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| Ophelia by John Everett Millais |
Honestly, the last few months of relative silence has kind of sapped my enthusiasm for the project. We were having that deep conversation about how could social media possibly prepare one for the “Profound Aloneness,” and had some deep answers to that question, but the answer seems to be quite a bit more mundane: you get used to a certain amount of interaction and excitement and the affirmation that comes from that, and when it dries up you feel more alone and depressed than you did before. It's just the simple mechanism of addiction and withdrawal. No big whoop.
Yeah, it's “circus animals desertion” time for me. I've got nothing for this project. I don't see its purpose and my goal at this point is to see it through to its end. Liza's incredible illuminated book will air in April, mostly Farthington's voicemail and my own unanswered emails to the group in May and June, and then a trickle of voicemails with a final one on July 4, 2016.
The end.
Back in college, I took on the task of transcribing the Civil War journal of my great-great-great-great uncle, Augustus Cochran MacKenzie, who was a doctor on a boat participating in the blockade of the South. I don't remember much about the first half of his journal, just getting used to the idea that his f's were actually s's. There was some entry about shooting at fish and going ashore to “find some woman to make love to.” At the very end of the journal, he seems to have gone nuts. He had some of his recipes for medicine, but just before that he had some scrawlings like “GOT THE THING BY THE THROAT” and a couple other such things. He ended up spending the latter part of the war in Portsmouth Naval Hospital, the same hospital where I was born some hundred years later. Somehow he pulled himself together enough to go up to Negaunee and become one of the early doctors of the UP.
And of course, all of those transcriptions are on a dead PC in a landfill somewhere. I think the journal is still over at my parents' place, but I'm not sure where.
Anyway, this journal has apparently influenced me profoundly, because for some reason I feel that this is the way that books are meant to end. I've never finished anything, never gotten past the preliminaries of any full-fledged project. And yet--on some deeper level--I feel that, in accomplishing nothing, I've accomplished exactly what I wanted to accomplish. Like my great-great-great-great uncle, I don't even get to the halfway point, leave the second half blank, and scrawl a little insanity at the end (perhaps with some preliminary notes about the next project). I'm just hoping that someone will happen upon this years later and find it vaguely unsettling. Same thing with The Principles of Theory: some vague sketches of something bad happening and a disturbing epilogue.
Perhaps this is one of the problems with fame is that it fills in too many of the blanks, provides too much historicity and not enough mystery. Most of my favorite writers seem to have a good amount of mystery surrounding them. Sometimes I feel like I would root for Emily Dickinson to have successfully burned all her poems.
As George Eliot put it, “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts.”
That desire for impotence, for emasculation, for passivity, for misrule, for ahistoricity, for oblivion is part and parcel of the Female King idea. Nietzsche's Hamlet “understands the symbolism of Ophelia's fate…he understands the wisdom of the sylvan god, Silenus: he is nauseated.”
Maybe one can do better than that, better than Arthur, better than Ophelia, as in these lines from Hamlet:
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarfed about me, in the dark
Groped I to find out them; had my desire,
Fingered their packet, and in fine withdrew
To mine own room again…
Being thus benetted round with villanies,
Or I could make a prologue to my brains,
They had begun the play. I sat me down;
Devised a new commission; wrote it fair.
I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and labored much
How to forget that learning; but, sir, now
It did me yeoman's service.
Perhaps one who has gone out over the waters, who has groped his way through the dark, who has his sea-gown scarfed around him, can return to his room again and write it fair. In order to do that one needs to both come to grips with oblivion and then pull himself together enough to devise a new commission, to write it fair.
Contrast this with Ophelia, who sounds a little more like us (me?):
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element; but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
Although I think it's true that Ophelia does provide the model and criterion for Hamlet's heroism, she nonetheless demonstrates some flaws that are hammered out by Hamlet. Whereas Hamlet's sea-gown is scarfed around him, Ophelia's tattered land clothing is what drags her down to muddy death. Whereas Hamlet finds it in him to devise a new commission and write it fair, Ophelia only musters snatches of old tunes. Both of them have the sea within and the sea without, but with differences that only the subtleties of symbolism can express.
Hamlet gets it right. But no one gets out alive, no one gets out without a wounded name.
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