teach me a lesson.

What I'll never understand is how come Nick didn't tell his mom that I threw those pinecones at him. He should have told her and she should have talked to my parents. And I should have been forced to go apologize to him. We might have become friends afterward.

Over the Fourth of July I was in Kenosha, and I rode my dad's bike past Nick’s old house four times. I went past it on purpose every time hoping maybe he was visiting his mom for the holiday or that she would be outside working in their yard and I could ask about him. I go past that house every time I’m in Kenosha. I don't ever see anyone there. She might not live on the block anymore. We moved away in 1993. Certainly his sister’s CRX is gone. He's 30 years old now.

I'd like to tell him I'm sorry. Not that an apology would make anything better. It is a few decades late. But he deserves an apology. Yeah. He at least deserves that.