Who's There?
Posted: Sun Jul 14, 2024 2:49 pm
Douglas Mercer
July 14 2024
Who’s there?
So says the opening line of Hamlet and really you can go anywhere from there, a usurper, a ghost, a prince clad in black who suffers a sea change and becomes dangerous, a blood strewn palace, a King to the rescue, strange doings in Elsinore; because that is the open question always is it not: who’s there? Were it really just us we could still do whatever we wanted and assign it any meaning we want but it would all only end in the selfsame pile of dust; you can be as cowardly or as courageous as you want about it, no matter, anything that has to end does; but if an entity is there—well that’s another ball of wax. And the key to it all is who will be there at the end and was there from the beginning, who is ready to enter stage right when we exit stage left, pursued by a bear. Soren Kierkegaard said it was illicit to play guess who with world history; but I don’t see why that is so. And anyways who is guessing?
***
Everyone concedes that Gustave Flaubert was a first rate writer; his problem is that he was a horrible novelist; he did, however, compose three rather interesting short stories; in one a simple country girl confuses a stuffed parrot with the holy spirit; in another a man of the nobility and a great hunter becomes a vagrant and crosses a river with a leper whom he embraces turning him into Jesus Christ; and then a neutral rendition of the John the Baptist story when in the end they bear the head on the road back to Galilee; Flaubert’s spirit was surgical and incisive but he said he was a Catholic.
Version One
All agree that at first was the word; for the Jews the God spoke and all was manifest; their tale then depicts themselves as the Chosen of God; the apple, so they say, of God’s eye; then the founder comes along and is told to kill his son by his own hand at the behest of God; of course the voice could be that of a demon or perhaps he is just crazy and hearing voices; but he fully believes (something which for the Greeks would have been sacrilege) that the God wanted him to kill his own flesh and blood and do so as a bond: this they call faith, blind faith, or the leap; this was the Knight of Infinite Faith or Infinite Resignation; to kill the lineage is what the god wanted and so it was done (man is subservient to God rather than its equal); then from the height of high philosophy come the laws, the man comes down from the mountain after seeing a voice speak in the fire and offers his people prohibitions and inhibitions, he says no, that the fear of god is the sum and substance of wisdom.
Then as chronicled the Jews have their ups and their downs, they start to stray and the prophets come down and say be warned lest etc. Then just like that the spirit stops speaking, and the rabbis fall to quibbling and equivocating among themselves about nonsensical points of law, and then comes the crossover just as Rome subdues the world first and then subdues itself; and then a Jew who claims to be (or is claimed to be later) the one who was to come is killed by the Romans at the behest of the Jews; after his death (and putative rising from the dead) his teaching spreads like wildfire.
Version 2
This version doesn’t really have a name, we call it Cosmotheism, which is strictly accurate, but it has yet to pierce the public consciousness; to call it Paganism would be wildly misleading, the Germans called it Gotglaubig (believers in God), but that is now esoteric and arcane; to trace this religion was born among the Greeks; there the gods and mortals freely interacted with one another in the open space of play; there even the gods were subject to a mysterious law named moira; here there was drama and tragedy and choral music and choruses; this was the splendor and the radiance of being and the young world singing; in its beauty and cunning it tells us of its tokens: psyche, narcissus, echo, eros, cupid, there we have the generational conflict of the original gods, we have mother earth and father sky, and tantalizing clues, and men holding up the earth, byzantine labyrinths, and wandering heroes, and songs of sirens, and whirlpools, and lotus lands, blind seers, and men rolling their weight up a hill forever.
These are not preachers warning or blindly believing; this the is the stuff of life itself; and of course we have the images of the man flying too close to the sun and getting burned, and the man who removes the fire from under the god’s nose like a key from the keeper and in punished eternally for it, though he is always regenerated; this is an aesthetic world of pure art and pure story and pure play; and so comports with reality.
One will notice right away that the two stories, though completely divergent in content, have the same progression; god is present, god is absent, the god returns; it is as always a three act play that observes the dramatic unites; all in one place and all in one day. But the two stories are intertwined like a helix, or like two swimmers clinging to the other for life, the one being the substance which is a shadow, and the other only a shadow or a ruse with no substance, the one wishing only to pull the other down to the depth. In the end what is real?
***
In his essay On Knocking On The Gates In Macbeth that famous lotus eater Thomas De Quincey exalts the intuition over the understanding; he says that understanding can obliterate the eyes, that one can see things every day of one’s life and not know it because everyone is telling you you do not see it; what is most obvious is always most opaque, and so it is; of that play which is a supernatural soliciting on the banks and shoals of time he reports that it is a drunk porter at the gates hearing an incessant knocking at the door that alarms and haunts him; in Macbeth he gets the ominous feeling that this porter is the key to the mystery of the play and it all, a bagatelle for all the world to see, a comic lull, representative of the slow return of the beating heart of life, after the bloody scene of murder, a revivification of presence after a long absence.
Remember the porter, the one who ferries or carries across, the one who opens the door, the transportation is here. For our very knocking has awakened the king and the life of the building, the master is stirring after having been roused from its sleep, here he comes now that the obscure bird had sung throughout the night. Now that we have sent the message through the receiver we know we will get an answer one fine day. Soon, and if not soon, then surely soon.
It does after all have some rights of memory in this Kingdom.
Which do you guess it is?
July 14 2024
Who’s there?
So says the opening line of Hamlet and really you can go anywhere from there, a usurper, a ghost, a prince clad in black who suffers a sea change and becomes dangerous, a blood strewn palace, a King to the rescue, strange doings in Elsinore; because that is the open question always is it not: who’s there? Were it really just us we could still do whatever we wanted and assign it any meaning we want but it would all only end in the selfsame pile of dust; you can be as cowardly or as courageous as you want about it, no matter, anything that has to end does; but if an entity is there—well that’s another ball of wax. And the key to it all is who will be there at the end and was there from the beginning, who is ready to enter stage right when we exit stage left, pursued by a bear. Soren Kierkegaard said it was illicit to play guess who with world history; but I don’t see why that is so. And anyways who is guessing?
***
Everyone concedes that Gustave Flaubert was a first rate writer; his problem is that he was a horrible novelist; he did, however, compose three rather interesting short stories; in one a simple country girl confuses a stuffed parrot with the holy spirit; in another a man of the nobility and a great hunter becomes a vagrant and crosses a river with a leper whom he embraces turning him into Jesus Christ; and then a neutral rendition of the John the Baptist story when in the end they bear the head on the road back to Galilee; Flaubert’s spirit was surgical and incisive but he said he was a Catholic.
Version One
All agree that at first was the word; for the Jews the God spoke and all was manifest; their tale then depicts themselves as the Chosen of God; the apple, so they say, of God’s eye; then the founder comes along and is told to kill his son by his own hand at the behest of God; of course the voice could be that of a demon or perhaps he is just crazy and hearing voices; but he fully believes (something which for the Greeks would have been sacrilege) that the God wanted him to kill his own flesh and blood and do so as a bond: this they call faith, blind faith, or the leap; this was the Knight of Infinite Faith or Infinite Resignation; to kill the lineage is what the god wanted and so it was done (man is subservient to God rather than its equal); then from the height of high philosophy come the laws, the man comes down from the mountain after seeing a voice speak in the fire and offers his people prohibitions and inhibitions, he says no, that the fear of god is the sum and substance of wisdom.
Then as chronicled the Jews have their ups and their downs, they start to stray and the prophets come down and say be warned lest etc. Then just like that the spirit stops speaking, and the rabbis fall to quibbling and equivocating among themselves about nonsensical points of law, and then comes the crossover just as Rome subdues the world first and then subdues itself; and then a Jew who claims to be (or is claimed to be later) the one who was to come is killed by the Romans at the behest of the Jews; after his death (and putative rising from the dead) his teaching spreads like wildfire.
Version 2
This version doesn’t really have a name, we call it Cosmotheism, which is strictly accurate, but it has yet to pierce the public consciousness; to call it Paganism would be wildly misleading, the Germans called it Gotglaubig (believers in God), but that is now esoteric and arcane; to trace this religion was born among the Greeks; there the gods and mortals freely interacted with one another in the open space of play; there even the gods were subject to a mysterious law named moira; here there was drama and tragedy and choral music and choruses; this was the splendor and the radiance of being and the young world singing; in its beauty and cunning it tells us of its tokens: psyche, narcissus, echo, eros, cupid, there we have the generational conflict of the original gods, we have mother earth and father sky, and tantalizing clues, and men holding up the earth, byzantine labyrinths, and wandering heroes, and songs of sirens, and whirlpools, and lotus lands, blind seers, and men rolling their weight up a hill forever.
These are not preachers warning or blindly believing; this the is the stuff of life itself; and of course we have the images of the man flying too close to the sun and getting burned, and the man who removes the fire from under the god’s nose like a key from the keeper and in punished eternally for it, though he is always regenerated; this is an aesthetic world of pure art and pure story and pure play; and so comports with reality.
One will notice right away that the two stories, though completely divergent in content, have the same progression; god is present, god is absent, the god returns; it is as always a three act play that observes the dramatic unites; all in one place and all in one day. But the two stories are intertwined like a helix, or like two swimmers clinging to the other for life, the one being the substance which is a shadow, and the other only a shadow or a ruse with no substance, the one wishing only to pull the other down to the depth. In the end what is real?
***
In his essay On Knocking On The Gates In Macbeth that famous lotus eater Thomas De Quincey exalts the intuition over the understanding; he says that understanding can obliterate the eyes, that one can see things every day of one’s life and not know it because everyone is telling you you do not see it; what is most obvious is always most opaque, and so it is; of that play which is a supernatural soliciting on the banks and shoals of time he reports that it is a drunk porter at the gates hearing an incessant knocking at the door that alarms and haunts him; in Macbeth he gets the ominous feeling that this porter is the key to the mystery of the play and it all, a bagatelle for all the world to see, a comic lull, representative of the slow return of the beating heart of life, after the bloody scene of murder, a revivification of presence after a long absence.
Remember the porter, the one who ferries or carries across, the one who opens the door, the transportation is here. For our very knocking has awakened the king and the life of the building, the master is stirring after having been roused from its sleep, here he comes now that the obscure bird had sung throughout the night. Now that we have sent the message through the receiver we know we will get an answer one fine day. Soon, and if not soon, then surely soon.
It does after all have some rights of memory in this Kingdom.
Which do you guess it is?
