Hamlet is a state of mind
Me
I am surrounded by hamlets. Hamlet was faced by the ghost of his father as a sign that he was killed by his brother, Hamlet’s uncle. Hamlet was supposed to draw his sword in his uncle’s face immediately after the shameful discovery; instead, he adjourned the dwell. Now days, all men are surrounded by the ghosts of their father figures and the killers are at their door steps. They know the enemy… they know what they have to do… they never draw that sword….
At least Hamlet did it at the end… he draw that sword… only to find his end… his eternal survival against oblivion…
I was there… a Hamlet among Hamlets… went through all the agonies of knowing arranging meetings… and rearranging meetings… and putting off others… and at the end I draw the sword in the face of the giant…
And I did that… only I discovered that I was waving my sword in the face of an old windmill… I was never a Hamlet… I was always a Don Quixote… trapped in the covers of my never-ending book… in never land…
THE WINDMILLS OF YOUR MIND
Noel Harrison
Round like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending on beginning
On an ever-spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain
Or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that's turning
Running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on its face
And the world is like an apple
Spinning silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind
Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of its own
Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half-forgotten dream
Like the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on its face
And the world is like an apple
Spinning silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind
Keys that jingle in your pocket
Words that jangle in your head
Why did summer go so quickly?
Was it something that I said?
Lovers walk along a shore
And leave their footprints in the sand
Was the sound of distant drumming
Just the fingers of your hand?
Pictures hanging in a hallway
Or the fragment of a song
Half-remembered names and faces
But to whom do they belong?
When you knew that it was over
Were you suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning
To the color of her hair?
Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever-spinning reel
As the images unwind
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind
The Alley
In one alley of this wide world, we met; he with big broad shoulders and I with small stature, in comparison to him. Yet, we never met. There was something about him that provoked me. I did not know what it was at that time. It was Urgent and frivolous. It was there, along with him. I do not know what was first in me; him or it. Nevertheless, they are both here within me now... And he went away.
At the same alley, we met again. This time his widened eyes met my cool eyes. I gave him a dare game he was really surprised by my... Well... Maybe presence. I think he discovered me that moment... the dare game; I mean. He was really confused; his eyes answered with no composure. Maybe he did not know the answer. Oh! He knows all the answers, I think he was only surprised by my intervenient. He was more surprised by my existence, more than he was surprised with it. At least, I am sure he knows I am there, out there, in the world I mean. Well, he knew I am there already, but he only realized how much I am there until that moment. You know, he knew what I MEAN. We parted but we met again due to the present circumstances...
It's been along time, the alley; we did not have an encounter. Again and again, we avoided each other, we both were scared. One moment he approaches and I retreat. The other moment I approach and he would retreat. I do not know when this would end! well not today...
The alley, he's gone for along time now. I waited so long on the promise of the rumor that he would come. I lost hope. But he showed up out of nowhere. He really pleased my eyes with the sight of his eyes that I never met. I was shaking, my heart was shaking, I even made mistakes in fore granted things. But I was pleased. His precense1 He was there at last. I did not believe it. He is here...
The Alley, He is not here. He disappeared forever. He will never come again. Pride, what is it? Well, I hate it. He will never come because of His Pride. Damn Pride!
The Alley (Part Two)
Absurdity, it is the notion that life in general goes in cyclic pattern. The repetitive nature of every day life makes you feel that you've been there or done that before, but they really are new experiences. Could Jung be right when he spoke of the collective unconscious? Or is it a new form of collective telepathy experience we're all going through? Is globalization only electronic or it's been there for a long time before, created with our minds?
Back to life, I'll give a small example as preface; why fashions of the 1960s and 70s keep coming back, not only of the 20th century fashions come back, but also from other centuries. And you can imagine how thinking is repeated through the years. In every generation we have a Plato followed by an Aristotle. In every generation there are people calling for the benefit of the other and there are others calling for the benefit of their own.
My life is not that linear either, it is rather cyclic and full of patterns. It is a spiral that keeps turning in never ending loops. It begins with a slight curve, and then it keeps getting down in a cone till I end. It will never cease or stop turning, it will keep sliding down its curving slope. Same people with different names and faces will keep showing up. Same events; success, failure, happiness, and sadness, will visit my heart in the same sequence every time. It will never stop. And why should it? It is part of this life and it will follow its same old pattern.
So, there is this alley in my life that I keep getting lost in. And no matter how much I try not to end up there; lonely and sad, I keep turning that turn and I find my self in that dead end. But it's all right; every time I find my self there, I just turn 180º and I find my way out, only I come out stronger. It is a must, a course that has to be there to be taken. A kind of a test to be done; you might pass or fail.
Why Gothic?
The Gothic expresses our fear and leads for a better understanding of the self; a kind of exploration of the self through its double, hidden in the unconscious; more over the double of the reader and the writer. Fear is a hidden motive or drive in our unconscious which is only expressed and recognized through writing and is not considered as neurosis; e.g. inflicting pain to seek pleasure as in sadism. The importance of the Gothic is a need for perfection and balance; starting with Burke's point of view of the sublime and its direct emphasis on the Romantic era; then the psychoanalytical interest in the Gothic due to the nature of the eruption of the repressed in the Gothic.
Burke thinks of the sublime as the maintenance of the highest degree of pain. Burke wrote his essay on the sublime almost a century before the reestablishing of Gothicism relating to the Romantic period in English Literature. By then it must have been a classic essay in criticism. The title of the essay establishes the nature of the essay; 'inquiry' is a highly scientific word that prepares the reader for a systematic article with technical evidences, and that is exactly the case in hand. Romantics where not interested in technicality as they where in the subject itself. After all, Wordsworth has his own definition of the sublime. Burke wrote of the sublime as the ultimate pressure of feelings that might come to a person; fear of death. He introduces his opinion of the sublime by the belief that criticism is the way to express feelings and reactions to things around us and giving our judgments on them; "...taste... that faculty or those faculties of the mind which are affected with, or which form a judgment of, the works of imagination and the elegant arts". People generally have the same tastes and in a certain period of time they agree that a certain thing is good and other times the same thing becomes bad. This is due to the collective unconscious that develops simultaneously with their general experiences of the time. More or less, some things remain the same "all men agree that vinegar is sour, honey is sweet, and aloe is bitter." To him the sublime is always to arouse horror, terror and the near death domains. More over to reach the highest point of sublimity is to experience death itself; for there is no such pain that goes beyond death, and such experience has been never been told before because nobody ever came back to tell: " Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.... so death is in general a much more affecting idea than pain.". Romantics of the period tried to reach the sublime of Burke through writing about it.
As for Freud, the people's need for the Gothic is explained by the Uncanny or the "Unhomely" experiences. Freud first tangles the idea o the legitimacy of the writers work by the general feeling that: "Nothing can happen to me!". In general, a person represses most of his feelings and desires to prevent himself of harm; more specifically, it is shame that prevents a person from spelling out what is on his mind: "The adult ... is ashamed of his fantasies and hides them from other people.". Here is where the writer's task comes; a literary piece of work is to spell out the day-dreams of the writer that is in consequently in constant with the reader's fantasies. Such kind of fulfillment, Aristotle's concept of 'Catharsis', is thus expelled: "... [O]ur actual enjoyments of an imaginative work proceed from a liberation of tensions in our minds.". This is the point of the thread that leads us to the Gothic importance in our life. Fear is one of the oldest feelings that humans ever experienced since the done of history: "The hereditary characters of our primitive and apish ancestors remain in our generic repertoire". Of course, such feelings are shunned by the scientific person as primitive and highly unscientific conducts. Such terror comes from fear of the dead, death itself and even of the dead person's soul coming after the living, or the more modern version of Vampires and Zombies. The only escapes of such feelings are through the expedition of "dead bodies and spirits". These expeditions are a manifesto of the unhomely or the 'uncanny'. "Considering our unchanged attitude towards death, we might rather enquire what has become of the repression, which is the necessary condition of a primitive feeling recurring in the shape of something uncanny ... but we refrained from doing so because the uncanny in it is too much intermixed with what is purely gruesome and is in part overlaid by it". To put it in short; a person reads the Gothic to press out his fear and express the unhomely, to end up free of pressure.
The picture now is full, first there was acknowledge of the importance of fear, then people wrote about it, later on they re-explained why they wrote about it. Now it is asked to write about the whole process as why we read it. The ideal way to read the Gothic is to lie back in a comfy sofa, light a scented candle in a moonless night and enjoy a vampire novel; meaning to forget the whole idea of 'why' and start to think 'how'.
Why Women for Gothic?
It is marked that Gothic as a genre is not exclusive to women writers. But as many examples given the majority of the best selling horror film or novel is going to women writers. It is the nature of the Gothic that entitles the woman writer as best to do with it. At the same time we can not deny the male writer from his triumph in the same genre. The answer to the former question is to be referred to naturalistic and psychological aspects.
Gothic novel is both complex and rich source of passion. This nature of the genre gives itself readily to the woman as dominator on its realm as a matter of course. The fact that women has been always considered as eccentric, mystic, an incomprehensible other, and the source of unknown darkness that only surfaces from within, all of the above made apt clear that only a woman can come up with such Gothic nature as herself. Let us not forget that other men had excelled in the genre too, one may say why? Cixous comes for the answer; "for there are men who do not repress their femininity, women who more or less forcefully inscribe their masculinity." True enough; if a man is in touch with the woman inside, he will be able to produce such thing as Gothic. All of the criticism above is what Jung might call Anima, the feminine part of the psychology of a man, yin in Chinese philosophy or Id in Freud's. It is part of everybody's thinking or our collective unconscious; still it has to do with female writers. For "...no man could write the 'female anger, desire, and selfhood' that Emily Brontë inscribed in her poetry and in Wuthering Heights."
Ok, shall we try a little Psychology then? The mother's absence affects the child and gives him insecure atmosphere; let's see. "The semiotic, as Kristeva uses the term, can be correlated with the anarchic, pre-Oedipal component drives, and polymorphous erotogenic zones, orifices and organs. The semiotic is the 'raw material' of signification, the corporeal, libidinal matter that must be harnessed and appropriately channeled for social cohesion and regulation. These infantile drives are indeterminate, capable of many aims, sources and objects. Kristeva describes the semiotic as 'feminine', a phase dominated by the space of the mother's body." If the semiotics' source is motherly originated then her absence might create a mal function in the process of creating; imagine the result of such reservoir, it is a deformed kind of expression, Gothic in literature for instance.
Two examples are to be given to illustrate this. The first is Poe who is the genius of his time and place, lost a mother at an early age to produce a departure from his American fellows both in genre and theme; a genius Gothic. The other example is the total opposite; a female of our time is Anne Rice. This case ids a bit complicated, Anne did not loose a mother she lost a child. The body of the mother lost a part of it and thus the product is a deformed box-office hit of the century; Rice's first vampire novel came after six years of her daughter's death.
A last word on the subject would be an appreciation for this genre. It is highly fictional that what makes it highly alienated; yet it is highly crucial for our psychological health, let out for a change. I like to be scared, I consider it a dare game to watch something that really could scare me. Monsters of the page or the screen do not scare me any more; what really scares me nowadays is the monster next by me and I'll never now who or when.
Yellow Mist
It is definitely much plausible... At least, it would be, provided that you read what I have to offer.
Suddenly… Out of nowhere… The wind carries particles of the Sahara, and it leaves it there, hanging. For no purpose… Or it is for a greater and wiser purpose that the human mind wont comprehend. It just happens to be there on the horizon dangling endlessly…
It is fall or autumn, call it what you please. But it is the season of the yellow, with all its interpretations of illness, joy, whatever, it does not matter what Jung profess about Yellow. The point is that in this season you expect to see Yellow everywhere, on the ground, on the tree, on the side walk, and I mean everywhere.
But to see it in the air, well, that’s another story. It is when the air you breathe attains the color of life, and your lungs are full with the smell of earth. It is when the beams of the sun are filtered with a thin tentative yellow, so overwhelming and transparent that projects on your eyes as striking vivacity, and you are left all alone with the magnanimous miracle of the moment.
This is when the mind goes on a maze of non-finite fit of imagination. I can not describe what goes on in that fit, I’ll leave it to you. But I can give you a word for it: contradictory. It is the only fit that provides you with the perfect place for oppositions to collide and form the matrix of their existence. It is where you become in an encounter with life itself; in body and soul…
Some people just hate the season, even loathe it, I was one… Till one day, I was caught unguarded, and held captured by the sheer sensation of being… To confess I still hate autumn, this is not an invitation to love the season. It is an invitation to capture your existence in a solitary moment…
Family Obligation?
I really was cornered with that question. The last person who really knows what family obligation is I. It sounds absurd sense I am the first born. But my mother reminds me all the time that I am selfish and I ought to think of others, especially my brothers and sisters. But the questions pop out: am I really selfish, or I am just not meeting what others expect me to act? Or is it a matter of convenience; meaning that I should take care of other needs before mine? Or that I think of myself all the time and leave no place for thinking about somebody else?
Family obligation is a very tangled question. It is fundamental to define what a family is. Which is a family: the one you are born to or the one you acquire through time. Some people are born with out a family, they do not have obligations, or do they really have obligations more than the one born to families. Still, everybody have to answer to a some kind of a family that tells him what to do, or what not to do, or even expect him to do or not to do.
In The Grapes of Wrath family was small nucleolus one. The Joads were a family of father and mother, and brothers and sisters, adding the grandparents. Not expanded like the family they end up belonging to, the Migrants. On the road to the Promised Land, the nucleolus families became one, and the all answer to the same rules, that "became laws, although told the families. It is unlawful to foul near the camp; it is unlawful in any way to foul the drinking water; it is unlawful to eat rich food near one who is hungry, unless he is asked to share." So everyone is obliged to act to the Migrant family, to which they became one of its parts. And the Joads acted to those laws; they spared no hand, no water, no bred not even breast milk.
The Bundrens, in As I Lay Dying, are a different case. Everybody tend to do what is to his best interest. Even when they act in favor of bringing the body to its destined burial they seem to act out of their best interest. Anse marries and get a new set of false teeth as soon as his wife is buried. Cash makes the coffin in front of his dying mother to show her that he loves her. Dewy Dell is busy hiding her pregnancy, which occupies her mind all the time. Vardaman is busy figuring out the similarity between his mother's death and the fish he caught earlier in the same day. He along with Darl are in an interior struggle to find out the secrets of life. Lastly there is Jewel, who seems in want of getting rid of the coffin as soon as possible. But in the cases of the later three, and maybe Cash too, what they want is in favor of their family's best interests too; does that make them selfish or inconsiderate?
As I said before I am not the best to judge. In spite of everything allow me to add something. God created us free to chose; yet he rewards good deeds and punishes bad ones. As a result I prefer to do well to my family, but not when it contradicts my interests. After all God wants us to cherish our-selves in every aspect (psychologically, and physically).
Miniluv
When I first wake up in bed, I think of my cup of coffee. It is the motivation that makes me get out of bed. Whether it is black or rich with crème and sugar, I just crave for it, indulge it, and adore it. The idea, that I will go next to the kitchen and make it according to the side of the bed I wake up on, will widen my eyes to full circles. I control my choice. I am entitled fully and uncontrollably over my preference...
It is the color of coffee that makes me calm down, the taste of coffee will satisfy my needs. I can live on coffee... The earth in my coffee exists... It is where every color happens to be, mixed in its dark black essence, a mark for the absorbing, and the color of the universe... Like a black hole that sucks even the light of a galaxy... Coffee contains its form no matter what taste, color, or smell get mixed in it. Unlike water, the essence of life, it has to be pure to be drunk. Coffee, my essence, has to carry the name and the rest get under the process of negotiation...
The cup of coffee is the one thing that companies me to my morning rituals. Writing... Holding a pen and apiece of paper, a note book or a book in itself will be only a full experience with a cup of coffee. The freedom of giving me a time for shaping a self happens through this medium. It is important to me because it is the only way I can produce through. My continuation and my part in this world happen to be filtered through this cup of coffee...
Only this ritualistic making of my cup of coffee will let my mind free. It will make it go where ever it wants... The wilderness of my mind... The big maze of its existence... The wildest dreams and the most tamed impulses live there...Going through the most sublime and going under the lowest ridicule... Traveling where nobody ever been because I am the first who imagined it, a place just for me, for my thoughts to plunder... To exist... To be...
I Imagine If I wake up one morning and I could not find any thing to make my cup of coffee. Going to the streets to find that I couldn't provide a cup of coffee will get my nerves on its highest levels. Imagine when the level of the caffeine in my blood gets a little bit lower than the usual... my mind will go slow and my hands will develop a nervous shake.... Got to get that coffee on any cost...
My worst fear is to loose it, and the most thing that I will miss is my morning cup of coffee.
Dizzy
Is that what everybody feels, or what?
Hazy isn’t it?
This is what life is all about, making you unaware of your whereabouts and giving you the allusion of not belonging. At the same side of the story, and unknowingly you belong. Whether you like it or not you have referential sources to go to at the end of the day. Whether you like it or not, you have to ignore every impulse, every passion and every thought that crosses your mind, and pay attention to that ruling force that governs your life. I am not going to name institutions individuals or relationships in specific all of the above could be called a ruling power.
No matter how high you get nor how old, you will be under that spell. The obligation that is forced on you since you shouted your first cry is going to haunt you as the same obligation but in different shapes. You are entrapped in the same situation for the rest of your life. But it is the same obligation that gives you the security of belonging.
You want to belong regardless of the consequences of that sense of safety. You will fight battles and win wars for the double standard of belonging and obligation. They are entwined. Safety means sacrifice. I do not know where Joyce flew away from Ireland in a commando effort to escape belonging. Yet he wrote and wrote and rewrote Ireland. His obligation to Ireland never gave him the opportunity to un-write it. He never flew away he stayed in Dublin all the time.
A writer or an artist is never out of context. It can never detach itself from where it belongs to. Consciously it might try or even succeed in running away, but it is never successful in not belonging unconsciously. In relations hate means belonging.
Not belonging means belonging. When you try to unattach oneself; that means that you already have something that attaches you, hence you belong. Security is there all the time. Even when you feel that there is nobody there for you, that mean that means that you belong to a group (a big one these days) of lonely people.
You are not alone and you belong, whether you like it or not, quit whining and start seeing through those hazy eyes of yours. You will be surprised that you always belonged and you are always obliged, so start making a meaning out of that life of Yours.
Hope
…That magnificent force that keeps us from drowning in despair. The one and only that keeps us from being pulled down by life to the bottom. It is the straw that keeps the drowning from being pulled to the sluggish sludge of desolation. Enough with the clichés…. What really is there for you other than hope to fight and survive? What are the chances of down morale people and how good they could live with out the daily dose of the secret potion?
What makes you wake up every morning to the eternal fight is a sensation of a better tomorrow in the making. Great expectations are always drawn on the faintest thought of a happier moment yet to come. It is a dream to arouse to a better world. All are definitions of the same and only HOPE.
Yet… It leaves you in a constant daydream that might never end. It invades your most unwanted dreams and start it on fire the moment you imagine that it is finally gone. You even start hoping to lose hope… But in a desperate bravado…
Hope becomes your SIREN. It becomes your compass that leads you in the most treachery storms to the rocky sure. To crash and to lay on that sure waiting for it to come again in another disguise… A better one this time, a more friendly one…
So, hope, you cant live with it and you cant live with out it. It is not women or men or any other creature it is the sole numbness that the one and only HOPE can give.
Monument
The earth is evaporating…
Life is evaporating…
Slowly… Unconsciously…
The only people aware of this
Are the sun and I…
The earth is evaporating…
From far away and on the remote hill I could see the earth with its houses, trees, rocks, greenery, roads and highways. There was a white veil enveloping the whole scene with its magnificence. The sky was blue and the sun was up. But the fog persisted, declaring its existence in the chaotic world we live in.
After two rainy days, the sun shown to vaporize the rest of the water, that resisted the suckling nature of the thirsty planet… The water endured to be free of capture and get up there in its ethereal existence… to embrace the sun rays in an attempt to free itself again from the substantial construction… The result was an image of evanescence.
When the mist is there, the sky is not falling but the earth is evaporating, or is it both acts in one? The earth and the sky are trying to return to their primordial existence and to retrieve their unison nature. Fog is a recurrent monument to remind the universe of its former state… Where the universe was a big happy matrix…No dark…No light… Just the oness of greatness that hugged everything… The monument is an attempt from the earth and the sky to capture their previous form for a split second of earth’s history.
Spatial Excesses
I am aching with anticipation, and the anxiety is killing me. My hands are numb. My lungs are failing to draw enough oxygen to my body. My nostrils are open wide but they are failing to let the air in. I am full with wild thoughts of failure and success alike. I wish I could draw lines to square my potentials once and for all, to give me a fair idea where I am going to.
The answer to my anguish is a day away. But it is not going to be final. It is not even determined when the final verdict is going to be. I need somebody by my side but I can’t find any. I feel so alone though all my family is around me. I don’t think that family is the entity I need now, though their presence is integral to this phase of my life. I long for somebody to ascertain my doubts and expel my fears. My whole hearted apology to you family, it is enough burden on you for now. But I need somebody else to be in charge of comforting when in need.
It is very hard right now to say exactly what I need. Though I always realized my lacks and set my goals and went ahead for them. I feel so paralyzed; physically and spiritually. God knows what I am going through now. And he is the only one who can help me to overcome my crises. Although it is from God who blessed me with such ordeal. Still I find no one but him to go to. I pray for him to save me and to put me out of my misery. Because he is the one who holds my whole life and fortunes in his hands. This is a reminder for me before all to how much I NEED Him.
God! As you harnessed me with life,
I implore you the cure.
To die is no answer for your blessings,
But to wait for more,
Sitting there is no answer either,
The motion is of no use.
But to pray for you is one of many,
As you said it is true!
Getting out of Your Body!
It is the accessible miracle of spiritual birth…
It might coincide with the symptoms of traumatic aftermath. But it is efficient to transmit your perceptions to a far more transcendent levels of your existence. This is the form that goes wilder than the wildest of your sensual dreams; where every sense of your mind participates in the conspiracy.
This is a warning to the weak hearted, do not go any further if you are not ready to accept a spiritual journey! You might also link this to neurotic love, so let it be. This is the best hard evidence you well get to the case. What is a better evidence than confession?
Location; in bed; in the street; on grass; in an elevator; driving a car; riding a bus; and so forth. In other words you are in jeopardy of being caught in that state everywhere. Status; feeling every atom of your body. Every little particle, so round so numb so alive, starts to pump into consciousness; starting from your eyes, infects your head and spreads down to your entire body.
Then it slips to your surroundings.
The feel of the metal, the linen, the other person’s delicious being (even when it is feets away from you) set you to the highest wave of contentment and well being. The satisfaction of the consciousness that you can get from every atom of you and the beings around you is beyond description. You become one with everything that you become nothing. The awareness of the consciousness that you have got from this fraction of a moment is the never ending time span that you have ever lived. In that moment you are immortal. Your perception gave you the benefit of the doubt; of full perception that will make you forever ignorant.
You have reached the highest moment of being. You are born again, naked to truth, inexperienced to the level of perception that you have reached. You are now in a new territory that nobody will ever be able to teach about. You are now born to the mother of the spirit; that will teach you how to love the great light of knowledge; the highest destination that you will get near to it is after death. After that moment of rebirth you become afraid of nothing. The only feeling that will overwhelm you beyond perception is anticipation. Anxiety will rule you beyond reason and you will become its celebrated token.
Do not be alarmed! This will be the most satisfactory feeling you will get in your life. It would be better than your first experience with love.
It is the key to happiness!
Or not…