On The Verdict

 

“O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

In my ordinary life, here, in the today moment, my kitten is going OUTSIDE for the first time and loving bouncing all over the yard in a way that makes me laugh. Alive.

It's interesting because it made him joyful.

We could all perceive that joy, and we all like him, and his exploration and new freedoms give us a feeling of hope. Strange to say. But it is really wonderful to watch a kitten climb a tree for the first time, or chase a bug, watch him listen to a bird. Having my children all home for the weekend was-exquisite.

Everyone enjoyed going to see, for our 12th or maybe 13th year, Shakespeare in the park at CaLutheran, put on by the Kingsman troupe. You sit in the yard under the trees and relax with a picnic. Weather was perfect. We saw the Tempest yesterday.

Interestingly this is the play where we think Shakespeare is reflecting on being a playwright-on giving it up, on his death-as he says-soon every third thought will be about my death. 

The play was put on very well.
But as it went along I started to think about leaving teaching and how what he had to say about writing and the theater-this closes with him facing his own personal darkness (and, I hope, his light). I understand his arc, as much as I could in my ordinary meddle from living my life.

I didn't love Prospero in this version. He was down right annoying for much of the play. Rushing his lines, shorting us the pleasure of speeches I know but went so quickly I failed to catch until midstream,  because they were trod through at a breakneck pace-probably to get us out by 11:30. 

But you think of him as a puppet master. You aren't really supposed to warm up-he's written to be a burr. In this version I suspected everything-his relating to his daughter, his manipulation, his making peace with his enemies. 

An actor on a stage, evoking and provoking your responses-predicting them. You sit clay in his hands-he is telling you this....

Plenty of time for me to think about how I got to a point in teaching awhile ago where I could see these elements, that I saw so clearly in The Tempest.
Because he chose to open the curtain and reveal this.

When we came home my daughter who remained home had made a peach pie, repaired a cabinet and totally reorganized and improved the kitchen pantry. A shelf fell-she dealt with broken jars and things yucky. I'm glad I just never saw it. That seemed a real boon.

Someone switched on the TV, and the "verdict" was in-it was midnight! A verdict on a case my husband watched almost entirely.

And sort of by way of being in the vicinity I had too.

It surprised me, and was what he predicted would happen.

Shakespeare could take such as this stuff and produce a play. 

Give it the life in the arts that it calls to find. Talking Head News cannot do that, nor restore to any of us the news that once was. We watched a lot of footage today, the day after,  of key moments in civil rights struggles, news footage. It was largely in black and white.

There was Lyndon Johnson talking about WHY we needed a Voting Rights Act.

News, reported. Serious, real, sincere. Headless.

We watched, somehow we let that voting right get undone. Not too many Talking News Heads on that. That seems a crime to me.

Food stamps just flew out the window.

A head  show silent.

And now a kid in a hoodie.

A playwright might be needed to turn this kid into a young man in his life, what his prospects are, what his motivations, his hopes and prayers might be. His angry chubby friend, his texts, his restlessness. What he is, what he might be, who he might love, what he has dared to challenge out on a evening walk. A kid that might look like a President's.

I think Shakespeare would see Zimmerman, his killer, as the complex one, the character tragically flawed, talking out to an audience, explaining, complaining, debating, justifying, -perhaps the character that is so large and so small. With the lawyers-gathered around. So sincere. So easy to see.

I think he'd cast him carefully as well. When it goes to the Globe.

Nothing clean and fresh.

This would be the stench of our collective shame.

It issues a challenge I believe to our writers, artists, poets, to take from this and not grind out a million dollar settlement. We need art that will cement a Trayvon into the annals of our collective consciousness. Here is the story of what happened one night in the rain when somethings gone very wrong, very awry, in a world they met to do battle. In the age of the gun.

Maybe there is a truth in the thought that we are entering a time when

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

The Talking News Heads told us the prosecution was masterful, a verdict comes, The Heads say it was lost by a prosecution not "really invested." We watched, told by Sunny this, by another that, until the emotions churn. we are told it might lead to riots they can cover. They can bring us 24 hour commentary, ah, the rage.

I can see Shakespeare turn those Heads into a Greek Chorus. I can see the sinister swirl of the media machine. 

We can watch the book dealers, the tabloids, the pitchforks.

I can see this as a play.

Because, to be straightforward, if we have a great mind writing, great actors on our stage, they need to come to the fore. To make something greater than the all of us here have done.

Of a mess we have wrought.

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest 

There is a clarion call -to the young-to those with experience too, for a voice for a child in a hoodie that liked to eat Skittles and stepped out on a rainy evening, never to return to this earth....

I can see the stage is set for us to raise our eyes to better understand the tragedy that the loss of his life is to us all. Make it a damn tragedy please.

 

 “So. Lie there, my art.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

 In violence, chaos, senselessness I always turn to creation, to art, to life.

I hope the voices among us turn to their arts, weave their magic, and help the all of us to the path of understanding not only one another, but the meaning that lies today completely untold and outside of our present knowing. Let us place it into history. Open his mighty book, please.