Hamlet for President?

Hamlet’s predicament epitomizes the famous dichotomy Matthew Arnold made between the Hebraic and the Hellenic in Culture and Anarchy, with the Hebraic representing "strictness of conscience" and the Hellenic, "spontaneity of consciousness." From the Hebraic point of view Hamlet must avenge his father, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. From the Hellenic, he is, according to Coleridge, “a man living in meditation, called upon to act by every motive human and divine, but the great object of his life is defeated by continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve.” However, is this last not an action, if we take the existentialist view that existence precedes essence and man is defined by  his actions? Hazlitt supports this conclusion when he remarks, “It is not from any want of attachment to his father or of abhorrence of his murder that Hamlet is thus dilatory, but it is more to his taste to indulge his imagination in reflecting upon the enormity of the crime and refining on his schemes of vengeance, than to put them into immediate practice. His ruling passion is to think, not to act.” But who do we prefer, the man whose action is action or the man whose chief action is thought? Hamlet has a clear chance to do away with Claudius, but his reaction is almost juridical. He realizes that killing his uncle while he's praying will be more a sanctification than a punishment, with the result that his uncle may well end up in his heaven, while his father’s ghost continues to languish in purgatory. That’s just good thinking. The specialty of the man of action is seldom an appreciation of consequences and such impulsiveness often comes at a price. A chess grandmaster's actions, by definition, comprise an extraordinary level of premeditation, but he or she is generally a mnemonic prodigy. Many politicians, who are quick to act, are not blessed with great memories, especially when it comes to history and hence end up getting us into quagmires like Iraq. On the other hand would we wish to have a Hamlet as the leader of our country? What about the philosopher king? The answer is a likely “no" since such a surfeit of consciousness is, as we have seen in the case of Hamlet, a precursor to madness. Hamlet prefigures the kind of interiority that Dostoevsky described in his characters. Yet would you go to the Underground Man for advice? Even considering the kind of men and women of action who are currently running for president, would you defer to a reformed criminal with a highly developed moral universe--like say Raskolnikov? Would you vote for Hamlet?

Chris Ofili: Night and Day

The Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili (1996)

There’s a lot of good shit in Chris Ofili: Night and Day currently on exhibit at the New Museum. Not the selfies of shit that are popping up on iPhones these days, but dung. Ofili is quoted as saying this about “The Holy Virgin Mary" (1996) whose profane Madonna includes inlays of assholes along with the infamous fecal matter: “As an alter boy, I was confused by the idea of the holy Virgin Mary giving birth to a young boy. Now when I go to the National Gallery and see paintings of the Virgin Mary, I see how sexually charged they are.” Ofili comments thusly about another centerpiece of the show, “Shithead,” a piece of dung with teeth, topped with bits of his own hair: “They’d look at me. They’d look at the shit. They look at me. Then it would get to them. So it was a cycle of looking in which they put me together with shit and created an image from those two.” The show is titled “night and day” since some of the paintings are so conceived that the color of a face will change from black to white depending on the perspective of the viewer. Ofili grew up in England and his parents were born in Nigeria. Race is one of his subjects. Blaxploitation and hip hop are elements of some other works. Big Daddy Kane’s song “Pimpin’Ain’t Easy" is reflected in an Oflili artwork of the same name from l997 which also hearkens back to the Notorious B.I.G lines, "Pimpin’ ain’t easy but it sure is fun.” But what’s almost disconcerting is the profound religiosity which infects all of the work. “The Adoration of Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Star” is the title of yet another painting. Ofili partakes of a tradition of transgressive Christianity that goes back to Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, to Graham Greene’s fugitive priest in The Power and the Glory and to the damnation that infects the saintly fallen creatures in Pasolini’s films. Then Mayor Rudy Guiliani took offense at "The Holy Virgin Mary” when is was shown at the Brooklyn Museum in l999 and tried to have it removed. In another age, Ofili would have been burned at the stake.

Burmese Days

In a recent article, “Back to a Burmese Prison By Choice”(NYT, 12/6/14 U Htein Lin, the Burmese artist and dissident is quoted thusly about his years of imprisonment, “I was completely cut off from art critics and an audience. I just did what I wanted. In the cell I found freedom. It was the most important time in my art career.” Now Mr. Lin makes the journey back to his former prison “to reconnect with a sense of confinement.” Edmund Wilson's The Wound and the Bow intertwined the Philoctetes to myth with the lives of writers like Dickens, Kipling, Joyce, Wharton and Hemingway to show how suffering can lead to creation. And Lin’s career and his nostalgie de la boue, as the French put it, underscores the idea of the part misery can play in generating insight. Of course there are many former dissenters once incarcerated in Burmese prisons who probably don’t share Lin’s fond memories. While pain may result in enlightenment, it more often then not simply crushes the human spirit. Solzhenitsyn who survived the Gulag and Dostoevsky who went onto achieve greatness after a mock execution are the exceptions. In John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, Lawrence Harvey plays the role of Raymond Shaw a former prisoner of war, who has been brainwashed into becoming an assassin. The Times story recounts how Lin used “old prison uniforms,” “syringes,” and “the flint wheels of cigarette lighters” as his palette. It’s a wonderful talent to be able to constantly recycle experience, performing a version of alchemy in which dross is turned into gold. Hannah Wilke the sculptress made her own death the subject of her last pieces. Lest we forget, George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days, derived from his deployment as a police officer during the waning of the Raj.The only problem would seem to occur when things are good. Many artists become so attuned to making their own subjective experience into an object that they are no longer able to enjoy the unmediated experience of reality. 

Rosewater

The Daily Show is considered primarily a comedy program finding it’s provenance in That Was the Week That Was and the media parodies on SNL. However, there’s undoubtedly a substantial segment of The Daily Show’s audience for whom the program’s satire is their primary news source. And if the satire about seemingly sacrosanct news items seems tasteless, the argument can be made that the grotesquery of what is going on in Iraq and Syria, in the Ukraine and to the Ozone layer is what’s truly lacking in taste. Rosewater,, the movie about the imprisonment of Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari (Gael Garcia Bernal) in Teheran’s notorious Evin prison (based on his memoir Then They Came For Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity and Survival), was directed by Jon Stewart, of Daily Show fame. However, as a director Stewart’s persona is a far cry from that of the television host. Instead of treating Bahari’s story as a comic strip or subject of satire (in the way Argo partially did in its tale of a notorious escape from Iran), Stewart tackles his subject with deadly seriousness. If there are humorous elements like one in which Bahari entices the film’s eponymous interrogator (Kim Bodnia) with stories about massage excursions in the exotic New Jersey city of Fort Lee, they’re intrinsic to the reality of what’s going on. The movie is curiously complex and a far cry from the kind of homiletics that are often the dark side of the satirist’s trade. The association between Rosewater and Rosebud is not serendipitous when one considers that one of the main axes Bahari’s tormentors have to grind is the link between journalism and spying. Whether Stewart or Bahari intended it, it’s hard not to fault the Iranian hardliners their insinuation of collusion (however one might detest their methods). The movie points to layers upon layers of connections rather than disconnects between the journalist and his captors, including the fact that Bahari’s father had been a prisoner of a common enemy the Shah—whose rise to power had come about due to the CIA’s machinations against the democratically elected Mosaddegh back in l953. There’s a scene where Bahari is about to be executed in the prison courtyard. His interrogator pulls the trigger, but there are no bullets in the gun. It’s a replication of an event in Dostoevsky’s early life. One wonders if the character, whose novelistic sensibility Stewart so vividly paints in Rosewater (personal/historical flashbacks are interspersed throughout the film), will someday turn the nightmare he lived into a great work of fiction.

Two Eyes for An Eye

Sing Sing’s “Old Sparky"

It’s not to demean the suffering of those who have been POW’s on either side of the fence. But when you read about the latest ISIS beheading, the infamous Hanoi Hilton really seems like the Hilton. Those who have traveled to Poland to see Auschwitz, to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, to the Jewish Museum in Berlin, those remembering Katyn may have thought they have seen the limits of depravity, but human innovation seems to know no bounds where the infliction of pain and suffering are concerned. Of course if you go to Italy and visit one of the Museo della Torturas you will find some pretty inventive contraptions like the Judas cradle, the rack,  head and testicle crushers. Let’s not forget burning at the stake, boiling in oil, bastinado and crucifixion. What is often remarked about pornography can also be iterated about torture: if it’s been said it’s been done and if it’s been done it’s been said. And then there is the infamous torture scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Waterboarding and sleep deprivation might seem mild what’s  compared to the failed death by lethal injection inflicted on a death row inmate in Oklahoma named Clayton Lockett? And then there's mental torture of the kind that was deployed on Lawrence Harvey in Manchurian Candidate and Dostoevsky, who was put up in front of a firing squad for his revolutionary activities and told he was going to die. Is there a limit to human torment, a point beyond which even the most depraved executioner refuses to go? Too bad Tomas de Torquemada, one of the stars of the Inquisition, is not here to answer the question? Does agency lessen pain? Do Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire or people who jump out of windows have something going for them. Would that Jan Masaryk were here to testify about the downside of unwilling defenestration. A scientist until the end Lavoisier reputedly performed an experiment involving his own death at the guillotine, by attempting to blink his eyes after his head was severed from his neck. However, while he may have been successful, he wasn’t able to talk about it. What if the ISIS executioner with the English accent beheaded himself as a way of expressing his anger at the West? Would the pain he felt be less than that which he inflicted on his victims, by virtue of the fact that relief was in his grasp?