The Tempest of Shakespeare's Foretold America

Shakespeare's Tempest Title Page, From Walter Crane's Illustrated 1893 Edition

"...like the baseless fabric of this vision, 

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

Shakespeare's The Tempest Act 4, Scene 1

Miranda - The Tempest by John William Waterhouse

See Walter' Crane's Engraving for Act 4, Scene 1

This painting from the early 20th century depicts Miranda, the daughter of Prospero, who after being visited by a gathering of dancing nymphs, becomes irate before his children and lets out this oft-repeated quote in the final play solely attributed to this great English master of drama. 

I'd like to imagine that Miranda, alone on the coast of this strange, continental "New World" island, whose fate is the design of familial power, takes these words to heart, and envisions the great catastrophe of human ambition, as with the same vociferous sight as a sail ship torn in the tempests of the besieging, isolating, and finally, humanizing seas. 

I often hear this quote in my head at times, it speaks to me in the volumes as voluminous as the Earth's own oceanic body; a truism for the unconscious, subsurface flesh of all earthly necessity.

__________

At the house of my paternal grandparents, upstate New York, embedded the deep thick of hilly forests, I drift outside the family circle. A lump of earth appears as an ancestral burial ground, laden with the cornerstone of belief in a religious death through a life lived for the proverbial travesty of peaceful rest. 

Cauterskill Falls on the Catskill Mountains by William Guy Wall

In an act outside defiance, towards the inborn will to dream, I flee, bounding beyond the borders of the family lawn towards a new home. My brother, eager to follow in my footsteps, cavorts sheepishly in the pliant mud of earthly selfishness, and looking behind me, I see his devilish eyes smile with ghastly service. He raises a small pistol, and fires. I thumb a ride, and bound tirelessly through traffic, having skimmed the side rails of a merging highway road, a cop notices my automotive thievery, and at once I am caught. In my plea, they capture my brother close behind, warned of his homicidal designs. 

Highway-Byways by Paul Klee

In the police station, a lawyer sees us, and our family soon becomes present. They find him guilty. I’m barred from seeing him, yet the lawyer slips me a note, a suicide drawing, written with a chipped pencil within the frame of a bullet illustration. “Is he portending to war?” I wonder, free to feed my smaller animal the fun-loving pride of colourful satiation.

_________

America! Why have you buried your deepest, darkest secrets in whispers unheard? Yours is a truth disguised in a white blur as brilliant as the green-footed greed of mad industry. Why do you never step lightly off the strength of Europe's forests, onto world mystery reduced to cartography?

What is your name? And since when have you dreamed so shamelessly without thought to the diligent right to be in peace on Earth? Where is your life, if not in the decadent splendor of your shared riches? Why have you become poor with anger, and offered only suicide to your stout-hearted mob?

- excerpt from "America! America!" 

At the Romantic Edge, Before the First Impression

The Golden Bough by J.M.W. Turner

"WHO does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough? The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi— “Diana’s Mirror,” as it was called by the ancients." Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, p. 1

Lake Nemi by J.M.W. Turner

__________

Reclined on plush couches in a generic condo lobby, my friend and I watch a political debate. Angered by a statement by the Prime Minister, he becomes extremely deviant in his manner. “No one should be living in Canada.” The argument goes on to delineate the environmental truths of socio-historical degradation in the wake of our 21^st century fate. Mindless, he unzips the entire leather covering and filches it for a sell. I follow in cheeky amazement.

Blasted knocks deliver crushing blows to the weak door, the hinges creak and splinter. A mass of Jewish men greedily express their intense fury. I unlock the door ever so slightly, leaving the chain lock in place. “Your friend’s killed our boy. A little man is dead.” Their mouths sputter with chainsaw smoke as they charge ultimatums and death threats in the name of my absent friend. “He’s skipped town,” I excuse. Unwilling to confront their standing guard, whose immovable post at the front of my residence is an unwelcoming barrier to my normal life, I flee with no plan to return.

Petworth House, Interior by J.M.W. Turner

After a filthy cheap bus ride, I clamber out upon the beach sand, and peering into the bright daze of lake horizon, I see my friend in a drunken rage at the water’s edge, swinging a heavy sack. As I approach, I see madness in his eyes. He is another person altogether, I sense a body in the leather couch covering. “Why didn’t you sell it?” I yell over crashing waves and turbulent wind. He simply eyes me with confounding disinterest and without a moment’s passing, he flings me headlong into the water, where we are all to drown with the corpse-filled leather covering. I swim, and as he plummets to the lake floor, suicidal and lost to the world, I grab through the heavy seaweed and rocky outcroppings with salt and stone eviscerating my every bit of skin of its human moisture. A whale’s fume stings my side and I feel I am being helped along, a fellow mammal and helper in my midst. And the undertow sucks me ever deeper beyond the shore’s shallow depths out to the plain sea.

Fishermen at Sea by J.M.W. Turner

Marooned on an island, miraculously alive, I am cast over a rocky shoal, where the sea moss hangs in a color scheme of subdued purples and deep greens. A man, of unknown origin, aids me in crossing a hillock, emptied of its cavernous rock, a mere sparsely covered hollow of mossy, volcanic emergence. As we reach out over the pockmarked swill, the entire island’s mass becomes visible, a wonderwork of natural phenomena, indescribable in its wonder: a truly new land.     

_________

in the shamanic din of civilized inclinations
to become the oldest persona of grace, emergent
of land intoxicated by the avian lords
who roam tearfully in landless bush
above the streaming Pacific's current
fanning to seed
atop island exotics
and breach the blind exploration
from nothing

to an essence of discovery
in the learned,
seated life

- excerpt from "Drugged Love, Seated Life"

Frisian Monuments

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich

During a daytime nap or after-morning drifting, bird's eye view over an island that resembles England, only without buildings, completely bare with short grass, lines appear where grass doesn't grow, thin trails of dirt from above connect stone monuments, I peer closer to look at the stone monuments, they look like Stonehenge, though the entire setting and atmosphere is pre-historic and not Polynesian because of the low grassland environment

Thurs, May 5, 2011