Bloom On Shakespeare: Do not go gently into the Night.

Since Sexson decided to one up my by reading the secondary text I picked beofre entering his class (and then cuckolding me by reading it first) I decided to pick up Bloom on A Midsummer Night's Dream. We all know Sexson's feelings about Harold Bloom and the predictability of him reading it.

Bloom portrays similar routes of understanding that Sexson is delving into during class (and in fact he uses the idea of a puzzle [or perhaps that Jessie Weston in From Ritual to Romance] in his description). Since this may be one of Sexson's favorite criticisms concerning a Midsummer Night's Dream I have decided not to quote heavily from it (only one), but anyone wishing to read it is welcome to borrow it after Jon Orsi returns it to me. It is only 32 pages long and a very, very rewarding read and quite possibly the easiest essay by Bloom. Ever.

Here it goes. Bloom states "Bottom suggest an apocalyptic, unfallen man, whose awakened senses fuse in a synesthetic unity" ( Bloom 26) and gives us perhaps the basest example of exactly what Shakespeare wishes his audience to comprehend and thus awake. Synesthasia is where people mix up seeing colors with tasting them,, Tasting Colors, etc. etc. It is a very real disease that Vladimir Nabokov suffered from (if you are planning to go to graduate school, I highly recommend that you have immersed yourself in Nabokov and that they know). While seemingly having no proof (at least brought forward by Bloom) that Shakespeare wanted this perception, I found it myself in Act V where Theseus states that an understanding of this goes where "cool reason" cannot go.


"Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends." (P. 279, Act V, Verse 4-6)



"And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend."- From Puck's Epilogue (P. 284, Epilogue, Verse 419-421)

In Response to Geoffrey on his Mind Bastard in regards to the School of Night

First off let me say that I enjoyed your blog immensely. That it showed deep thought into the present ideas.

Now whether or not any of your comments are relevant....I'm going to have to disagree. While I have no problems whatsoever bashing criticism, reviewers, and smut novelists, I do believe you are taking to Fredrick Turner's "School of Night" incorrectly. It is not a research paper. It is written completely in prose often times making allusions to the very thing he wishes to point out, yet he never points it out. Why?

This, I do believe, is what Turner's "School of Night"  wants as an effect; not a correction of his work, or an argument of the philosophies we now hold as "truths" as proofs against his own discoveries, but instead he meaningfully paves with his prose a treasure map. The knowledge he wishes to share with you, for you to learn yourself, is a place where "cool reason" cannot go. And even if these things he wishes to share with us are merely scams, "irrational" and "unreasonable", isn't it odd that a group of genius's gathered together with these thoughts around the most well-known writer ever?

I would try and persuade you, Geoff, that instead of discrediting Turner for being "vague" (as you put it) on "nothingness", to instead delve into the wisdom throughout Christian, Oriental, and Greek Philosophy that deals with this idea of nothingness. If, and I may be somewhat mislead by your own inability to discern the phrase (don't we all?), Wisdom is the cornerstone of creation, these ancient writings may give you an idea of how important the idea of "nothingness" is to human knowledge. And yes it doesn't make sense, but in order for something to make sense you have to go by a way of non sense first, in a sense.

As for the idea of a broad study how do you know that it is not a broad study?

I do agree that the microcosm can not only reflect, but control its own macrocosm yet how is this any different than what Turner has said? But I do understand what you are saying, and it's based upon philosophies founded after the time of  "School of Night" and one of these philosophies, the one which deems the I as separate and alone from everything else, just happens to be based on a meditation using "nothingness."

And you are right, Geoff, fitting the entire world into your mind is purely irrelevant......so what are they really saying? In fact this doesn't disagree at all with your conception that my microcosm reflects the macrocosm.  The philosophy is not flawed, it is your understanding of how to take in the wisdom that is (and I mean no disrespect). I would recommend looking at Heraclitus' Fragments as evidence of a similarly "ambiguous" philosophy. The beauty of his Fragmentes is that they do not die with time (knowledge of the age) and that when even one of his sentences is understood in its complexities an entire new world becomes apparent....if only because it's flipped upside-down. You may even find the Fragmentes complimentary to Turner's "School of Night" in elucidation.

Best of luck on your research and discoveries,

Sincerely,

James Kushman

Sonnet 1

Shall I compare this father's form to a

patriarchal conceit? Say "his hand tells"

and you either lie or love enemas.

....But perhaps hear siren swells and church bells-

"A blinding flash ends in a thunderclap"-

Tremored Weapons plays sword as really sheath

then bores sword to sword-spills youthful sap.

If a woman, to deflower the wreath;

with man-seems no increase; but between breasts

blooms the mean; A flower a heart- the heart

the flower- given so first we think blest.

'Til midsummer when love's pull gives a smart.

Now the choice: awake or be forgotten.

Conceive the sexes or be the fallen.

On reading Shakespeare

Excuse me for the next series of moments as I try to display what exactly it is that needs to be said. This will be an expose of a few of the more major points involved in the reading of Shakespeare and with that name also entails the reading of any form of Literature.

I have very little faith into the depths that analytics can go. When looking at a text it is nearly impossible to form a concise argument of what the cumulative words are saying based solely on the words. Two major problems arise; the first being that the writer may not know even what he is writing about and therefore his style may not include all the steps needed for an analytical deduction.

The second is a far bigger problem and a greater grasp of the functions of words and symbols will be useful in its elucidation. Alphabets are merely symbols. Symbols arranged in a coherent pattern that our brains have been programmed through education to understand. The Nazi swastika for example is a symbol. Yet since it is often conceived of commonly as picturesque we view it synthetically, that is it opens our minds to a spectrum of everything "Nazi" entails. We say a picture can paint a thousand words (which is a synthetical viewpoint) and that a storyteller paints a picture. Yet instead of viewing the storytellers painted picture as yet another picture that melts into a thousand more words, common thought believes that we have all we need in the story for its  picture and need only deal with the material inside said story. This viewpoint is analytical, saying that the only deduction need be made when in fact a closer look shows that (just as words fall apart into symbols, and symbols fall back into shape of words) this analytical deduction leads to a bottom in which the only way to continue, the only way for a true revelation of what the text is saying, is an induction.

Intuition is a form of induction. To know what is being said before it can be "proven" (proof, which in today's society, in the literary criticism entails that analytical deduction is the only certain, only definitive "truth") is often looked down upon. "How can you know that?" "What proof can you show me from the text?". The creative process, the aesthetics of an author (horribly incomplete in definition), does not serve only its analytical side, therefore we should not think that looking at a text in such a way will ever, ever give us a full understanding of its meaning. This is in fact part of the ailing wound in popular literary criticism today; it has forgotten how to look. It has subjected itself to the popularized scientific method and applied it therein. It has reasoned itself into a box of ill-formed ideals about how things are in literature and in doing so has dragged literature kicking and screaming into its box.  In its effect literature has fallen off.

No "one" (one being the majority) reads literature anymore.The critics and reviewers no longer are being equipped with the needful intellectual tools to understand and elucidate the wisdom in our words.Those who have these tools are looked down upon by the literary "elite" (being self-claimed) critics. These critics who have become so enraptured by their own misunderstanding of literature that they, being considered literary sovereigns over what need be read, cannot even grasp the straws of what is being said in the novel. Whether it be from sheer ignorance created by their impractical education or their own arrogance to admit they cannot grasp the text, they claim it is "junk", "the novel of a self-involved sociopath", "little importance to today's society" and other meaningless definitions that upon a closer inspection show us that they know nothing; that they have yet to even discuss what it is that is junk, that has 'little importance to today's society" because they never grasped anything from the novel and so they blamed the novel! By doing this they create a vortex in which the lack of reading is blamed not upon themselves but upon the artists.

This lack of reading should not be blamed on the artist who does not "connect" with the reader, but instead on the misinformed critics of our era that, are in turn, misinforming the public readers. The reason grocery markets are stuffed with literary smut is because our literary "elite", our critics and reviewers can only grasp what is being said, when nothing at all is really being said. This writing that is based upon intellects developed solely in analytics provides the reader with the minutest details that allow the reader never, ever, ever, to think synthetically. In fact why would a reader expound on an idea when the writer never inspires it through his own style? And more broadly why would a literary critic or reviewer think anything other than analytically about a novel when that is all he has been trained to do by his schooling? Mark Twain had it right, never let your schooling get in the way of your education.

Oh but anyone in this mindset will probably miss my point entirely. They'll complain of form, or mistakes in spelling, words that aren't words, that the paragraphs were too long, or that this was certainly not needed. They'll think all of these and never take a step back to meditate on what was being said because they are to involved with how things "should" be in their "box".

Thank you to everyone that thinks this way for ruining literature and dragging us back into this dark age. You think that you are a part of literature. That you are part of its reviving, but really you are dragging it kicking and screaming into an abyss.

And for anyone asking how this is about Shakespeare, I would point out that in order to have mind babies we need to first get rid of our erectile dysfunctions.


I would add as a postscript that I am not referring to any of the secondary texts that Dr. Sexson has subscribed. In fact I do believe that, thought I have not read all of them, they subscribe to a mode of intelligence looked down upon in today's society (and in doing so, contain vaster knowledge). In regards to the editorial notes of the Pelican, I would advise noting Robin Williams' role in the play The Dead Poet's Society.

3

Methinks I see these things with parted eye,
When everything seems double

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Da, Damyata
Da, Dayadhvam
Da, Datta

Our Father...
Forgive us our trespass....
Lead us not into temptation....

Many of you may have a little Ted Hughes stocked beneath a florescent bulb or perhaps blocking open fictional or functional doors, or perhaps you snuggle it beneath a pillow in hopes that dreams may come and intuition strike its frightful middrif' blow.

I'm a strange person, and normality seems strange to me, but I have a deep seduction brewing between Shakespeare, Eliot, and I (Donne of course continues to poke his head in, asking for endowment or at least a lavish 'dressing).

I did not chance to catching a falling star- It was rape! A willing rape perhaps, at times; and at others I do feel a Colussus Plath in my path. I'm not one to play tricks. I'm playing as straight as the game allows and the rules of these words is they never tell the truth- I can only hint at- I can only point you in the direction- but, if you've come this far you've felt the prod too, haven't you?

Do you know the pain that shivers bones? Rudolph Rudolphovich spins the easy sell- Love is no doubt a beautiful thing but not without consequence. I wonder if he knew White Center was within him or if he felt Hugo sitting upon his shoulder? Da. Dayadhvam: And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. The intuitive solicitor spoke to your ear and did you even know? "I've written a sonnet! I've written a sonnet! screamed while taking coffee in a library....and did you even know? Did you feel it! Could you have known, that your words were my words to that woman whose attention held my pose?

Da. Datta: And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Two souls entwined like roots of plants with will, To be but split shall kill them both in prime. And it must have been difficult to watch Guinevere thrusted towards Lancelot, Arthur. It must have been terrible to see the chalice slip, to see the petals rippled in another August's current. Oh Venus! clutching the sweet refrain of youth before that Perseptful tone drags her newly circumcised groin down to the depths.....you will never win Venus! Though you know this. It only makes your love more sweet, your lust more passionate, and every day is a countdown towards that inevitable kiss, that sweet zero summer, that blissful silence of nothing, absolute nothing, in which you no longer feed the earth and so Adonis gives back to you what is only his to give....and how unruly youth thinks of wisdom once we find we must die.

Da. Damyata. Our Father who ar't in Heaven, hallow it be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. And Rudolphovich, remember when we discussed ourselves amongst coffee and 'yevsky? Our problems were never the Fetzer. The root cause. "It's a cover up" you said and slapped the table and told me of God, that it was never up to you, that everyday was a humble humiliation. Those spirits are the same as these thick skins we cling too. The boar is that selfsame bottle of souls drowned in a flight from nothing. Absolute, serene, nothing. Nothing. And I humbly agreed to you, you saying "it's a cover up", knowing your death would be meaningful, knowing that indeed your life was walking a wasteland. And you shall walk through the shadow of the valley of death and fear no evil. And

Give.

And I must admit also,

Roberto,

Give us,

That you have always found me in the midst of an eternal nothingness,

Give us this,

midst an eternal nothingness in which light and darkness way the fulcrum,

Give us this day

and you've always kept me from having a choice to make

Give us this day our daily bread

As if the intuition that guides you, guides me too

Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our debts
as we forgive our debtors.


Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Fragmentes of my Lament: My Driving Mythos.

"To be sure, all the genuine revolutionary experiences of modern art reflect certain aspects of the contemporary spiritual crisis or at least of the crisis in artistic knowledge and creation. But what concerns our investigation is the fact that the "elites" find in the extravagance and unintelligibility of modern works the opportunity for an initiatory gnosis. It is a "New World" being built up from ruins and enigmas.." (Eliade Myth and Reality)



"Raleigh wore black velvet, with a myriad pearls sewn on loosely so that in a press they would fall and roll among the crowd, to be fought over as he passed on, with his gold earring, his princely perfume. Raleigh’s heart, so his myth went, was broken by the Queen. She called him “Water,” making fun of his name, and he, in his epic love-poem to her, called himself 'Ocean'."-(Turner)

 ARIEL SINGS
"Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell" (Tempest Act 1.2 V. 397-407 Pg. 742)

 (Aside: Notice 400 is forgot)

                          Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) -( T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland", Burial of The Dead, Vrs.46-7)

'What is that noise?'
                               The wind under the door.
What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?'
                               Nothing again nothing.
                                                                 'Do
'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you
        remember
    'Nothing?'

     I remember
 Those are pearls that were his eyes.
'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your
       head?' -A game of Chess

                               I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. -Burial of the dead

"The way up and the way down are one and the same" (Heraclitus Fragmentes) 

(Greek at the beginning of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets)

 Contradiction is life.

 IV. Death by Water

"Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
                                    A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
                                  Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Considering Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you." (Eliot, Wasteland)

Phlebas in Latin means felibirus- "to be wept over, to be lamented."

 Phoenicians lived in Canaan, a narrow strip of land between the Sea and the Mountains. They had not enough land to live off of so they lived off of the sea.


Dans Le Restaurante

Phlebas, the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls and the wind's howl of
     Cornwall,
And the profit and loss, and the cargo ships of pewter:
An undertow took him far away,
Passing the stages of his former life.
Go figure, it was a hard fate;
Nevertheless, he was once a handsome man, of great stature. (Eliot, "In the Restaurant")



We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown. (Eliot, Prufrock)

 The music is successful with a 'dying fall'
Now that we talk of dying-
And should I have the right to smile? -(Eliot, Portrait of a Lady)


"[T]his bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wings between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that ethereal thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it." -Meville, Moby Dick.

Epilogue

Spoken by William Shakespeare as Prospero

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint. Now 'tis true
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
in this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free. (Shakespeare, The Tempest)

“No use covering up our eyes with our hands like Michelangelo’s damned soul” (Turner School of Night).

“In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo” (Eliot, Prufrock)

“Even in the sciences the boundaries of the world have cracked, giving us a glimpse of a void beyond. No use covering up our eyes with our hands like Michelangelo’s damned soul: the Renaissance pride of knowledge makes us peer between our own fingers” (Turner School of Night).

“In the room the women come and go

Taking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spit in the middle of my hair—

(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to

       The chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a

       Simple pin-

(They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are

       Thin!’)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?” –(Eliot, Prufrock)

“Fludd himself was probably on personal terms with several members of the School in its later years. If we generalize his principles once more, we are very close to the ideas we have already detected as characteristic of the School of Night. The principle of the lever, whereby a lesser weight balances a greater across a fulcrum by means of a proportionate difference in the length of the beam ends, can be extended and abstracted in a very suggestive way. In theory, for instance, an infinite weight could be properly balanced by an infinitesimal one if the scales are properly biassed: the world against a feather. The weightless thoughts of man can effectively control the massive universe itself, if correct principles of rational transformation–proper levers, pulleys, lenses, clocks, quadrants–can be found. The microcosm can not only reflect, but control, the macrocosm.” (Turner)

“And in The Tempest, islanded off from history, the Magician-Artist-Scientist-Philosopher is free within his magical theatre to revise the moral rules of the world for the better” (Turner)

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you.” (Eliot Wasteland, What the Thunder Said)

(Ile is french for Isle)

“What is translation if language is no less real than the world? Can we change the rules? Should we change the rules?” (Turner)

 MIRANDA

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
HOw beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't! -The Tempest
 
   
GNOSIS is a spiritual knowledge of a saint, or a mystically enlightened person.

Killing Shakespeare

Kill Shakespeare. That has been the overwhelming thought in my head for a few months now. But to kill a man I don't even know, and that's already dead? That doesn't make much sense now does it?  George Steiner (I believe it's him) says this has been what every great writer has tried to do since his death (Or perhaps it's one of Bloom's snide remarks about Americans lacking European style). So that's what I'm here to do. I am here for a great kenosis of James the Rat and a plerosis of William's genuis if he so wills it, and if I am rightly enough to be of acceptance. And one thing I've found, in my picking ups of William's poems and plays, is that in order to get anything, anything from them, it is not enough to read the words and apply them to an analysis. You must live it. You must live every dripping word tell the cup overflows and everywhere in life you look dripdried stains of Williams tattered worth stick to the very surface of everything your senses wish to acquire. Shakespeare is all around us, in this illusion of culture and critique, but the true reward, the bulls-eye wherein reason and ration find no target, is to find Shakespeare inside yourself, and to know him as he is really you. Let us, class, Kill William Shakespeare.