Tuesday, December 21, 2010

The Winter's Postamorous Adoration

I had a girlfriend whose favorite Shakespeare was The Winter’s Tale. Now that I've read it and I think about her, I see the play’s about women ruled by the foolish whims of a man who lives too much in his imagination for a short time.

            King Leontes of Sicilia is being visited by his oldest and dearest friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia. The King works himself into a jealous frenzy, thinking that his old friend has wooed and impregnated his wife, Hermione. He convinces himself of this over the course of a single scene and orders one of his servants to poison Polixenes. He begins the day in love and ends it out of love. (As Benedick would say: "man is a giddy thing.")

Leontes’ servant, Camillo, cannot bring himself to kill Polixenes and instead confesses the plot. Polixenes takes Camillo in his service and runs to Bohemia. Leontes considers this an affirmation of guilt. He puts Hermione on trial, and has the baby girl (whom he thinks to be Polixenes’ progeny) taken away by another servant to be abandoned in some wild place.

Because of his unfounded, jealous rage, Leontes’ son dies, Hermione dies of grief, and the baby, Perdita, is abandoned by the servant who is then eaten by a bear. Luckily, Perdita is discovered by a shepherd who raises her as his own and then years later she falls in love with the Prince of Bohemia and the two have to escape to Sicilia out of fear of the king’s wrath. In Sicilia, she meets her long lost father Leontes, all things are laid bear and a happy ending is achieved in fulfillment of some prophecy or other.

Of the 35 plays of Shakespeare that I’ve read so far, this is the only one which actually brought tears to my eyes while I was reading it. In the end there is a perfect revelation, which I probably should have seen coming a mile away.

Leontes’ queen, Hermione, who died of grief when her daughter was stolen and her son died is honored in the final moments of the play when they bring out a statue of her. The moment the statue comes out, you know that it’s the real, living Hermione, who has been in hiding these 15 years and not dead at all, but she steps down from the pedestal, upon which she has been cast. The amazed Leontes touches the statue’s arm and exclaims:

 

O, she’s warm! (5:3)

 

            Despite his massive vocabulary, Shakespeare can land on a perfect moment and capture it in 3 monosyllables. Leontes' queen returns to him. After his earlier buffoonery, it's more forgiveness than he ever dreamed was possible.

            How many men have cast off love when they had it? Driven away a good woman with accusations of inadequacy, and then, seeing them go… misunderstood themselves.

The girl who loved The Winter’s Tale moved from Minnesota to California to be with me, and she was constant in her love even though I was not. When she left California to return to Minnesota she had convinced herself that I never loved her. I refuted that accusation, but not passionately. The relationship had to end, and it was easier to allow it to end if I didn’t own up to the affections I had squandered. 

Even though it was right and I was relieved when we split up… in the moment when she walked out of the door, my heart broke. Somehow I hadn’t seen that coming.

For weeks, months afterward,  you imagine that she might come back. You might be forgiven, and the small moments of bliss that were once ours would confederate, like matter drawn into a black hole, until we became a burning hot singularity whose only motion can be to explode into a new universe.

            When the King is looking on what he thinks is the statue of Hermione, he feels pain, but wants it to continue:

 

For this affliction has a taste as sweet

As any cordial comfort. (5:3)

 

            These are the delicious regrets of failed lovers. The lost queen, was literally put on a pedestal.

 

Whilst I remember

Her and her virtues, I cannot forget

My blemishes in them, and so still think of

The wrong I did myself, which…

Destroyed the sweet’st companion that e’er man

Bred his hopes out of. (5:1)

 

I am guilty of the same postamorous worship of every single girl who has come and gone. You can’t reconstitute lost love. The only hope is in new love. And a new love with an old lover demands reformation beyond reasonable expectation. 

But maybe not beyond Shakespearean expectation.

            The Winter’s Tale also has a troublemaking rogue named Autolycus, who steals and cons, and finds himself elevated in the robes of a gentleman. He learns of the plot of the lovers to escape to Sicilia and here is how he reasons what course of action is best suited:

 

If I thought it were a piece of honesty

To acquaint the king withal, I would not do’t. I hold it

the more knavery to conceal it, and therein am I

constant to my profession. (4:4)

 

            But his knavish actions play a key role in the reunions and prophetic fulfillment that ornament Act V. The Shepherd who found and raised Perdita is able to disclose her true parentage to her father, Leontes, and the Shepherd and his son are rewarded with gentlemanhood. Upon seeing this, Autolycus promises to amend his life. Does he? I don’t know. I like to believe that he did. There’s hope for the rogue, that in his treachery -- being constant to his profession -- he might stumble into redemption, and forever after find himself in the employ of a more honorable nature.

            Taking stock, I think I’m still who I was, despite efforts to improve, but there’s hope for we -- the men of wandering nature -- that from our errors and the mishmash of broken romances past, we will emerge clean. And come to life like a cold statue, touched, and found to be warm.


Scraping away some winter

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Stop Bullying: The Secret Theme of Cymbeline

I’ve never really been bullied in my life.

I think this means that I am a bully.

There was my roommate my first year at boarding school. That whole year I was so afraid of being hazed that I treated him terribly in an effort to feel strong and not completely vulnerable in every aspect of my life. Even though he was a good guy and became one of my best friends, I was horrible to him. I physically bullied him, pushed him around, and at 14 I was foolish enough to think that exercising dominance over this small corner of my high school life was important enough to warrant such wretched action.

His name was Tito and he was from Chicago. Tito wasn’t his real name, it was the name that the seniors gave him and it stuck because we all preferred to conform to norms established by upper classmen rather than stand up for our own. He didn’t just take all of my behaviors lying down. He and Mike Osecky put icy hot in all my underwear one night, they read my journal (which promptly led me to stop using a journal forever), and then when he walked in on me… well, you know… I was so sure he was going to tell everyone about it to get back at me for being an asshole. But he didn’t tell anyone. Not until a year later, and by that time, we were good friends and nobody cared because you’ve got to be some kind of auto-erotic ninja to make it through four years of living in a dorm with high school boys to not get caught squeezing one off.

So, I guess I sort of understand bullying a little bit. And in the way that we all feel a little sympathy for the villains I have a tiny amount of sympathy when I suspect bullies are battling their own lack of self-confidence, when they’re fighting for a little control over a small section of the world. There’s nothing worse in life than feeling that circumstances are entirely beyond your control. Which is why I was so stunned in Cymbeline when Cloten, the bullying son of the wicked stepmother/evil queen was killed off-stage in a fight with one of the disguised, kidnapped sons of King Cymbeline and his head was brought back on stage.

As if he were Macbeth, or a traitor from one of the histories -- as if he were a villain of such profound historical consequence that the audience was going to cheer -- he was abruptly beheaded. Cloten was an idiot and his evil mother made him feel like he was entitled to marry princess Imogen and become king. He wasn’t clever enough to create these ambitions for himself and it was this entitlement that escalated his quarrel with Guiderius to bloodlust:

GUIDERIUS

Have not I

An arm as big as thine? A heart as big?

Thy words I grant are bigger: for I wear not

My dagger in my mouth. Say what thou art:

Why I should yield to thee.

CLOTEN

Thou villain base,

Know’st me not by my clothes?

GUIDERIUS

No, nor thy tailor, rascal…

CLOTEN

…I am son to th’ queen.

GUIDERIUS

I am sorry for’t: not seeming

So worthy as thy birth. (4:2)

Cloten goes on to threaten to cut off Guiderius’s head and stick it on the gates of Lud town, so it’s not like Guiderius isn’t justified in his action. And of course, Imogen needs to find Cloten's body and mistake it for her lover, Postumous's body -- sending her into a downward spiral, so that she winds up serving the Italian general in battle against her father. Eventually she is unmasked as is her still-living lover Posthumous, and her long-missing princely brothers, and the sinister plot that made her seem like a slut. So the beheading of Cloten is necessary for the intricate house of cards that makes up the plot of Cymbeline. Still, I feel a little sad for poor, stupid, bullying Cloten.

Now that I think about it, I suppose even though I didn’t get hazed badly back in high school, the mere threat of it was a form of bullying… and then I got punched another time in my life and that’s got to count as an incident of bullying.

That was at Space Camp. You have to be some kind of geek to get bullied at Space Camp.

It went down like this. We had a simulated mission and the kid on our team who was the pilot forgot to follow the script and lower the landing gear of the shuttle as it was coming in for the landing. Our totally hot counselor, Frances, told us it was the only thing that went wrong with the whole mission, and that it probably would have resulted in the shuttle crashing and everyone dying. Not the most tactful thing to say to a 12 year-old kid, I suppose. The kid started crying and then later in the day we went to the Imax to see “Destiny in Space” and I was about to sit next to him when his big, fat roommate grabbed me and punched me in the stomach and said: “I’m sitting there!” I said, “God, fine!” and moved a couple seats down to sit next to my roommates.

It wasn’t like it was a terrible or scarring incident. These days I use it mostly as a self-deprecating anecdote to amass geek cred. People always think it’s cool that you went to Space Camp as a kid, but it’s actually really lame, and this is the most exciting thing that happened while I was there. But I guess it proves I have been bullied, and I’ve committed bullying. So like all stupid things in life, there’s no black and white here, just a bunch of grey.

It’s like that line in “A Night at the Opera,” Lassparri is beating up Harpo, who works as his costumer, and Groucho walks in, “Hey, you big bully, stop picking on that little bully.”

That’s me. The little bully. Darting in and out of the operatic incidents around me, pulling the strings and wisecracking in the wings, but never demonstrating any brash heroism or fierce pride. For those are qualities that land one’s head on the end of a pike.