Sometime early in 1599 (and it is a shame the exact date is not known, because a global holiday should be celebrated on that day, with simultaneous recitations in every tongue on earth), Shakespeare wrote his most important speech with, at its heart, the most important word he ever wrote. If James Shapiro is to be believed (and I fully intend to believe him) Shakespeare himself spoke the speech at the first performance.
O! for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention;
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene.
Then should the war-like Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire,
Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that hath dar’d
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confin’d two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts:
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth;
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass; for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who, prologue-like, your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge our play.
That great ‘SUPPOSE’, exploding and arcing like a firework, itself the fulcrum of the speech.
Cast out pre-conception and opinion, forget yourself. Look, hear, taste, touch, smell – feel – and, flying beyond the merely mechanical reflex, join all that you experience with all that you have experienced and all that you find somewhere inside your mind and heart that you might experience – and SUPPOSE. Let the play, the painting, the song, the view, the person, the bird, the blade of grass on your imaginary forces work. How deeply sometimes you have to sound within yourself to find a response. How much deeper and more involving is the response because of that. How much more are you enlivened, alive! How much more clearly defined – like the hoof-prints you can see – are the objects of your imaginative attention. How much more profound, how much more complex they are than when you shone the light of your proud opinion upon them and furnished us with your appraisal. The ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ is not merely a handy tip for theatre-goers; it is the imaginative acceptance of the universe. Perhaps all the world is a stage, after all.
* * * *
Virginia Woolf longed to write “the greatest book in the world. That is what the book would be that was made entirely, solely and with integrity of one’s thoughts. Suppose one could catch them before they became ‘Works of Art’? Catch them hot and sudden as they rise in the mind – walking up Asheham Hill, for instance. Of course one cannot; for the process of language is slow and deluding.”
Even so small and unlearned a book as this contains plenty of words (probably far too many) and each of them is not quite right, is ‘slow and deluding’. Language rather than reality. A carping reader will certainly find phrases to discredit to his own satisfaction; a generous reader will understand well enough, gently hear and kindly judge what was meant. If this has failed adequately to communicate reality (and of course it has, as I warned from the outset) the inadequacy is surely mine and not reality’s!
All theory is grey, but the precious tree of life is green.
Forget the theory and the book. Look at the precious tree (and the sun, and the mist, and the person) in all its vital sufficiency. STA
David Jones, Major Hall's Bothy
Post-script
Well, that was concluding if not, perhaps, conclusive. Nature does not ‘do’ cadences, those satisfying final chords of the symphony that tell the audience when to clap. The end of the writing is not the end of the book any more than it began ex nihilo. Where there’s life, there’s STA. [Footnote: and perhaps, as the stump in the sands at Borth tells us, even the dead are a work-in-progress.] Just as the yew-tree at Defynnog, older than Stonehenge or the Pyramids, still bristles with new shoots from every pore, every day brings new books, new conversations, films, views and visions which could fill more and more pages, but we have to wrap up sometime and it might as well be now. Here, changing metaphor one final time, are some last sappy branches to crackle on the embers:
Men that look upon my outside, perusing onely my condition, and fortunes, do erre in my altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders. The earth is a point not onely in respect of the heavens above us, but of that heavenly and celestiall part within us …. There is surely a peece of Divinity in us, something that was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the Sun. Nature tels me I am the Image of God as well as Scripture; he that understands not thus much, hath not his introduction or first lesson, and is yet to begin the Alphabet of man. Let me not injure the felicity of others, if I say I am as happy as any, Ruat coelum Fiat voluntas tua, salveth all [Let the skies fall, Thy will be done]; so that whatsoever happens, it is but what our daily prayers desire. In briefe, I am content, and what should providence adde more? Surely this is it wee call Happinesse
Thomas Browne, Religio Medici
If you know yourself, or God, or the world,
you must of necessity enjoy it.
Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations
But yet in it shall be
Isaiah 6. 13
No hay camino, se hace camino al andar
Antonio Machado, Caminante no hay camino
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