God's Spies
On the possibility of revolutionary privacy
Towards the end of King Lear, the dissociated monarch who has brought downfall on his own head, and in a sense, the entire kingdom, declares in the face of imminent punishment:
No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon us the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.
T.S. Eliot thought the brilliance of Shakespeare’s writing was epitomized with: “No, no, no, no!” How could an infantile repetition, a senescent tantrum, typify genius poetry? The simplest word in the language repeated four times. Because at that very moment, the declaration is charged with the entire scope and stakes of the play. The human condition. It’s called dramatic timing.
Though I am susceptible to and prefer a baroque aesthetic, I can’t deny the power of phraseology when it turns—in James Baldwin’s keen phrasing—“clean as bone.” When I think of Shakespeare’s poetic powers, I call to mind any number of touchstones, like this one from Hamlet: “Whose phrase of sorrow / Conjures the wandering stars.” There is so much thought and architecture compressed in that branching clause. Yet Shakespeare could also write at the end of his career: “The day is done, and we are for the dark.” Worthy of Emily Dickinson, no?
But let’s talk about Fantasy. . .