Shakespeare.
1564–1616, England
Between imagination and reason: History is a tragicomedy in the Greek sense, with death not far away¹. It is a tension between the tangled, dreamy wood of the unconscious and the structured Athens of civility, the Dionysian and Apollonian, madness and imagination on the one hand, and rationality and convention on the other. There is creative imagination that leads to a loving gaze that finds the beautiful, that poetically pushes beyond. But that same force can be mired in fantasy and conjure dark and insane visions. This tension can sometimes, well, make an ass of us.²
Imagination beyond abstraction: Labels are applied onto mutable forms, forms we can play with, and that play with us through appearance — again, creativity, imagination, irrationality.
Gender is part of that play. Is a woman a woman because of biology, reproductive organs, or a way of socialized being in the world?³ Is manhood about pugnaciously asserting oneself on the world towards your own ends, or can it involve the bravery of facing one’s feelings with dignity?⁸ These abstracted constructions can be stifling. They can encourage divisions that are arbitrary, which can grow into antagonisms that explode as needless suffering. The imagination expressed as love, united with it, with an eye towards beauty, can reach beyond names and dualities. It is transcendent, somehow. At the same time, this force can be fickle. It may not enough to bridge the gap widened by entrenched division.⁴ More generally, such non-duality can result in a clouded moral compass.⁸
The unconscious beyond conscious, appearance vs. reality: The bubbling, untamed transcendental nature of the unconscious can just as well produce specters and demons. It comes to the surface in bloody daggers.⁸ There is always the world of appearance, as well as the way things “are”.⁶ Our limited perspectives misinterpet the prophesies of the world, trapped in phenomena. In our fragile irrationality, wading through a world of seeming, we can be easily swayed, warping ethical decision-making — “fair is foul and foul is fair”.⁸ We can even be swayed to violence: by rhetoric and mob mentality⁵, grief and a desire for revenge⁶, being taken advantage of by someone with malicious intent⁷, or merely simple misunderstandings.
Violence as “force”: Again, this violence can be explosive. It is another untameable force — it is hard to put it back into its container. It spreads if unchecked, despite all of our plans to use it for our grand designs.⁶ It instead uses us — emptying and “unsexing” us into sleepwalking husks for its proliferation, and often into corpses. We are given over to “force”. Violence is needed to cover up violence, blood wants blood. The force sets itself on an irreversible course, consuming people through guilt, paranoia, sadness, no matter how much we fantasize about cheating its consequences.⁸
Death and the absurd: Imagination does seem to have its limits in another way. The wheel of time moves on. Revolutions sow the seed for their own collapse, sometimes without a clear answer as to whether or not they were justified. There are certain deterministic constraints, and our schemes to escape them are displays of hubris.⁵ Again, death is unavoidable. It can often feel like a Sisyphean task to face “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”⁸, like life is a bind, a coil. Is it better to live and suffer through the whims of fortune, or end our troubles with one action?⁶ Is it worth it to live to old age only to end life in frailty, having endured and lost so much?⁹ Is the fear of the unknown the only reason we don’t choose the “quietus”? Imagination’s existence as a generative force from the abyss, arising to fill itself with fantasy (what is the “undiscovered country”?), can combine with the fact of mortality into an absurd coil, in a sense. Is the double helix a double-bind?
Two responses to chaos: in view of indeterminacy, giving oneself over to ambition (especially from what we think we “deserve”) and the force of violence seems like a meaningless sacrifice. The awesome “sound and fury” of a world soaked in chaotic and mysterious creativity becomes idiocy, noise, void of significance.⁸ Perhaps instead, a dynamic balance can be struck between amor fati and action.⁸
See also: Badiou, Blake, Camus, de Beauvoir, Emerson, Freud, Haraway, Heidegger, Murdoch, Nietzsche, Sartre, Weil
[1] His son Hamnet died young a couple of years before writing Hamlet, plagues were hitting London, etc.
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[2] A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595); act 3, scene 1 for the dumb joke.
[3] Twelfth Night (1601), made even more knotty when taking into account the gender-bending quality of stage productions at the time.
[4] Romeo and Juliet (1595)
[5] Julius Caesar (1599)
[6] Hamlet (1601)
[7] Othello (1604)
[8] Macbeth (1606), written not long after the Scottish King James was crowned King of England. James was also obsessed with witches.
[9] King Lear (1606)
[10] The Tempest (1611), released within two years of his retirement and five years of his passing.
[11] Sonnets (1609)
[12] The Taming of the Shrew (1592)
