Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs's Reviews > Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

IN PRAISE OF FOLLY!

"Thus are all things represented in counterfeit, yet without this is no living!"
Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly.

Hamlet goes nuts because he wants to somehow truly Live in a counterfeit world. He tells Horatio at the outset he's going to put on an antic disposition...

Fact is, though, seeing a Ghost has Driven him Antic! He's now crazy as a coot.

When the counterfeit world forces is into a corner at our Coming of Age - and we're labelled from that point on - the world WINS. We don't like it, but there it is.

The freedom of childhood now gone, we either pay obeisance to the True and Counterfeit State of Things or - like Hamlet - act weird over in a corner, as Dostoevsky's Underground Man does.

What's WRONG with Hamlet, folks? Better yet, what's RIGHT with him? All's well, he says, with him. Logically he just HAS to be nuts in a loony tunes world.

He knows cause the World knows. And he drops out of polite society, which sugarcoats its hidden knowing. So, out of spite, the World gives a label to such noncompliant ones.

And Hamlet? Freud says he has an unresolved Oedipal complex. And T.S. Eliot says his emotions have no "Objective Correlative," which means, I guess that he cannot link any FACTS together to express his anxiety.

But, dear Sigmund and dearer Tom, our world is skewed - and you know it. It doesn't FORGIVE. Because the State of Denmark is in charge. And that state is rotten.

So, bottom line, as the great philosophe Jacques Derrida says, our consciousness - Hamlet's, and Ours - is APORETIC. The world is unjust. It favours the Phony.

Not the Authentic. And Hamlet is Authentic.

Which means he's a tangled knot!

Therefore the Bard never successfully resolved the incredible Tensions of his play - hence, only four stars. You see, he never sugercoats it. But, man oh man, did we 18-year-olds dig our teeth into its words and its plot back in 1968!

We loved it. THIS, guys, was COMING OF AGE. No wonder I was a dud.

My friend Brian bought a powerful motorbike, Robert Pirsig's chosen weapon of Resistance. Camus wrote Resistance, Rebellion and Death. If the Establishment had a bone to pick with us real items our lock was Pick Proof.

For me too. I buried myself in existentialism. And that's the main reason MY consciousness has Remained aporetic all these years. I had no choice. If I couldn't win, I had to resist. And Bad luck has hounded my every act ever since.

I've been perched on my aporia for 50 years.

I loved this play because it showed me how to find a peaceful hiatus from its storm, now and then:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet (I said)
Nor was meant to be!
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, and a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, Almost ridiculous -
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I'm other words I SAW THROUGH myself, all the way to the Emptiness.of all play acting.

Those words of T.S. Eliot heralded the beginning of long-delayed precarious peace for me.

The key, to me, was in the Gospel: "resist not evil." On a personal and not, however, international level - which remains in God's hands. That we can only pray about.

Resist not evil, because violence breeds further violence. KNOW that there's a solution for our pain. That solution is an outsider's authenticity.

Its way of Fractured Peace is best...

Even if its aporia has to be a personal MARTYRDOM:

For such is, in the end, our Unbalanced Purgatory and its final product, Everlasting Peace.