5. Vacation (II) & the Prince of Denmark

The woman next to me was snoring. That's right, snoring, in the middle of Hamlet! Apparently, tragedy bores some to sleep.

I had excellent, centered orchestra seats for Saturday's Broadway performance of Shakespeare's classic. Between that woman's steady, equine, nasal choking and the untimely, shrill, trilling laughter of the rest of the audience, I tried to remind myself that in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare's new plays were rowdily attended by all segments of society, even the dreaded "riff" and "raff." These days, the Bard of Avon is usually confined to an Ivory Tower. But I believe in the shared artistic experience. I took a class in college on the television show The Wire, the most brilliant and inspirational series in history, as great as many great films and novels. We viewed every single episode together, as a class. I had already seen all the content, but, in the company of my peers, I appreciated new aspects of the work, especially humor. I suppose the same phenomenon of collective viewing occurs at the theater. Hamlet is indeed fermented in the fast-acting, black serum of sardonicism. I only think that, in a perfectly valid humorous reading, more of Shakespeare's jokes are on the Prince of Denmark himself than Law's overly-demonstrative, Vaudeville/Hollywood command-of-expression allowed. But I have no objection to jokes on a serious stage; any Jewish person could tell you that humor is an adaptive trait. Without laughter, the best medicine, chasing down to our sensitive stomachs, the public might not want to swallow such an intoxicatingly depressing pill as Hamlet. A few particularly pessimistic peptides:

I have of late, but / wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, foregone all / custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems / to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy / the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, / appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent / congregation of vapours[2.2,297-305. I cite from the Arden edition, 2001].

[I hope nobody thought that they were there to see Memphis. The lines mingled outside. Many people do visit Broadway on vacation, after all].

Speaking of "vacation," the fourth story in Santiago Ramùn y Cajal's short-fiction collection Vacation Stories, titled "The Corrected Pessimist," happens to pertain to Shakespeare. The protagonist, a twenty-eight-year-old doctor named [rather uncreatively] Juan Fernández, is a paper thin re-creasing of Shakespeare's archetypical origami swan-prince, with some spilled-inky shades of Moliere's "Misanthrope." As the story begins, Cajal immediately reads us in on the case. We are told that Fernández is "suffering from a fresh wave of nausea toward life and indifference toward society"[122]. He has ceased to practice medicine and begun to neglect his friendships. For slight, self-affirming pleasure, he reads Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, pictured left, who share his negative opinions. In short, the protagonist is feeling what jazz men would call "blue." "For unhappy Fernández," Cajal summarizes, "life was a tasteless, endless bad joke that Nature was playing for no apparent reason or purpose"[123]. And, on top of it all, his career is a failure and he is unsuccessful in love.

At the climax of his misery, at four o'clock in the morning, Fernández drearily discourses on doom. "Humanity, which arose from death, must end in death," he states[128]. He calls the Sun an "unfeeling, habit-ridden star"[128]. Then he directly addresses a divinity, whom he calls the Prime Mover, asking a theodical question: "Why did you create the enemies of life, the cruel insidious pathogenic bacteria"[128]? Furthermore, Fernández claims, we had no chance of combating these diseases because our senses and intelligence are weak and faulty. Man himself is "as weak and overwhelmed as some bird transfixed by a snake"[130]. All in all, the speech lasts four outrageously pessimistic pages before finally finishing with two disillusioned exclamations: "What a cruel sarcasm! What a bloody irony"[130]!

However, "the Corrected Pessimist" suddenly pivots when, like Goethe's Faust, Juan is visited by an insightful, inciting spirit. After his final words, thunder roars, and the shadow of an old man appears in a purple cloud. "I am the spirit of science," the man says, "sent by the Great Unknown to enlighten men's minds and sweeten the sad fate of every living creature, in gentle gradations"[131]. He lists the different names that different men have called him: intuition [philosopher], fortunate coincidence [scientist], inspiration [artist], and luck [merchant]. The spirit of science speaks wisely and from a divine perspective, telling Juan that he and our species are "merely the means, rude links in an endless chain, simple terms in an endless progression"[131]. Moreover, according to the spirit, we will never understanding the whole course, for "the Cosmos is a great system of hieroglyphics, of which scholars from each epoch will laboriously decipher only a few phrases"[132]. After setting the scale straight by focusing on our smallness, the spirit of science decides to give Juan a gift. "Once and for all," the Spirit says, "you are going to lose your innocent illusions . . . [you] will see objects within [his] normal focal range as though they had been amplified a thousand time"'[138]. This sight will last for one year.

And so Juan sees the world as never before. Cajal writes that "[Juan's] eyes had been turned into microscopes, though not by changing the optical dioptrics"[139]. He sees particles in motion, including disgusting bacteria in his love's breath. Instead of the continuuous, mosaic world, Juan lives in the discontinuous, crystal world[141]. Because of this vision, he has been transformed into "an extraordinary being, a portentous genius"[140]. His life changes dramatically. He is now a well-suited scientist. His former love now becomes his wife. They are successful within the species; they produce one progeny. What's more, they are even happy! For Cajal, life is how one sees the world; his own vision was the primary tool of his own genius.

Alas, in Hamlet, the protagonist meets a different, more emotional spirit that alters his vision: his father's ghost. Immediately before the ghost's arrival, in Act 1, Scene IV, Hamlet speaks to Horatio and Marcellus about his uncle, the king, Claudius:

So, oft it chances in particular men/ That for some vicious mole of nature in them, / As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty/ (Since nature cannot choose his origin), By their o'ergrowth of some complexion, / Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason, / Or by some habit, that too much o'erleavens/ The form of plausive manners -- that these men, / Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, / Being Nature's livery or Fortune's star, / His virtues else be they as pure as grace, / As infinite as man may undergo, / Shall in the general censure take corruption / From that particular fault. The dram of evil / Doth all the noble substance ofte dout / To his own scandal[23-38].

When it appears, Hamlet calls the ghost, whom he has given his own name, an "old mole"[170]. Truly, this dram of vision will, henceforth, dout Hamlet's noble faculties to a scandal of revenge. Shakespeare understands that Hamlet's sickness is inside himself; more specifically, we know it is in his brain.

Shakespeare's poetic mimesis of grief and depression in Hamlet, an investigation of mind and madness, shows his supreme empathy, the most active and important quality in storytelling. But he also thought much like a scientist. Take, for example, this quote from The Merchant of Venice.

"Tell me where is Fancy bred, / Or in the heart, or in the head"[3.2,63]?

We now know the answer: the head, which my father always facetiously calls "the principal instrument for thinking." Later this week, thirty thousand people will be attending a conference devoted to the jewel inside that head case, the brain, which constitutes two percent of our body weight but demands roughly twenty percent of our resting energy. I will be a humbled one in those Chicago crowds. I will write updates from the annual Society for Neuroscience conference every night, starting Friday. I am still figuring my conference itinerary now, but it so far includes lectures titled "Magic and the Mind," "The Origins of Abstract Knowledge," and, of course "Cajal's Butterflies of the Soul, Science and Art." There will be a wealth of knowledge there.

Again, thanks for reading! I've ordered Cajal's 600+ page autobiography, Recollections of My Life, and will write about that book after I return from Chicago.