La Voz de España ed. 813

Infiltrados (The Departed): La paradoja del espía

 

Goffman: El teatro de la interioridad

Goffman: El teatro de la interioridad: https://www.academia.edu/32941977/

Being Bullied

From Stephen Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky"— a newly-wed couple travel for once, above their means, in a first-class Pullman railway car:

To the minds of the pair, their surroundings reflected the glory of their marriage that morning in San Antonio. This was the environment of their new estate, and the man's face, in particular, beamed with an elation that made him appear ridiculous to the Negro porter. This individual at times surveyed them from afar with an amused and superior grin. On other occasions he bullied them with skill in ways that did not make it exactly plain to them that they were being bullied. He subtly used all the manners of the most unconquerable kind of snobbery. He oppressed them, but of this oppression they had small knowledge, and they speedily forgot that unfrequently a number of travellers covered them with stares of derisive enjoyment. Historically there was supposed to be something infinitely humourous in their situation.

     'We are due in Yellow Sky at 3.42,' he said, looking tenderly into her eyes. 

     'Oh, are we?' she said, as if she had not been aware of it. 

     To evince surprise at her husband's statement was part of her wifely amiability She took from a pocket a little silver watch, and as she held it before her, and stared at it with a frown of attnetion, the new husband's face shone.

     'I bought it in San Anton' from a friend of mine,' he told her gleefully.

     'It's seventeen minutes past twelve, she said, looking up at him with a kind of shy and clumsy coquetry.

     A passenter, noting this play, grew excessively sardonic, and winked at himself in one of the numerous mirrors.

     At last they went into the dining-car. Two rows of Negro waiters in dazzling white suits surveyed their entrance with the interest, and also the equanimity, of men who had been fore-warned. The pair fell to the lot of a waiter who happened to feel pleasure in steering them through their meal. He viewed them with the manner of a fatherly pilot, his countenance radiant with benevolence. The patronage entwined with the ordinary deference was not palpable to them. And yet as they returned to their coach they showed in their faces a sense of escape. 

 

El Mercader de Venecia (y el judío)

 El mercader de Venecia (y el judío): https://www.academia.edu/32890063/

What Ceremony Else

Retropost, 2014:

A passage from Christopher Rush's biographical fiction on Shakespeare, Will (2007). It is a novel much possessed by death, as it is structured around a conversation with his lawyer concerning Will's final will and testament, and his life now all past and no future. But there are many other deaths to go through before the final one. Here (ch. 47) Shakespeare reminisces on the death of his son Hamnet—and on the traces it left in his work. Such traces are not in the least explicit: there is no elegy  "On the Death of My Only Son", something which has bothered a number of scholars.  Here, Rush's Shakespeare resumes work after the child's burial.

When I finally came back to my lodgings in St Helen's, I clumped heavily upstairs to find the script of King John scattered on the table just as I'd left it. I leafed through the pages till I came back to Act Three Scene Four, where Constance, bereft of her boy, takes comfort from the Cardinal that we shall see and know our friends in heaven. 'If that be true,' she says, 'then I shall see my boy again.'

The ink in the pot had dried up in the sweltering August heat. The room smelt foul and was like an oven. I opened the shutters to let London in again, re-filled the inkpot, and with three strokes of the pen scored out the scene. Then I sat down and re-wrote it on the spot. This time the distraught mother found no confort in the golden words of the church. As I wrote, I recalled those four empty walls in Henley Street that used to echo with his laughter and prattle.

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.

Stuffs out his garments. I was remembering that little pile of clothes. And how I'd sat for hours in Stratford, turning them over and over, holding them up, crushing them to my lips. My own garments were stuffed out now with a stranger. I caught a sudden sight of myself in the glass.

A ghost had come back to Bishopsgate to carry on the life of work and worry. There was nothing left for him to do. I knew he would throw himself into it, reap the rewards, bask in the glory, the honour, the fame. All of which he did. But he carried a long sorrow for his son and these were not the last lines he wrote for him. He spoke to him in his verses many a time to come. That's what the death of your nearest and dearest does to you, Francis — estranges you from yourself, from life. After the funeral you look at the world like the moon, with that vacant stare, and no one sees or knows what's on the other side.

 Ben Jonson's son died too, of the plague, seven years later (the child was seven at the time). I poured drink into Ben that night.

'His life may have been cut short, Ben — but in short measure life may perfect be.'

He looked at me with red eyes. And later stole the line when he lost a daughter and penned her an elegy. Never missed a trick, old Ben. But for his son he wrote a touching little lament of his own: Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy — my sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.

My own sin had been the opposite. I hadn't thought of him enough. Not after that day I'd left him on Clopton Bridge. At least Ben Jonson didn't have that guilt to live with. But I buried my guilt between many lines. Ben's grieving love deserves to stand out clear.

Rest in soft peace, and asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetrie,
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.

It was nicely turned, don't you think, that verse of Ben's? But I don't believe Ben turned back to it after that. He moved on. Maybe I moved on too, or seemed to. But it didn't stop me, couldn't stop me turning back. Grief in its fullness doesn't always erupt at the time of death. It may take years to blossom, to burst into those blackest blooms of the heart. The black bile was always threatening me anyway, but Hamnet always kept it at bay, even when I only thought of him. And when I saw him, all too seldom, he cured in me thoughts that would thick my blood, with his child's matter made a summer's day short as a winter solstice. After he died came bleak December everywhere, every day; and every day after that, somewhere in every single day that followed, I felt the chill of that one awful day that would never go away. Every chill was that same chill, every day was that same day, the day we buried him.

What ceremony else? That's what I really wanted to shout at them that day, remembering my sister all over again, and those maimed rites. What ceremony else? The old rites were gone that could have comforted. We therefore commit his body to the ground. Therefore. It follows. Because we can no longer sing him to the saints with sage requiem and ministers of grace. Because we have taken away your old rituals, and therefore something of your beliefs too — for even beliefs are made of words.

Which leaves you with what? With a private knot of pain. Goodnight, sweet prince, I wanted to whisper — and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. But no more of that, if you please. Forasmuch as it hath pleased almighty God to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life thorugh Jesus Christ our Lord.  Sure and certain? Nothing was sure and certain any more. They didn't even call him by his name, didn't even use a personal pronoun. Not a 'thou' was spoken. Dear brother? What brother? What impersonal being was that? Dear God, he was my son, my only son. They were throwing on the earth, closing up the grave, shutting off communion, sundering me from my dead child with their Puritan words, hammered like cold nails into his coffin. Must there no more be done? Can't we help them on, our lost lovely dead? Can't they be allowed to call out to us, to help us too, the ones that mourn? Can't we communicate? Must the bond be broke so entirely by death, and the starkness of that cold ground, those inflexible words? No, the dead boy is not in heaven, he is in the earth, he's dead, dead and rotten.

That's what you're left with on that terrible day, worse than the wrath of God. Dies irae? God's anger would be acceptable, divine ire heaped on your head, better than that emptiness, that coldness in the soul, and that rebellious anguish that makes you cry out in the bitterness of your heart. No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou not breath at all? Thou'lt come no more. That's the closest words can come to expressing the pain of child loss. And ten years later, in Lear, the pain was still going on.

It went on in play after play. Sebastian was plucked from the waves and restored to his twin sister, Viola, the sea of troubles turning to salt waves fresh in love, in my troubled mind. And Leontes sees the dead brought back to life, a miracle before his eyes, and all pain subdued. But not the son, not Mamillius. The son never comes home again. Good night, sweet prince. It's the father's fault, always the father's fault. John Shakespere's time was unjointed and I'd to set it right, an absent father, and I must be from thence, and Hamnet's life the price, aye, Will, lay thee down and roar.

So he died over and over as I lived on and wrote on and on, died in every play that filled up the space he'd left. He couldn't stop dying, even in the days of my best success. He had to keep on dying because I had to keep on burying him, laying him to rest — not in shattered Catholic rites but in the only rituals left to me, the theatre, the ones that plays provided. They could never take that away from me. What ceremony else? The play, of course, the play's the thing, once more, over and over again. It was a public burial, never ending, pulling in mourners from the globe, from the ends of the earth, but it was also deeply private too, it was that paradox of the self that only the player knows.

Hamlet se ahoga y renace

—oOo—

Retroprospección del Dasein

 

Hay en el marco del pensamiento de Heidegger sobre la existencia específicamente humana (o Dasein) una interesante reflexión sobre la retroprospección, más en concreto sobre la experiencia retroprospectiva de la muerte y del transcurrir de la vida. En su ensayo sobre "El concepto del tiempo" (1924), que esboza muchos de los temas de Ser y Tiempo, apunta Heidegger cómo la experiencia de la limitación temporal, la consciencia de la muerte, es inherente a la existencia humana. La retroprospección es por tanto una experiencia constitutivamente humana, aunque normalmente se halle atenuada:

En este contexto, el ser de la posibilidad es siempre la posibilidad [constituida] de manera tal que sabe de la muerte, las más de las veces, en este sentido: ya lo sé, pero no pienso en ello. Sé de la muerte las más de las veces en el modo del saber que retrocede. Como interpretación del Dasein, este saber tiene inmediatamente a la mano el disimular esta posibilidad de su ser. El Dasein mismo tiene la posibilidad de evadir su muerte.

Este haber-pasado, como aquél hacia el cual precurso, hace, en este mi precursar hacia él, un descubrimiento: es el haber-pasado de mí. A título de este haber-pasado, descubre mi Dasein en cuanto súbitamente no más ahí; súbitamente no soy más ahí junto a éstas y aquellas cosas, junto a éstos y aquellos hombres, junto a estas vanidades, estos subterfugios y esta parlotería. El haber-pasado desbanda todas las familiaridades (Heimlichkeiten) y ocupaciones, el haber-pasado se lleva consigo todo a la nada. El haber-pasado no es un suceso, un incidente en mi Dasein. Pues es su haber-pasado, no un algo (ein Was) en él, que acontezca, que lo asalte y lo altere. Este haber-pasado no es un Qué, sino un Cómo (Wie), y, ciertamente el Cómo propio de mi Dasein. Este haber-pasado, hacia el cual puedo precursar en cuanto que mío, no es un qué, sino el Cómo de mi Dasein sin más. (13)

La reflexión, y la filosofía, sacan a la luz esta retroprospectividad inherente o voluntariamente olvidada de la experiencia humana. O, puesto de otro modo, la reflexión y la filosofía ahondan en lo específicamente humano mediante la reflexión de estas dimensiones retroprospectivas de la existencia.  Puede decirse que la tradición de filosofar sobre la complejidad de la experiencia temporal debe mucho a Heidegger. Nos enseñó mucho a ver cómo la prospección no pertenece únicamente al futuro o al presente, sino también al pasado, y cómo la comprensión retrospectiva de los acontecimientos (ese "saber que retrocede" en torpe traducción aquí) no es sólo cosa del pasado, sino que también se aplica, en algunas de sus modalidades, a la experiencia futura, o al presente. Hoy encontramos ese saber sobre el presente en las páginas de la prensa, esas páginas inauténticas—en este artículo de Oliver Burkeman que nos promete cambiar la perspectiva (temporal) sobre nuestra vida:

This Column Will Change Your Life: Hindsight—it's not just for past events.

Se verá aquí un énfasis en la vida, y no en la muerte. Y ciertamente el énfasis en la muerte, y en la eternidad, pesa desmedidamente en un ensayo sobre la especificidad de la experiencia humana. Las razones por las cuales olvidamos la muerte, razones que también son parte de la experiencia del Dasein, merecen atenderse más. Heidegger encuentra una Verfremdung brechtiana en la perspectiva sobre la vida que nos ofrece la retroprospección, el imaginarla ya transcurrida. Y es cierto—pero hay muchas perspectivas desde las cuales se puede desfamiliarizar la experiencia presente; y en nuestra experiencia vital no es "su más extrema posibilidad" siempre la más relevante, ni la que ofrece un punto de vista más auténtico o deseable.

El ser-ahí se dice de muchas maneras. No hay un punto de vista privilegiado sobre el tiempo, ni sobre la eternidad—todo punto de vista está situado y cada cual tiene sus condicionantes. Heidegger comienza citando a Einstein, pero en realidad es poco relativista. Todavía menos absolutismo perspectivístico puede encontrar lugar en un universo evolucionista, y no estático como el que (de modo ahora harto incomprensible) describía el propio Einstein. La eternidad es mala consejera, y mal rasero, sobre todo para los que vivimos un tiempo, y en el tiempo.

Ahondando en el papel que juega la retroprospección no sólo encontraremos más consciencia de la muerte, sino también más consciencia de la vida y sus complejidades. Y una experiencia del hereafter menos ambiciosa y más ajustada a la experiencia humana real, en sus prioridades y en su multiplicidad compleja. No vivimos sólo para la muerte y para la eternidad, sino también, y ante todo, para el presente, y para el futuro que será presente, y para el pasado que lo ha sido—para más allás más provisionales e inestables, para una vida que aún está por venir, aunque ya haya pasado, o quizá nunca vaya a existir.

Margarethe von Trotta, Hannah Arendt

—oOo—