I still haven’t read a book that I want to, The Closing of The Bi-Cameral Mind, but was told about another last night that argues the ‘Left Brain’ function has triumphed in the West, especially in the greedy and aggressive brutalities of super capitalism, so ‘rights’ driven and so battle front creating, and how does that make anyone alive really whole? Bill the Bard’s being the most complete example of a full consciousness to me, when the left and right were clearly still so united, here’s one to remind of the noblest purpose of the poem, the book, or the drama, apart from that vital purpose of entertaining, and especially in that measured distinction of ‘art’ and ‘reality’. Polixines’ crisis in The Winter’s Tale is an astonishing example of the collapse of a male psyche, written in the 16th century, yet with startling ‘modernity’, long before the wounded language of therapy, and of course through his own error too. So again Bill Shakespeare uses all his art and understanding to heal, breathing through nature’s power too, that culminates in that famous trick of the play I’ve mentioned before: ‘strike music’ and a ‘statue’ coming to life, as total harmony and love is restored. All art aspires to music! They staged Polixenes’ mounting tyranny brilliantly at the Round House, and his loss of truth, when his entire court turned their back on him, one by one. The first rule of fantasy fiction is that you cannot explicate on your own fiction, as you do it, because it’s very purpose is to allow the psyche it’s natural flow. But when a full and balanced consciousness is doing it right, it becomes fully aware of the staging of its own psychic props. Perhaps it’s why good storytelling really is kind of ‘magic’ and starts to sing and echo all over the place. When I was scruffing around as House Manager of Regent’s Park’s Open Air Theatre in London years ago I saw a man leaving during ‘Time’s’ Chorus, to sit under a tree and simply sob his heart out. I wish I was the mad knight in Monty Python and The Holy Grail, as both arms were lopped off, then legs, then the head, amid gruesome spurts of ketchup blood. – “A nothing”, “a scratch’, “Pah, a mere flesh wound.”
TIME:
“I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror
Of good and bad, that make and unfold error,
Now take upon me, in the name of Time,
To use my wings. Impute it not a crime
To me or my swift passage, that I slide
O’er sixteen years, and leave the growth untried
Of that wide gap; since it is in my power
To o’erthrow law, and in one self-born hour
To plant and o’erwhelm custom. Let me pass
The same I am, ere ancient’st order was
Or what is now receiv’d: I witness to
The times that brought them in; so shall I do
To the freshest things now reigning, and make stale
The glistering of this present, as my tale
Now seems to it…; “
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