Poetry Rising above the CPAK Horizon

Little known fact: when Ptolemy of Alexandria set the "time-clock" of the stars for tropical (Western) astrology, the position of the stars was forever fixed at a time whose centerpoint was exactly 0 CE/AD. For those who don't believe in coincidence, recorded history shows many such examples of the abrupt freezing of codes, rituals and even landscapes. The Indian scholar Panini for example "simplified" the entire (and heretofore unwritten) Sanskrit language into an uncompromising, near-algorithmic matrix of 4,000 hyper-dense algebraic rules that forced Aryan priests into extreme mathematical precision just to use it.

Why did so many cultures rigidly systematize and fix a sacred language nobody speaks, an ancient calendar after the sky has shifted, an arrangement of monoliths though the original context is forgotten? 

If a global cataclysm such as was recorded in virtually every human society (with materialist science now catching up with its @9600 BC Younger Dryas/Tiamat theory), it would cause an immediate "hard reset" on human populations. Civilization collapses, the global network scatters, isolated groups of survivors enter extreme survival mode. Over thousands of years of deep isolation vocabulary, syntax, and grammar drift and mutate. A group trapped in the Caucasus/Steppes develops the grammatical architecture that will become Proto-Indo-European. A group trapped in the Near East/North Africa develops the structural roots that will become Proto-Afroasiatic (Semitic). Soon their superficial speech structures become linguistically unrelated.

But ritualized preservation keeps certain types of knowledge alive post-deluge. One may rightly ask, why didn't they just write it down? Maybe they did (the Romans have a lot to answer for, they did, after all, delete the Gnostic, Druid and other traditions) but the modern mind, to understand this process, must grapple with the fact that language as we know it (a tool of semantics, or meaning) is fundamentally a technology of separation. To say "the earth is round" instantly fractures reality into two distinct concepts ("earth" and "roundness") that are actually entirely inseparable in nature.

That may be why, in even the most advanced ancient cultures, sacred knowledge was transmitted almost exclusively through speech while writing was considered profane (even though written languages existed). And not just speech, but the way it was sounded. Song, chant, recitation, dance -- all of these were used to imbed knowledge, especially of the sacred kind. 

A culture concerned about preserving information over immense timescales would naturally become interested in:

• Rhythm
• Repetition
• Alliteration
• Poetic structure
• Musicality
• Sacred names
• Pure pronunciation

These are memory technologies. Civilizations independently realized that the human mind remembers rhythm and rhyme far better than abstract prose. To prevent a total cognitive wipe, the survivors of a global cataclysm created "anchors" that could not drift. For the vast majority of human existence, in fact, sacred, structured sound was our most advanced technology. "Poetry" in this sense was a data storage and compression algorithm. The human muscle memory of the throat, tongue, and diaphragm is a more reliable hard drive to survive the decay of time than fragile paper.

We see the same tendencies across widely separated cultures. Spoken and written language was codified:

For the Ear: Speech made Sound Primary. By utilizing phonomimesis (where the physical mouth shape and acoustic frequency try to approximate the "energy signature" of the object), they locked the knowledge into human muscle memory, breath control, and neurology. And they complemented this with actual sound engineering, whether it was the Chavin culture of Peru transmitting with their pututus (massive conch-shell horns) inside a labyrinth of underground galleries, or the neolithic builders of Malta with their "oracle chambers" that amplify voices, or the astounding Serrapeum amplifying cavern in Egypt, El Castillo in Chichen Itza and the Pyramid of the Moon in Teotihuacan, where exact stair-step geometry was used to scatter and manipulate sound. In all cases, the sound generated bypassed the analytical left brain entirely. 

For the Eye: Writing made the Symbol Primary. From Sumeria to Egypt to China, the alphabets were not phonetic but drawings of universal physical objects. No matter how much your local dialect mutated over 5,000 years, a picture of a knot, a hand, or a bird remained a knot, a hand, or a bird. This explains the "impossible" overlap between Hopi and Sumerian languages. Mainstream linguists scratch their heads or dismiss it because the grammar systems are entirely unrelated. But through this lens, it renders perfectly: they are reading the same visual cues AND, as researchers are discovering, using the same phonetic keys. A Hopi elder in Oraibi and a Sumerian scribe in Ur will look at the exact same symbol and utter the exact same monosyllabic mouth-shape. They aren't sharing a vocabulary; they are playing the same acoustic notes on the human vocal tract.

Let's look at some examples of this.

The West Kennet Long Barrow stone chambers in Wiltshire, England are built on telluric currents and behave as Helmholtz Resonators. The first chambers resonate precisely at 84 Hz (a low musical E), the inner chambers and central passage lock into 110 Hz (a low note between A and B). 110 Hz is the exact frequency found across Neolithic sites globally, known to stimulate the auditory cortex and quiet the left prefrontal cortex, inducing a state of trance, timelessness and internal vibration. By shaping a chamber to a strict 4:3 dimension ratio (as Steve Marshall's acoustic mapping discovered), the builders created a permanent, physical trap for 84 Hz and 110 Hz waves, which means the stones themselves correct the pitch, forcing the voice back to that exact frequency. And the bounce of the sound waves off the sarsen stones doesn't just echo; the air in the chamber becomes an acoustic standing wave, causing the body itself to vibrate as it takes on properties of mass in its structure.

The same acoustic template is found in a classic Hopi kiva, a room cut out of the earth and sealed with a timber roof. When a person speaks, tones or drums inside, the trapped air compresses, forcing the walls to bounce the sound energy back into the room. Like the European barrows, they are tuned to amplify low-frequency, deep vocal resonance, particularly around the 110 hz trance note. As in West Kennet, where the strongest acoustic nodes sit at the absolute back of the inner stone chambers, the kiva’s physical sound pressure is directly above a small hole in the floor called the Sipapu, representing the place of emergence from the post-cataclysmic world. In both systems, the physical architecture forces a person to sit at the literal zero-point of the sound wave.

This sound architecture extends from physical structures to the languages themselves. 

The lineage from the Steppes (the mainstream origin of Indo-European languages, although it has never been inhabited) conventionally believed to have migrated east and developed Sanskrit (Hindu tradition holds the "channelings" of the 400 rishis that were later codified in the Rig Veda created Sanskrit, as far back as 10,000 BC) created Shiksha, a complex ruleset that chains words together so smoothly (Sandhi) that a priest chanting long verses could maintain that same unbroken, internal body-vibration for hours without the acoustic wave dropping. Two-thirds of the Rig Veda are mantras (mind-tools) and are clearly intended to create sound resonance with our infinite being -- as one mantra goes Om - Bhu - Bhuvar - Sura (I am - the sound - creating - planes). By employing Hasta Swara (precise hand movements and gestures synchronized with pitch changes to physically lock in the sound), Svara (a strict 3-tone accentual system), Japa (rhythmic repetition) and Pranayama (breath control), a Sanskrit chanter creates internal acoustic nodes. When done correctly, the chanter experiences the sound as an external, universal wave (Nada Brahma) that is merely vibrating through their temporary biological vessel. According to the Shabda principal, vibration, form and meaning are one, interconnected. Sound exists outside of human speech (Sphota) as a cosmic infrastructure, and human vocalization simply "unveils" it.

The Semitic lineage that remained in the Near East codified this same impulse into the throat-heavy gutturals and nasalizations of Hebrew and Arabic. By forcing the sounds deep into the pharyngeal and nasal cavities precisely where in the throat or mouth such sounds must originate, they discovered a way to replicate the crushing, resonant pressure of a stone chamber inside the human skull. Instead of hand gestures, the sounds were internalized by swaying movements to synchronize breath, meter, and focus. In Hebrew mysticism, the Bat Kol (literally "the daughter of a voice") or the Shechinah (the divine presence) is described exactly as experienced in West Kennet: a thunderous sound that feels entirely outside the self, yet causes the body to vibrate. Through the strict rules of Tajwid or Cantillation, the reciter alters the pressure in their pharyngeal cavity to “trick” the auditory cortex into perceiving the voice as an objective, external entity commanding the body from the outside.

The architects of West Kennet and the codifiers of Sanskrit and Hebrew created a technology that could grab a human being by their nervous system. Om, Amen and Amin (the "mantra" note of all three languages respectively) use identical mouth-shapes to hit the exact same cranial resonance because they were all trying to reproduce the exact sound that triggers the 110 Hz neurological shift -- a strong indication that human biology dictated the architecture of sacred language, not the other way around. These traditions developed sophisticated sacred sound systems involving prolonged vowels, emphasis on breath, precise vocalization, repetition rhythms and precise oral transmission protocols. This crossover shows that beneath our immense cultural and ideological divisions, humanity shares a singular somatic operating system.

The Hopi language belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family, but its sacred application utilizes the identical sound-symbolism principles found in Welsh and Sanskrit. Their ceremonial chants use ancient, repetitive root sounds to mimic the physical sounds of rain, wind, and planetary vibration. The Hopi warn that the world falls out of balance (Koyaanisqatsi) if the ritual rhythm is dropped. Why? Because the ancient root languages (Armenian, Welsh, Sanskrit, Hebrew, etc) were engineered to be vibrational matches to the frequencies of the Earth. When the population stops speaking the root sounds, stops performing the precise rhythmic ceremonies, and loses synchronization with the landscape clocks, the entire belief system is at risk.

Each of these four linguistically distinct systems encoded sound in strikingly similar ways:

Sanskrit meticulously codified the exact mouth-positions (guttural, palatal, cerebral, dental, labial) required to speak. By locking long texts into a mathematical chanting matrix (Pathas), they encoded a biological regulation program. Chanting these verses forces precise breath control that stimulates the vagus nerve, alters blood oxygenation, and physically coaxes the human brain into meditative alpha and theta wave states.

Ancient Welsh used sharp, descriptive root syllables where the sound physically mimics a shape or action (like Cwlwm -- pronounced Kum-loom -- for a knot). With their Master Astronomy Map, they named every hill, farm, and river bend after these monosyllabic root shapes, then (according to Hugh Evans' painstaking research) turned the entire landscape into a 2,000-square-mile, un-erasable star clock that could be read aloud simply by walking through the valleys.

Hebrew locked its data into a geometric grid of three-letter consonantal roots overlaid with precise cantillation marks that dictate punctuation, grammar, and musical pitch simultaneously.

Hopi avoids written text entirely, locking its data into repetitive ceremonial chants and synchronized dances.

And here is where it gets interesting.

Evans has dropped a massive finding: Welsh phonetics can be applied directly to decipher both Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform. Why is this significant? Both Egyptian and Sumerian are considered language isolates, with no known linguistic relatives on the planet. Mainstream linguists hit a wall because while they can translate the symbols, they don't truly know what the spoken language actually sounded like. The only clue to linguists trying to reconstruct Sumerian pronunciation was the adoption of cunieform script by the later Akkadian Empire (who spoke a Semitic language related to Arabic and Hebrew). Akkadian scribes compiled massive, clay-tablet dictionaries where they would stamp a complex Sumerian word-sign and then spell out its exact pronunciation next to it using simple, phonetic Akkadian syllables (e.g., stamping the symbol for "son" and spelling out du-mu next to it).

Because we know how Hebrew and Arabic sound today, linguists work backward from Akkadian to deduce how those clay-tablet pronunciation keys might have sounded in real life. This standard academic approach has a number of inherent flaws: who's to say they don't rely on wholly independent Akkadian pronunciations; a much later language like Akkadian can't be expected to retain much memory of an earlier, unrelated language; perhaps most challenging, how can one account for the slow drift of Akkadian itself through "misremembering" time?

Researchers like Evans, Alan Wilson and Baram Blackett discovered that when you bypass standard grammatical rules and apply Welsh phonetic values directly to the symbols, the texts instantly reveal themselves. Here is how they claim that protocol works: 

Step A: Strip Away the Assigned Sound. These researchers discard the Akkadian, arguing that this filter applies a limited text-only lens. Their method, called Rebus Acrophoneticism, focuses purely on the physical object represented by the symbol.

Step B: Name the Visual Symbol in Ancient Welsh. They take this visual image and "pronounce" it using the monosyllabic root sounds of ancient Welsh (Cymraeg). This forms, these researchers say, perfectly coherent, grammatically sound Welsh sentences. Because Sumerian is built on monosyllabic, agglutinative (stuck-together) mouth-shapes, it mirrors the syllabic structure of ancient Welsh. 

Step C: The Sound Becomes the True Text. The text transforms from an "indecipherable isolate" into a highly descriptive, practical language that matches the engineering and astronomical concepts of the prehistoric world. For example, the constellation Cancer, which in English means "crab" even though the actual constellation looks nothing like a crab (and poses similar difficulties in all modern languages), in ancient Welsh Can means "round arch" or "hoop" while Caer means "enclosure." Not only does this sound like the constellation, Evans argues that it literally describes the constellation's placement in the sky, where it rises above the Milky Way on the Summer Solstice: "Where the enclosure (the ecliptic) meets the hoop (the surrounding ring of the Milky Way as seen from Earth)."

In this theory, the ancient scripts were never meant to be read as an alphabet, but as sheet music. Mainstream linguistics says this method is a statistical coincidence — if you try hard enough, you can make any language match arbitrary shapes. But these researchers argue that ancient Welsh preserves the exact phonetic root-keys of a shattered, pre-cataclysm global language -- a literal pre-Tower of Babel hypothesis. All these ancient languages that used sound to expand consciousness may be fractured splinters of the same ancient operating system.

New Poet Tree Sound Files

The surge in views of three very old sound files on my right rail prompted me to make available here recordings of some recent poems. I will continue to post sound files as I record them. Thanks so much for listening! That, after all, is how poems should be "read." 

What We Do With Our Choices

Posted September 11, 2025 

Kirk Reaches for a Note

Posted July 25, 2005 

God as Truth, Key 77

Posted July 7, 2025 

On Horses Running Maskless in the Sun

Posted July 5, 2025 

Only Birds Over Hillhead Road

Posted June 26, 2025 

The Cazimi of Compassion

Posted June 24, 2025 

Machado with Guitar

My Emotional Support Tree

To Virgo, with Eternal Thanks

Madison Ponce

     Calls herself a They

To become an army

     That obliterates

Anything that stands

     In their way.

She'd sell her loving mother

     Up Santa Ana river

If it interfered

     With her desire

For vintage Me decade

     Furniture,

But she refuses to wear

     Turquoise jewelry

Or any other culturally

     Appropriated tool

Of power, raw power,

     To take away.

Madison Ponce

     Has no real feelings, 

You see,

     So she's free 

To light the city

     Of Anaheim on fire

And have anyone who tries

     To stop her

Put in the slammer

     For centuries-old murders

She makes stick with her wand of feelings

     We call witchery.

Pride of the Yaquis June Rainbow Edition

World Animal Day in Huntington Beach

Three Perspectives on the War

Reposted from 2007, because I, at least, remember.

I. 

It started, as it usually does, in the board room, with power points of growth projections and visions of expansion to new brands, new locations. There was no pre-merger discussion, but all present were softened by nostalgia for earlier operations like the memory of a perfect golf game. This gauze gave everything about the plan a certain half-thought-out quality: the capital expenditure was more than their budget, it offered the competitors an opening, even the marketing was an afterthought, but I'll say one thing for the powerful, they know they can get it done with only a look of displeasure, and they knew, deep down knew this was their time, and legacy. Who, after all, could see inside them, could doubt their shareholder concern? 

It only took a few people, and most of these would be whisked out of the country. First they purchased the buildings, equipped it with insurance, and agreed to remove the deadly asbestos. Their security unit, with its flawless reputation, got the contract at all three airports. The state-of-the-art remote control guidance system from their technology division was inserted for a double-blind test in the actual planes. Their partners at DOD, as usual, were small-minded and held their ground, but their contacts inside had infested the place like ants with money and secrets and shameless flattery, they knew when and how the war games were planned, and what software was used. As for marketing, their strategy was simple and effective—massive media buys that tied that nagging consumer problem to be solved with the end corporate goal (which, as always, was destroying the competition)—just like Walmart used the problem of high prices to drive all U.S. manufacturing away. Here, they used a bunch of stolen IDs of some Saudi trouble-makers, and relied on their strong distribution network to do the rest. They hired a few actors to make noise, use phony credit cards, and leave in an easily found place a few bad Arabic flight manuals. At the advice of compliance, to limit their own liability, they gave them boxcutters and plastic knives instead of actual weapons. The international department that handled this was kind of sloppy, as they often are—some of these people were already dead, some popped up later alive (even Atta, the appointed "leader"), these so-called religious fanatics were "seen" drinking at a strip club the night before, the one designated to pilot impossible maneuvers had flunked flight school—but they got by because foreign names and cultures are always unfamiliar to customers. 

Operationally, it was a thing of beauty: the towers were powered down for the first time ever for "routine maintenance" and expertly wired by people who believed they were, in the end, saving lives; the right phone calls were made beforehand; no one asked why the security cameras didn't work; enforcers paid visits to air traffic controllers; NORAD fell for the war games diversion and then evaded blame expertly like the bureaucrats they were; the steel was carted away without a question asked, every piece of evidence was put under the protective seal of high-level company men. 

But as with all plans with large logistics, there were a few glitches: the shorted futures couldn't be cashed because the markets closed too quickly; they had to pull the building that was hit second because the fireman gave the all-clear signal; a lot of people felt explosions, saw missiles, heard other jets; there was more than one expert to bribe; the "owner" admitted on national TV he pulled the third building; a kid on a "cell phone" from 30,000 feet called his mother and introduced himself by name; the follow-up anthrax attack was completely botched, when the scapegoat said too much; enough anomalies to keep the auditors busy for decades. 

Despite the product flaws, it was a triumph, in the end, of public relations. The public simply willed it to work. There was the willing suspension of disbelief, like a good action movie, with victims and dark-skinned, inexplicable psychotics, unlikely heroes and shocking twists, and, also like a good action movie, it was followed up by the video game. People were entertained, and an entertained customer is one who spends money: even newspapers sold, weak leaders were turned into kings, the whole world saw them as winners to emulate, investment exploded, new entrepreneurial industries flourished—people were united with a purpose, to "kick the ass" of the corporation’s competitors. The best of all investment worlds: the product sold itself. 

Granted, there was more than one competitor, imposing a little more scrutiny into alliance-building than would be optimal. It was not something simple for the common man to follow, but give him credit, he could handle sophisticated plot-lines, he knew about conflict and rising action, he could envision many happy endings; so they came up with a brilliant plan—pick em off one at a time, from weakest to strongest: Afghanistan pipeline, Iraq oil fields, Lebanon squatters, Iranian treasure, and so on. Like an epic with sequels, base the conflict on something that would never end, like, say, terror, something you couldn’t even fight, with no armies, no enemies, just any old excuse to keep the meter running on all the expensive equipment. 

The plan didn't need much else, but there were a few rules of thumb: when you destroy, always re-build, but make sure the construction side always falls way short; don't forget antiquities—easily an afterthought, they could be sold to private dealers, mostly friends, after all, it's the entire record of the birth of writing, laws, religion, marriage, politics and other quaint but profitable concepts; and, most of all, don't share the spoils with anyone—just because someone gives something up to go along, doesn't mean he's a partner in the venture. 

By bottom-line standards, this launch was a success, but, on a long-term investment, you still have to show quarterly results. This made things more delicate: the accountants keeping the books needed some poetic license; the advertising expenditures needed to be competitive to keep the product fresh and in demand; then there’s the labor issue, always tricky, with a lot of workers lost through attrition and severance cuts; competitors on their home turf had small company flexibility and reduced infrastructure expenditures, all of which raised costs; suppliers will always overcharge if given half a chance, and this far-flung enterprise did not provide much transparency at the local level. These hidden costs all filtered down to the customer, who signed a long-term contract but thought they could get their money back. It's a perception management issue that was addressed by pointing out this new and improved perpetual war cannot be won but it can be lost—unless one gives, and gives generously. 

Even today, some on the street lack confidence in the management, but there's a transition plan in place. They've left the franchise stronger than it was, maybe they can work on that golf swing after all! At the end of the day, who has a better product for the market? Something people crave more than the sweetest, darkest chocolate.

II. 

She lifts up ecstatic, her reason for living exhausted, 

Her children extinguished, her neighbors turned to ash... 

So many together, holding hands like they couldn’t in life, 

Ascended from the hell of twenty-five years, if only they knew it was

 as easy as this, 

That the reward would be so sweet. 

In Iraq, new lost generations of maimed and heartsick curse God

 they didn’t die: 

When the date trees were bulldozed from their land; 

When they were spread naked, guns to their heads on the floor before

 their families; 

When the soldiers who raped them gave them children with organs

 on the outside; 

When they were forced into bestial and homosexual orgies to be

 filmed; 

When they saw what they saw, remembered what they once had,

 allowed themselves the right to feel… 

No power, no water, no safety, no food, but revenge can keep one

 alive indefinitely. 

There's no Allah, there is no Rapture, but the mind goes on

 in paradise, 

To remind us our cause was even larger than we knew 

Defeating the greatest power in the world simply by saying no… 

In the U.S., the blood spews out of the TV as they eat dead flesh for

 breakfast. 

She can't stop buying things. 

He wants to kill something. 

It's better to live in a dream than this, and there are 2,000 dreams

 available every night, 

Against which telling the truth from a lie is so very small… 

Dying’s just part of the job, 

The cigarettes of this man's army. 

The griefs are silent, unresolved, 

No one made responsible. 

We drop bombs on the garden of Eden, 

Spray "USA" in DuPont graffiti on a ziggurat 

Chase an alien God through the red clay of Babel, Karma, and Hit. 

In Najaf, city of cemeteries, rag-wrapped soldiers defend the graves 

Against the U.S. eating machine that builds freedom like a shark

 one meal at a time.

There's a deep need in the Earth to disappear. 

This war is not much. More die from the U.S. health care system. 

Millions simply vanished in the tsunami—they had to leave. 

The cowards who set roadside bombs against the cowards who wear

 full flak regalia. 

Both terrified as chickens on an assembly line. 

Heroes made out of those who do what any person would: 

Save a buddy’s life, plow a road, harvest missiles from heaven 

While the true heroes, those who grow cold enough to watch a person

 die without regret 

Sink invisible among those who would never get it. 

Though I may appear to be dead for today, this year or this century, 

I am watching you always, and will come back to plant another

 crop of rice 

Knowing all that I know now, and all that I will see in the future 

From these eyes locked as the last light leaves them. 

I will water your bones with my tears, 

For the vanquished get redeemed through their forgiveness,

 the victors get much less. 

Your tears will run in our rivers with all you left behind: 

Your innocence, your virtue, your peace-of-mind, 

Which nourish our future in ways you'll never know 

As you sit on a porch swing thinking about me. 

War is social, death is individual. 

I must live to chronicle the inhumanity, 

To compile the list of the lost buried with the flagged bodies, 

To project the wreckage further to the future, 

To explain why something that should be known to anyone 

With a human brain and heart 

Is not. 

Maybe this time when I jump off the wheel, I will smile… 

III. 

It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us the freedom of speech." —Father Dennis Edward O'Brien, Sergeant, US Marine Corps 

Nothing more beautiful than a beach full of Marines 

Their skin as red as their colors 

Hair like crisp lawns as far as the eye can see, 

As they lay with families on holiday forgetting 

The thousand negotiations between honor and slaughter 

Or between the Marines and everything else. 

Their wives are lathered with ubiquitous banana oil, 

Reading the news of the day in magazines like Self and Us, 

Celebrity recipes for great sex and drunk driving arrests, 

One eye on kids in a forward position at the water’s edge. 

The shovels that dig the sand to build their castles 

Are also used to annihilate them before the ocean can. 

Beyond the beach, there’s the wildlife preserve, the recycling center, 

The pottery kiln, the commissary with its discount on organic food 

Then the Quonset huts and white concrete structures 

Like something out of the Soviet Union circa 1958. 

The maintenance vehicles are as slow and noisy as lawnmowers 

But at the gate they still salute you with white gloves. 

To some, it's all that matters, to hear the country’s call, 

Like the small voice of God saying “leave the ugliness to me”; 

As if they were born for this work 

Of ignoring consequences. 

To others it's for money, education, discipline, career direction, 

For a chance to be a hero instead of in the way, 

But most of these boys were already broken when they got here, 

They’d been prisoners at gunpoint their whole lives 

Strong-armed from trailers to bars by vengeful, ravenous mouths 

That struck if they opened theirs. What a relief to get all that here 

Without the demand for love. A soldier only has to love his rifle. 

He is allowed to exist if he does what he is told. 

Objective, Obstacle, Strategy, Victory 

And other ludicrous fantasies 

Come down to this: who fears annihilation enough 

To transform murder into a duty? 

And so they say "the bad people with the false God deserve to die" 

When they mean "I am afraid my God will abandon me" 

And they say "they hate us for our freedoms" 

When they mean "I don’t deserve the freedom I’ve squandered." 

For them, any symbol will do, for righteousness is a crutch, 

The cold, inescapable wound is in the mirror. 

While we – unthinking – are marched with slogans and drums, to war 

Tugging at the tribal obligation, are you with us or against us 

With the basso profundo, the causis belli, la musique terrible

 of envy and fear, 

The 30-year Marine laughs: "The source of this war is always 

The human heart, what's missing, the cause of all human suffering." 

The flag snaps like a snake at sunset, 

The sky is still streaming with colors: 

Orange warning flower, red stripes of battle, 

A gash of pink, the purple smoke of gunpowder, 

The indigo arm of comfort, then a heavy carpet 

Gold-tinged black laid over the narrow band of sun 

Lighting the camp as if from below 

And bringing out the red in the pines,

And then, suddenly, the frail light was gone, 

Gone out for taps, and darkness in the barracks.

John Keats is NOT an Idiot: A Screed

Even in the long and illustrious history of the harsh treatment of wild and magical poets in the august institutions of higher learning, the purple shiner around John Keats’s eye stands out. 

Part of this, of course, is the obsession the modern academy seems to have about not valuing poetry as poetry, that is, as something emotionally moving that gives harmonious pleasure. The “joy” is only in the intellectual discovery of its meaning. To “adore” a poem, today’s thinking goes, is to be an inarticulate philistine. 

This becomes a problem for Keats in particular because of his sublime, perhaps unparalleled, mastery of the art of English-language poetry. It’s assumed, at best, that his composition of sounds, harmonies, rhymes, assonances and consonances, alliterations and rhythms is spot on, and thus not worthy of anything but lip service. Thus, his poetry as poetry is largely ignored, and the all-important way he says things is conveniently excluded from the “serious discussion” of his work in the millions of pages of “secondary literature” that have sprouted up like mushrooms around the rich soil of his name.

This would not be so bad – one can only expect so much blood out of an intellectual turnip – if the interpretations of what he means didn’t always paint him as a country simpleton without an actual thought in his head. 

At the moment I’m thinking of a paper I recently read by one late professor Earl Wasserman that offered, with panache and verbal precision, a compelling argument that the major British Romantic poets all react to 18th century philosophical quandaries about the transactions between the mind and the sensuous world. The only problem was that what he said about Keats – that he was obsessed with losing his self and his identity through empathy into objects of sensory experience – is about 180 degrees from what Keats actually does. 

If readers of Keats have learned nothing else, they should realize that he is a master of showing how his raw and ragged humanity just doesn’t fit in the plans of others, no matter how much he loves or admires them. The discomfort of love, for want of a better term, is at the poignant heart of his poetic genius, a fact one would think would not be lost on A KEATS SCHOLAR! 

If you think Mr. Wasserman is an outlier, sadly you would be mistaken. Keeping the Keatsian threat within the barbed wire of the farm runs across institutions, eras, academic disciplines. That is easily verified for anyone who cares to look. What is harder to account for is why this apparent conspiracy exists to turn him into an oversensitive moron who did not appreciate the gift he gave to the world IN THE NAME OF RATIFYING HIS GREATNESS.

A Keats poem at random will make the point. My magic 8-ball chose “Bright Star,” which is short, “major,” and a good illustration of how at odds Keats’s poetic vision is from the conventional academic caricature. Here is the poem in full:

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—

         Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

         Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

         Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

         Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No — yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

         Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

         Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever — or else swoon to death.

The conventional readings of this poem assume that the first eight lines literally have nothing to do with the last six lines. That is, the poet had no actual plan, he just grafted two delicate and sensitive poetic moments awkwardly onto each other, the still aloofness of unchanging nature and the sweet feeling of wanting to be forever in one’s lover’s arms. Critical interpretations dress this up in all sorts of morbid speculations based on the supposition that this, the last known complete poem of Keats, is some kind of tragic statement on his imminent death (without any actual evidence, I might add).

Somehow, in all the extrapolation, the professional readers miss an obvious and rather pedestrian metaphor that the star in line 1 is the girl in line 10 – an analogy too sophisticated apparently for our country bumpkin. It’s certainly less trite and far more intriguing to attribute the qualities described to a woman than just to a star. She has “lone splendour … watching, with eternal lids apart … patient,” who like a monastic (“Eremite”) priest oversees the snow and blesses the ocean waters. From the vantage point of the speaker, she is removed, uncommunicative, cold yet loyal and strangely all-powerful. That the woman and the star are one and the same is pretty clearly conveyed on line 9: “yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, / Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast, / To feel for ever its soft fall and swell.” 

The speaker is a man hypnotized and dominated by this force of nature, equally loyal to her, but he gets nothing from her in terms of the melding of souls such commitment suggests. He wants more than an eternal “fall and swell,” but he is consigned to live forever this way, in the “sweet unrest” and overwrought emotions of love, when she might as well be a heavenly body, for all he knows and feels.

It’s really brilliant and heart-breaking if you open up to think about it. Most readers – non-professional poetry readers – would readily understand and embrace such an interpretation – if it were not for a pernicious system that makes authoritative hash out of the admitted difficulty of interpreting poetry. You don’t even have to step into Keats’ life story and confer special poignancy since this poetic moment occurs so near his early death (much less take it the next logical step and contemplate how death was for Keats a small price to evade being defined as a poet).

“Bright Star” is just one demonstration of the special cognitive dissonance that is the hallmark of Keats’s poetic genius, in poem after poem, from the unfathomable difficulties Endymion encounters in love to the way the art of the Grecian Urn – both dead and alive in effect -- leads the present admirers to their slaughter. The richness of Keats is in these moments, when one has to, with the characters, suck it up and embrace a beauty that cannot be embraced. 

I know, I know, it’s called “negative capacity;” everyone pulls that term out of a Keats letter to define his rarefied spirit. Why, then, is no one seemingly willing to navigate how that quality is expressed, over and over again, in his poems? 

I won’t hold my breath waiting for an answer.

Film Review: The Social Dilemma

Ten or so years into the mass zombification of humanity through smart phones, someone in the upper suite of the control matrix has decided to release a bunch of lapsed true-believer engineers in the great experiment to confess to the black Netflix screen, like disillusioned priests at the unspeakable corruption in their blessed vehicle, the alienation this attempt to connect humanity has wrought. This staged confession has in turn given the gazillions of people who have watched the documentary permission to face the obvious: They have been imprisoned by the very devices that were supposed to free them. 

OK maybe that’s a stretch. They are given permission to wring their hands about the suicide rate of Gen Z girls, the collapsing consensus between what is real and fake, the reality that the reality presented by their device (including Netflix) is unique to them and their buying preferences, and, oh yeah, that violent white supremacists have been given free reign to terrorize America because of the unrestrained profit motive powering Big Tech. 

Hold up. What was that last point? Yes, it seems the end results of all this social media excess are unrestrained gangs of racist brown shirts, as shown in the film’s interspersed dramatization, where a hapless teen’s need for peer approval inevitably leads to him joining a mob seemingly intent on putting black people on crosses and lynching them. They bring home this grisly reality with images from my home town of Huntington Beach as an example of this social-media inspired violence breaking out between right and left. 

The only problem is that the two images they choose to make this point – as I am well aware since I witnessed them happen – show nothing of the sort. One is of 5-time World Wresting Federation Champion (and now Huntington Beach City Councilman) Tito Ortiz blocking the way of a bunch of paid Antifa ruffians, who were trying to invade one of a series of peaceful protests against the state’s lockdown policies with a vow to “burn the city down.” It was a citizen trying to prevent a crime – not violent at all. The police were right there, many on horses, standing by. The protests included all sides, all of whom – mask-wearing and flag-bearing – respected each other and their right to speak. There were skateboards, soft serve, drum circles. It was a festive day at the beach. Why would a film intent on showing how deceptive social media can be take such a risk to blatantly misrepresent what actually happened? 

The second shot from my home town offers a clue. It was of a woman planting an American flag on the beach before being accosted by police. The film again made it look like a violent clash when it was actually a beautiful and iconic cry for liberty, someone bravely reminding us of our constitutional rights before she was physically removed because Governor Newsom decided on a whim that no one was allowed to go on the beach. In reality, the shot changed things, beaches opened, people’s eyes opened to the reality of a totalitarian state that they said could never happen here. 

What in heaven’s name is going on? How could a movie that started so promisingly, full of cool diagnostic terms like “snapchat dysmorphia,” “positive intermittent reinforcement,” “growth hacking,” “psychometric dopplegangers,” and “the attention extraction model” go so dismally wrong? Why reinforce the interpersonal void that anyone parenting a Gen Z child grieves every day –  a generation that has the unusual habit of turning their phone around to film anyone who confronts them in an unpleasant way – only to turn its psychic energy into railing against Russians hacking elections, flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, “pizzagate” believers and the aforementioned white supremacists? 

The short answer – and it pervades every frame of the movie – is that they know they’ve lost the war. 

The film reminded me of a similar doom-laden documentary from about a decade ago called The Corporation. One left that happy flick with the idea that Monsanto was on the verge of poisoning the world’s food supply and we are collectively powerless to stop it. It didn’t quite turn out that way, for similar reasons that technology won’t take away the last vestige of our collective will. One indication of this is that FCC Section 230, which protects the internet giants from libel laws on the condition they make no editorial decisions, was not even mentioned once in the entire documentary, even when they were waxing poetic about rule changes, regulations and taxes to rein in Big Tech. 

It’s no great secret anymore that the giant social media companies routinely game their algorithms to highlight approved and bury non-approved content, they shadow ban so that the poster doesn’t see that no one else can see their post, they “fact-check” and label “false” anything that veers from their official approved narrative, and they even demonetize and delete independent thinking accounts that have done nothing wrong, with no warning and for no stated or discernible reason except that they’ve attracted a large audience. With these knowing violations of the terms of their FCC charter, indefensible under any standard of free speech I’ve ever been taught, they have put not only their legal freedom but their very existence at risk, going so perversely against their so-called profit motive that all they can do now is double down with other conspirators to censor anything that will keep their autocratic control in place, even if they have to, say, brazenly support the current massive electoral fraud that will turn out to be the biggest crime in US history.  

Could it be someone is letting this all happen, waiting for big tech and big media to overreach, to the point where people rise up and demand a change? On the ground, it looks like we are rapidly reaching that point. The film's over-the-top propaganda, and Big Tech's panicked actions suggest they are in a lot more trouble than the public at large realizes. 

During the last few decades, but especially in the last four years or so, arcane and unspeakable secrets held back for thousands of years have come out into the open, as millions and millions of people realize that the world we live in is largely a controlled illusion that we are free to transcend at any time. It’s called the Great Awakening, and it is a truly special time in history, one that I and countless others feel truly blessed to live in. We want to go shouting from the rafters the good news about the unimagined possibilities that are in our not-too-distant future.

The challenge we have is that the media – social and traditional – is absolutely at war with this awakening, because they can’t control it. They seek to subvert, censor, ridicule and squash non-approved thought by ANY means necessary, because their biggest fear is an awakened populace. 

This civil war, an information war for the minds of the populace, is ongoing and has been for years. There are two distinct sides, secretive though they both are, and they each have distinct strategies. Let’s just call these sides the Alliance and the Hive. The Hive has long held power, by controlling governments, banks, churches, foundations, academia, media etc. in an elaborate system of reward and punishment – power and money on the one hand, blackmail for compelled unspeakable crimes to enforce loyalty on the other. The Alliance has been consistently outmaneuvered for decades – maybe even centuries – but it came into possession of the blackmail files (electronically of course), has infiltrated Hive communications, and found enough support within the Hive-controlled institutions to put one of their own into a dominant position of power. 

This was the first genuine threat to Hive control as far as anyone can remember, and it triggered an aggressive strategy to remove this usurper from power by any means at their disposal. The Alliance, having the “black position” in chess, responded by setting traps using their ability to know the enemy’s moves, and allowing them to walk in the front door only to be ambushed. Classic guerrilla tactics, in other words. While this strategy bought them time, they used their blackmail files to either free, take out or control key players across all Hive-controlled institutions, enough at this point to shift the levers of power definitively in their direction. 

The key to the ongoing Alliance plan is their strength in numbers. The Hive, despite its vast size, is rigidly hierarchical and controlled by very few people, and its processes are developed to project its power through largely illusory means. If this illusion can be broken, the people informed that they have been deceived, the Alliance can release the technology and money that has been withheld in the name of power for a long time. This is all going on behind the scenes, but some of us can see the shadow patterns on the cave wall, mostly because the Alliance has started communicating with us directly. This is very difficult, since all areas of media are controlled by the Hive, but the strategy has resulted in the already-awakened people to bond together and help others awaken. At each point of awakening though, lies the Hive, with its communication engines and control over the population’s minds through a dizzying array of propaganda techniques and mind-controlling technologies. Thus those aligned with the Alliance are acutely aware of the war. Most of the human population is not, because they are under the mind-enslavement of the Hive. But day by day, as the pillars of Hive support collapse, the Alliance gains ground.

And that’s why it’s all going to come crashing down on the Big Tech octopuses as it is coming down on the earlier, unassailable Monsanto. They could not figure out a solution to the genie they let out of the bottle, an informed populace who think for themselves and share information with others in an open forum. They really thought they could target, geotag, shadow ban and censor the fringe of free thinkers, but every day more people are waking up to the fact that they have lied to and gaslit for a very long time, and they are determined to never let it happen again. 

My Father's Obituary

Skip Sigler, 85, proprietor of Marblehead’s iconic Seagull Inn B&B for 27 years, passed away peacefully on April 10 from complications of social distancing. He was surrounded by his loving family responsibly standing six feet away.

Skip was born March 3, 1935 to Ernest and Sara (Patterson) Sigler of Upper Red Hook in New York’s Hudson River Valley, where at age nine he was an honor guard at Roosevelt’s funeral. He graduated from The Ohio State University in 1957, later spreading the Buckeye gospel around the world as an unpaid zealot. In 1958, while putting his life at risk for his country on Pentagon snowplow duty for the Army Corps of Engineers, he met his wife Ruth on a blind date. Fortunately for posterity, he agreed to meet her despite being told her best attribute was that she made her own clothes.

He developed an almost-mythic reputation as party host in Detroit, Cincinnati, Toledo and Indianapolis as he climbed the corporate ladder to become a sales manager at Owens Corning Fiberglas. He remarked that the hours were long as a drunk and you often had to play hurt. The opportunity to be transferred to Boston in 1969 allowed him to achieve a childhood dream of settling his family in Marblehead. In fact, he left his corporate nest to stay in his home by the sea, embarking on a series of enterprises that unfortunately were decades ahead of their time, including alternative energy, house flipping, house husbanding and dating clubs. It wasn’t until 1994, when he reconstructed his home on the Neck as an inn to annoy his neighbors, that he finally found his true calling. Being able to tell the same jokes to different, paying guests each night was Skip’s idea of heaven on earth.

As host of his Seagull Inn, the New England Travel Guide honored him as the Boston area’s best, “a natural-born host with a remarkable gift of gab.” His door and bar were always open to the free spirits, unfettered dignitaries and world-class drinkers who gathered round his kitchen island to be fed, entertained and made to feel special in a safe and nurturing environment of complete debauchery.

He was a President of the Marblehead Chamber of Commerce, a charter Tennessee Squire, a short-lived member of the Corinthian Yacht Club, and a decades-long contributor to the Piss and Moan Club. In addition, Skip was a gourmet chef, an accomplished painter and furniture maker, hypnotist, record producer, and author of the popular cookbook series The Best of Skip, The Rest of Skip, The Last of Skip Parts 1 and 2 and the uncompleted What’s Left of Skip (to be published posthumously).

Preceded in death by his brother, the renowned wood artisan Doug Sigler, Skip is survived by his wife of 61 years, Ruth (God bless her), three sons Bill, Randy and Eric (God bless them), and six (confirmed) grandchildren who will forever miss their one-of-a-kind “Skippy.” He also leaves behind 6,000+ inn guests and uncountable jokes, stories, unverifiable facts from Skip’s Almanac, and aphorisms such as “the only thing that kills you is guilt,” and “everything I know today I’ve learned from listening to myself talk about things I know nothing about.”

He was happiest when enjoying a finger-stirred Manhattan while conducting business from his kitchen swing, which he still guards from beyond the veil.

Needless to say, any celebration of Skip’s life will have to be postponed until stadiums can be re-opened. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that contributions be made to the American Association for Mediocre Red Wine (AAMRW).

Lesbos by Sylvia Plath

A Triangle in Three Parts

1.
We are born in agreement
     but somehow diverge.
The truth furrows naturally
     from its opposing side
That, being ever equal, grows
     us further apart
Until the two are joined as one
     by a third line,
Where all the energy of perpetual
     disagreement can go,
A base that is no more
     than a connector
Of the places where we have fallen the farthest
      from the tip of primordial unity,
Joined in the hope of joining.
      As spirals expand, triangles lock.

2.
I want truth and I want love
     but I can never choose,
For they seem to me the same thing,
     no matter how many times
The wind has laughed, the sun has explained,
     the earth has swallowed its dead.
There is something on the other side
     that always moves away.
And always this thing
     that says we are the same
Without explaining what it is
     we are
Or how we'll ever find a common ground
     except in the unknown,
What can only be a theory —
     the way we reach some form of agreement.

3.
The heart comes, a circle, and
     fails to understand,
The whole elaborate play a toy
     for a child to command,
The urge to awaken all the others
     to show off what you've made
Says you are more important than sleep,
     you long forgotten one,
Waiting in the stony silence
     for a familiar voice.
You started dying away like a leaf at birth
     to meet that distant call
That holds you still, though you move
     ever further beyond ...
Love must be impossibly distant;
     it's far too close.

The Lure of Fame

I could be one of the world's leading authorities
On 20th century Buddhist poetries,
Published in journals and books,
Consulted for readings and conferences,
Living in a dim 2-room in Hong Kong
With little money but a dutiful wife,
And able to offer visitors a mean dim sum
With a gloss on every line in my library.
It would be an unarguable existence,
With the chance to be remembered by many,
But not, actually, a Buddhist.

The Prince Who Would Be Poet

Prince Hamlet, having already contemplated suicide due to the cognitive dissonance of seeing his mother move so quickly and pliably from mourning to marriage, encounters the spirit of his father, who informs him not only that he’s been eternally damned to hell for his deeds in life, but that he was murdered by Hamlet’s new step-father and it is the son’s sworn duty to revenge this with blood. Hamlet brushes off this extraordinary experience like so many flies (“Shall I couple hell? Fie” [1-5: 100]) and goes immediately back to hating his mother (“O most pernicious woman!” [1-5: 110]). It’s clear he has no interest in this courtly game of revenge, no particular love of his father or hatred for Claudius. It is all part of the relentless court intrigue that surrounds and imprisons him (“my prison house” [1-5: 19]) throughout the play and gives rise to his own constant voicing of his (well-founded) distrust of the motives of everyone who implores him to play the role more befitting a prince.

The role he’d rather play – and spends the bulk of his time pursuing – is using art – particularly stagecraft – to express the extremity of his circumstances. His witticisms and articulations of truth are a constant through whatever situation he finds himself in. What changes is the reaction of the other characters. In the first act his words are more or less ignored by Polonius as if they are a foreign language, whereas Rosencrantz and Guildenstern express frustration at not understanding his word play, being they are in the service of managing him in whatever devious way proves effective. The audience, in fact, can laugh at how rigid and obtuse these characters are in response to Hamlet’s incisive wit.

As Hamlet’s power to disrupt through the truth of his words emerges as an imagined threat, the same tendency of wit for truth’s sake is seen as "turbulent and dangerous lunacy" [3-1: 4], and the second half of the play is laced with uncorroborated claims by each of the main characters that Hamlet is mad. This, too, is humorous. Contrast, for example, Hamlet’s self-awareness, sense of responsibility for his actions and clear articulation of the moral corruption within the royal court with Ophelia’s descent into gibberish and suicide, how he, not she, is viewed as the one who is insane – nor is he given the same excuse for grief that she receives. For his part, Hamlet takes the accusation in stride, confidently stating, "I essentially am not in madness, / But mad in craft. [3-4: 209-210]" This is the “method [in the] madness” [2-2: 223-224], that even Polonius, obsessed with his delusion that Hamlet is hopelessly in love with his daughter, is forced to recognize when his “plentiful lack of wit” is subtly compared to a “weak ham” [2-2: 215-222].  

Hamlet’s obsession with articulating and staging the emotional truth of his experience comes into focus as the play progresses. The primary emotional experience is, of course, his mother’s perceived betrayal. The prince fashions many responses to the distress he feels, from judging her, himself and the world at large deficient (his so-called melancholy), but he doesn’t “come alive,” so to speak, until Polonius introduces the travelling players to court.

Even the other characters notice his change in disposition when this happens ("there did seem in him a kind of joy to hear of it" [3-1: 19-20]). In contrast to the dour conclusions he draws about human affairs in general, Hamlet tells Guildenstern, after grilling him with detailed questions about the actors and play, "'Sblood, there is something in this [drama] more than natural, if philosophy could find it out. [2-2: 390-391]" He warmly welcomes the play "masters" [2-2: 445], compares the lovers of plays to guiding falconers [2-2: 454], and, with similar generosity, announces to the troupe:

"He that plays the king shall be welcome; his majesty shall have tribute of me; the adventurous knight shall use his foil and target; the lover shall not sigh gratis; the humourous man shall end his part in peace; the clown shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickled o' the sere; and the lady shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt for't." [2-2: 343-350]

In other words, all that is denied to Hamlet in life is indulged in the play, thus warranting Hamlet’s decisive commitment to reward the troupe.  He also urges patronage on Polonius, for the sake of his own immortality: "Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty," [2-2: 557-559] adding “after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their [the actors] ill report while you live" [2-2: 551-552].

Hamlet goes well beyond patronage, however. He knows more about the play than the players. He spends inordinate stage time discussing the minutiae of handling actors, adapting from different sources and putting on a proper presentation. He quotes with relish Pyrrhus's lines, which follow an eerily similar trajectory to the vengeance directive his father gave him. Unlike his desultory mope through his own life, he is energized by the possibilities for this dramatic reenactment.  His request to insert a few lines of his own into the Murder of Gonzaga quickly mushrooms into what appears to be much more extensive involvement in the staging.

The thought that this is where his heart actually lies, and not in the world of power vacuums, religious schisms and blood obligations, never seems to occur to anyone, despite what is arguably the most unexpected and remarkable Hamlet soliloquy in the play [2-2: 577-634], in which he admits, begrudgingly and with deep disgrace, that he is a wordsmith rather than a king.

He begins with his envy of how actors can conjure seemingly genuine emotion out of empty literary vessels: “and all for nothing! / For Hecuba! / What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?” [2-2: 584-587] “What would he do,” Hamlet continues, “Had he the motive and the cue for passion / That I have? He would drown the stage with tears / And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, / Make mad the guilty and appal the free, / Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed / The very faculties of eyes and ears” [2-2: 587-593]. The sublime power of staged entertainments (and his emotional state) established, he focuses in on why he can’t himself speak his truth in this manner: his role as potential king (“And can say nothing – no, not for a king” [2-2: 596]). He concludes, however, that no one had forced silence on him, it was his own cowardice (“I am pigeon-liver'd and lack gall / To make oppression bitter” [2-2: 604-605]). For this he calls himself, among other epithets, a “remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain” [2-2: 608-609]. But it’s not the cowardice that causes such self-recrimination, it is the unseemliness – even unmanliness – of a would-be king to use poetry instead of statecraft to accomplish his ends, “That I, the son of a dear father murder'd, / Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, / Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words” [2-2: 612-614].

It is then he concocts the plan to reproduce in the staged play the circumstances of his father’s murder, if only to wrest some form of emotional justice from the overwhelming pathos of the situation (“For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak / With most miraculous organ” [2-2: 622-623]).  With the players of the real-life deed experiencing its mimetic reproduction, “I'll have grounds [stability as well as legal pretext] / More relative than this [the command of his father’s possibly tainted spirit]: the play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king" [2-2: 633-634].

In that context, Hamlet queries, seemingly at random, the meaning of life and death in his “to be or not to be” soliloquy. This is arguably the central play within the play, where Hamlet, freed of guilt for his poetic wit because it now has some practical purpose in the affairs of state, can unburden his gift. What follows is a fuller and more dramatic recapitulation of the dark truths he had been nursing up to that point, seemingly uncorked for no other purpose than the free expression of the emotions created by a world that gives no quarter to our human sense of right and wrong and provides no answers to our endless quests for meaning.  

His speech is interrupted by Ophelia, who is perplexed by her belief, based on his "words of so sweet breath composed / As made the things more rich" [3-1: 107-108], that he loved her. He continues in his truth-telling mode, correctly painting her as a tool of her scheming, ruthless father, and scolding her for all manner of feminine manipulation, and himself for falling prey to it. This poetic madness, the madness of truth-telling, prompts her to note “"Oh what a noble mind is here o’erthrown" [3-1: 164]. She changes her mind after the play is staged, however, remarking on Hamlet’s brilliant words, among other compliments, “"You are as good as a chorus, my lord" [3-2: 269].

Other reactions to the staged entertainment are even more instructive. Hamlet himself, at the pivotal moment when the Player Queen admits she killed her first husband, says "wormwood" twice [3-2: 204].  Wormwood was referenced in Romeo and Juliet as a way to wean children off their mother's nipple [1-3], suggesting the play's catharsis promises release from his mother’s control. 

Similarly, the Player King is portrayed with compassion and fairness for the difficulty of his position [3-2: 209-238], indicating Hamlet the maker of plays can understand and forgive through the transference of art far more readily than he can in “real life.” 

Horatio confirms the royal look of guilt in the show’s aftermath, but Hamlet seems more concerned with whether the intended audience liked it: "For some must watch, while some must sleep: / So runs the world away" [3-2: 299-300]. In fact, far from being incriminated for revenge as the courtier plotline would have one believe, both real sovereigns display the usual arrogance of play-goers. Queen Gertrude concludes, "The lady doth protest too much" [3-2: 254], in other words, the drama is overwrought, unrealistic. Claudius is only marginally more tuned to the subversion, in that Hamlet easily distracts him by denouncing the "knavish piece of work" [3-2: 264] (contrived by an “arrant knave,” himself).

A truer picture emerges later, when word comes from his mother: "your behavior hath struck her into amazement and admiration" [3-2: 344-345]. The show was indeed impressive, how it showed a mirror to life. This culminates in the “closet” scene [3-4: 11-117], where he literally shows his mother a mirror with his words. This results in a real admission of the truth of what has happened, and some acknowledgement of its emotional cost as the son finally finds, in the approval of his mother for his artistic efforts, the ability to express himself to her.

Claudius similarly feels the import of the play’s message, as he prays repentance and curses his compromised position. Hamlet finds the overheard prayer satisfying enough, for it shows the true suffering of the king. He wants no part of revenging a father whose sins were exposed "grossly, full of bread; / With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May" [3-4: 85-86]. Why should he be condemned, Hamlet reasons, while the murderer goes to heaven? Claudius obliquely seconds this by concluding, "My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go" [3-4: 102-103]. The clear implication is that words – not the prayers or machinations of kings – are what provide immortality to a soul.

Hamlet affirms this idea when he speaks to Horatio – while holding “immortal” skulls – on the futility of life's ambitions. He extends the lack of legacy from Yorick, his old truth-telling jester (who he seems to regard as a representation of himself) to the remote emperors Caesar and Alexander. He gives lambs and calves special privileges, however, for providing parchment on which to write [5-1: 116-118], as if words are, once again, more immortal than even the most well-intentioned deeds.

It is Horatio, Hamlet’s last honest man, that he tasks with telling his story, to confer the only immortality left among the doomed:                     

"Ere I could make a prologue to my brains,
            They had begun the play--I sat me down,
            Devised a new commission, wrote it fair:

I once did hold it, as our statists do,

A baseness to write fair and labour'd much

How to forget that learning, but, sir, now

It did me yeoman's service: wilt thou know

The effect of what I wrote?" [5-2: 34-41]

The irony imbedded inside Hamlet is that it would be considered beneath a noble, much less a prince, to sully himself with popular entertainments, yet it is this prince, through his words and Horatio’s account, who lives on, not the closed and treacherous world of kings he had spent so much time chronicling and trying to escape from. The human spirit, the true and beautiful response, lives forever. As does Hamlet himself.