Douglas Mercer
September 10 2024
To your mother!—John Lennon
Nietzsche famously said that no one understands Hamlet, that like the plays within plays within plays it’s only one riddle after another, all of them unsolvable. But perhaps the truth of it has been lying in broad daylight like that purloined letter all along. Perhaps the truth is that Gertrude killed Ophelia, took her own bare hands and made her go under, drowned her. Think about it. First off is there any depth of depravity that those in Elsinore won’t descend to? A father suborns a child, everyone is spying on everyone else, everyone is scheming, entrapping, tricking, and deceiving, and hiding behind curtains, eavesdropping, nothing is what it seems and even illusions won’t stay. Letters are forged, and sealing wax is removed and replaced, and people go to it, and a man tosses skulls through the air and a fight breaks out in a grave. Something is rotten indeed, some foul eruption is the prologue to the omen coming on and the state and its inhabitants are all infected and the god of illusion casts his images which blind. In light of this why would not Gertrude kill Ophelia, who poses a mortal threat to her and to her state? After all that bit about those waterlogged weeds has all the hallmarks of one of those pat and just so stories, and we only have her word for it. She appears suddenly out of nowhere and announces what we need no ghost come back from hell to tell us: that one woe follows hard on the heels of the other; and then she gives us in effortless verse the locus classicus of poetry itself:
There is a willow grows aslant a brook
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them
There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. He clothes spread wide
and mermaid like a while they bore her up
which time she chanted snatches of old lauds
as one incapable of her own distress
or like a creature native and indued unto that element
but long it could not be that her garments
heavy with drink pulled the poor wretch from her
melodious lay to muddy death.
A likely story, one might say; so beautiful is it that the soft-hearted dare not ask a question such as: if she saw that process did she try to save her? One is right to be suspicious of this, it has all the elements of a set piece meant for the rhetorician’s study, to be pawed and poured over by candle lamp and perhaps corrected by a squib of a quill pen. And what have we learned of this Gertrude? She either turned a blind eye to her husband’s murder or was in on it from the beginning, a conspirator; and then posted with greedy and avaricious haste to the murderer’s arms. And she had plenty of motive. Hamlet knows the truth from the outset but the truth is a tightly guarded secret in Elsinore as it always is, ringed about by signs that read High Voltage. Touch it even once and you will be shocked. Hamlet has been acting mad and playing the double or triple word game and saying it without saying it and now the virus of madness of truth is spreading as it always does when one begins to focus precisely on the event. For Ophelia mad has been wraithing through the castle like a ghost herself and singing old songs and catches and lays and through some kind of spiritual osmosis she has picked up the truth. And if you want an usurping state to last the last thing you want is some sibilant Sibyl or divine wisp Cassandra in a willowy slip to be flitting this way and that talking nonsense rhyme that may one day hit upon a home truth. That is who knows when the prophetess will simply blurt it out and infect other ears into believing or half believing that the man in charge is a thieving murderous lecher—and the woman is bedding down with garbage, for sure it’s not conducive to the health of the state. And so the evil Queen took matters into her own two hands and throttled the poor crazy wretch and committed muddy murder as in the best it is.
Hamlet has a presentiment of this and had the ghost not forbid him from harming her he would have turned himself into a kind of reverse Oedipus and drew the fatal dagger to her throat—as it is he damn near assaults her and calls her a filthy whore straight to her face one that feeds on sewage and garbage and disease. When one’s own mother is at the heart of the wickedness a man draws a long breath; and so though in general the death of one’s mother is signal milestone in a man’s life not for our noble Black Prince, by suffering his sea change and jumping into the grave he has become what he long lacked: his own father. He’s dying himself by then but when he walks over her lifeless body he gives her a fitting farewell and almost as an afterthought says: wretched queen adieu! To your mother!
***
They said that the worldly triumph of Christianity was not a religious movement but it was a literally a literary victory—and that’s pretty perspicacious. Through a series of books collected in one book they got the world to believe the fable true, that a man was God. It’s true that Caligula made his horse a senator and got people to treat it with deference and perhaps wrap it in a toga—but no one actually believed it. And likewise outside of a small band of mind numbed fanatics in the year 70 AD few in the world had ever heard of this Jesus fellow and the few who had did not care. It’s true that the chief fanatic Paul had written some ill written and tortured prose that circulated among the small band of mind numbed followers. But apart from a few grace notes the lot of is filled up with cockamamie theories about how gentiles are “grafted” on the Jews, forgetting the lead character’s warning not to put patches on garments lest one be a person of shreds and patches. To say I’m a Jew, I’m not a Jew is neither great prose nor high philosophy but that did not stop millions of future minds from poring over it ad nauseam and trying to glean a substance that simply was not there. The Gospels are of course another kettle of fish (so to speak); essentially conventional novels or novellas with a story arc and climax and a denouement; they attained a sort of post-modern sheen avant la letre by telling the story from four perspectives Rashmon-like or 13 blackbirds sitting on a fence; but with their mixing and matching of stories (pretentiously called pericopes) they give their literary game away and the lead to protagonist becomes a sort of screen on which any fantasy could be projected, which is what has been going on now for these long 2000 years of delusion.
And like his counterpart fictional character Hamlet they say that Jesus too had a thing with his mother. For all the ballyhoo and blazon and hoopla surrounding the so-called Mother Of God, and the treacle of the weeping women at the foot of the cross, Jesus was none too happy with her. Story is that in the early days of his roaming vagabondage and his picturesque wonder working (ie, juggling) his family wanted to have him locked up and committed. From a modern point of view Jesus was a classic schizophrenic, he had the entire hatchery of symptoms and complexes; complete and total psychotic break with reality, he had both auditory and visual hallucinations, he had command hallucinations, perhaps even a bit of suicidal ideation, he had delusions of grandeur. Indeed, walk into any ward today and you’ll find a few who have the biggest symptom of all, they think they are Jesus Christ; well Jesus had that one too, but he really was Jesus Christ, at least within the fame of the fiction. And in a way you can’t blame his mother and family for wanting to subdue him, he was saying some crazy things after all and was firing off his big mouth about being God (of all things)---the kind of things that could get you killed and, indeed, did in his case (in the frame of the fiction mind you). And there is a reason that no man is a prophet to his family in the same way that no man was ever a hero to his valet---hell, they knew him when he was in short pants, when he was just knee high to a grasshopper, they were there when he was nothing but a gleam in his daddy’s eye (so to speak). You can hear them thinking as the farfetched tales of healing came to them—son of god my eye.
But of course Jesus got his own against his mother and when the time came paid her in kind. Supposedly he was having a relaxed meal and time and his mother shows up begging entrance. Jesus of course will have none of it, no sentiment of bygone days cloud his thinking, he recalls not the small kindness she showed him, or the things she taught him. And in as cold a manner as possible he says to tell her that she is not his mother, she is not his family, those around him are, he has been born again, given birth to himself; someone says that the womb that carried him must be blessed but Jesus bitterly scoffs at that as well; those are blessed who act on the word of God. That is in as cold blooded and willful and deliberated and calculated a way as possible he told his mother to get lost: am-scray. Mother Of God his eye and wretched queen adieu. To your mother!
