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"Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth;
The page you're looking for could not be found."
—Shakespeare

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

CONTENTS

1. The movie
2. Leaf Falling Example
3. Determinism
4. Random Snoopy Example
5. Flower Plucking Example
6. Hume
7. Bart Simpson & Dobby Example
8. R&G Are Dead

The Movie

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is a Tom Stoddard flick about free will against the plot of Shakespeare's Hamlet. It illuminates the philosophical debate between Hard (or, Soft) Determinism vs Libertarian Free Will or Hume’s compatibilism. It is a theatrical query on whether or not life is determined, or whether we have free will. 

Leaf Falling Example

If you take for instance the leaves falling from the trees in a Northern Hemispheric winter, you might say the leaves had to fall due to the presence of a hormone in leaf-dropping trees that signals a chemical message to every leaf to essentially, “Take a dive!” 

Once this message is received, little cells appear where the leaf stem meets the branch. They are called “abscission” cells. Like their namesake, “scissors,” they cut themselves free. 

Determinism

In this sense, a leaf must fall. Its prior causes necessitate later effects. It is the leaf's fate to fall; it is already determined. 

Random Snoopy Example

“What if the wind picks up and blows the leaf off the tree?” 

That’s a good question, Snoopy. 

In this scenario, it appears that the leaf’s fate is random, i.e., not-determined. It can be affected by additional forces. Since the presence of random is not under our direct control, there is still no free will.

Hume

But what if your tribe is seated at the same campfire as Hume? 

You may retort the notion of determinism, saying that free will does not mean to do other than what you actually do, nor is it something that happens other than what actually happens. 

It means, doing something you want to do, regardless. 

Flower Plucking Example

Here, we pluck a flower and put it in our hair. Adorning ourselves with nature’s beauty. We exercised free will when we chose to pluck the flower. We seal its fate in our own story. 

Was the flower going to wither and fall, regardless of our action? Yes. 

Did we exercise free will? 

Yes. No. Maybe?

Bart Simpson & Dobby Example

Consider instead a more serious topic, one of life and death. 

In this scenario, we as human beings cannot escape death. We are still trapped in the cycle of birth and death (regardless of whether that cycle is singular or plural; get it? This image of Bart dying over and over is a gif. It keeps playing). 

We still die 

(dramatic pause), 

eventually. 

But if we had a choice, we may not choose death. The fact that is not our choice to make indicates that we have no free will. 

This is the dilemma of determinism, 

Dobby.

R&G Are Dead

In R&G Are Dead, both realize they are trapped. Literally living out a certain set of actions. In their realization, they still "decide" (free will) not to tell Hamlet, which ultimately leads to their deaths, the climax of their roles in the play Hamlet. 

Oh, and, by the way, 

Heads or tails? 

"Free will is a revenge theory.
We cannot answer the question of who wins."
~Soph Laugh

Harvard with My Daughter: Richard III

WITH MY DAUGHTER

Below is my homework on Richard III: that revengeful, plotting, deformed Machiavellian tyrant we love to hate. I got a B+. 

ENGL E-124

Shakespeare’s Early Plays

Fall 2017

1. The first thirteen lines in Richard III’s opening soliloquy are about the improved state of affairs for his family after the ascendency of his brother King Edward IV to the English Crown. “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York” (1.1.1-1.1.2). Using winter and summer as metaphors for sadness and celebration, Richard III reminds the audience that his family suffered during the civil wars and the wars of the Roses, when “clouds … loured” (1.1.3) upon their house (of York). But in line fourteen, the monologue shifts from a relieved Duke of Gloucester for his family’s “victorious wreaths” (1.1.5) to the revengeful, plotting, deformed tyrant, known as Richard III: “I, that am rudely stamped (1.1.16) / Cheated of feature by dissembling nature (1.1.19) / Deformed, unfinished (1.1.20) ... villain” (1.1.30). Here, we discover that the kingdom may be at peace: “Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings” (1.1.7) under the sunny reign of his brother Edward IV, but the spell of the long winter: “In the deep bosom of the ocean buried” (1.1.4) remains with our vibrantly melodramatic hero-villain who has “no delight to pass away the time” (1.1.25). His determination to become the villain speaks to the real-life political scheming – made ever more popular by the Tudors - of a tyrant’s ascent to political power. Richard III laments that he “hate[s] the idle pleasures of these days” (1.1.31), then declares “And if King Edward be as true and just / As I am subtle, false and treacherous / This day should Clarence closely be mewed up” (1.1.37 – 1.1.38). Here, Richard IIIs plotting and promulgation of the false prophesy “which says that ‘G’ / Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be” (1.1.39 – 1.1.40) stops with the poignantly abrupt: “Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here Clarence comes” (1.1.41). At the surface, it is as if he is silencing the mechanisms of his own tyrannical thoughts in order to falsely greet Clarence with the mild smile and gracious air tyrants put on when rallying support for power. No strenuous effort is required on behalf of the audience/Reader to recognize Richard III as the rationalist tyrant. In Book VIII of Plato’s Republic, the regime of the tyrant is examined, explaining that in the early days he has a smile and a greeting for everyone he meets (such as how Richard III greets Clarence); he disclaims absolute power (Buckingham convinces the people that Richard III is the true ruler; then Richard III feigns modesty: (3.7.204) “I am unfit for state and majesty.”); essentially scheming (spreads lies, slanders others, generates conflicts between others to promote his plot) his way to the throne. Richard IIIs deceitful machinations are transparent and ironic, bringing an Elizabethan/modern audience to delight in the notion that the unflinching, unsparing villainous Richard III lost more than his life in the process - he lost his soul.

2. When in Act I, Scene III, it is proclaimed that King Edward IV wants to make peace between his wife Queen Elizabeth and Richard III, and their respective kinsmen, Richard III takes the offense, accusing Queen Elizabeth of wishing her husband dead and imprisoning Clarence and Lord Hastings: “Meantime, God grants that I have need of you: / Our brother is imprison’d by your means” (1.3.76-77) and “You may deny that you were not the mean / Of my Lord Hastings’ late imprisonment” (1.3.89-90).  Naturally, Queen Elizabeth is forced into defensive posturing: “Brother of Gloucester, you mistake the matter / The king, on his own royal disposition, / And not provoked by any suitor else / Aiming, belike, at your interior hatred / That in your outward action shows itself / Against my children, brothers, and myself / Makes him to send, that he may learn the ground” (1.3.62).  Entering the scene, at first unnoticed, Queen Margaret, widow of Henry VI, upon overhearing Richard III and Queen Elizabeth’s discord, laments for her lost husband, son, and title: “I was, but I do find more pain in banishment / Than death can yield me here by my abode / A husband and a son thou ow’st to me / And thou a kingdom; all of you allegiance / The sorry that I have, by right is yours / And all the pleasures you usurp are mine” (1.3.166-171).  Queen Margaret further curses Richard III: “And leave out thee? Stay, dog, for thou shalt hear me / If heaven have any grievous plague in store / Exceeding those that I can wish upon thee / O, let them keep it till thy sins be ripe” (1.3.214-217) and then curses Elizabeth: “Poor painted queen, vain flourish of my fortune / Why strew’st thou sugar on that bottled spider / Whose deadly web ensnareth thee about? / Fool, fool, thou whet’st a knife to kill thyself / The day will come that thou shalt wish for me / To help thee curse this poisonous bunch-backed toad” (1.3.242-247). Essentially, Queen Margaret is portrayed as bitter about the assignation of her husband and son and her loss of power: “I was, but I do find more pain in banishment / Than death can yield me here by my abode” (1.3.166-167). Out of pain and grief, she curses Queen Elizabeth to the same fate: “Thyself a queen, for me that was a queen / Outlive thy glory, like my wretched self! / Long mayst thou live to wail thy children's death / And see another, as I see thee now / Decked in thy rights, as thou art stalled in mine / Long die thy happy days before thy death / And, after many lengthened hours of grief / Die neither mother, wife, nor England’s queen” (1.3.200-207), and with these poignant words she foreshadows the play’s plot. When Queen Margaret returns in Act 4 Scene 4 she admits how her curses come to fruition: “... prosperity begins to mellow / And drop into the rotten mouth of death” (4.4.1-2). Margaret further warns the Duchess of York, Mother to King Edward IV, Clarence, and Richard, Duke of Gloucester, that she is: “hungry for revenge” (4.4.60) and that of Richard III she aspires to declare: “The dog is dead!” (4.4.77). It is here when Queen Elizabeth recites Queen Margaret’s curse: “O, thou didst prophesy the time would come / That I should wish for thee to help me curse / That bottled spider, that foul bunch-backed toad!” (4.4.78-80). Again we see the use of a toad as a metaphor. In the Book of Exodus, the Second Plague brings frogs and Richard III is being likened to one. Aesop wrote a fable about an old frog who died after trying to inflate herself to become as big and powerful as the ox that crushed a young frog into the mud (perhaps a metaphor for Richard III’s involvement in the demise of the essentially helpless Edward V, King of England and Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York – the two young brothers and only sons of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville). Here we see an almost woeful prophet of God, Queen Margaret, acknowledging how she had cursed Queen Elizabeth: “I called thee then vain flourish of my fortune” (4.4.81) but now, seeing it come to fruition, acquiesces to Queen Elizabeth’s request to “quicken” (4.4.123) her words so that they will “pierce” (4.4.124) like her own. Here she comes to the aid of Queen Elizabeth. After bestowing a gift in recompense, Queen Margaret exits, but her wrath continues in Queen Elizabeth’s Margaretian-like curses of Richard III. Without Queen Margaret the play would lose the ‘eye-for-an-eye’ logic derived from the Bible (“Vengence is mine.” Deuteronomy 32.35), though Queen Margaret’s willingness to help Queen Elizabeth find the words to curse Richard III almost implies a ‘turn the other cheek’ (Matthew 5:39) attitude. While the divine right of kings, or God’s mandate, the political and religious doctrine of royal and political legitimacy asserting that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, deriving the right to rule directly from the will of God, did not come to the fore until under the reign of James I of England (1603-1625), the Christian notion of a divine right can be traced back to 1 Samuel (24:6-7) when “[David] said to his men, ‘The LORD forbid that I should do such a thing to my master, the LORD’s anointed, or lift my hand against him; for he is the anointed of the LORD.” In this way, Queen Margaret could not vow to harm Richard III, only curse him, for it would be against the word of God to do otherwise. This keeps the play in check with the Protestant Rule of Faith: “ALL Protestants agree in teaching that “the word of God, as contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only infallible rule of faith and practice.” (Archibald Alexander Hodge). Under Queen Elizabeth I, the scriptures were infallible, and given in inspiration by God. This aspect speaks to the divine authority of the Tudor monarchy, attesting that it is by the will of God that the monarchs reign on Earth.

3. When Richard III with his train enter, asking: “Who intercepts me in my expedition?” (4.4.135), his mother, the Duchess of York, claims it is “she that might have intercepted thee / By strangling thee in her accursed womb / From all the slaughters, wretch, that thou hast done!” (4.4.136 – 138). Here, his own mother laments his very existence, but he reminds her that he is “... the lord’s anointed” (4.4.150), further attesting to his legitimacy and the fine line upon which even his mother treads. He implores that she: “Either be patient and entreat me fair” (4.4.151) or he will “...with the clamorous report of war / ... drown your exclamations” (4.4.152-153), which he does with the sounding of alarums. His mother demands to speak: “O, let me speak!” (4.4.159) to which he retorts: “Do then, but I’ll not hear” (4.4.160). The Duchess of York softens her tone: “I will be mild and gentle in my words” (4.4.161). “I have stayed for thee / God knows, in torment and in agony” (4.4.163). Here, Richard III reassures his mother, “And came I not at last to comfort you?” (4.4.165). But it is to no avail, for his mother now recounts of the burdens of her pregnancy with him: “A grievous burden was thy birth to me” (4.4.168) and how he, despite in his prime being “daring, bold, and venturous” (4.4.171) only in age to be: “confirmed, proud, subtle, sly and bloody / More mild, but yet more harmful, kind in hatred / What comfortable hour canst though name / That ever graced me with thy company?” (4.4.172-175). Basically, she is giving him the ultimate guilt trip. Richard III reminds her that they had “breakfast once forth” (4.4.177) but that if he “be so disgracious in your eye / Let me march on and not offend you, madam / Strike up the drum” (4.4.178-180).  Here, his mother pleads again: “I prithee hear me speak ... Hear me a word / For I shall never speak to thee again” (4.4.181, 4.4.183-184). Richard III consents, really he has no choice as she words are thunderous over the alarums. Now begins the curse put upon Richard III by his own mother: “Either thou wilt die, by God’s just ordinance / Ere from this war thou turn a conqueror / Or I with grief and extreme age shall perish / And never more behold thy face again / Therefore take with thee my most grievous curse / Which in the day of battle tire thee more / Than all the complete armour that thou wear’st! / My prayers on the adverse party fight / And there the little souls of Edward’s children / Whisper the spirits of thine enemies / And promise them success and victory / Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end / Shame serves thy life and doth thy death attend” (4.4.186-198). Richard III does not succeed in silencing his mother’s attacks with the sounding of drums (music); thus, he listens. It is almost as if his silence here tells us that he is considering her words, taking them to heart. The next scene, of course, is a discussion on matters of the heart, as if his mother’s curse is not only a prophesy for his ultimate demise, but also as a set-up for the ensuing dialogue between Richard III and Queen Elizabeth on his love for her daughter: “I mean that with my soul I love thy daughter / And do intend to make her Queen of England” (4.4.265-266).   

4. It is difficult to separate Richard Burbage’s original delivery of: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” (5.3.361, 5.3.367) from the intensity of how the line is remembered, but the line itself returns us full-circle, back to the irony with which the play begins. Richard III was discontent during a time of great peace and celebration. At the beginning of the play his family was victorious, but he was: “Cheated of feature by dissembling nature / Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time / Into this breathing world, scarce half made up / And that so lamely and unfashionable / That dogs bark at me as I halt by them” (1.1.19 - 1.1.23). Here, Richard III’s lament that he was cheated out of his rightful inheritance (good looks, healthy body for wooing women) foreshadows his final lament that he was also cheated out of victory by a horse. In 2 Kings 23:11 it is writ: “He removed from the entrance to the temple of the LORD the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun. They were in the court near the room of an official named Nathan-Melek. Josiah then burned the chariots dedicated to the sun.” In this Biblical passage horses and chariots were being used in idolatrous processions, as noticed in regard to the sun. In the opening soliloquy of the play, the Duke of Gloucester states: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York” (1.1.1-1.1.2). Metaphorically, Richard III destroys his entire family (the chariots) under his brother’s (son of York) sunny reign. He beings with the plural “we” and “our” and ends with the singular “my”, which speaks to his lament: “I shall despair. There is no creature loves me / And if I die, no soul shall pity me” (5.3.204-205). It is as if the play ends on the same ironic thread with which it begins, with false glory in relation the sun of York, King Edward IV.

The Inadequacy of Writing Debunked

What is inadequate about "writing" is hardly that it is not "visual" ... let alone beautiful: most simply, it is not aesthetically inviting. It is not comforting. It is not sexy. It does not fit into our vision of the world. It is a "thing" sent to the "archives" of society, awaiting its Alexandrian executioner. Thus how serious can a doomed fate be?

To writing we bring our everything, but the words illuminate more than what we bring. We enter a new ideology, thrust into an affair of perceptions and sensations. Words bathe us in the experience of sensation, enlarging citizens with consciousness. Even resenters are entertained. 

We are all Pagans in the liberal spaciousness of literacy. Primal ambivalents internalizing the hero-villain. Asking which is pious and patriotic, and whether hypocrisy is as substantive as we imagine it so. 

Inviting kindly modifiers like little goodwill trees, in which our only pleasure is the imagining. We cannot solve the puzzle of our representation, so we delve back in, before atrocity can prevent us through her shrewdness. One would hope that the words we find are persuading enough to lead us to the next abyss.

But this is illusory. Both the writer and the Reader know it. The bond between theme is intimately elusive. No one has sway over the pen. It guides us all. 

Beyond the injured self of ego, we take on the burden of language's mystery. We raise our fists at it in beautiful defiant delight. If the beauty of language is found in our reaction to it, language itself is ugly. Battered and truncated by our fashionable ideologies, caricatures of our own design. 

Not even Shakespeare was a Shakespeare, which explains his adherence to the word "nothing". But cheer up! All is not lost! Literature's characters are unmatched by how real we make them. 

Ha! 

Says the mind of the Reader! 

Who takes an art virtually unlimited, and offers us a second nature - and we "listen" - to the perplexed triad. Heeding mirrors with many voices, who neither act nor speak for nature. Pragmatically there is no difference, though you can hear the sun set between the two. 

But words impart meaning, attributing values to our ideas of self and to other persons. Certainly more or less a Parisian spectator sport, in which Voltaire is judge and jury. 

And therein we find the why of writing.

The Seduction of Richard III

These blandishments do not ensue us

From rhetorical magnificence.

Cold brilliance, complex genius

Serving the Mistress of Intimacy,

with more foreboding paws

than has the king of cats.

Wretched indulgence,

the unhealthiest of fantasies,

die not; it is, a certain relishment

alone that accounts.

Endless exuberant gusto

appeals and delights and terrifies,

and like a page turned vital,

transforms each line into death's dive.

All his audience can do

is rest and recharge

 in long-winded Margaret's exorbitance,

nearly giddy in footing,

stumbling, and falling in

- a soul's respite.

But the empty vast smothers our wandering air,

and the sour ferryman returns us back

to the slimy bottom of the deep, 

in defiant poetic bathos

by which the greedy kingdom of perpetual night

greets us.

Stranger still to be rendered incapable

of resisting his charm.

~Soph Laugh

An Ode to the Romans of Decadence

Romans in the Decadence of the Empire, 1847

Thomas Couture

The Spirit of Decadence 

It is natural to dream of ascent toward the Heavens, in which the noble soul ascends by means of the "noble" ... winged horses ... of the gods ... soaring upward, as is the rule of the universe. 

Our imagination working like the light of the sun on Icarus's wings ... we droop in our flight and at last settle on solid ground, but this descent to earth is an imaginative eidos, essential in the sense of "essence" and also as an idealization of other worlds. 

Here is our "heaven" ... the pastoral retreat, the ideal Republic, the Golden Age. 

Necessarily imagined as departures from other worldly experiences to higher spheres or manifest spheres in the absence of matter. The essential and the accidental are mixed in formal concepts like objects of logic and a whole series of conditions that essence reveals. 

Above and beyond the intuition, "essences" concern their conditions into existence. The pursuit of essences involves the consideration of paradoxical instincts in the notion of ideality of all, the cosmic symphony. 

It is no wonder the Romans were so decadent 

The Devolution 

In an acceptance of the conditions of earth, the sensual and intellectual possibilities of life and poetry, the possibility of transcending, of touching another human being, and of letting go of time-bound existence, death, and the limits knowing enables, an essential condition of being becomes "event" ... 

In extremis the affirmation occurs in a world proud and strong and also in the withdrawal to stellar pallor. To touch this poverty is to know autumnal space between words complete and essential to being on earth, and touching that which one is and which one is not. 

Vivid expressions of the conditions of earth's aesthetics mirror divine harmonies. Historically, or mythically, the descent plummets "essence" to earth. Exalted images of floods of white that burst from the clouds and the winds that blew life forth contort strength around the sky, until it swoops down in a notable fall. 

Here the world becomes noble even in its raucous sociability, as in Couture's Romans ... the poet is the earth's metaphysician in the dark, twanging a wiry string that gives Sound to passing rightnesses, the noises of Shakespeare and the sweet airs of New Caledonia that give delight and hurt not. Humming in our ears is an echo of instruments chosen as analogies to the modern mindset, arguing only with analogy and historical influence. 

The ideas alternate in movements toward heaven and earth and accessible in the light of eidos, without need for explanation, is the idea of the depreciated concept of being human, an essential element in Shakespeare's many plays. Pointing to our earthiness and our experiences of noises we create the accompaniment: 

The music

The Meditative of Earth

Our experience of earth's noises confuses and fuses our senses into what is natural and what is created and plays onward toward that which we create and that by which we are eluded. Beings are subjective and objective, internal and external. Self identity expresses earth's many harmonies and is experienced as "rightness" by both poet and actor. 

The impulse to soar, to rise above idealized otherness, is implicit in those that neglect worldly ends. Dedicated to closeness with the notion of "the One" in a perceived betterment of an already perfect existence is the mind, the dukedom's library large enough to fit legions of civilizations hoist one upon the other in a never ending symphony of ideas and tragedies. 

Our commonwealth is the knowledge that this is a shared experience. No need for magistrate, no riches, no poverty, no service, no occupation, no idleness and no purity or innocence. This is the dream of the golden age, of excelling and excellence giving way to delight and sensation. 

The primordial is antithetical to the ordered, controlled state of Plato. Rome rests comfortably and fruitfully in earthly harmony. The imposition of control and discipline in such a world cedes, and the scene is abandoned to its "natural" state, which is bountiful and providing. 

The decadent splendor

The Idyllic Pastoral 

The Platonic world of Ideas are reflected in common earthly realizations that rise upward toward the ideal, a soaring architecture of symbolic perfection realized in the social design of the city state. With the ascendancy raised to the forefront of our aspirations, the eternally true and geometric supreme, these essential exaltations of the ideal of humanity and of human nature in relation to the supreme world contribute to our education under Prospero's tutelage. In it we recognize a Platonian anamnesis: that the dream of the ideal is humanity's gift to itself. 

Humanity sees itself mirrored for the first time in the other's company, and after having intuitively recognized other as divine, declares 

"How beauteous mankind is! 

O brave new world

That has such people in't!" 

The Antithesis 

The insensate brute, paradoxically brutish and aesthetic. The clanging of a thousand pots and pans. The brute cannot hear the sounds of sweet air, the noises of earth instead imbue him with an unnatural strength, which he presents and supplants with impulse. 

When the brute sleeps, the natural world manifests a benevolent and generative appreciation of quietude, though his voracity hums like an aching wanton buzz. When awake it twangs, refuting and disappreciating the ennobling instinct, though he joins it in a paradoxical essence, such as in The Tempest. 

Inherent in this worldly brutish experience is a human recognizing experiences sympathetic to force and desire, both central to existence. Martin Heidegger's earthly path, a felicitous way of being human. 

Linking discordant or opposing impulses appears oxymoronic, a pitying of Prospero and Miranda in a "loving wrong" or "sacred orgy" of the Bacchantes, destructive as it is restorative. 

Pentheus's craving for a voyeur's watch is ripe in the imagery which is titillating and scandalous. Tales of ecstasies permeate and serve Aphrodite rather than any new god. Teiresias warns him from above, hand outstretched against villainous pestilence, but Pentheus cares not for wholesome remains. 

Revelry from which no good comes 

The Miracles

Women perform miracles in the natural world, causing milk, wine, water, and honey to rise from the earth. The messengers of surreality's effects, but also of their activities, until interrupted by intruders, including the ethical, law-abiding, faithfully devout and dutiful. Blame against idyllic and harmonious with nature-like activities drunk in abandonment taunt the righteous and in fierce opposition in the name of that which is praiseworthy they place judgment. 

Gratifying their lusts alone amid the woods, by wine and soft flute-music maddened, but resting on the ground, flung carelessly, they discover modesty. 

The new view of woman is echoed in the Golden Age, innocent and pure. Woman's idleness, unlike man's, is a reassurance of her virtuosity. What she hears is beauty, springing up from a strange, fair array of ordered ranks: a miracle of discipline to behold / a wondrous sight of grace and modesty. 

The messenger of miracles assures Pentheus that if he could see her honor god himself would appear and in his arrival grant him eternal and everlasting joy and the flowing of heaven's eternal bliss. 

Honoring the gods Penthesus aligns with righteousness and the brute, though terrifying in his subsequent deeds, does all in the name of this new and blessed state, in harmony as a group and at one with the notion of nature. 

In repose ...

The Transformation 

The character is transformed akin to the music of the spheres, the rise to heaven, the ennobled escape from the environs of earth, its boisterous noise, its danger, and its darkness. The music of Bacchantes, in its raucous affinity with earth, rises up. 

In the opening stasimon, the Chorus sings, not of the elevated image of the individual ego characterized by Pentheus in his arrogance, self-aggrandizement, self-assurance and certainty of things, but in the virtue of love, participation, and community - the highest dance of Dionysus and his followers, accompanied by the deep heartbeat of the drums and thunderous-kneeling of timbrels. 

The sound of the booming drums symbolize the "win" of victory, the maddening and ecstatic Satyr-band, winning favor from the mother-goddess for their participation in the festivities. Having been appropriated, the most unrefined of creatures are sweet in their crying breaths and Phrygian flutes. All dance at her festival. 

To snare the nimble marmoset

The Exalted World 

The idea of an exalted world is attached to the architecture of the city, represented in the painting. It is the city Pentheus rules. His sense of rightness and privilege essential to the protective and benevolent social design that is mimetic of cosmic logos. The duplication of ideal reality in the state. Plato's Republic is implicit in the painting's attitude of superiority and control as a safe harbor, even for chaos. 

The Dionysian principle literally demolishes and burns the palace in a fiery ecstasy, bringing it crashing down as the archangel pulls at Teiresias's robes (far right). The release of the sacred into this world is not an event of justice and order but a renewal of earth's power, the reaffirmation of earthly truth in the face of Cosmos, who asks "What is wisdom?" 

Man concludes that wisdom is found in he whose life day by day is happy and blessed: "Happy is he whose bliss from day to day doth grow". To accept being on the earth is to accept that which suffices in the essence's remembrance of joy, heard in mortal music. 

Echoed in a finite sky

The Affirmation 

The earth fosters a presence as sweet as noise, a counter- but also an alter-beauty, and the twang and drum noise of the Satyrs, with their raucous harmony. Not mere cacophony, nor meaningless sound, but truth: essential as the structures idealized in the painting, represented in the aboveness of the expansive sky and the belowness of the bacchanal scene. 

The primal truths speak like essence in self-discovery. The gaining of purity and an exactitude of knowledge in a recovery of purity and innocence. It is the return to the world that retains its virtú. 

If one must again become ignorant by the death of Phoebus and the death of the one god, then one must mirror the death of all, the certitude that is the ending of life. The first idea - and the last. 

This notion is not presumed escapable, even to childlike innocence. The past idealized condition makes way for disciplined achievement from pure perception: the new understanding. The precise awakening of knowledge not in ideas but about the thing itself - it's authenticity. 

Birds with their scrawny cries, appropriate to the earth, precede the choir and part of their knowledge becomes the earth's new reality. There is no romanticizing here. The past pays attention to the present in the concreteness of life while intentionality yields only to originality. 

Where art reveals

Nature's lack of design

The Drama 

The Romans reemerge, falsified and previously impoverished by the naturalistic tendencies of their time, only to overflow the world with nature, recapturing the contours and richness that life in its abundance deems interesting and boring, useful and useless, beautiful and ugly, ridiculous and anguishing.

The world of our time unlike in the painting has moved toward its center. Our time's naturalistic tendencies are countered by the noise a recovering world, the idealized image of beauty, the "desired," and those reborn Romans who recline in the warm basking temperatures of heaven, sleek in their natural nakedness.

Modern society attends the tranquil pastoral scene with wit and with intelligible twittering that substitutes for intelligible thought. Like the unpromising thickness of the Romans' robes, human thought, human language, and the accomplishment of regaining or reconstituting the world is exalted into what Levinas calls an

"Overflow of Nature" 

The New Generation 

The new generations currently populating the earth hear their own music and in response and participation, opposing Plato's view of the depreciative artist echoing braying asses and crowing cocks (noises of an inferior and contrary nature, sound effects of earth's crackles, moans and groans), share the assonance and dissonance of earth as an entity with its own justified and justifying music.

A capable human voice is but a mirror of earth's sound. Attuned to the creatures of earth, the sounds of the planet are echoed in ancient instruments and modern ones, too.

Distant cries of the sea-nymphs announce that the sea is changing. Revelers hear them and their companions create a religion of wine and worthy earthly sustenance to adore the unfolding. Untamed beasts are left to run wild. Trees adorned to press, the cries of nature's elite, a dance in unison for the Dionysus of the mountain top toward which the adventurous brazenly trek.

In response the hills are thrilled and join in bacchic worship. The devolvement is the newest voice of nature exalted into Earth Day, simultaneously elevating the language of Pentheus, who ostentatiously identifies his superiority as evident of his lineage: he is Pentheus, son of Agaue and Echion.

Par excellence among the newer tribes of pantomimic imitators is the high-toned, those jovial singers ode'ing to the spheres. The poetry of their verbal exuberance representing the onomatopoeic sound effects vital in their engendering of the world. The only satisfactory human existence is now imbued with that which has been undermined and overcome.

Perfection in the dream of Saints

The Renewal 

This condition establishes a necessary renewal or retrieval from one generation to the next. In the imagination of the ultimate horizon of being, beyond the last thought, the image of Rome's decadence reappears in the bird's song. Knowledge and happiness are placed as heroic icons with the human as center of the universe, among the gods. The abstracting power of the intellect makes this possible.

The bird's song has no human equivalent. It is in and of itself complete. The appearance of the winged creature on the horizon represents the transcendence of thought. Identifying with its essence humanity understands the essentiality of being human. This makes one happy or unhappy.

To know is not the reason.

The bird's feathers swoop down and then extend upward toward the fire-fangled cosmos. The effect is heard among the multitude of diverse voices expressing a mimesis of that which is considered an essentiality of becoming a fully realized human.

A richer experience

A finer susceptibility

A newer mode of thought,

acts or passions

The Notion of Truth 

The notion of truth makes us happy. Delight and sense sing of springtime while poems end in the imposing thickness of winter's austere hand. Both sing puissantly. Echoes of past songs are ransom for Willow's rebirth.

The ultimate meaningfulness negotiates regions of the earth and of the human psyche, from which the philosopher rises ambulatorily, joining in the song that is not primordially a logic of language but of the extravagance of the mind's intelligible twittering.

Together with the poet the philosopher participates in the transforming, transmogrifying celebrant appropriate to exalted worlds. Pentheus's image of himself takes center stage, and declares twice:

"O brave new world!"

The Comic and the Imp

Befittingly becomes comic, even grotesque. Opposed to the heroic stands comedy, natures balancing act. King Pentheus produces pictures of aged men dancing, paradoxically, the youthful dance of age. There is something foolish in the avowal that one should tire in old age, and remain repose all day and night long, striking the earth with nothing but a cane or walking stick.

Forgetting joy in age is the first assurance that one is old. Feeling young enough to dance is joy in costume, comedy in errors, arrivals in departure. The ridiculous trappings and their linking arms shame the modesty of grey hairs so sense-bereft. The only senility is shame.

Delivering a lecture in metaphoric pentameter, the Comic reveals Dionysus's truth and power. Teiresias warns Pentheus not to deem himself wise, nor laugh in scorn ... but instead to wreathe his head in leaves, grasses, flowers and branches to dance with Ivy.

Comedy is indignant, scoffing at its appearance, clad in dappled and worn-torn cloth. Greybeard cannot dance but at the same time he knows he must. Attuned to the forces of earth unleashed he seeks tribute to youthful celebrants found only in nature's imps. His reawakening is because he "must".

The grotesqueness of this image is repeated in the beast with four legs, under the cloak. It is Rome's only animal shape. Referred to as fish and monster, sometimes as both or amphibious: half a fish and half a monster. But this monstrous image is compounded by union with the Imp.

In a frenzied fright he lies with her wondering whether he is a man or a fish, and, as the storm approaches, decides to creep under his gaberdine, an action making for strange bedfellows.

Pleas for mercy are sung to the Imp in a most delicate and monstrous manner, to heal the monster she pours wine into its mouth and into her own. The comic antics of these types reiterate the comic figure that Pentheus and Teiresias make together, and the depreciation, like that of old men, brings them close to the mouth of earth.

Society declares the Comic not the victor but the fool, reassuring him that the noises and sweet airs of the Imp's voice are attuned to the intelligible twittering of birds, and when he protests, it is said that the two are one in the same in their absurdness.

But it matters not in this moment ... because the Comic also brings release. His voice grows ever mellifluous in appealing to his new Imp's senses. Mimetic in his stuttered song about his new freedom. He has a new master and he bows before her only.

Eternity, Fidelity, Affection

The New Poetry 

The Comic's ode becomes the poetry of positivity, of, "here and there, an old sailor / Drunk and asleep in his boots no more" ... he who catches tigers in red weather and the grotesqueness of his old figure stripped of illusory decrepitude in favor of virile robustness. A new nobility in poetic ennoblement. 

Imps delight in their fortune's twists of fate and the image of ourselves overcoming our demons paints a picture of nakedness newly clothed. The monster is to myself as two things are together as one. The self as Comic and Imp singing the heroic image of bearded bronze just because the singer must. 

Yet another form of renewal essential for the interdependence of those expressions embedded in the time and place of our collective being and becoming. The loss of despair the greatest beauty and clearest distinction between life and the premature death of living. 

The desire to go and see and explore the garden

The Scene is Set

What is repeated in the script is now only a souvenir. Life learned the speech of place and time and in it saw the face of the people reflected in war and that which suffices for peace. Poetry is once again ablaze, constructing a new stage upon which the world, a theater, in its construction of self exists. 

The intricate elicitings of language and being in the most delicates ear produces a meditation of satisfaction. The scene transcends, as Aristotle would argue into a new reality. Like the aged man whose intellectual gymnastics mesmerize an Imp, life is again an intrinsic image of contorted and contorting, the "eccentric" and the elemental participant in a decomposition and consequent fertility of earth. 

Yet the worm wins

The Worm-Poet is Speaking 

The worm battles with the Chieftan while the chicken clucks in a carefully construction illusion of himself as a ten-foot dinosaur among inchlings. The worm in its pretentiousness enlarges and exalts himself, creating an illusion of himself consistent with the exalted illusions of humanity's splendor. A laughable illusion crying in defiance to uncertainty. 

Affirming the inchling is smaller than he, the worm inches his way along the earth and aligns himself in the philosophy of being a comically diminutive worm-poet who makes fun of the world in which he performs. His "fear not" and his "all is well" transform his shape and the metamorphosis that occurs, orchestrated by the universe, that remarkable protean composer, and enables us to see that he is affinity expressing capability held in form. 

Now, that's a mouthful. 

The worm-poet knows that "he" and "it" are as inseparable as performance and activity. He might as a matter of taste prefer one over the other. So long as he does not exalt one and deny the other, taste is only a matter of taste, and also of being there and there-being. 

Such versatility from a worm-poet enamors the world and in their own bodily metamorphosis which produces mimicked sounds they shift the quality of the comic further toward the grotesque as they raise the Worm to Heaven's Gate. 

The worm-poet looks down upon the world and sees nothing but the idea of beauty. Instead of joyous experience relishing in itself judgment enters, which is an experience in itself. Being a worm the worm-poet knows that a decomposed object can be reconstructed as beauty, and that putting something back together is a metamorphosis. Conserving, preserving, restoring and reanimating for an audience a metamorphic act. 

The worm-poet creeps along the fallen jugs of wine in search of ideal-forms of distortion while composing his next ode. 

Here are their lips

one by one

the bundles of bodies

and the feet

The Eccentric 

The eccentric enters with her noisy distortion of standard form. Squawky sounds and high-tones in opposition to Poetry. Squiggling like saxophones, the Eccentric appears in devolutions. In doing so the "essences" are being retrieved, or discovered, made or found. 

Reconstruction of the awareness of need is awakened in the world, and in the idea of a fruitful earth, a world of belonging and possibility is realized. The worm-poet shares this impulse with the Eccentric, and both echo the Dionysian celebrants of a "new" religion, the religion of authenticity. 

Found here are those who preserve a recalcitrance to being uplifted by anything but their own bootstraps. Like Pentheus's Apollonian architecture, the Eccentric believes it is language that causes rebellion against civilizing. And in a rebellious tone she abdicates authority admitting her own thing of darkness and lightness. 

Essentially the world idealizes the blessed rage of order, as identifiable as it is elusive. A place of books and imposing high-minded values, provocative to balance against a paradoxical acceptance of earth as human beings cede to mother nature. The immanent image of nobility plunges to the ground. If transformation is to occur, the flower is to take the place of Narcissus's corpse. 

The forces of the earth, the danger and destruction, the withdrawal into darkness, the comic and the grotesque, regenerate in the losing of temporal power and beauty. The year ends. Spring has not yet come. Without renewal presence in the eccentric is absent.

While Orpheus plays the leading role

Spring Comes Forth

The music of the earth once again echoes across time. A new season opens with the pervasiveness of the paradoxical grounded in impish thought provoking monstrous appetites. The sense of dismay is replaced with childhood's harmony while nature while glory has passed away. 

Spring is the dialogues of business, of love, and of strife to which honeybees affix their tongues. Solitude is replaced with earthly delights and the tale repeats itself again. 

We return full circle to the blessedness that comes with knowledge and the belonging that comes with an earthly domain. The perpetual benediction sings sweet songs of thanks and praise for the achieved awareness of a previously obstinate questioning. 

Sense and outward things fall and vanish and that divine purpose, insomuch as it is intuited by humanity, necessitates an acceptance and identification with the meekest of flowers whose petals are also blown about by the wind. 

For one final instance we can trace the earths twists and turns in Couture's painting pressed down upon the canvas of the earth, and thereon setting our sights anew, pulling them in a lavishly upward direction toward an unattainable impulse. 

The Roman desire to apprehend cosmic design is dripping with spring in this painting which reflects a total sky without defect. The ephemerality of the frenzy appears as a pool of flowers, brief as they were, eternal as they are. 

The contingency of things in nature is not to be lamented but rather to be celebrated. The essence of being, in the progress of this ode, is from the pleasures of youth, and the sweetness and beauty that gratify because they satisfy the need for "ache" and they "sting" ... it is for a mature appreciation of only the most powerful of pleasures and pains of the senses, and aims to satisfy a craving for both with the stain of honey and of tears. 

The worm-poet becomes a moth while the poet transforms him into a butterfly. He flies alongside the winds of the cosmos, humanizing nature with his song. The old men in Euripides's play delight in their Bacchantes.  The birds sing and the lions are tamed. 

Apollo takes measure and smiles