hands on the openable book

A couple of weeks ago I was having a really extraordinarily bad day, and Molly sent me this poem. Sending me this poem was a really good call.

Just days ago we sat upon this rock
Watching the ignorant armies marching past
With the scholar's sense of knowing more than they.
Now you are in England
And the soldiers somewhere as grave,
And I seem to know nothing at all.
Oh, I can name you stones, planets, stars,
By Agricola, Linnaeus, and Tycho;
Words I know, objects, machineries, but mechanism
Has ceased to be sufficient for events.
I still do not believe in ghosts, say I.
A lamp burns blue from gasses in the flame,
Light blooms in unstruck conduits of the eye
And the shape-seeking mind gives it shadow substance:
I saw a phosphene with a silvered beard.
It was easier for the others: they believed.
Unpolished by the wheels of Wittenberg
They roughly knew that death sleeps not
When trouble wakes it. We were so very cold.
What did you see by darkness, then? Your mind
Had always a good eye, and your soul
Always a muted voice. Some recollection
Was it, some fatherly advice
On power, trust, and counsels in the court
Rose up to haunt you, and you called it Father.
Why there I have deduced it, QED.
I will believe that men are stricken mad
When I can think naught else, as I believe
That they are dead when I do see a corpse.
Recall that night in the days of our study
We went up to the tower in Wittenberg
Because the old professor, Johann Faust
The wondersmith, the one who could not choose
If God had mercy, promised us a wonder.
Shortly he gave it, with his body and crossed timbers
And a thunderclap. Demons, you said,
Had rent him. I never thought you
More than metaphorical. Surely
Something in an alembic had gone wrong,
A spark touched to a firework, perhaps
Those strange heavy metals he said were Philosopher's Stone.
He swore he could wall Germany with brass
And all knew he meant cannon: Gustavus Aldophus
Taught the world that trick. You and Rosencrantz and I
Looked on Faustus in pieces among his instruments:
Thence Ros went off to form that fond attachment
To Guildenstern with his horrid clarinet,
Flowering Narcissus. You said demons,
Meaning more I think now than I thought then.
I confess to this air that I saw first and mainly
Anatomized Man, in exploded view,
And wondered which of all those riven vessels,
Those open hollow parts, had spilled his soul.
There's a mystery wants answering.
You did not stab Polonius in the brains,
Nor heart, nor anything particularly.
(The doctors never thought to open him;
A lung, the liver portal veins, I'd guess.)
You did not stay to see the transference
Of wounds. Your thrust went further than you know.
Here is where we define Horatio's courage.
If I put this message to paper and ink
Instead of casting it on water after you
Would I tell you, reasonable friend,
How Ophelia's reason cries out in its sleep?
They gave me charge of the distracted maiden,
Thinking her safe thus, I suppose;
How flattering to my mind. Though safe she was,
Not just because she was, in my faith, yours,
But out of simple fear. Not simple. Mine.
I think she knew it. It was she who kissed
My palms as if they smoked, then ran, light-foot,
Trailing blossoms, laughing. Laughing, laughing,
There was never such laughter at Wittenberg,
Nor demons either. And now the girl is tended
By some old hen who fears to go near water.
Does any of this matter to you, damn it,
Who turned her aside for reasons I trust are good
Who'd have her without taking her? At school
You thought on sex. I heard you through the walls.
Of course it's not a cloud of autumn light;
It's awkward and it's noisy and it's humid
And leaves you feeling half like Jupiter
And one third set to vomit. Do I shock you?
Oh yes, friend, women have delighted me,
As, I should hope, I them. Consider it
Research, hands on the openable book,
Affording here and there to the caring student
A subtle glimpse of Time and God.
No. No. It is my faith to understand,
Not to disprove, your motives. I would know,
And now that I am here, I think I do.
My parents' house had walls and doors and roof,
Elsinore none of these. The place is open
As diagram in a book; here read the legend:
A represents a whispering-gallery,
B indicating a confessor's alcove,
C shows a hollow underneath the stairs.
This is no house, it is a theatre,
A cockpit in continuous performance,
All actors, all audience, no interval.
You hurt me when you would not take my oath
Of silence, but you did not mean to do:
You only knew your ground, the listeners' kingdom,
Where intimacy's the rarest paradox.
I wonder if this place does wound the mind,
Echoing nights with auditors and ghosts
(Memories I mean, the ghosts I will acknowledge)
Toxic with stone-dust, lead in wine and paint,
The moldy wheat that dements villages?
It is the time, near war, too near to death,
The witchfinder's needle bearing down,
Demanding, scream or be burned alive?
I learned in Wittenberg, I learn here
To watch men die and women suffer
With the same Apollonian detachment I kept
For the droppings of unidentified wildlife
And tumors in jars, driven by the passion
Of glands undiscoverable by knife, and the thought
That the world might not be left
So bad as when one entered;
If demonless Wittenberg and haunted Elsinore
Were brought together in some essential coitus
Would the child be good?
Gone friend, what do you dream
What my philosophy dreams of?
Words fall in water, and the world shall end
No different for Horatio's tenancy.
Down yonder hill two clowns are digging holes
For dead men. Every doctor knows
Whence comes his study-matter; I'll go there
And see if spades have brought up interest.
There's motion, out to sea. A pirate sail,
Black sheet on silver water. That's a legend:
Of grief and trouble come to royal fathers,
Trouble and grief come unto princely sons.

—John M. Ford (1957-2006), "Letter from Elsinore," 1993. (In this case, from Heat of Fusion and Other Stories, 2004).

I love so many things about this poem. I love how it positions Hamlet in history, how the play exists (as it really must) in the same world as Faustus; I love Horatio, and I love that we know what comes after this -- a pirate sail -- and Horatio sort of does, too, but not quite, because he's in the middle of the story; I love that the poem is both about renaissance education and lives in a world of renaissance education, as a letter, and as a fictional letter imagined from one fictional character to another (cf. Ovid's Heroides); and of course, I love that it's a transformative work.

Happy birthday, Mike.