James Howard’s Romeo and Juliet,
or, Revolver (an intermission).
John Holbo cites Nietzsche and makes my head ring, once more proving how inadvisable it is to do this sort of work without a license, or at least a basic grounding in the classics:
The stronger the roots which the inner nature of a person has, the more he will appropriate or forcibly take from the past. And if we imagine the most powerful and immense nature, then we would recognize there that for it there would be no frontier at all beyond which the historical sense would be able to work as an injurious overseer. Everything in the past, in its own and in the most alien, this nature would draw upon, take it into itself, and, as it were, transform into blood. What such a nature does not subjugate it knows how to forget. It is there no more. The horizon is closed completely, and nothing can recall that there still are men, passions, instruction, and purposes beyond it. This is a general principle: each living being can become healthy, strong, and fertile only within a horizon. If he is incapable of drawing a horizon around himself and too egotistical to enclose his own view within an alien one, then he wastes away there, pale or weary, to an early death. Cheerfulness, good conscience, joyful action, trust in what is to come—all that depends, with the individual as with a people, on the following facts: that there is a line which divides the observable brightness from the unilluminated darkness, that we know how to forget at the right time just as well as we remember at the right time, that we feel with powerful instinct the time when we must perceive historically and when unhistorically. This is the specific principle which the reader is invited to consider: that for the health of a single individual, a people, and a culture the unhistorical and the historical are equally essential.
And, well, yeah, though there’s a demon on my shoulder muttering sardonically, what, you have to repeat history sometimes, to give your life some direction? (What comes after farce? —And if Rumsfeld were to look it over and then note that gosh, there’s a distressing lack of meaningful metrics, well, I might allow as how he is not without his point on this one.) —And so I’m stuck halfway, trying to figure out how to say something not altogether unmeaningful in the matter of World Building v. Allegory, though that’s not it—Tlön v. Quantum Mechanics, perhaps, or Schrödinger v. That Darn Cat—and comes now the Urbane Sophisticate and the Rude Mechanical tumbling ass-over-teakettle down an astroturfed hill, about to crash into Samuel Delany, who’s waiting in the wings for his spearcarrier’s cue as Siegfried bellows his last. And while I’m trying to figure out whether the next move up my sleeve is necessary, or needlessly petty, Nietzsche through Holbo whacks me upside the head with the Martian’s lesson: knowledge is power is a crock. The more you know, the less you can do, and that’s the hidden snare in the Wiccan Rede. (But isn’t that the point? Strength is for the weak! That way, you never have to do anything.) —But this has dissolved into a mush of inside jokes and personal shorthand; airy gestures in the general direction of what I think I’m trying to say, rather than hard work with muscular prose, digging in to figure it out. So I’m off to the drawing board again. In the interests of slaphappiness and the general spirit of what-the-fuck, I’ll leave you with this:
Romeo and Juliet, Wrote by Mr. Shakespear : Romeo, was Acted by Mr. Harris ; Mercutio, by Mr. Betterton ; Count Paris, by Mr. Price, The Fryar, by Mr. Richards ; Sampson, by Mr. Sandford; Gregory, by Mr. Underhill ; Juliet, by Mrs. Saunderson ; Count Paris’s Wife, by Mrs. Holden.
Note, There being a Fight and Scuffle in this Play, between the House of Capulet, and House of Paris ; Mrs. Holden Acting his Wife, enter’d in a Hurry, Crying, O my Dear Count! She Inadvertently left out, O, in the pronunciation of the Word Count! giving it a Vehement Accent, put the House into such a Laughter, that London Bridge at low Water was silence to it.
This Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, was made some time after into a Tragi-comedy, by Mr. James Howard, he preserving Romeo and Juliet alive; so that when the Tragedy was Reviv’d again, ’twas played Alternately, Tragical one Day, and Tragicomical another; for several Days together.
Count Paris's wife?
Isn't the point of R&J that Juliet, secretly married to Romeo, is now about to married to Paris, so she drinks the death-imitating potion, setting off the tragedy?
Oh, wait. The writer has forgotten the name Montague, and given the name Paris to Romeo's family. Gotcha.
Huh. I'll be talking to some art school kids next week about world building vs. allegory in the works of Delany.
(And urbane, nothing. If I could, I'd be reaching up your sleeve myself to see what you got there. It'd have to get pretty danged petty to count as needless in *this* game.)
If Nietzsche's guff about the Dumb Horizon is correct then don't you have to sit and nod this week every time you hear some RNC operative or diminutive grandma gush about how Ronald Reagan "made them feel optimistic again" or "made them believe in America again"? In fact, aren't you required to shout "Hell yes!" and put your copy of "The Use and Self-Abuse of History" down your pants one more time?
I realize this has little to do with the aesthetic context in which the Nietzsche quotation was urged, but a) the aestheticization of politics so as to handicap the political game in favor of the Right was Nietzsche's primary modus operandi, and the proliferating invocation of his little "allegories" in any and all non-political contexts helps to serve that political function, and b) context? context? You and your piddling details! I have exuberantly forgotten the ENTIRE CONTEXT of the argument, which makes me stronger than you!
I like that Spider-Man post though.
Except doing whatever it is you do isn't the point, or at least it's not my point. It's not that Nietzsche has opened my eyes to some essential truth; he's just said rather neatly how it is that people can cheerfully take up, oh, the imagery of the dolchstoß, without a care in the world as to its provenance, its echoes, its connotations. (That these people then get so righteously indignant when those echoes are pointed out—hey, look at the slime-trail you're leaving, look at the shadows under your eyes, look at the blood in your ink—means their horizon isn't nearly so neatly sealed as Nietzsche might have wanted.) —The dumb horizon is all that makes the hagiography of Reagan possible, indeed, but a horizon that dumb is almost as useless as no horizon at all.
And yet, none of us has a cable channel.
—There's also the other side to this coin I'm flipping: the literary (for want of a better word) criticism. Nietzsche's a little more directly useful there: it is all too possible to get so caught up in the world you're building that you never get around to telling the story that is the vehicle for that world; without a utilitarian dumb horizon in place (the waterline on your iceberg, say), you risk overwhelming your readers (for all the various ways one can read a work) with detail at the expense of—what, exactly? Narrative?
I mean, what I could really go for right now is a book-length essay by W.G. Sebald about a long walk taken through the deserted, ruined halls of Ten Sleep Wall, there above the broken coast of the northernmost continent in the world-sea of the third planet out from alpha Centauri A, and whatever divagations might be spawned by the 22nd-century litter he spies along the way. Which leaves me where, exactly?