i watched Avatar today. the movie was good. i enjoyed it very much. but sitting for too long gave a ‘butt cramp’ tho. haha.

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4 more days to enjoy 2009 before the big 2010 comes!

Quentin Crisp was born on Christmas Day 1908, but was probably used to people forgetting about it on the day. This is a belated tribute to the author of The Naked Civil Servant and unheralded philosopher.

This three-part documentary from 1970 finds Crisp at a curious mid-point. He’s past the trials of young adulthood which saw him literally beaten up on the street for flamboyant campery, but not yet settled into his elderly, august years as a “stately homo”. I love his delivery in this; that inimitable voice delivering opinions and observations of such elegance and insight as to constitute a masterclass in life itself.

About XIIDX, the Strange Flowers XII Days of Xmas Film Festival

COMING BACK WITH A VENGEANCE VERY SOON!!!

Waxwork Romy as Sissi

In the English-speaking world, Elisabeth of Austria, wife of Emperor Franz Joseph, is arguably less known than her cousin, Ludwig II of Bavaria. The two shared a dark, melancholic beauty and both preferred luxurious solitude over court formalities and withdrew as much as possible from public life, Ludwig into his dream castles, Elisabeth into ceaseless wanderings around Europe. Their family, the Wittelsbachs, had married so often into the Habsburgs (Franz Joseph’s family) that the gene pool had grown shallow and murky and even by the dangerously in-bred standards of 19th century European royalty they stood out for their flamboyant lunacy.

Today, in Austria and Germany Elisabeth enjoys a widespread cult of veneration under the name Sissi, a phenomenon which reminds you why we take the word “kitsch” from German. This number from André Rieu, the Liberace of the fiddle, may also give you some insight:

Romy as Sissi

Above all, Sissi is associated in the German-speaking world with the trio of 1950s movies based on her life starring Romy Schneider, which appear in Christmas TV schedules with grim inevitability. These films have contributed to a generalised, tourist-friendly 19th century nostalgia whose version of Sissi has all the nuanced sophistication of something knitted to cover a toilet roll. The beautiful Austrian actress would come to hate the role of Empress as much as Sissi herself did, and like her was no stranger to tragedy. Both women were devastated by the loss of an only son; Crown Prince Rudolf died in an apparent murder-suicide with his mistress in 1889, Schneider’s son in an accident in 1981.

Sissi as Sissi

The real Empress in fact disdained the idealised Vienna of Strauss waltzes and Sacher torte and cared little for her subjects. The feeling was mutual; Sissi was absent from court for so long that the Austrians more or less forgot about her until after her death.

In Visconti’s 1972 film Ludwig, Romy Schneider once again played Sissi, but this time she was allowed the full run of the empress’s complex persona with all its morbidity, nihilism and caustic irony. In this atmospheric, almost wordless sequence, she revisits her cousin’s palaces:

Sissi longed for her own death, the surprise was that she was felled by an anarchist’s dagger in 1898 before she got round to it herself. Schneider died in 1982 of a mixture of alcohol and sleeping pills, though it’s unclear if it was accident or suicide. The two women are now united in death, peering blankly from a hundred coffee-table books, their manifold idiosyncrasies wiped away to leave them as hollow paragons of goodness and beauty.

oh man..my last draft abt this post was deleted by accident and i cant remember what i wrote! darn.

anyway, yes i watch anime now. but not the hardcore ones like naruto.

and yes right now i’m watching my 4th anime. its been so long since the last time i watch one.

animes i’ve watched:

1. Ouran Highschool Host Club (rating 100/10)
2. Nodame Cantabile (rating 6/10) i like the jdorama sooo very much better!
3. Fruit Basket (rating 10/10) its hilariousss

and right now i am watching Kaasan – Mom’s life. and it is suuuppeerrr funny! i hope i wont be like her haha.

Ok. Some months back I wrote about someone whom I hold dear.

Last night ’someone’ just dumped me.

I’m confused. ?

You Don’t Have to Be Buddhist to Know Nothing shows that, like many Eastern sages, deep thinkers in the West also recognized and pondered nonexistence as an essential component and complement of existence itself. Organized in short topical chapters from “Knowing Nothing” to the “Joy of Unknowing” and “Nothing is Sacred,” the verbal snapshots captured in this collection create a coherent work of wisdom, humor, and wonder.

“I love talking about nothing…. It is the only thing I know anything about.” —OSCAR WILDE

As Konner writes in the book’s introduction:

“Nothing can and does co-exist with Everything, because everything in the natural world, we are learning, has its equal and opposite force—matter and antimatter; electrons and protons, and so forth. We accept ‘equal and opposite’ because we trust science. We also trust, from science, that Nature abhors a vacuum. If a vacuum occurs, nature rushes in to fill it. But where and what would Nature rush in to fill if there wasn’t a vacuum? Without Emptiness there would be no opportunity for something new, or something else, to occur. Where would Something happen? Stars disappearing. Novas appearing. Leaves falling. New leaves growing. One generation dying, another being born. Nothing is the still center of the wheel of life. Nothing is the core of creation. In the dark evanescence between equal and opposite, the Universe ignites.”

As dryness prevails with no clouds in sights or those roaming the skies are bereft of moisture, I cannot fish for ideas in the erstwhile pool of imagination, for it is long sucked by the intensity of times. So, I decide to set out on a ramble towards nothingness, than waiting in futility for something non existent. I wander about in the vast expanse of the Writers Block when my eyes catch a glimpse of something shimmering, ‘Ah, thats it, move on lest it fades!’. And it fades the moment I reach there. In this wilderness I’ve found good allies in mirages; they play games with me. But like every other game this game has to end and I dont want to be a loser. I’ve already have my hands full of emptiness. I better make some rain that will fill the pools of my imagination where fish of different ideas will brood to give me a choice to catch ideas from.

P.S: ‘Fishing for ideas in a pool’ is something I heard from Cav

Any number of catastrophes could befall Katie Spotz in the next three months.

She knows them all, and will rattle off all the potential and likely issues that could arise when she’s by herself, surrounded by the nothingness of the Atlantic Ocean¦

Source:
http://www.cleveland.com/sports/index.ssf/2009/12/mentors_katie_spotz_prepares_a.html

i had a friend request (facebook) from my primary school friend this morning. at first i did not recognize her face. even her fb name. but as i went thru her fb and read some of the posts posted by her friends, OH MI GOD. it is my primary school friend!

we’re not that close back then. in fact, we barely know each other at all. but we recognize each others faces and nicknames thats all.

actually what i’m trying to say is, she looks sooo different now. i mean the face is still the same of course but its the whole appearance thing. she has turned from the ugly duckling to a beautiful swan!

back then when we were in school, she’s a very comot girl, kampung-like-dressing and ntahlah. everything was just not right. but now, she looks very pretty, wears very up-to-date outfit and living a modern lifestyle. man, she is so different.

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these 2-3 days i’ve been checking out my primary school friends fbs. just to see what they’ve been up to, what they’re doing and how they look like now. some of them dont change much but there are some who really transformed. girls especially. out of the many school friends fbs i browsed, 2 of them are already married. 1 girl and 1 guy. time flies fast la. now we are in the-working-and-marriage phase. it was only like what? 12-13 yrs ago je baru.

dulu pergi skolah naik basikal, or mini bus. early in the morning we have to assemble at the assembly point ans sing negaraku, lagu negeri selangor and lagu malaysia. then baca ikrar which i can soo totally remember till now, and every friday morning we have to recite asma-ul-husna sampai dari terkebil-kebil baca from the paper until dah hafal macam pro.

then we had this competition for the ‘best garden’. each classes were given a small land and we have to like tanam whatever u want and by the end of each month the most beautiful and well kept garden will win. but that wasnt the case for my class. we suck at it. haha

talking bout my class. 6 cempaka. 6C is the coolest class in the school la masa tu wey. we’re a combination of intelligence and craziness. we can score papers, but at the same time had fun like hell. unlike 6A (top class duh), they’re smart alrite, but they’re sooo BORINGG. skema dowh. hehehehehe

i miss those days. i enjoyed my school days. school is fun. i’m sure when we were small we were like, “tak sbrnye nak habis skolah…boleh kerja, dapat duit sendiri bla bla bla”. but now, its the total opposite. i wanna go to schooooool. i dont wanna think abt work and money and problems and life. its toooo depressing. gggaaaah. *sigh*

Our weather is cold, but the sky is bright and clear for the first time in a while. It’s nice to not have those dreary damn clouds being so smug above us.

I once met a tree,
Who said to me,
Wrap your arms around me,
And I will love you.

Love me it did,
And I never let go,
Not even when it said,
It’s time to go.

Here I stand with,
My arms still wrapped around,
Space, Emptiness and Nothing.

For it is gone,
And with it taken its love,
But not mine.

i watched new moon yesterday. i kno  i’m a bit ketinggalan coz the movie has been out for 2 weeks plus i think. but what the heck.

but what do i think abt the movie?

first of all let me first tell u that i received a lot of negative feedbacks from ppl who already watched new moon. they said its a waste of time, less action n a lot of talking, less edward and more jacob n so on and so forth. only 1 person said that the movie was alrite.

but being a twilight fan (becoz of edward), i just gotta have to watch it. regardless what ppl say. so i did.

and what do i think abt the movie?

it was aweeeeesome! haha. why?

1. there’s a lot of emotional part. from edward leaving bella, and the part when she was on total brokenhearted phase, to meeting jacob back, and the whole cinema scene and banyaklah! i cried few times in the cinema dude.  hate to admit it but i cried! lol. somehow i feel connected to what bella is facing. from personal exp of cos.  and PLUS,  i was already feeling a bit depressed right before i watched the movie due to something.
2. eventho i’m not very fond of jacob from the first twilight, it kinda sorta different for the second movie. one, maybe because he cuts the scary long hair and two, becoz he was shirtless almost the entire movie and MY GOD, what an abs! it looks soo surreal. its the perfect abs yo. i was literally smiling seeing the sight of it. (haha!) but of course not when boyfrie is looking at u tho. nak kena ke. hahaha.




3. besides jacob,  the..other 4 werewolves if i’m not mistaken, are ALL HOT. they cast a bunch of verrry good looking ppl la wey. i wouldnt mind dating a werewolf if it is as hot as the guys in the movie. heheheheheh.



4. the king EDWARD. whoaaaa he is still as gorgeous as before! but the real robert pattinson is not as alluring as the character. so i’m not in love with robert, i’m in love with edward. his character is just unbelievably hot.

but eventho i said the movie was awesome, actually there’s also a lot of part that i think is quite tak best la. for axample, victoria’s part in the movie, and the part when alice n bella were rushing to save edward. tapi i malas nak elaborate la.

but i got one question tho. is that Dakota Fanning playing as vampire? coz the girl looks soo much like her. if its a yes, that means she’s all grown up! and soo very pretty.

well, thats all from me.

note to self: i love edward i love edward i love edward i like jacob too i like jacob too i like jacob hot bod too.

I sit there and as the minutes tick away I begin to realize –
I don’t even speak their language…
Their voices droned on and on
And I listened… but nothing was worth commenting on
I didn’t understand what they meant

They laughed and I feigned a chuckle
They gasped and a tried to frown
But inside I thought – how strange
They gave me sideways glances
They could see I was far off – they could see I was alone
But I was anything but lost

Then I just laughed
And then a real smile spread across my face
And I thought to myself people are so silly
I still didn’t understand
I laughed because it was utterly useless
To even feign that I could live on the surface like they did
That I could find their worlds amusing
But as hard as I tried I couldnt bring myself to smile when I could see the world that enveloped their individual realms

I just want to show them
To show them that words can have meaning
That laughter can resonate for years
That joy is something that runs through our veins
That love is something that exists without a need for expression
But they’ll never know
Because they choose not to…

So I laugh and I cry
Because I feel alone
And they’ll never know
What it means to really live

In that moment, I wished I were far off sitting on the edge of a rocky shore -
At least when nature speaks to me it makes perfect sense
and when nature sees me smile it smiles back …
and for a brief moment everything seems as it should

And in that moment I realized there was no use pretending
It was the source of closure I had been looking for
The revelation of truth makes reality so much more bearable
But sometimes I still wish
That I could sit across the table from someone
And have them smile back at me the way nature does

________________________________________________________
And I knew their eyes were accusing
I knew they could see right through me
They knew I wasn’t really there
I scoffed down the food

And tried to confront them to be polite but
They still didn’t understand
How could I make them understand?
No matter how I analyzed the sounds and syllables and expressions they had
Nothing they said had meaning
Their pain is faux
Their joy is short lived
Their lives are empty
And this made me laugh

And then I began to cry as I watched a part of humanity die…

I just want to show them
To show them that words can have meaning
That laughter can resonate for years
That joy is something that runs through our veins
That love is something that exists without a need for expression
But I know they’ll never know
So I laugh and I cry
Because I feel alone
And they’ll never know
What it means to really live

___________________

Here I breathe, the protest from over worked lungs.

Here I lay, the complaints of my body from not enough sleep.

Here I contemplate, stories of my youth, ideas of faith, the world that sleeps.

Here I sit stewing in my own emotions.

Here i accept the confines of a body that doesn’t let my soul breathe.

How it longs to breathe,

It longs to experience the freedom;

To feel the existence of the world as One.

Peace reigns supreme through the existence of the one supreme being.

We experience Her as He experiences us.

We are one.

I feel the restrictions of my limitations,

The desperate attempts to put the pieces back that I have scattered throughout time and space.

I feel the loss of the one I loved.

I feel the space between each breath.

I feel the space between the last kiss and the next slap in the face.

I feel the nothingness and the everythingness.

I feel.

I

Feel.

In it all there is only one;

one voice,

one truth,

one simple word that rings through my heart.

Freedom.

My name is Rochelle Ann Foulk
I am a Child of God and a Child of light.
I am a Writer.
I am the Dragon.
I am His Dragon.
And I say this to you because;

I am Free.

And so shall you be.

Wisdom of the Dragon, Rochelle Foulk

Author, The Stone People

http://www.rochellefoulk.wordpress.com

Hi! Back again with some photos of sunflowers that I am growing indoors. Sunflowers are my favorite type of flower. I had no idea that they were capable of growing indoors until I saw mini ones for sale at a flower shop. They were the cutest things. They make really great gifts and are fairly inexpensive!

[click on the pictures to enlarge the images]

The very first seeds that I planted around November 24 are sadly dying!

I’m guessing it is because of improper drainage. I didn’t put stones at the bottom of the pot to help with the drainage and above is the result of my laziness. It’d be nice if these came back to life but as you can see it seems hopeless.

I planted new seeds on December 8. After five days, I started to see some little fellas peeking through.

These are pictures of them the following day. These buggers grow fast!

I recently added fertilizer spikes for indoor plants. Because it is winter and the heat is constantly on which can dry out the soil, I try to water them once a day, if not twice. Just a little sprinkle is all you need considering the size of the pot. There are about 2 or 3 seeds per pot.

More updates soon!

Like many of Shakespeare’s works Hamlet is a play about the nature and the force of language. Unlike many of Shakespeare’s works, however, language in Hamlet is a supreme activating force. Throughout the play it is language, or in Shakespeare’s terminology ‘speech’ that calls into being the action of the play and the surface of appearances that this actions moves across. More often than not, Hamlet has been viewed as a play without action, and it is this propensity toward inaction that has been seen as the central contextual anxiety of the play. Arguments concerning the action of Hamlet tend to focus on what is not happening, about the role of meditation, mediation, and introspection, how those ‘natural philosophies’, impede or disavow the action of vengeance so central to the structure of the play. These arguments are by no means unfounded and it is the angst of inaction that drives the core of the play, that lends it its ‘tragic’ structure, but like a majority of Shakespeare’s works, Hamlet is at its heart about the nature of language. Hamlet, in its drive toward the speech act as the prime motivator of action in the play uses language as a guiding device that consciously calls this theatrical world into being, language is, throughout the play, a force both generative and destructive. The speech act as deus ex machina cannot be overly represented in a discussion of Hamlet,  but in addition to the status of language, or because of this status, the speech act should also be viewed as one of the governing principles of the play, if not its central figure. In effect, language is not a means to convey desire but is in itself the creator of desire and the facilitator of action in the body of Hamlet; what Bruce Danner in his essay “Speaking Daggers” notes is “this congruence between the natural world and narrative language [in Hamlet]” (44).

The calling forth of the world with speech begins with the play’s opening phrase “Who’s there?” (1.1. 1). This question can be seen as the lexicon logical framework for one of the major dilemmas of the play i.e. Hamlet’s questioning of his nature, of his identity and attached to that the nature of his will and motivation, a dilemma which is couched in the following line which carries the imperative “unfold yourself” (1.1. 2). These speech acts reach into the darkness surrounding the scene and call forth the two first players. This calling forth is then echoed in a like manner by Barnardo who, with his narrative concerning the appearance of the Ghost (1.1. 33-37), calls forward the Ghost in a way that suggests that the speech, the language of description, activates the presence of the Ghost, or as Danner has it in the above mentioned essay, “the Ghost’s subsequent presence functions less as an interruption to the tale than a completion of it, as if Bernard’s words take shape in the apparition itself” (44). In addition to the language in this early section bringing forward elements of the world (and the unnatural world), there is the motivation for bringing Horatio into the scene, which is, for Barnardo and Marcellus, to “speak to it” (1.1. 27), and where Barnardo and Marcellus demand speech of Horatio, Horatio echoes this same demand of the Ghost to have the Ghost “[s]tay, speak, speak, I charge thee speak” (1.1. 49.). This opening emphasizes over and again how crucial the operation of language is in Hamlet, not only is the charge in this opening scene that speech be used and addressed, but it is also worth noting that it is action, the casting of Marcellus’ partisan which drives the Ghost from the scene; this leaves the mystery of the Ghost, his identity and reason for appearing, intact.

It is this selfsame force, the ability of words to circumscribe reality, in the ‘natural’ world of the play that also defines the logic of the action in the court of Elsinore, where the condition of ‘finding out’ generally hinges on acts of verbal deceit, of coloring over the world with language, and thereby changing its appearance. In order to look closely at this logic of action, it is important to first look at how speech is used by the inhabitants of Elsinore. Appearance, physical appearance, is the first matter addressed to Hamlet, in particular it is the constant state of mourning that Hamlet has been attired in since his father’s death. Here, one of the key traits of the environment of Elsinore is brought forward—the difference between appearance and reality:

GERTRUDE              If it be,

Why seems it so particular with thee?

HAMLET        Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems’…

These indeed ‘seem’,

For they are actions that a man might play,

But I have that within which passeth show— (1.2. 76-58)

In this interchange, Hamlet professes himself as a person who is unable, or does not see the necessity, of representing himself in a form other than the one that he feels is native to himself, and it is this state of personal understanding that Hamlet delivers forward, that his nature is not one of disguise or conceit, but instead his outward appearance and action are in check with his inward self. This stance by Hamlet can be read in a number of ways, it can be seen as a critique on the superficiality of the court and politics, it can be read as consternation concerning the short time between the marriage of his mother and uncle following the death of his father, and it can be read as a characteristic habit of thought and system of understanding that Hamlet will return to throughout the play. It is this last reading of the exchange quoted above that warrants the closest inspection, especially in light of Claudius’ response to Hamlet’s speech. Here Hamlet addresses the state of the world as a thing that is definable, that a state of being is best understood at and for its own sake. For Hamlet, at his core, meaning is derived by addressing directly the subject itself. This may seem an odd statement concerning the character of Hamlet since he has often been judged as a character who’s inability to act has been framed around his indecisiveness, his inability to find meaning directly (interestingly, though, Hamlet speaks through a pun on ‘seems’ and ‘seams’, the nature of a pun though rests on the mutability of language, of a words double-sided nature). Though this may be true, his inaction can also be seen arising from the manner of his rhetoric. In his most famous soliloquy, Hamlet takes two states of existence and measures one next to the other in an un-transformed state; he takes the subjects directly, “To be, or not to be; that is the question” (3.1. 58). There is no equivocation in the pointedness to which Hamlet holds these to binaries one to the other. Notice here how the action of living or dying is filtered into a speech act, a question. Importantly language has become the source of meaning. Daniella Jancsó in her book Excitements of Reason: The Presentation of Thought in Shakespeare’s Plays and Wittgenstein’s Philosophy comments on Hamlet’s form of understanding: “Hamlet’s utterances…exemplify the relativity of the ‘appearance-reality’ reference system: what is denoted as ‘reality’ and…‘appearance’ depends on where the reference system is set up” (135). This “reference system” in the character of Hamlet is generally set up in the knowable, measurable and the real, as in Hamlet’s entreaty to the recently arrived players is one which emphasizes a more indelibly human performance, a performance ground in believability and realism, as opposed to a performance that dabbles in spectacle, type, and superficiality. This understanding of art and in effect the nature of reality, is commented on by Danner in such a way that points again toward the transference of reality and language, or in this case, reality and theater: “For Hamlet, the verisimilitude of theatrical representation, the notion of the theater as a world (theatrum mundi), develops into a conception of the theater as the world, a mirror of historical events, a lens for determining guilt or innocence, and, ultimately, an agent for conducting worldly action” (37).

If Hamlet’s speech is filled with a rhetoric that demands that a thing be looked at straight, then Claudius, in his speech following Hamlet’s “seems” quip, can be seen as a speech that produces affirmation in its counter form. For Claudius, the subject is best looked at through its negation, that is that as opposed to holding the subject verbally in its affirmative, or direct state, Claudius measures things through what they are not. His speech concerning appearance is peppered through with these negations: so that Hamlet’s grief is “unmanly”, with a heart “unfortified”, a mind “impatient” and “unschooled”, which is “unprevailing”, and Hamlet’s decision to stay at Elsinore is an “unforced accord” (1.2. 94-123). Here Claudius uses a language where the shape of the subject can only be come at slant, Hamlet is not acting girly (which is what Claudius means) but instead he is not acting like the thing that he should be i.e. manly; this manner of verbal construction re-posits the subject in what it is not portraying as opposed, and as Hamlet addresses subject, to what it is, is not what is contained but what is not contained. This same system of language will be mirrored in Polonius’ manner of speech as well, however, Polonius draws attention to the rhetorical device, “That we find out the cause of the effect—/Or rather say ‘the cause of the defect’” (2.2. 101-102). It is in a mixture of these two forms of address, Hamlet’s and Claudius’, that the Ghost uses, later, to describe his murder as “most foul, strange, and unnatural” (1.5. 28). However the case may be, Inga-Stina Ewbank in her essay “Hamlet and the Power of Words” outlines the role which language enacts throughout the play: “what the still small voices…have in common with the loud and eloquent ones is a general belief in the importance of speaking” (157).

The second appearance of the Ghost brings back again the capacity of language in creating and circumscribing the world of Hamlet. Again when the Ghost comes, it is language that is called for from the Ghost, speech is the first and final demand on the Ghost and it is the one thing that the Ghost will give forward. Notice as well that like Barnardo, Hamlet’s first impulse is to describe the Ghost as bearing the look and dress of his dead father (1.4. 20-36), Jancsó discusses this interchange through the shape of language: “one cannot relate to a ‘questionable shape’, however: it is necessary to settle on a conclusion…Hamlet solves the problem by switching from the descriptive to the performative use of language” (119). The descriptive mode has already been addressed and it harkens back to Barnardo’s descriptive act, the performative language comes before the Ghost makes his first “beckoning” gesture toward Hamlet, with Hamlet’s imperative, “Say, why is this” (1.4 38) which is followed by the performative, “I say, away! Go on, I’ll follow thee” (1.4. 63). Upon following, Hamlet learns of his father’s violent death by murder and more importantly by poison administered through the ear. This mortal location (though a somewhat questionable means of injecting poison) locates the organ in the body that contains and understands speech, it is the ear now that will become the target for Hamlet, and though up to this point the image of the ear (and all attendant puns) has been used often, generally in regards to speech; the ear now, for Hamlet, has become a locus in his designs for revenge, from this point in the play on,  the word ‘ear’ will recur continually and the way that the ear is abused through language will garner an even greater significance. In addition to this shift, it is also important to note that it is the words of the Ghost, not the actions of Claudius, in which Hamlet locates meaning in “the book and volume of [his] brain” (1.5. 130), and which will be punned, after Hamlet writes in his table, “now to my word” (1.5. 111).

Following Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost, we are given a verbal portrait of Hamlet, in his antic disposition, as related by Ophelia to the upper branches of the court of Elsinore. Hamlet’s first movement toward his ‘feigned’ madness is positioned as a pantomime. This scene is interesting in the way in which it mirrors the dumb play in the ‘Mousetrap’, in that it ‘acts’ out the inner state of Hamlet without speech and, like the dumb play, does nothing to activate understanding; it gives no meaning and shapes no real action in the world. Here the play takes a turn toward a mode of operation that will be repeated throughout the play, that of contrivance, of resurfacing the world in order to understand it better, or, in the rhetoric discussed concerning Claudius, to order the world by what it is not in order to come at what it is. What has changed at this point in the play is that Hamlet has shifted his public rhetoric to match that of the courts. This shift in Hamlet comes as a binary opposition to his original public statements concerning his position on the way in which he “seems”, at this point Hamlet has conjoined, publicly (this insistence on Hamlet’s public self is here emphasized because Hamlet’s intimate, private self is still concerned with the world behind appearance) the conception of rhetoric and the world that belongs to Claudius. Hamlet uses this form of speech- rhetoric to his advantage, so much so, that his adversaries become unmoored in their conception of language and the world that language creates. It should be noted that Hamlet has entered a world, that of politics and law, that creates through language, through edict and writ, a world where the rule of law follows the mantra ‘so it is written, so it will be done’. Which now points to the contrived meeting of Hamlet and Polonius designed to ‘find the matter out’. In the opening of this interaction (2.2. 173-185) a number of motifs are mirrored in earlier and in later sections of the play concerning language, toward the early parts of the play there is the issue of being “too much in the sun” a notion which is repeated but which is moved onto Ophelia instead of Hamlet, and Hamlet’s insistence on taking the direct route in the meaning of words:

POLONIUS   —What do you read my lord?

HAMLET        Words, words, words.

POLONIUS   What is the matter my lord?

HAMLET            Between who? (2.2. 191-194)

echoes the interaction between Hamlet and the Clown/Gravedigger, where Hamlet finds that only the literal meaning of words will do, “[w]e must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us” (5.1. 162-127).  This warning about speaking to the card will be picked up again in the play where we find Polonius, taken so far in these types of word games, that he no longer is able to express the nature of the world as he sees it. He has been drawn into a world that is shaped primarily through Hamlet’s linguistic construct:

HAMLET        Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

POLONIUS   By th’ mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.

HAMLET            Methinks it is like a weasel.

POLONIUS   It is backed like a weasel. (3.2. 345-349)

To continue in this vein, it is important to understand what a strain this shift in rhetoric, this redrawing of the world in words that do not suit, has on Hamlet; a strain that is both sincere and ironic, sincere in that Hamlet is “Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,/ Must like a whore, unpack my heart with words” (2.2. 562-563), and ironic in that it is through these unpacked words that Hamlet will create, in part, a play “Wherein [he’ll] catch the conscience of the King” (2.2 582).

Hamlet’s shift in intercourse parallels an equal shift in court around him, especially in Claudius and in Gertrude. In Act Three, there is a tidal change in Claudius in regards to his feeling of guilt, and this alteration in Claudius is adjudicated around language, “How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience…Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it/ Than is my deed to my most painted word” (3.1. 52-55). This surface cover that Claudius has used, constructed of words, is here compared with a harlots face, with the application of make-up as a means of redrawing the nature of identity through a change in outward appearances. This strand of thought, and this image will be picked up some hundred lines on when Hamlet remonstrates Ophelia, “God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another” (3.1. 142). These two lines show clearly how both Hamlet and Claudius understand the crime of re-drawing facts through appearance through much the same rhetoric, it also demonstrates a certain moral equivocation on the part of Hamlet who, while chastising Ophelia over her changed appearance, is doing so while wearing his own version of a changed appearance. By this point in the play, language has taken the role of actual violence, the actual poison in the ear has been supplanted and replaced by words that cut, or as Hamlet expresses it, “I will speak daggers to her, but use none…How my words somever she be shent” (3.2. 366-368). This violence, generative and destructive, of language is brought forward by Ewbank, “human intercourse is enacted and the power of words demonstrated and what we say, and by saying do, to each other, creating and destroying as we go along” (155).

Ultimately, as the above passage points toward, words in Hamlet contain in equal measure the ability to create the fabric of appearance and to destroy. Language in Hamlet is a type of violence the follows the natural violences of creation and destruction. Ophelia’s death is a death of words, it is passaged by Hamlet’s silence, it is a death that is only presented through narrative, it is a death made of speech acts. Gertrude speaks to the force of language fittingly, toward the end of the play when she asks Hamlet why he should speak to her “In noise so rude against me” (3.4. 39), and who later, in the same scene, interlaces language and action, “Ay me, what act,/ That roars so loud and thunders in the index” (3.4. 50-51). The end of the play signals, in a way, the failure of language. The real violence in Hamlet’s ending points to a shift from reason into the realm of the ‘dumb animal’, a movement that is guided by silence.

See:

Jancsó, Daniella. Excitements of Reason: The Presentation of Thought in Shakespeare’s Plays and Wittgenstein’s Philosophy. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007.

Ewbank, Inga-Stina. “Hamlet and the Power of Words.” Shakespeare and Language. Ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2004.

Danner, Bruce. “Speaking Daggers.” Shakespeare Quarterly Volume 54, Number 1, Spring 2003, 29-62.

Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.