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abdicate

To proclaim or declare to be no longer one's own; to disown, cast off; esp. to disown or disinherit a child. 

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MND cont.

The question that continues to trouble me about the play, however, is the resolution of Lysander being restored, Demetrius being left enchanted, and the girls just dropping all the rivalry and everything returning to happily ever after. The logical extension is that it is just accelerating the maturation process as they would get older over time, but that seems to run counter to Shakespeare’s views on love that the fluid nature of humanity cannot settle down eternally in love without change. It all just seems to easy and nice that they happen to settle on clean pairs with no more conflict. I feel like it has to do something with the Bottom subplot, Theseus and Hippolyta’s relationship, or the mechanicals’ play, but I don’t think I’ve really thought enough about it yet to say either way.

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esoteric

Of philosophical doctrines, treatises, modes of speech, etc.: Designed for, or appropriate to, an inner circle of advanced or privileged disciples; communicated to, or intelligible by, the initiated exclusively. Hence of disciples: Belonging to the inner circle, admitted to the esoteric teaching. Opposed to exoteric adj. and n.

oed: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/64367?redirectedFrom=esoteric#eid

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream

At the start of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, what really struck me was the speed of the play, both in the writing, by the heavy rhyme, and in the action. It seemed like every mistake was caused by people moving too quick, not taking time to think, and really by Puck moving quickly (he also has several sections where the length of his lines get shorter and shorter, adding to the speed). The Girard paper added an interesting element for me, as it layered on the rationality of mimetic rivalry to explain what is at face value, magic. In either case, whether through magic or mimesis, the outcome is change. The boys are flipping who they love, if you take in the prehistory, as Girard does, so do the girls. Now this change is mentioned by Hippolyta after the youths are set straight and all paired up nicely. She says enigmatically that by the change happening to all, there is a kind of constancy, or consistency. This seems like a paradox, stasis coming from change, but in life, change is constant, yet because it is so incremental, it is hardly noticeable in many cases, and I believe that Shakespeare understands this on a fundamental level, especially concerning human relationships. There is a comment on the trueness of love in this play, and it appears to be undermined by the sudden flips of love that go back and forth. Love, however, as ideal as it may be from a neo-platonist view (which I don’t really know enough about to argue either way) is always going to be muddled in practice because it is only to come into existence through human relationships, and humans are always changing. Because this is a play, these changes can be accelerated to happen instantly, which is why the love potion makes such a good proxy for the change. However, there is also the element that it isn’t rational why we change or why we love. It is in our nature to do both, so that is why the fairies, personifications of nature, control the potion and the antidote. It is not that an outside force is controlling the scene, but that nature is running its course. [Does Girard have this, and I missed it, or is this where I can differentiate myself from his views? Is it substantial enough of a departure?] The speed of change is not necessarily caused by mimetic rivalry fueling change, but the ability for the play to imitate life at a faster, almost absurd clip, instantaneously showing the change that may happen over a period of decades in real life.

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122117

Yesterday, I went back into the Soledad Prison for the first time since I graduated high school, and it was a really moving experience. They had read John Steinbeck’s /East of Eden/ this semester.

East of Eden was one of the very first books that hit me in a real way, and it really was only the one line, “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” I think this Whitman poem, /O Me! O Life!/ is a beautiful thing to lay over that line. “That the powerful play goes on.” The powerful play, not the perfect play, because I know many people who chase that perfection – I have often found myself in their company in that gilded rat-race – and who even achieve it by some standards, who are wealthy, or successful by some metric or another, who plod along with those sordid crowds and live empty, hollow lives. However, I would like to say that it is a very beautiful thing to be in a room where no one is like that. Everyone in this roof has lifted their head high above that crowd, and picked up the pen, maybe for the first time, in the case of my brothers from Palma, or for a second time, for the men in blue, to re-write your verse. It does not have to be perfect, and it never will be, but it can, and will, be powerful.

I do not know much. I have only been stomping around on this planet for nineteen years or so, and only really thinking for the past two or three, but I have a strong sense that the most sure route to writing that verse is through an action brought up several times tonight. I am going to reiterate it because I do believe it is the truth, and that is compassion. Last summer I read a book by a priest at Notre Dame, Father Don McNeil, who sadly passed in August, under that name, /Compassion/. It said that “wherever true community is formed, compassion is made actual in the world.” Real community, founded on love, faith, and brotherhood; Real community, like that found here in Life-Cycle; This is what makes compassion. This is how we must write our verse.

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O Me! Oh Life - Walt Whitman

O Me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;   Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;   Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who  more faithless?)   Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d;   Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;           Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;   The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?                                                            Answer. That you are here—that life exists, and identity;   That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

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In the beginning there was the Word – and it is all we’ve ever had.