Mike Brennan: Denial
(Acrylic on canvas, 24" x 30")
It will surprise no one to discover that Shakespeare is the most oft-quoted of all English writers.
Whilst it's probably impossible even for literary scholars to definitively say what his greatest lines are, the good people at No Sweat Shakespeare have kindly provided a list of 50 famous quotes, beginning with To be, or not to be and ending with What light through yonder window breaks.*
It's not the worst list in the world, but it's hardly an imaginative or controversial selection. And, what's more, it doesn't include my own favourite line from Shakespeare: I know thee not, old man ...
This line, from Act 5 Scene 5 of Henry IV, Part 2, has particular resonance to me at this time and deserves much greater critical attention, because the need to deny - our elders, our loved ones, our teachers, our leaders, and, ultimately, ourselves - is an absolutely crucial requirement in the process of becoming what one is.**
Prince Hal, upon assuming the crown and becoming king, knew it; Zarathustra, who instructs his followers that they must ultimately lose all masters and learn to hate their friends, knew it; and even Jesus, who accepted the kiss from Judas and predicted Peter's triple denial, knew it.
Indeed, Christ himself denied his own mother, when he notoriously put the question to her: Woman, what have I to do with thee? As a reader of Lawrence, I have long viewed this remark made to Mary as a sign of failure. But now - in the position of a long term, full-time carer for an elderly mother with dementia - I'm rather more sympathetic.
That is to say, I'm tempted - in order to preserve my own health and sanity - to turn my back and walk away, because too much love and loyalty to another, or to the past, can be deadly and anyone who wishes to live and fulfil their own destiny has to offer a seemingly cruel denial of someone or something at sometime or other, regardless of the consequences or the pain caused.
We deny and must deny, says Nietzsche, because something in us wants to live and affirm itself.
There is even, we might suggest, an existential imperative to sell out (i.e., to compromise one's integrity and betray one's principles); not necessarily for personal gain, but in order to leap into the future and carry forward the banner of life. A creative individual must repudiate the familiarity of the past (including old relationships) if he or she is to adventure onward into the unknown.
But this isn't easy: far easier to martyr oneself and to shrivel away inside an old life; a victim of that moral poison and great depressant called pity.
Indeed, Christ himself denied his own mother, when he notoriously put the question to her: Woman, what have I to do with thee? As a reader of Lawrence, I have long viewed this remark made to Mary as a sign of failure. But now - in the position of a long term, full-time carer for an elderly mother with dementia - I'm rather more sympathetic.
That is to say, I'm tempted - in order to preserve my own health and sanity - to turn my back and walk away, because too much love and loyalty to another, or to the past, can be deadly and anyone who wishes to live and fulfil their own destiny has to offer a seemingly cruel denial of someone or something at sometime or other, regardless of the consequences or the pain caused.
We deny and must deny, says Nietzsche, because something in us wants to live and affirm itself.
There is even, we might suggest, an existential imperative to sell out (i.e., to compromise one's integrity and betray one's principles); not necessarily for personal gain, but in order to leap into the future and carry forward the banner of life. A creative individual must repudiate the familiarity of the past (including old relationships) if he or she is to adventure onward into the unknown.
But this isn't easy: far easier to martyr oneself and to shrivel away inside an old life; a victim of that moral poison and great depressant called pity.
Notes
* Readers interested in the full list of quotes provided by No Sweat Shakespeare should click here.
** Obviously, I'm not talking about denial here in psychological terms, i.e., as a coping mechanism used to avoid confronting an emotionally disturbing truth, or denialism in the political sense of denying historical or scientific fact.
The line from Jesus can be found in John 2:1-5 and the line from Nietzsche in The Gay Science, IV. 307.
Fascinating post. The necessity of estrangement, and self-estrangement, as a propulsive force for creative life provides much food for thought here in both the Shakesperean and human context.
ReplyDeleteOf even greater interest, perhaps, in Shakespeare are those moments when certain figures, uncannily, are both recognised and not recognised, as in Macbeth's first encounter with the Witches:
'What are these
So wither'd and so wild in their attire,
That look not like the inhabitants o' the earth,
And yet are on't? Live you? or are you aught
That man may question? You seem to understand me,
By each at once her choppy finger laying
Upon her skinny lips: you should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so.'
While denial is well recongised in clinical psychology as a human-all-too-human defect that allows people to 'fit' reality to their own limits, the cost of surrendering such contours may in some cases be sanity itself. As Eliot famously put it, 'humankind cannot bear too much reality'.