To thine own self be true

Barbara Ann–The Beach Boys
Rainy Day Women–Bob Dylan
Mellow Yellow–Donovan
Yellow Submarine–The Beatles

correctly puts it, in the impeachment trial, we are seeing two views of America. One is the desperate, declining, lawless, olde white male supremacist lie version of America. The other is the more honest, truer, diverse, representative, emerging America trying to achieve and defend the original American Dream.

Who wrote it? Shakespeare.

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sing hymns at heaven’s gate:
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

(sonnet 29)

Only Shakespeare could have written it.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

(sonnet 116)

Shakespeare wrote it. Who else could have?

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad–
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof; and proved a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

(Sonnet 129)

Based on Wallace Shawn’s unconventional, intense stage play (really dialogues and conversation between three actors), the DVD version is not recommended until you have read the original play. Reason: It is a play mainly of ideas about the conflict between the haves and have-nots set in a dystopian future. The movie makes much more sense as a performance of the play, so see or read the play first to get the most out of both.

The movie version stars popular director Mike Nichols in a rare acting role of Jack, a charming Andre-style (as in My Dinner with Andre) cynic who has adopted high-culture trappings, only to cast them aside later. His high-society wife is effectively played by Miranda Richardson in a nuanced, powerful manner. The third character is the wife’s father, played by David de Keyser, only appearing in the first of the two acts. He is a memorable crusty columnist whom the rebels call to account for his snooty newspaper columns.

Directing the movie is veteran David Hare who also directed Nichols and Richardson in the original London stage premiere. I should add that author Shawn himself has played Jack in recent U.S. revival productions of the play and it is not hard to imagine that the Jack character evolved from Shawn’s frequently manic, ebullient, oddball persona.

In fact, this play has grown much more relevant during the Trump era. (Given that the latter is a low-brow ignoramus who played the anti-elite card card to get elected back in 2016–a fact that echoes the background rebellion behind the surface of this play in which the have-nots call the “lucky” ones to account and to a harshly violent reckoning.)

In short, this is the most relevant socio-political play of our time and reflects the declines of cultured elites and ruling classes in 1984ish times. Shawn, himself, looks like a prophetic genius in his ’90s forecasting this major changing of the social and political guard. His writing is weirdly powerful and pointed, culminating with a shock ending expressing the ultimate crazy wish-fulfillment of a hoi-polloi anti-establishment rube. Both play and movie are highly recommended.

(after Glenn Gould’s The Idea of North)

(We have administered these vast territories of North in an almost continuing state of mind…)

High latitude
vast flatness of poles
wind a whitewash
breathing lungs
stone-cold

(I have an enormous compulsion to look upon the polar seas and I find that this is growing apace each year, so that I really want to get it out of my system somehow…)

Cold enlarges consciousness
an inner feeling: hinterlands
We are stirred & sharpened
made precise, altered–
a mental nordicity

(The North is almost everything beyond the comfortable and familiar, everything frozen and dark, treeless and windswept…)

Arctic night
blizzard bone
drift of pelt & parka
polar values
break the ice in rime
evoke an introversion
like isotherms

(When men live in the North their values change…)

permafrost/permavision
cold Judas chill
solitude
& idea-flakes

(They live a lifetime and die when they emerge. They become citizens of a different country–that tapestry of tundra and taiga…)

blue-planed spirit
frozen subsoil
keen surface
cutting/nipping
uninhabited
vanishing point

(There was something spiritual about it, elements of magic having to do with the magnetic pole…)

brush-blade pointillism
breath & breathe
vision elemental
inland seas
frozen sonata

(Something really does happen to people up here…)

ice age cold snap
cold storage
icefields
pro-found snow-bound

(It cares so little and sort of diminishes you…)

pack-ice growlers
overhang design
spirit gathers hoarfrost
terminal moraine

(It looks so odd and cold you wouldn’t want to live there…)

chilblain shiver
raw polar night
boreal abstract
a treeline sensibility
gather & evoke
this nordic index

Not exactly a day to put out cats for nomadic travels unless quick popsicle pusses are the goal.

Saw some guy on Weather Network driving a nail into a board with a frozen banana.

Wife reminded me that in ’67 girls were still expected to wear dresses or skirts in high school, so the girls changed from pants to the expected mandated attire between the front doors of the school when coming in from -30 or so outside. Crazy stuff.

Winter City? Frozen North? (fact)
Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”
or Sam McGee incarnate.
Too bloody cold for rats.
Snow blown across Xmas potholes.
Someone else’s bad dream
rammed down a senior’s throat
like feckless mayors, windrows
or snow-covered bike-lanes.
City of a dead downtown
awaiting invisible people.
Awaiting the day when the power
conks out for gutted grid-hours
and all will simply freeze and die:
pets, plants, taps, houses, taxpayers.
Or else as some huddle in their monster trucks
idling the pipe-dream mirage
until all that UCP gas runs out.

with his latest bang-on video about Marjorie Taylor Greene, available online.