The Blood is the Life

Now the Christian church was founded on blood, strengthened by blood, and augmented by blood; yet nowadays they carry on Christ’s cause by the sword just as if He who defends His own by His own means had perished. And although war is so cruel a business that is befits beasts and not men, so frantic that poets feign it is sent with evil purpose by the Furies, so pestilential that is brings with it a general blight upon morals, so iniquitous that it is usually conducted by the worst bandits, so impious that it has no accord with Christ, yet our popes, neglecting all their other concerns, make it their own task.¹

Blood defends the faith, establishes the borders of nations, and strengthens – or so we say – the bonds of nation and brotherhood. We use blood as a demarcation of rites of passage: blood-brothers, the blood of the first battle, the first kill, the blood of menstruation, the blood of birth, the final blood of death. The blood – as so many of fiction’s vampires seem so fond of saying – is the life. But it is also the death. It is the fluid that marks the passage from this life into the next – or into whatever it is that awaits us, be it another life or simply the long silence at the end of our fitful lives.

Blood can be beautiful. It flushes our cheeks in moments of passion or anger or embarrassment. It warms our skin, fuels our bodies, and makes us alive. Bright red blood is, in fact, a very pretty color. It draws our attention, inspires our curiosity and our poetry.

Blood can also be ugly. It stands for loss, death, and pain. It congeals and dries into a coppery, muddy color unlike anything else. Dried blood screams its identity. It stains and doesn’t come out. It crusts and flakes and nevertheless retains that strangely sweet-salty-coppery scent that makes our mouths water and turns our stomachs. It makes us – like Lady Macbeth – want to wash our hands.

Blood incites panic. It howls in our heads that primal scream of bad thing! We want to stop its flow, stifle the brightness, the liquidity, of that precious, disgusting fluid. Blood makes us faint, makes us scream, makes us vomit. Blood is a sign that something is very wrong. Ask any parent or teacher – blood is bad.

And in today’s world, blood is a carrier of disease – “blood-borne pathogens” are the new hidden threat. HIV. AIDS. Hepatitis. The silent and invisible monsters that hide inside our blood.

And yet, so much has been built on blood. The Church, as Erasmus notes above, the nation (pick one), what we so desperately cling to as “freedom.” Built on blood. Mortared with a paste of blood and dirt and crushed bones and hopes. “Founded on blood, strengthened by blood, and augmented by blood.”

And still, our politicians, our armies, our supposed saviors, “neglecting all their other concerns, make it their own task.”

In the thousands of years of civilization on this planet, we haven’t figured out a way to solve our differences, to build our cities and our societies, without blood. We mouth the words that “the pen is mightier than the sword,” murmur platitudes that say “give peace a chance,” and click our tongues in censure at the violence in other places, but we do not acknowledge – do not want to acknowledge – that we are creatures of life and death, creatures of healing and violence, creatures of blood.

I do not say that I support war. I do not say that I am in favor of violent means as an end to conflict. I do neither. But neither to I deny the violent impulses I have – I don’t follow them, but I also don’t deny them. Our society is one in which violence is a source of entertainment. It makes us feel good, provides our catharsis. We revel in shadenfreude. We want to watch pain. We want to see blood. We’re just happier when that blood isn’t real, when the shiny red drops are corn syrup and food coloring, starch and dye. When they wash out or wipe away. But they, for all their falseness, are still drops of blood. Symbolic, yes, but blood, nonetheless.

I say that blood does us more good when it stays inside our bodies than when it is let out. But I also say that it has a place in our lives. Every woman who menstruates, who has given birth, knows what I mean. Everyone who has skinned a knee, cut a finger, scraped an elbow, knows what I mean. Everyone who has lived rather than died because someone else gave a pint of blood knows what I mean. Everyone who has waited to hear the yes or no of a blood-borne pathogen test knows what I mean. Blood is a part of us, a part of our society, a part of who and what we are.

I am a creature of blood. So are we all.

1 Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, 100-101.

What is "rational," anyway?

In his article, "Rational Control, or, life without virtue" (from The New Criterion, September issue, 2006), Harvey C. Mansfield suggests something with which I want to simultaneously agree and for which I'd like to beat him with a wet noodle.

God is the foundation of the irrational order. Modern liberation is liberation from God as the source of irrational custom. (41)

Mansfield defines "rational control" as things, rules, and/or people who control the actions of others for a "rational" purpose, here identified with things like "life" or "the greater good." Things like mandatory seatbelts, airbags, auto-flush toilets, and those automatic sinks that never seem to work right. These things make our lives better, or would if they worked properly instead of getting stuck in their dispensers and car doors, going off for no good reason, flushing and wetting one's behind, and refusing to turn on or off no matter how much hand waving is involved. The idea behind them is, ultimately, altruistic. Designed to prolong and better (or at least sanitize) our lives.

The "irrational order," then, is that which goes against "rational control."

Don't get me wrong. I'm an atheist. While I personally do not have any faith in a higher being/power/flying spaghetti monster/invisible sky wizard, I also recognize that belief in a deity or deities gives great comfort, solace, and even joy to other people. I'm all for that - as long as they keep it to themselves.

But how is placing our human inclination to have faith in something in the handlessness of brainless technology any more or less "rational" than placing it in the possible handlessness of an unseen divinity? Given the track-record of auto-flush toilets, I personally don't feel any more inclined to allow the auto-plumbing of the world to have "control" over my "rational" impulses, thank you very much. Particularly since the faucets repeatedly confound my perfectly "rational" desire to wash my hands after using the equally "rational" (and often equally malfunctioning) auto-flush toilet.

How is the auto-flush toilet a better "replacement god" than god?

At least nobody asks god to flush for them. They're perfectly willing to do it for themselves.

But, Mansfield says, we are unable to exercise that kind of "rational control" over ourselves.

To liberate us from subjection, modernity must show that men can control themselves. (41)

Great. I'm with you Mr. Mansfield. But I do have one teensy little problem... Auto-flush toilets do not let me control myself. They don't even let me control my own fecal matter. The auto-flush is most certainly not an instance of human control. It represents our desire to give up control to some sort of porcelain god that will happily whisk away all unpleasantness from our spanking-clean bottoms. And this is most emphatically not a case of giving up liberty for progress - it's a case of transferred reliance. From god to technology. From ourselves to unreliable auto-plumbing. It's a case of the age-old human problem of "not-my-problem."

But Mansfield is aware that progress can come at the cost of our liberty. I wish - oh, how I wish - he weren't.

It appears that the two aspects of modernity are liberty and progress, and that the two are linked. Liberty means liberation from unreason, which is progress; progress means expanding the scope of liberty. Is there no difficulty here? Yes, there is, and not a small one. There is no liberty to be irrational or to be satisfied with less liberty. For example, women today are equal to men, or closer to equal than they used to be. Men, however, are less free to be their old sexist selves. No doubt this is all for the good, but men are still less free in a sense. Moreover, having abandoned the "traditional stereotypes," we have set in place new, non-sexist stereotypes. These are to be taught to children by parents, to parents by the mainstream media. (41)

I think I was just catapulted back to 1950. No, wait. To 1789 and the writing of the Bill of Rights. Not only do I find it extraordinarily insulting that Mr. Mansfield considers his freedom "to be [his] old sexist [self]" to have been curtailed by feminism, but the very idea that sexism - or racism, homophobia, etc. - is a freedom... For Pete's sake. Okay, fine. Freedom of speech says that you can feel free to be vocally sexist if you want. Fine. But it also says that I don't have to take that crap from you if I don't want. Just because I get to retaliate doesn't mean you are any less free to say what you think. It just means you might have to weigh some consequences before you open your big, fat, bigoted mouth.

Now I will concede Mr. Mansfield's point - modernity has led us down many paths on which improvements in medicine, government, and social expectations have also led to restrictions in our "liberty." But pick a less offensive example, please. In all fairness, perhaps that is Mr. Mansfield's point. He doesn't feel "free" to use offensive examples, so he does it anyway, just to push some buttons. But I think that in so doing, he does himself and his ideas a great disservice.

In this age of Patriot Acts and phone taps, there needs to be some recognition that just because we've allowed our language and ourselves to be "rationally controlled" doesn't make us any more "rational." It makes us, in my humble opinion, a good deal less "rational." I acknowledge that political correctness may seem like a restriction, but I will also say that does not stop us from saying what we want to say. It simply asks that we consider our speech.

And what I say - what I have always and will always say - is that if what you have to say is important enough, you should say it anyway. Speak up, speak out, political correctness be damned. To requote the oft-and-over-quoted Voltaire, "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."

Just remember, the auto-flush toilet has a button that lets you exercise your independence, to defy "rational control" and flush whenever you want.

The poor player

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (Macbeth 5.5.24-28)

This particular passage, so often quoted (and, like any Shakespeare, misquoted) is the subject of today's rant. Specifically, the following elucidation by Harold Fisch:

The problem arises when one comes to evaluate the total function and meaning of this metaphor. Does it suggest simply, in reference to Macbeth, the ‘automation of the stage-actor’ as Mr. Kantak remarks – the hollowness of an illusory existence which has lost all its meaning? The comparison of the world to a theatre and of the people in it to actors had certainly served to ‘stress the empty, ephemeral nature of life on earth’ and certainly this represents the main direction of Macbeth’s thinking in the fifth act.¹

But does the trope of the theatrum mundi, as here Fisch (after Kantak) implies, really suggest that life is “empty, ephemeral” and “hollow”? Or is the implication that what is rich is performance itself? That the color and quality of life is contained entirely within the realm of the theatrical? Let us examine, for a moment, this inversion. If Macbeth, for example, has just recognized that performance is the core of existence, that richness, power, and monarchical glory are all contained within the ability to perform them well, then his nihilistic attitude is not that life is empty, but that his life, in specific, has been empty. I suggest that the argument should not be that life is “empty,” but that Macbeth has failed to perform it. It is his failure, and not the intrinsic quality of life, that indicates the “hollowness” of which Fisch speaks. In essence, then, the message of the theatrum mundi is not that we are “mere” anything, but that the whole of creation is available to us through the power of performance.

Is not the actor image essentially ambivalent? For whilst it implies on the one hand that life is a play of phantoms, a meaningless repeated cycle, in another sense surely it implies that life has the gripping significance of a dramatic plot, that it has design, intention, purpose. It may serve to introduce something not less, but more meaningful than the neutrality of a non-dramatic order of existence. The world of nature is without pattern; but the world of drama is full of pattern – a mighty maze but not without a plan.²

"Not without a plan"... Dear god, intelligent design is infiltrating my damn literary criticism. Okay, Mr. Fisch, so drama is better than nature because it has "a plan"? You have, sir, come up with what may be the driest, most boring reason that life is like theater and vice versa. Your theater, Mr. Fisch, makes me want to go to sleep. Or, better, cry out of sheer, desperate boredom. No wonder Macbeth gave up and his wife offed herself. While life is hollow and empty, at least it is... "dramatic plot." Good god, man! Better yet, it's okay that our lives are mere theater because we get something "more" when we're dead. The applause from god. Oh, goodie. I can't wait. Ugh.

My issue with Fisch and Kantak - and Macbeth - is principally this: what is so bloody wrong with the theater that you are so damn against it? Why is it so bad to be a "poor player"? What's wrong with "strutting and fretting"? That's all most of us spend our time doing! Strutting and fretting. I'm all about strutting and fretting, thank you very much Mr. Harold Fisch. Lay on Macduff! On with strutting and fretting!

Okay, so that's a little melodramatic. But still. This is Shakespeare's way of saying "life is what we make of it," and, Mr. Macbeth, you sucked at it. You fretted more than strutted and you killed a few people that made you crazy... but you didn't ever just say "To hell with you and your prophecies you stupid hags, I'm going to be a real King!" Nope. Not once. You whined at your wife, who told you to act like a real man, and you whined at your friend (whom you killed), and you whined at the witches to "make it all better" for you. But did you ever just try to rule the damn country you killed Duncan for? No. Much better to blame everybody else for your problems, Mr. Macbeth. Because then you don't have to pretend that you failed because you are a terrible "player."

So, my dear Mssrs. Fisch and Kantak and Macbeth, I say Shakespeare was a bloody smart guy - smarter than you guys anyway, and certainly smarter than me - and when he says that "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing" through the mouth of a complete whiny failure...

I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that what he means is not that life is empty, but that it is oh, so rich. So impossibly, beautifully full of possibilities, of costumes, jewels, and roles, of hats and gowns and robes that we can don and cast aside, glittering and shiny things, swords and pens and shimmering silks and rattling bones, bits and bobs and all manner of fantastic and wonderful things that can let us be anything we want, if we only take a deep breath, push aside the stage door, and step out into the wide world - that great Globe - and play.

1 Harold Fisch, “Shakespeare and ‘The Theatre of the World,’” The Morality of Art: Essays Presented to G. Wilson Knight by his Colleagues and Friends, ed. D.W. Jefferson (London: Routledge, 1969), 80.

2 Fisch, 81.

History moves in a cyclical motion...

Signs that times haven't changed all that much since 1515...

All these revolutions, treatises made and broken, frequent risings, battle and slaughter, all these threats and quarrels, what do they arise from but stupidity? And I rather think that some part of this is due to our own fault. We do not hand over the rudder of the ship to anyone but a skilled steersman, when nothing is at stake but four passengers or a small cargo; but we hand over the state, in which so many thousands of people are in peril, to the first comer.¹

A pompous man Erasmus may have been, but he wasn't an idiot. When I first read this out loud, K commented that it didn't really apply to democracy, as an election didn't automatically accept "the first comer" as President. I gave him a look. He acceded the point. We now call him King George II. (Yes, I know very well there were other Georges in the Presidency. The point is that this is becoming a dynastic line, which, as my work with Shakespeare continually reminds me, is a very. bad. thing.)

A few days ago, I read a blog published posthumously by a soldier in Iraq that reminded me - contrary, I believe, to his own feelings - that there is nothing we do that is without political ramifications. He'd asked that his name not be used for political soap-boxing (a perfectly reasonable request, in my opinion), and that got me thinking. Considering what I do - i.e. read things published by people over 400 years ago about kings who (if they existed at all) died several hundred years before that - it is strangely relieving to recognize that politics haven't really changed all that much. True, it's also vaguely nauseating that we haven't managed to get any better at government and politics as a species, but it does seem to point to some intrinsic feature in human nature. We lie, we steal, we manipulate the facts and the diction of our speeches, blogs, and publications to reflect our own opinions. We use other people as pawns in our political games, whether that means we send them off to be killed or whether it simply means that we use their names and the grief of their families as a launch-pad for our own political agendas.

Is that a bad thing? Yes. And no. Should we feel that it is acceptable to use people? The moral voice in my head says no. But on the other hand, that's what we, as a culture and a species, do. Much as I hate to ever admit that Ayn Rand might be a little bit right, she was. We use other people. For our own comfort, for our own gratification, for our political, social, and/or religious ends. We use their bodies, their minds, their names, the iconographic representations published by newspapers, television, the military, even their parents. We make these things into what we want them to be, which may or may not have any connection to what they actually are.

Is this bad? No. And yes. We do what we do. Does this mean that we are all fundamentally selfish beings with no sense of altruism? Sometimes. But sometimes we do what we do - we use people - for the betterment of society. (A horrible phrase, that.) Sometimes we create this propaganda because we truly believe it is for the benefit of the majority. The benefit of the future. Shakespeare did. Maybe he didn't figure it would change the world (really), but he had something to say. And he said it. A lot. In verse. And it did something. It made a difference. Even if that difference is only the continual acknowledgment that we see that he made a difference.

Shakespeare wasn't a saint. He wasn't a great bard channeling some divine muse. He was a man. A man who made mistakes both literary and social. He misspelled words, messed up his meter, and sometimes had plot-holes the size of Texas. And he said something. He said that kings are people, too. He said that no one, no matter how lowly, how base, has an influence in the world. Sometimes large, sometimes small, but has an influence.

That is why Shakespeare is, to paraphrase one of my students, "Da man."

1 Desiderius Erasmus, "One Ought to Be Born a King or a Fool," The Erasmus Reader, ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto, 1990), 339.