QUERY

You are walking through a store with a companion and come across this scene: A young mother at the checkout is leisurely emptying her cart with one hand and holding her cell phone with the other. She is smiling and having a lively conversation with someone on the phone while her toddler is hanging off the front of the shopping cart screaming his lungs out. It's not the usual kid-cry/temper tantrum, mind you, but this eardrum-piercing shriek like he is being hideously tortured — over and over. His face is crimson. Tears are streaming. The shrieking gets louder and louder. Everyone is staring. Do you:

a) Just hurry past and don't give it a second thought
b) Tell the unfazed mom that something appears to be wrong with her child and suggest that she get off the phone
c) Saunter by in disbelief and complain bitterly to your companion about how people have no sense of decency/compassion
d) Other

A WILDERNESS OF TIGERS

"Titus Andronicus" is one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, which is why I wanted to read it next — I haven't read anything from his salad days — that and because I had just finished "Antony and Cleopatra" and have a special fondness for his Roman stories. It is also his bloodiest play, and that piqued my interest, too — not the gore, but the deviation from the rule.

What I had read about it, though, had not prepared me for this:

A human sacrifice involving severed limbs and burned innards.
Parents savagely killing their children.
A gang rape where the victim's hands and tongue are cut off.
And where the rapists are encouraged by their mother.
A scene where a character is asked to sever his hand to save his two sons, only to be betrayed and have his sons' heads returned to him with his own dismembered hand. (The chilling stage direction for this: Enter a Messenger with two heads and a hand.)
Throat slashings.
Stabbings.
Hangings.
Mothers being fed their dismembered children for dinner.
A corpse thrown to the birds.
A man buried chest deep and left to starve.

It is so shockingly gory that many have disputed its authorship. As one essay says, "Critics up to the middle of the 20th century saw 'Titus Andronicus' as a pointless horror show, so bad that it was probably not by Shakespeare."

But then there is the language, unmistakably Shakespearean, as in Titus' speech to his son: Why, foolish Lucius, dost thou not perceive that Rome is but a wilderness of tigers? Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey but me and mine.

The hacking of Lavinia's hands occasions these incomparable verses from her uncle:

O, had the monster seen those lily hands
Tremble, like aspen-leaves, upon a lute,
And make the silken strings delight to kiss them,
He would not then have touch'd them for his life!

It's Shakespeare through and through.

If these horrors happened in a modern play, we would of course be reading about a sociopath. It would be a slasher piece. But everyone in "Titus" is more or less sane. In fact, they are the cream of their society's crop. They are just really, really pissed off — and in way that we can identify with, mostly. The play's bloodbath is largely set in motion by the motherly wrath of Tamora, queen of the Goths, who begs Titus for her son's life and is coldly rebuffed. She makes a vow:

I'll find a day to massacre them all
And raze their faction and their family,
The cruel father and his traitorous sons,
To whom I sued for my dear son's life,
And make them know what 'tis to let a queen
Kneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain.

And massacre she does.

The one exception to the "normal" violence-doer is Aaron the evil Moor, whose sociopathic behavior is shocking even to the other characters. But it's not his bloodlust so much as his lack of remorse, his admission that he has enjoyed the horrors he has perpetrated. They were all doing it out of anger or grief or lust, and he was doing it, well, out of a sense of fun. And he has no regrets.

LUCIUS
Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?
AARON
Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
...
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.

I wonder what effect this character had on Shakespeare's audience, who were used to seeing blood and guts and torture, who'd walk by severed heads on London Bridge to get to the theater. They were used to gore, but were they used to it out of context, with no apparent motive? Senseless, sociopathic violence seems simultaneously primal and ultra-modern. It doesn't seem Elizabethan.

Christy and I talked a little today about the nature of violence in creative works. Why does violence play such a crucial role in so much art, and what is it, exactly, that elevates gore and pain to something poetic and meaningful? Is beautifully "versifying" extreme violence the same as beautifully filming it? Does it make it more palatable?

Shakespeare didn't write anything else the rest of his career that came close to the violence of "Andronicus," even though the play was very popular, and even though he had ample opportunity with the stories he told. Did he learn something? Did he get something out of his system?

ONE OTHER GAUDY NIGHT

I love this painting! I came across it — an image of Cleopatra's suicide — while looking up some stuff about Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra." It took my breath away.

It's by the 17th century Italian Baroque painter Guido Cagnacci. I had never heard of this artist, but here are some choice bits from Wikipedia: He dedicated himself "to private salon paintings, often depicting sensuous naked women from thigh upwards ... His life was at times tempestuous, as characterized by his failed elopement in 1628 with an aristocratic widow. Some contemporaries remark him as eccentric, unreliable and of doubtful morality. He is said to have enjoyed the company of cross-dressing models."

Who better to paint Cleopatra doing, in her words, "that thing that ends all other deeds"?

It's rather amusing that he paints her half-naked when in Shakespeare's play she actually commands her waiting women to dress her to the nines. "Show me like a queen: go fetch my best attires ... Bring our crown and all."

At least Cagnacci gave her a crown, if not the "and all."

And the nakedness, let's admit, is lovely. He must have taken his greater inspiration from Shakespeare's line in Act V: "I know that a woman is a dish for the gods." Indeed. So why not paint her in all her womanliness?

Cleopatra is one of my favorite Shakespearean heroines thus far. She's sassy and smart and passionate. She's getting up there in years, but as Shakespeare says, "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety." As with the best hedonists, her goal isn't emotional maturity, but emotion. When a messenger tells her Antony has married, she beats him senseless; when a messenger tells her Antony's new wife is not pretty, she gives him gold. She's really very easy to get along with, when you think of it. Shakespeare loves to compare monarchs to spoiled children, and he had clearly been beguiled at some point by a spoiled child's charm — the insistence on personal liberty, the love of excess.

Cleopatra is wildly poetic and romantic. The reason she's killing herself with a poisonous snake in that painting is because Antony is dead "and there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon." (That line slays me. I love how Shakespeare never hesitated to give his female characters the most gorgeous lines, which really first stood out to me in "Romeo and Juliet," where Juliet rattles off delicious phrase after delicious phrase.) There will never be another Antony, Cleopatra says. "It's past the size of dreaming."

Cleopatra — "Egypt," as Antony sweetly calls her — kills herself for love of the man whose "legs bestrid the ocean," but also, let's be honest, to save face. She knew that if Caesar captured her alive he would savagely parade her through the capital as the "whore" to whom noble Antony gave his empire for a plaything.

Shall they hoist me up
And show me to the shouting varletry
Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt
Be gentle grave unto me! rather on Nilus' mud
Lay me stark naked, and let the water-flies
Blow me into abhorring! rather make
My country's high pyramides my gibbet,
And hang me up in chains!

It's a little hard to imagine the woman in that painting mustering that kind of pep, but I'll take it on faith.

THE DAY!

Today is Shakespeare's birthday; well, the day it's celebrated anyway. No one really knows exactly when he was born. They know only that he was baptized on April 26, 1564, and figured that he must have come into the world just a few days prior. (In those days of lingering Catholicism and high infant mortality rates, people were quick to baptize their kids so they'd go to heaven if they died right away.) There's also the matter of discrepancy between the Julian and Gregorian calendar, which complicates the birthday matter further.

But, for all practical purposes, today is the big day for Shakespeare dorks. Bonus: April 23 is also the day he died, in 1616.

In celebration, I bought myself a present: "Shakespeare's Words: A Glossary & Language Companion," a hefty book that I've been petting and ogling for several weeks now. It's delightful. Not only is it a great source for every word in his work, but it also has fantastic sections on, for example, every plant mentioned in Shakespeare, every weapon and type of clothing, every archaism, every curse and insult ("Thou lump of foul deformity!" "Thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane," "You starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat's tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stock-fish!"); explanations of usage, such as when "thou" is used instead of "you." Plus it has a chronology of the plays, complete with a synopsis of each one and a graphic representation of character interactions. Sweet!

APRIL FOR BILLY

sundown
my neighbor collects the clothes
I hope his lover finds
magnolia blossoms
in his tight, crisp folds.

THE FINAL JUDGE OF ALL MATTERS

When I grade quizzes I'm always amazed by at least a few answers — a student identifies Nancy Pelosi as the secretary of state or Dick Cheney as the attorney general or locates the Nile in South America. I try not to be too judgmental. I try not to write "WTF?" on their papers (sometimes I fail and have to find my good eraser). I try to see myself at 20 and think of all the things of which I was profoundly ignorant. I was a huge moron, I'm sure. I still kind of am. But that doesn't stop me from being amazed by the moronity (yes, that's a word —  I checked) of others. This latest batch of quizzes broke a record, I believe, for quantity and quality of wrong answers. I'll list only the laughably wrong, however.

Identify two national or international stories that you thought were important last week:
{This should be hard to miss, right?}

Africa got a new president.

Shiitake forces in Iraq fleeing.

Flags flying from light poles alerted the campus to what weeklong event?

lesbigay whatchamacallit
{Technically not wrong; just lacking in warmth}

They were rainbow colored flags, but I don't know what they represented.
{Totally real answer. Totally believable if you know this kid}

Why was 14,000-year-old poop in the news last week?

Dinosaur poop was discovered in a cave (I'm totally guessing)
{This student always indicates to me when he is guessing or "totally guessing," lest I think he thinks that he is knowing, albeit incorrectly, and not conjecturing. I find the self-consciousness of this gesture extremely charming.}

The oldest poop ever found of a dinosaur.
{At least three people seemed to think dinosaurs were alive 14,000 years ago.}

The oldest human poop.
{At least three other people seemed to think humanity began 14,000 years ago.}

The discovery of this poop will show great advances/info.
{Not wrong, I suppose, but rather too mystical and vague.}

Identify the following people: Arnold Schwarzenegger

Somehow still the governor of California
{Not incorrect. Just amusing. On other quizzes this kid has identified Antonin Scalia as "that Catholic homophobe on the Supreme Court" and William Quantrill as "Confederate wingnut who torched the town."}

The population of the United States is:

300,000? I didn't study this part.

13 billion

1.3 billion {Do you think this one was copying off the previous one or vice versa and misread the decimal point?}

1.6 billion
{People really have no innate sense of proportion, do they?}

A legislative proposal would allow Kansans to vote on adding what to the state constitution?

a coal plant

English

Gay pride

Define "pro tem" as in "She is a judge pro tem in the 7th District."

This means she is the final judge of all matters and there can be no appeal.

THAT'S MY DILLUNS

This sign somehow says everything you need to know about my grocery store — a place where patrons need written reminders about appropriate behavior.

No shirt, no shoes, no service. And by the way, said shoes must be wheel-less.

This sign is at the store's entrance. There are two identical warnings inside the door, in case you roll right past the first one in your haste to procure cigarettes and bologna.

The other day, some juvenile delinquent, in broad daylight, was altering the exterior sign to say "NO HOES WITH HEELS." Funny, right?

But that actually reminded me of the one time I had seen someone in the store with wheeled shoes. It was a grown woman, quite conceivably a hoe, with actual roller skates, which I believe are a subset of "SHOES WITH WHEELS." She was about 6'5" with the skates, but her presence was even larger. She came banging through the electronic doors roller-derby style and rumbled right over to the milk case, where she proceeded to spin in tight circles, ankles splayed, while waiting for her companion, whose shoes lacked wheels, to catch up. They both wore tiny cutoffs and spaghetti-strapped tank tops. Both were heavily tattooed. Their extreme excitement over the chocolate milk suggested an altered state of mind. They could have been sisters. Or maybe lovers. Possibly they were mother and daughter. Or maybe they had just met within the hour. It was impossible to tell. After I left the dairy section, I caught glimpses of them steamrolling down various aisles, the wheeled one grabbing this and that shelf to slow her momentum on the corners, the unwheeled one laughing hysterically.

It was the best thing I saw all week.

Sometime after that, the "NO SHOES WITH WHEELS" signs appeared, but I don't know whether it was in response to these two lovelies or to something more pernicious like schoolchildren with those Junior James Bond sneakers with the hidden wheels. (They are walking alongside you and then they are magically gliding, like tiny changelings. It's unsettling.) In any event, this wheeled shoe problem apparently became so widespread as to require a written ban. I have not seen such a sign at any other grocery store, so I am inclined to think this is an issue peculiar not to children but to my store's unruly adult clientele. Again, the boring beige people are targeting what little color remains in this town!

Perhaps, to be fair, the sign came on the heels of some horrific accident, like some innocent, unwheeled shopper being sideswiped by a wheeled one and falling headlong into a pyramid of pork and beans.

Or perhaps the wheels are a menace to the flooring. But really, what could damage the floor more than a steady parade of out-of-kilter shopping carts laden with mounds of hamburger and frozen pizzas? And if they are trying to protect the floor, couldn't they have just left up the most recent — and elegant — defacement of their sign: "NO SHOES"?

CONFUSION'S MASTERPIECE

Mabel likes Kurosawa for the horses. And I like him for the Shakespearean themes.

Mabel and I agree on most things, but on this she's wrong. The horses, I told her, are a cheap distraction — the historic counterpart to the modern car chase. I'm guessing there are scholars who agree with her point of view, but, as usual, she couldn't cite a single one. (Isn't there a Latin word for relying on the passion of one's argument vs. its logical authority? This is one of Mabel's favorite rhetorical devices).

"Throne of Blood" is based on "Macbeth." In Akira Kurosawa's version, the Macbeth character is a medieval Japanese warlord — a very apt adaption. And Lady Macbeth, the "butcher's fiend-like queen," is a Japanese ice princess, more sinister and creepy even than Shakespeare's original villainess.

I love what Kurosawa does with the setting in "Throne of Blood" — a barren plain shrouded in a dense, roiling fog that seems to mock humanity's ambitions; a haunted, maze-like forest that has no beginning and no end; a wooden castle that, for all its Oriental minimalism, is intensely layered and romantic; the set-piece of samurai sitting stiffly as boards, legs akimbo, in their armadillo-like armor; the shrieking birds that accompany the known world's collapse. It's all perfect for "Macbeth."

And Kurosawa's emphasis on the Macbeth/Lady Macbeth scenes is stunning — just two people in an empty room plotting to kill a king.

The amazing thing to me about "Macbeth" is how Lady Macbeth rushes into the void of her husband's psyche and inflates his vanity to a false and unsustainable courage. Art thou afeard to be the same in thine own act and valor as thou art in desire? She's able to make him mistake her desires for his own, to proceed with the murder on the strength of the solidarity and courage of two, not grasping that the consequences will belong to one. There will be no help, no company, for him — or for her — in the moral isolation that follows the murder.

After the dark deed, she tells him not to fret. Things without all remedy should be without regard. What's done is done. But later, she rephrases slightly, and with anguish: What's done cannot be undone.

Beforehand, she tells him, "Screw your courage up to the sticking place and we'll not fail." But, in the end, there is no sticking place – for courage or love or honor or anything. Everything is unhinged, unmoored, set adrift. There is nothing to grasp or cling to. Shakespeare's Macbeth famously, eventually, concludes:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

In a way, Kurosawa's relentless fog seems to embrace this sentiment more deeply than Shakespeare's inevitable moving on, as it were — as it always is — to the crowning of a new king. For Shakespeare, life goes on — always — despite the blackest tragedy. For Kurosawa, the blackness lingers. The despair seems to win in the form of an almost Buddhistic resignation to the folly of humanity. (There might also be something of the mood of post-World War II Japan — an empire propelled by jingoistic vanity to its own annihilation).

In Shakespeare's play, noble Ross warns English Siward, whose son has been slain by Macbeth, to not cling to grief: Your cause of sorrow must not be measured by his worth, for then it hath no end.

But Kurosawa's world — it's easy to imagine — can accommodate a sorrow without end.

Another interesting thing about Kurosawa is how his movie actors are really like stage actors. Their facial expressions are exaggerated, as if they are meant to be seen by people sitting in the back row of a theater. The Lady Macbeth character begins icy and immobile, like an evil oracle, then her movements become increasingly alive and panicked as the plot is set in irreversible motion.

For Shakespeare's three Weird Sisters (or witches) — those of "double, double toil and trouble" fame — Kurosawa substitutes an elderly spinner, a sort of ancestral spirit, which I suppose is more Japanese, but I personally prefer Macbeth's "secret, black, and midnight hags." It seems important that these seers be women, in the context of the play, because they counterbalance and complement Lady Macbeth herself. (I also find it disappointing, though, that Kurosawa substituted sons for daughters in his "Ran," which is based on Shakespeare's "King Lear." Again, the daughters seem essential, but Kurosawa — inexplicably, to me — went with sons.)

Perhaps he did it for the same reason he includes horses and battles, whatever that might be. To appeal to a more "action-driven" crowd?

One could argue that the advantage of film over the stage is that you can show the horses and battles, you can dwell on them, but I don't find this very persuasive, especially with Shakesepeare. I think for Shakespeare the emphasis must remain not on the action, but on the talking about the action. His plays aren't interesting for what happens in them — he borrowed nearly every plot from some other well-known source — but for how the characters process what happens. What is the point in spending time showing warriors silently hacking each other up, when you could be listening to warriors talking prettily about the hacking?

Why do we need real cutlery flailing about when we have Macbeth's "dagger of the mind" proceeding from his "heat-oppressed brain"? Why do we need gory wounds and blood spurts when we have the imaginary blood that Lady Macbeth can't wash off her hands, the mental gore she can't escape. Here's the smell of blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

I'm not a Shakespeare "purist." I love modern adaptations. The whole point of Shakespeare is that he is for all time. I just don't like when the emphasis is taken off the language. The whole point of Shakespeare is the language.

The central action of "Macbeth" is not shown. King Duncan is slain offstage. But the slaying precipitates a flood of words, which take center stage — among them, my favorite in the play, spoken by Macduff when he apprehends that noble Duncan is dead. He says: Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.

It's not the guttural cry of woe you hear, for example, in "Romeo and Juliet" when Juliet is thought dead: O me! O lamentable day!

It's not even something someone would actually say. But it's an absolutely perfect description of grief: Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.

And it's an absolutely perfect example of "emotion recollected in tranquility," which is what poetry, if not cinema, is supposed to be.

HAPPY, HAPPY

I'd like to be the sort of person who can tap-dance herself out of a depression. But for now I'll settle for watching someone else who can.

I saw the Grace sisters at a house concert last night, and it was a happy night. They radiate joy. Not dumb joy — the kind that comes from lacking a tragic sense. But just the opposite. They've been around. They've lost. But the sweetness of life — the gratitude for its every minute — grows in them like a weed and tangles up everyone in the room.

They've been performing together since they were kids. They don't wear matching dresses anymore. They play every stringed instrument, with an emphasis on banjo and mandolin.

They sing.

They dance.

They promote social justice, with an emphasis on gay rights. They sing odes to goddess lovers.

They rock.

See them if you can.

ZELLA

This has been gnawing at my conscience for a couple of days.

My grandpa finally had to be taken to a nursing home after two especially bad nights at home, where he fell twice and went into insulin shock, started hallucinating and had trouble breathing. Once when he fell, the combined effort of my grandma and mom, who had been staying the night, couldn't get him off the floor. They had to call for help. He was adamant about not wanting a hospital bed in their home. He wanted to sleep in his own bed, the one they had just bought to furnish their new apartment. It was ridiculously high off the floor. The two times he fell were getting in and out of it. But he wouldn't hear of anything else.

He obviously needed around the clock medical attention, at least for a few days, so it was decided to take him to a hospice facility. My grandma was completely frazzled and sleepless. She couldn't even make out the labels on the comfort medicines she was supposed to give him. She needed some rest. He needed full-time care. They reluctantly agreed. When my mom went out to look at care facilities, my grandma insisted that she didn't want anything "pissy smelling." That had always been the thing she associated with nursing homes. She was torn between staying with grandpa and going with my mom to look at the facilities. She wanted something "quality." I told her I would stay with grandpa, who was snoring softly in his liftchair, and she could go look. She agreed to that. But then she went directly into their bedroom and crawled under the covers. She just shut down.

He went to a nursing home the next day, and died there that night. The nursing home called my mom at 2:30 a.m. When my stepdad called to tell me, I asked how it had happened, what happened at the end. He said he didn't know, they didn't ask.

Didn't ask?

I told them I wanted to know. My mom asked a nurse on the day shift. She said she hadn't been there, that his chart just noted that he died in his sleep. My mom asked his roommate if he had heard anything during the night, and he told her that he heard my grandpa "call for his wife and then didn't hear anything else."

I was glad my mom thought to ask the roommate. But then she said something astounding: "Of course, I'm not going to tell grandma that. It would just upset her."

I didn't know what to say. I understood my mom's concern. If my grandma knew he was calling for her — this man whom it had been her life's work to serve — and she wasn't there, that she'd feel terrible guilt, that he died alone at a nursing home, that he wanted her and she wasn't there.

I suggested it might make my grandma feel good, too, to know that he had called for her, that he had been thinking of her, even if it was in the context of a need she couldn't answer. But I dropped it there. It wasn't the time to argue with my mom, who was also upset.

But it's been bothering me a lot. I don't know whether to revive the issue or just let it go. My mom knows her mom best, right? She's familiar with the kind of emotional protection she might need right now. And maybe my grandma didn't ask what happened at the end. That's conceivable, knowing her, but it seems unlikely. I personally can't fathom not having any curiosity about how my partner died and what the end was like. It's impossible to know, not being in that situation, but I think it would be something to treasure, that your loved one called for you in the end, even if it increases your inevitable guilt about not being there.

And it would be one thing, I guess, not to volunteer the information, and another thing to lie. I hope they didn't flat out lie to her, if she asked.

Someone could tell my grandma down the road, that he was calling for her in the end, but if they have lied to her, then there's the complication of the lie. Her daughter lied to her.

People try to control emotional outcomes by controlling information. I don't know what to make of this.