I'm starting to think that people who make footnotes have no sense of humor.

-What man dost thou dig it for?

-For no man, sir.

-What woman then?

-For none, neither.

-Who is to be buried in in't?

-One that was a woman, sir, but, rest her soul, she's dead.

(haha... what an asshole.)

In a Medieval literature class I took a while back I learned that the point of the clown archetype is to criticize the lofty 'powers that be' in order to either dis-empower them or draw an satirical illustration that can be used as a mirror upon the plight of the protagonist or the protagonist himself. There are other things at work there but this preamble is too long already (then re-write it, idiot). Anyway, there's this part in Hamlet where Hamlet speaks to a gravedigger who offers him a good flyte and the bleached skull of his old caretaker, Yorick. This is also a great bit of fun and reveals a characterization in the story of Hamlet as a cynical trickster turned effete aesthetic-hero-trickster-who-is-less-cynical.

(so...Hamlet is a funny dude who stabs people and manipulates them into being murdered.)

(Is the aesthetic hero archetype partially a trickster? Is Krishna a trickster? I think I'm going to go in to this later because I think Pan is also a trickster of sorts. Divinity as jester. Word.)

Back to the other thing:

We discussed the impact of mentors in class. A mentor is a trickster of sorts, he (and I use the masculine because I think the substitutes are stupid, however, I guess could augment between the two, but that would make this ramble more confusing. I suppose I could also use 'she' but that's also silly because it is illegal for women to be teachers in America) a gate keeper who manipulates information such that it can be digested. To Hamlet, his father is a mentor who has given him his quest. Lacking from this quest is Hamlet's will. We discussed this in class a lot too so I'm not going into it. But in brief, Hamlet has many teachers. Likewise he is a mirror to the disunity in all of us (maybe why we read this so often in high school)turning him into an aesthetic hero. This is also the role of the jester character. I would argue with myself here though that there is a difference between a cynical trickster and one who is acting to unveil the pretensions of a powerful neurotic.

Hamlet gets off to a slow start.

His call to action is separated from his desire for action which breeds aimlessness.

His forgetting of duty becomes a loogie in the face of his dead brethren.

He wanders around as a Volpone, divesting himself from things, taking a critical eye on the world that cultivates inaction or false action.

Hamlet overcomes these lacks with each confrontation. Each confrontation reveals a new aspect of his plight (ah crap, now I'm just describing storytelling). In its unraveling, the world reveals its true nature to him. Even as he develops, he cannot recognize his own virtue over his wall of nihilism. That is until he reflects upon the eyeless gaze of Yorick. A father figure who does not return as the king did, but whose very memory becomes the enacter (not a word) of will. Yorick screams, 'remember me' as loudly as any ghost. This is a tying of the coporeal and divine. This is a breach which occurs after moments of hilarity and empowerment (this reminds me of Job's 'all is vanity' from that big book of the word thing). Even after his epiphany in front of Fortinbras' army, Hamlet has another, more introspective epiphany where he realizes the equality of things. This is something that previous 'trickster' Hamlet failed because the root of the trickster character, as I learned in my medieval literature class, is dis-empowerment, and dis-empowerment is a force of equalization. I need to stop writing sentence like that last one... In humility, Hamlet begins to construct the final acts of his own narrative.

I think this is a big part of this class. The recognition of our own narratives. Seeing what our own imperatives are and pursuing them with no mind to the end so much as to the narrative itself.

This is a tremendous act of ttim (Will will will Will's will to will a play).

In the Bhagavad-Gita we learned the essence of will comes from many facets. Three of these are Discipline, Tradition, and Detachment. I mention these three because I think they are offered as facets missing from Hamlet's persona in the beginning acts of the play. My next post will not address this. My next post is going to be about the movie, Tron and about Pat E. However, I think the post after that is going to talk more about the connection here. Or not- kinda of getting a dead horse vibe from this one.

(if I was a decent writer I would have written this better)