Douglas Mercer
August 4 2024
Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there to clean ourselves? What festivals and what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to justify it?
The King James Bible was published in 1611 but was completed in 1610. When it was completed William Shakespeare was 46 years old (b. April 23 1564). In Psalm 46 the 46th word is shake and the 46th word going backwards from the end is spear. These are carbon dreams from the heart of the cybernetic field, filings that attach to the magnet. At its heart of hearts (Hamlet-1603) is William Shakespeare (shake the spirit) and the more you enter into his domain the more it becomes like a labyrinth or network of literary force field which resounds and redounds and ramifies not only to his texts but to the whole world of texts. It is dream of course (insubstantial pageant, think that you have slumbered here and the play no more yielding than a dream); it is of course bottomless knowing no end where time is conquered. As for the Psalm in question there are many possibilities; that Shakespeare helped write the book; that the divines, notoriously antipathetic to the players, were begrudgingly or nobly giving credit where credit is due and a doff of the miter; or the swirling of chance, fate, or coincidence. They say that a decade or so before Shakespeare was born Coverdale had the spirit at 48; but that only makes the web of fate go deeper, in the world of myth and mysticism precision is an empirical fact.
In the Tempest (1611) Shakespeare’s stand in or alter ego is a man devoted to his books, and likes to live alone with them in his cell, that is he is a sorcerer who controls the elements. In the play there is a reference to the “still vex’d Bermoothes”; vex is hex and Bermoothes is Bermuda. In 1609 the Sea Venture was wrecked near Bermuda (those are pearls that were his eyes), and a report was made about it in 1610; the Virginia company had a written report that was not published until over a decade later but textual clues show the author had obviously read it. This means that Shakespeare was circulating in rarefied circles and had access to sensitive and secret information. The reference to the Bermudas being vexed is the first known reference to the idea that there was a force field around the island that could lead to sinking into the sea (the Bermuda Triangle), though in his logs Columbus reported haywire compasses, strange lights, and flames falling into the sea; and sailors who arrived on the island were unnerved by the calls of cahow birds and the sounds of wild pigs from the interior. So in his play Shakespeare immortalized the island’s mystical reputation, though the phrase “Bermuda Triangle” was not coined until 1964, the year of the 400th anniversary of the poet’s birth (Gaddis in Argosy Magazine).
Shakespeare’s intellect is uncanny, eerie, spooky, and unearthly. His work comprises a cybernetic field which is (so to speak) the switchboard of human language, everything is created there and ends up its circle. In his work one will find mention of every flower of the English Countryside, he invented not just hundreds of words but hundreds of idioms, John Milton got two: all hell breaks loose and tripping the light fantastic, Heller got Catch 22, Joyce got earsplitting, two seem to be the maximum everyone else got. You can’t count Tyndale with his salt of the earth as it is a translation and anyway how else would you say salt of the earth? You can give him the powers that be but Shakespeare got more than that by sunup; Joyce did not say too much when he said that after God Shakespeare crated most; and in that author’s book he makes his chapter on Hamlet function as the brain of the rest of the book, the still center around which the rest revolves; others abide our questioning they say, but he was free; a scholar has said that many a time he has seen correspondences in the plays and it made his hair stand on end (hair to stand on end, Hamlet-1603). The same scholar said that Shakespeare’ text constituted an interlacing self-referential network; but that is to not sell it dear enough. Language itself it the network and Shakespeare is its mind’s eye or it’s heart of hearts, a love song so sweet it even made those in heaven woozy.
***
Out of the air or out of his back pocket he casually conjures up as luck would have it, break the ice, pound of flesh, flesh and blood, be all and end all, dead as a doornail, to have someone in stitches, faint-hearted, leapfrog, livelong day, mind’s eye, neither here nor there, blinking idiot, mum’s the word, bated breath, the world is your oyster, foregone conclusion, pitched battle, heartsick, wild goose chase, hot blooded, knitting your brows, not sleeping a wink, it’s Greek to me, in my heart of hearts, too much of a good thing, neither rhyme nor reason, the long and the short of it, eating one out of house and home, vanishing into thin air, and wear your heart on your sleeve.
***
In Macbeth, a play where nothing is but what is not, life itself is called a walking shadow and compared to an actor. This is the play of supernatural soliciting where proleptic imagination peers into the womb of times to see what nestles there, to see which grain will grow and which will rot. Puck says of his players that they are but shadows playing on an idle theme (the theme is love in idleness) no more real than a dream. It is said that the best in this kind are but shadows and that the poet and the lunatics are always shaping imaginings. When the play ends a sea change occurs and the final vision ensues:
These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
This mirrors exactly the postulated future universe, where the fabric is rent or ripped and things break apart to drift over so much space and become ever smaller and smaller forever and always more distant from each other until one has (virtually at least) nothing. Absent any divine interloping this is the fate of the universe, a cold place with neither life, sound, nor light.
We thus have the repetition of plays, players, acting, lunacy, plays within plays (Mousetrap, Masques) shadows, and we should note that the word unreal itself was coined by Shakespeare (Macbeth). That is the be all is the end all; and something will come from nothing. What Shakespeare is telling us is that the so-called real world is called so called for a reason. It is not real. What is real is what is in the mind (the mind is its own place, the soul selects its society and shuts the door). This reference to the inner world of inner intensity is a version of the Identity Fracture Project (See The Poet’s Calling, White Biocentrism, July 23 2024, my eyes were open tough they might just as well be closed, living is easy with eyes closed). That is also a before the letter version of the inner intensity called for by German Idealism. It is inside knowledge, as it were, or intelligence in its manifold meanings.
***
Induction means initiation and in the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew we begin with a nobleman who plays a trick (illusion of identity) on a beggar who wakes up from a drunken stupor. The beggar’s name is Sly, just so one won’t miss the point, equally so the reference to the “glasses you have burst.”
“Christopher Sly, a drunken beggar, is driven out of an alehouse by its hostess. A great lord, returning from the hunt, finds Sly in a drunken sleep and decides to play an elaborate trick on him. The lord orders his servants to place Sly in a luxurious bedroom and, when the beggar awakes, to tell him he is a great lord who has long been out of his mind. A troupe of traveling actors present themselves to the lord, who, by way of further elaborating his trick, instructs them to stage a play for Sly.”
Here we have an extension of the Identity Fracture Project, the lords persuade the beggar he is mad (the antic disposition), this time with the implantation of memories to create a new identity or the illusion of a new identity, but one that seems real enough. This is artificial intelligence as it were, or a virtual reality, the point being that what one experiences in one’s mind is what is real, (the truth is subjective, Soren Kierkegaard, perception is reality, look for nothing beyond or behind the images). One of Shakespeare’s heroines refers to herself as an “artificial god”; the counterpart to this is the counterfeit death which creates life; so we get a cluster of concepts and words, unreal, artificial, virtual, counterfeit, play acting, madness, shadow, all of which point to what he is trying to tell us: that the everyday reality is an illusion, that to reach true reality one must make it up.
***
Hamlet considered as the brooding inner man was a late creation; it took Kant with his notion of the mind creating or shaping its own reality and it took his English advocates and acolytes, Coleridge first among them, to invent the word psychology, and place Hamlet in his proper light. Hegel finished off his history of the spirit by calling Shakespeare’s characters “free artists of themselves” (self-creators, or artificial gods) and sending the spirit sailing to the edges of the universe and into eternity. Hamlet tells his mother that he knows not “seems,” that he has within that which passes show. The emphasis here is on “within” meaning that which is without is a show or semblance, not real. He uses mind’s eye not once but twice (the first instance of the phrase) and he speaks of being bound in a nutshell and considering himself to be the king of an infinite space; Shakespeare was well aware of the “compeers of the night” and of Bruno with mnemonics and the memory theater; he cribs from Mirandola’s esotericism and his Pelagianism and the perfectibility of man in his speech about man’s faculties being infinite; thus he is the avatar of taking on a new identity with his emphasis on playing (the play’s the thing) on acting, and on being mad (the antic disposition), and on creating and becoming a new self (we must become gods to justify this crime). In his letter to Ophelia Hamlet shows his awareness of the new learning by challenging her to doubt that the stars are fire and he cryptically refers to himself as a machine (cybernetic field). He then suffers a sea change while at sea and averts death by a forgery, jumps in a grave, and prepares to meet death. He mimics God creating the universe by saying both “let be” and “let it be” (Let It Be, 1969). In his penultimate parry he speaks of a bonnet (hat) and that it is for “the head” and he then exemplifies that nothing is either good nor bad but thinking makes it so by jesting with the fop like courier that he thinks it first hot, then cold, then sultry. And then he speaks of one who’s “semblance is a mirror.” For by the end Hamlet no longer is holding the looking glass held up to nature, but has got rid of both altogether.
***
Now that German Idealism comes to its foreordained finish we enter into the heart of the grand decider’s field (grid, matrix, etc) where all the most important motifs congregate and cluster. This is the completion of the system until it disperses forever, the placing of the roof in a meditation on the floor until it blows away.
Dream
Madness
Ground
Abyss
Completion
Virtual Reality
Weave
Fugue
Love In Idleness
The first thing to notice about A Midsummer Night’s Dream is that the very title refers to the Summer Solstice, a sacred Holiday of the sun of our people, and it is set in Athens and it is full of English folk legends. Aside from the perfunctory “God’s wounds” referring to Jesus Shakespeare never once gives praise to this Jewish Savior. He does, however, throw incense to the gods and beseeches the heavenly charmers, that is his gods are our gods and this play, taken over from Ovid, is peopled with the folk myths of our people, the fairies and the goblins and the winged messengers. In the play the King and Queen of the fairies are at odds over the custody of a changeling (a human-like creature found throughout much of European folklore). As the Queen has the changeling the King decides to give her a herb named Love In Idleness, so the Queen has her mind replaced with another artificial one consisting of the madness of Divine Love. Then the King’s Emissary transmogrifies Bottom into a donkey to become the love object of the queen. Bottom is a weaver (dream weaver, Penelope weaving and unweaving, Alice and the Cat disentangling and tangling the ball of yarn, concentration and dispersion, storytelling or yarn tangled or otherwise). The Donkey is an ass and in The Golden Ass the protagonist tries to transform himself into a bird (word) but changes into a donkey instead. In this way the words and symbols cluster for a moment only to be released straightaway, like Ariel at the latter end of the play.
“Numerous Greek and Latin writers allude to a widespread belief that Jews, and subsequently Christians, observed some form of ass worship.”
“Tacitus tells of a herd of wild asses which led Moses and the Jews to a spring when they were sorely in need of water, the Jews, in consequence, elevating the ass to an object of worship.”
Thus the Jews are seen to worship an idol in a reversal of the accusation that the Christian fathers hurled against our people.
In the play Shakespeare will mediate on the famous passage of Paul from Corinthians.
“I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called Bottom’s Dream because it hath no bottom. And I will sing it in the latter end of a play.”
This is directly related to Corinthians:
“Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect, we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, the eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. the Spirit searches all things, yea, the deep things of God.”
This correspondence is compounded by the fact that in the Geneva Bible (which Shakespeare surely read) the phrase the deep things of god is translated as: the bottom of God’s secrets, thus the name of the character. And notice what Shakespeare does with Paul’s passage. He spoofs and mocks and sends it up and parodies and travesties the simplistic notions of Paul by replacing them with a fugue vision of the carnival fun house based on the combination of the senses in a free for all vision of synesthesisa, in which different and more complex cognitive pathways are opened up in an act of flooding. Note also that Paul says what God has prepared enters into the heart, but Shakespeare says what the heart reports; that is it is not what goes into selves but what comes out of it that matters, we are the agent; that is we are the speakers here, or artificial gods who have become real. We have seem a rarefied vision and will expound it; not as a make-believe ass but a real bird.
***
Philosophy has always searched for the ground (the bottom). But roof is in floor and the roof is going to fly away. The final solution is that there is no ground, there is only abyss, but this lack of a floor is a false floor when the rug is pulled out from beneath one, that is the way down is the way up, or vice versa. Paul has his vision of being caught up in the air and Salinger too has his vision of the catcher but he says you have to not catch the children but let them grab the ring for themselves, that is don’t treat them like babies. Milton rationalizes this as the “fortunate fall” but here once again we see that the Jewish tradition parasites on the logos doctrine. The fall was claimed to have happened after man had been tempted to be as a god; the Greeks have these myths too: Icarus, the son of the man who built the labyrinth, but he falls due to irrational exuberance; and Prometheus but he lives a hero’s life, not cast out of the garden in ignominy. That is the Greeks have their concept of hubris but the ones who “challenge” the gods are heroes not idlers as in Genesis. Heidegger rationalizes the Jewish rationalization by noting Heraclitus’s vision of the Logos as the place where there is no twisting or distortion or closure, where one simply circulates through the field and is held aloft in pure thought (strange to see all that was once in place floating so loosely in space, Rilke, 1922).
***
In his two greatest plays Shakespeare doubles the image of the dizzying (withering heights). The first is a foreboding of dark power, the second is a play of virtual reality. The one image of staring into the abyss is false because it supposes a false entity with malevolent powers, Satan takes Jesus to the high mountain and dares him to jump, saying that Angels will minister to him if he does, this is taken for reality but is myth, whereas to the Greeks their myths were always representations of reality, not it in itself.
What if it tempt you toward the flood my lord
Or the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beeltes over his base into the sea
And draw you into madness?
In the second a dutiful son leads his recently blinded father to a flat place but he tricks him into believing it is a brink or precipice, thus the virtual reality illusion as in the Induction.
Come on, sir. Here’s the place. Stand still.
How fearful and dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles. Halfway down
Hangs one that gathers samphire—dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
The fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice. And yon tall anchoring bark
Diminished to her cock, her cock a buoy
Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge
That on th' unnumbered idle pebbles chafes
Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more
Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.
In this passage we have the transposition of proportion as in the Alice books and the idea that the baleful sight can turn one’s brain. But the images is just a scary monster to instruct and they are standing on a dry and level place all the while.
***
A plateau is a high-level place, or a period of stability after a burst of activity. In this passage the tension and contradictions are all resolved:
Many a hand has scaled the grand old face of the plateau
Some belong to strangers and some to folks you know
Holy ghosts and talk show hosts are planted in the sand
Here we are at the height of eternity; and both holy ghosts and talk show hosts (the twittering world-Eliot 1948) are buried in the sand, like the ostrich not wanting to know about reality.
Nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop
And an illustrated book about birds
You see a lot up there but don't be scared
Who needs action when you got words
On the top is an agent of purification and a collection of words about words (birds) with pictures; here the Logos rules, that is the mind rules and the realm of deed is dead.
Many hands began to scan around for the next plateau
Some say it was Greenland and some say Mexico
Others decided it was nowhere except for where they stood
But those were all just guesses, wouldn't help you if they could
In the final analysis we go higher and higher, we don’t break through screens to the next screen because screens (glass) have disappeared; but rather there are visions and revisions that reverse; to say where one is (maybe you wonder where you are, I don’t care) is beside the point; but there was still distortion on the line that one can edit: for nowhere except where one stands is not a guess but a recognition. The final site is stationary (paper, writing), just as at the latter end of the play we have pure resolution.
***
As always Shakespeare traffics in enigma, but enigma that once the dust has settled is as clear as a bell on a midwinter eve. In retrospect (once the facts come to light) it seems plain that Birnam Wood can come to Dunsinane, or that a man does not need to be born of woman to be untimely ripped; with him it is always the fun house mirror and there will come dreams though it will never be quite what it seems. You just have to read between the lines or, failing that, just read them. It’s what happens when you put away childish things, break the glass in order to see, and know that nothing is above our question and we will not leave off dispute until the last of the secrets comes to light. A trick question is one thing and misleading riddles have their place; but it occurs to me that King Oedipus’ problem was not that he had one eye too many but that when it came to the heavenly charmers he could not see straight.
We have no blood to wipe off us now; what we have created is the machine but a ghost still haunts it; when we banish it forever we will become the god or, better, the host. This requires no elaboration as it speaks for itself.
***
Notes:
In the movie Ex Machina (Hamlet refers to himself in his mad letter to Ophelia as a machine) the replicant Ava on the other hand represents those who have only ever derived their identity from what is real. Nietzsche looked forward to this new kind of person, someone more than human, that is why she embraces her true identity. But the film never says that Ava is more than a chess computer. Like Alice through the looking glass she has changed places with her reflection, mirroring the path out by which she entered, and as with Alice who found herself a pawn in a game of chess having to be moved the eight spaces in order to be transformed into a queen Ava now stands as a queen. Her shadow in the sunlight representing her overturning of Plato’s allegory of the cave. This is why in the movie the replicant is always looking through and seen behind glass.
Some are trying to make machines be human and some are trying to make human be machines; in fact German Idealism solved this dilemma long ago, and both of those endeavors will never bear fruition, but have their place in the game as models or pointers to lead us to the truth.
Deus Ex Machina: the Greek for god out of a machine, it was a somewhat heave handed plot device where a machine would come down to wrap up the play. It is used now to describe an arbitrary ending that is unrealistic, far-fetched or outlandish, tying up the loose ends in an implausible way.
In the two summit quotes the poet uses the word “beetles” each time once beetling over the base. Famously Paul was a base player, and in I Am The Walrus snatches of King Lear are heard (Paperback Writer: based on a novel by man named Lear, whimsical author).
Shakespeare had a comprehensive and organic image of England’s inner life in such a way that be became prophetic, as a computer model, accurately programmed, simulates (or stimulates) the entire future development and projects the outcome.
It is common myth or folklore that a swan is never more beautiful than when it performs it final song.
