Concluding part of Anwar's rumination on Da Bard

THis Sunday's Inter:Lude is a journey within a journey -- Reflection on Someone's Rumination.
That Someone is no ordinary person but a fromer Deputy Prime Minister. But today's journy is not on account of him being a former VIP but that he's one human who in his trial and tributions can sit back and share with us that in the darkest hour, he fcould find solace in the Quran, and in the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

So don't leave home without IT; neither deprive your home with a spare set of these tomes. You can spend your entire life reading these works, and with every reading, you learn something new about the human nature.

So I conlude the relection on Anwar's treatise delivered at the Brisbane's Congress on Shakespeare, following the previous two days'partial extractions.

"We could say, like Harold Bloom, that with King Lear we are at the very centre of canonical excellence just as we would be as we traverse the cantos of the Inferno or the Purgatorio. But above all, it is in the harrowing barrenness in the final scene that makes it particularly compelling for me to read the play, over and over again, in those long hours of solitude and read it with intense attention. Yet it is in defeat that we find victory as we can gather from Lear’s speech to Cordelia after they have lost the battle:

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’s 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. V, iii, 8-19

Needless to say, depending on your state of mind at any given time, with Shakespeare, you could be anyone you choose to be. When Keats was suffering from his bouts of depression, he wrote to his friend, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, who chided him. In reply, Keats says “I never quite despair and I read Shakespeare – indeed I shall…never read any other Book…” (4) And this leads us to Hamlet.

According to Eliot’s doctrine of the “objective correlative”, the finding of which is the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art, Hamlet is a failure. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. It is a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. In conclusion, Eliot says, we must simply admit that in Hamlet Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. (5) With all due respect to the poet whose Four Quartets I continue to quarry whenever I am short of a quote or two, in my view, Hamlet needs no “objective correlative”, and this is what happens when we keep hoping to be wrong about Shakespeare in a new way. Coleridge, perhaps having foreknowledge of the self-induced intellectual conundrums that might be caused by Hamlet, had summed up the situation as follows: “It had been too much the custom when we could not explain anything that happened by the few words that were employed to explain everything; we passed it over as beyond our reach: they were looked upon as hints which Philosophy could not explain: as the terra incognita for future discoveries; the great ocean of unknown things to be afterward explored, or as the sacred fragments of a ruined temple, every part of which in itself was beautiful but the particular relation of which parts was unknown.” (6) Indeed it is this terra incognita in Hamlet which, in the language of transcendence, will remain hidden to those who are not initiated in the mysteries but not being unknowable, it is but a hidden treasure waiting to be discovered. It may be more accurate to say therefore that in Hamlet, Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for the audience at large to handle.

This calls to mind the observation made by the late Martin Lings that to be present at an adequate performance of King Lear is not merely to watch a play but to witness, mysteriously, the whole history of mankind. As Shakespeare matures he becomes more focused on the question of religion, not in the narrow sense of a mode of worship but in its most universal aspect, which is man having the right attitude of the soul towards God. He places himself at the very centre of the ancient world. For him Apollo is not the god of light but the light of God. Character after character is developed to a state of virtue which is pushed to the very limits of human nature. King Hamlet is purified in Purgatory but he is also a symbol of man’s lost Edenic state spoken of by young Hamlet in the following terms:

A combination and a form indeed,

Where every god did seem to set his seal

To give the world assurance of a man (III, 4, 60-62)

The pious man looks at the story of the Garden of Eden objectively but imagines the devil to be harmless, unaware of the extent of his own subservience to him. The mystic, on the other hand, looks at it subjectively and knows that most of what seems neutral is harmful. Hamlet transcends the idea of salvation, that is, simple piety in the conventional sense, and shows that Shakespeare, having drunk from the fountain of esotericism, knew where to ‘take upon us the mystery of things, as if we were God’s spies’ and tread the path towards sanctification. (7)

Whether it is Islam, Christianity, Judaism or other religions, faith reinvigorated could lead not just to bigotry, but may, when compounded with the elements of political and social discontent, cause us to express ourselves through violence and bloodshed. But if molded under the hand of the universal wisdom it could be a force to free us from ignorance and intolerance, injustice and greed. To use the language of the Gospel of Saint John, this perennial wisdom is the light that “shines in darkness,” although “the darkness comprehends it not.” It is also alluded to in the Qur’an with striking imagery: the light of a lamp “lit from a blessed tree, an olive neither of the East nor of the West, whose oil is well-nigh luminous, though fire scarce touches it.”

Shouldn’t this be the light to illuminate our path by imbuing us with ideals that are universal: a message of truth, justice and compassion, and above all, of the liberty and dignity of man? We talk of globalization and the end of history, but we remain a world torn asunder by the practice of polity identified solely with the exercise of power, and leadership that is increasingly divorced from ethical concerns and morality. Enduring peace and harmony of the world must be built not upon hegemonies but on mutual concern, trust and respect. We must discard our loyalties for the parochial and break free from the chains of outmoded mindsets; we should, like Hamlet, be “a little more than kin, and less than kind”. For more than a century, Kipling has had his say. Let us forswear “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”, and instead, like Prospero, proclaim a “fair encounter, of two most rare affections”.

I see that The Tempest is not in the list of performances; so let me throw caution to the wind and seize this moment while I still have the podium, to recite, as my parting words, the last few lines of the Epilogue:

Gentle breath of yours my sails

Must fill, or else my project fails,

Which was to please. Now I want

Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,

And my ending is despair,

Unless I be relieved by prayer,

Which pierces so that it assaults

Mercy itself and frees all faults.

As you from crimes would pardon’d be,

Let your indulgence set me free.

Thank you.

________________________________

Notes

1. Santayana, G., Three Philosophical Poets – Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe, Cambridge Harvard University, 1910, pp 106-7
2. Areopagitica; A Speech of Mr John Milton For the Liberty of Unlicenced Printing, To the Parliament of England, 1644 p 107
3. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, London, 1946, p 214
4. Dorothy Hewlett, Adonais – A Life of John Keats, The Bobbs Merrill Co, New York, 1938, p 110
5. T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, London, Faber & Faber Ltd, 1932, pp 141-46.
6. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808-1819 On Literature I, ed. R.A. Foakes, Routledge & Kegan Paul, Princeton University Press, 1987, p 316
7. Martin Lings, The Secret of Shakespeare – His Greatest Plays Seen in the Light of Sacred Art, 3rd edn., Quinta Essentia, 1996, pp 5, 10-13, 22-25, 29-31; He is better known in the Muslim community as Shaikh Abu Bakar Siraj al-Din, the writer of the highly popular modern biography of the Prophet, Mohamed, his life based on the earliest sources.


DESIDERATA: Having spent two days of reading, and re-reading, I have highlighted (THUS BOLDED)these two sections towards the end of Anwar's treatise which I deem highly relevant to the "interesting" times Malaysians find ourselves. Worth our reflection on this Sunday of undivided focused, holy worship for some, of wholly or partial wantonness for others; I'm living out my own Comments at the moment as I feel "wearY and disaffected" by certain events surrounding me, so I'd postpone my innermost thoughts lest the expressions betray the the mind's truest inetntions. For between the individual's verbal expression sometimes a gulf between his real motives, be the gult intentional or unwitting. We must avoid committing such giefs, or at a deeper level, sins.