At one end of the floor, where stage center would be in a more conventionally blocked piece, was the arresting image of a heap of broken images—sorry, chairs:
Most ominous was the grisly bathroom to the audience's left as we entered the space: the room into which, one after the other, the play's principal characters are led to be executed (with of course the singular and "fundamental" exception of the gruesome onstage murder of the king himself—the murdered played, as was the case in the San Francisco production, by the same actor who had been Edward's lover earlier):
Out of the mob of actors and audience order of a sort does emerge once the play gets going. Graney cuts a lot of Marlowe's text, inserts a number of anachronisms, and unbalances the balance suggested by Marlowe's long title: in spite of his childishness and spitefulness, our sympathies are engaged by the fey, hapless Edward much more than they are by the thuggish, homophobic Mortimer. One ought to feel, I think, a bit more strongly how Edward's distraction has put the entire kingdom at risk: Mortimer ought to emerge as a thug, driven to unspeakable evil by noble motives, if the play's design of darkness is to properly appall. But it was cracking good theater nonetheless. One element I liked was how, after each character's death, he re-emerged bloody from the bloody bathroom to be led offstage by a hideous masked Death ringing a bell. At the play's conclusion, young Edward III mourns his father and one of his attendants is a figure wearing a similar mask, though smaller and daintier. As the last line rings out, this figure whips off his mask to reveal the face of the murdered king. And so Edward II's identity with death is made clear.Here's hoping that the coincidence of this tale of mischief, mayhem, and misrule has nothing whatsoever to do with the atmosphere of our new administration. So far things seem to be going smoothly with our new, rockstar President-elect. The sense of relief I feel about the presidency's being assumed by a genuine grown-up—an intellectual, even—grows and grows. It remains to be seen just how progressive he will be, but I continue to be stunned by the sensation of having a leader I don't have to be ashamed of. A few poets have already begun to muse about what Obama's rise means for American poetry: some seem to conclude it means—drumroll, please—the death of irony. Others have come to the same conclusion in a decidedly tongue-in-cheek fashion. I'm beginning to assimilate various thoughts about it.
In the must-read insider's account of the two campaigns in the latest Newsweek, the writer remarks on how after World War II, Democrats and Republicans fought as hard as they ever had, but they both had the shared experience of war in their backgrounds, which bred a certain degree of respect, or at least recognition. We don't have that. Instead, we have echo-chambers, crystallized now in the very, very large chamber of Obama's supporters (whose sudden disconnection from the feeding tube of electoral news has become an instant joke) and the somewhat smaller chamber of Republican dead-enders now busy telling each other that McCain lost because he wasn't conservative enough. Now there's talk of bipartisanship, about which I have very mixed feelings. On the one hand, I don't understand how we can even begin to talk about sharing power with the people who have been so cynical about power and government: whose skill (up to now) in winning elections was inversely proportional to their basic competence, even in pursuing their own fucked-up goals (c.f. Iraq). On the other hand, to turn around and pretend that a massive swath of the population which continues to be conservative—"Real America"—is actually faker than fake, means to buy into a similar kind of cynicism. Count me one of those stirred by Obama's 2004 claim that "there is not a red America or a blue America but the United States of America!" But joining hands with the people who've done so much to make the very word "America" into a dubious object doesn't sit well either.
I find myself thinking, of all people, of Giambattista Vico, whose New Science I'm being reintroduced to as I finally start to read a book I've long delayed reading, Robert Pogue Harrison's Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Harrison and Vico together both seem like practitioners of what Isaac Asimov called "psychohistory," studying the past in order to predict the future. Harrison takes the title of his first chapter, "First the Forests," from Vico's analysis of the progress of human civilization: "First the forests, after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academies." But in Harrison's reading, this account of progress and synthesis is really an account of disintegration and decline. His reading of Vico reminds me of nothing so much as Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the dialectic of enlightenment, by which that which disintegrates myth—critical reason—becomes itself a myth that must itself distintegrate. It's the nutshell version of postmodernism. Breathtakingly, Harrison shows how Vico presents humanity emerging from the forest, only to recreate a "forest" of isolated individuals within the bounds of the city as myths and traditions fall apart to be replaced by naked self-interest. Vico:
But if the peoples are rotting in that ultimate civil disease [skepticism] and cannot agree on a monarch from within, and are not conquered and preserved by better nations from without, then providence for their extreme ill has its extreme remedy at hand. For such peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure.Does this not describe our culture as it is, or as it was on the verge of becoming, before we agreed on a monarch from within (deeply within, I take it, as Obama's multiracial appeal makes him truly resemble an image of America as it is and shall be, more than any visage featured on any currency)? Are we not, in our respective blogospheres, at the extreme of delicacy and pride, reacting disproportionately to every stimulus that penetrates the bubble? It doesn't seem like too much to say that, had McCain prevailed, Vico's account of the ironic society could and should have been printed as the most accurate front-page news of our condition. It remains to be seen whether Obama is the symbol of a counter-impulse for a new, progressive mythology, or if his election will amount to too little, too late.
Is the poet's task now, then, to consolidate the new myth? Are we to become court poets singing the praises of our new king? I wonder. The New York Times has poems about the election from John Ashbery, August Kleinzahler, Joshua Mehigan, Mary Jo Bang, and J.D. McClatchy. Only McClatchy's poem is free of irony, and in fact it stages a little morality play about hope versus cynicism. It is also of course the least interesting poem, language's little perversities having been ironed out by its firm-handed message. So again I wonder: where does politics leave poetry, now that poetry, or at least oratory, has re-entered politics?
Perhaps more free than ever before. Certainly not less relevant to public discourse, because there's nowhere for a needle to go beneath E. But poetry still wants to be public, still wants to tease out myths, still needs to believe it's stitching something together more perdurable than the animal media and the quick, unsatisfying his of connection it offers.
The hopefullest time I can recall as an adult. A time which will no doubt pass too quickly: the troublesome and lamentable will no doubt return. For now I take comfort in Whitman's remark about the President: that he takes off his hat to the people, not they to him. That there is some hope in hope's endurance.
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