To be or not to be (Hamlet): writing and thinking about the meaning of life

(from Hamlet, spoken by Hamlet)

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:

                                                                      (Act III, i).

 I was discussing this speech today with a student. Somewhere along the way we began to augment the verb to be with other verbs: compound verbs, transitive verbs, something more complete: to be avenged, to not be avenged, to avenge, to not avenge, to carry out a revenge plot, to not carry out a revenge, to act, to not act, to be passive, to not be passive. We began to play with verbs that might generate more meaning. Verbs that might give us more territory for thinking. ‘To be’ hanging alone like that seems incomplete or unfinished, an awkward infinitive form, an intransitive verb left out in the cold with no point, no object. We began to notice the other infinitive forms that litter this speech: to take, to suffer, to die, to sleep, to dream. ‘To take’ has ‘arms’ attached to it because it is here a transitive verb; it carries over and attaches itself to an object: those arms. A transitive verb needs a doer, a source of action, an agent. (Lights, action, arms waving about).

All writing requires action, the application of movement, a sense of choreography. The infinitive form reminds us that Hamlet havers and hovers in the theoretical realm, within unconjugated, undissolved plots. He can only repeat his sense of being overwhelmed by the call to arms, the call to action, his mortal self frozen in-between thinking and doing.

             ‘O that this too too solid flesh would melt

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!’

 Good writing requires some generation of action. I sense that many students are afraid to act, to think on their own terms because there is no space in their learning to do so. Reading and writing in schools and universities is now too tethered to outcomes; a right or a wrong answer tided away inside implausibly neat resolutions. Theoretical language that flags the idea of meaning but often says little at all. Obfuscates, stands in for thinking, words, words, words. Meaning has to be made.

I like to think that Hamlet would like to be — on a good day -- well conjugated: to join up, to build relationships between parts of himself and others, to discover other countries, so to speak. He is a student after all. Conjugation – in grammatical terms -- is the process of generating different inflections of voice, mood, tense, attitude and number to verbs. In biological terms, it is the process of uniting bacteria or cells in order to exchange genetic material. So to conjugate might be the art of exchanging parts in order to create new material.

 As an exercise in critical thinking, I often ask students to generate a set of verbs that might gloss or define the principal verbs in a piece of writing, to try and make something with them, to practise moving ideas along. At some point something surprising will emerge — a question such as — why is it that ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ is so definite, already qualified by ‘the’? As though these arrows and slings were already known, already felt and experienced, already identified as those in that particular set of sharp implements. As though fortune were itself an already knowable entity, or at least the suffering that accompanies bad or ‘outrageous fortune’.

To take arms

To resist

To fight back

To oppose outrageous fortune coming your way — Norway and Fortinbras — the invader, the outsider, the foreigner, the other king. Denmark’s opponent, and perhaps another father.