(skip to paragraph 4, to get to the real point of this blog post)
The night of Sunday May 1 - Monday May 2, 2011 I didn't sleep very well. Who did? Everyone on my campus was celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden and the end of our annual spring weekend of alcoholism. Such an announcement couldn't have come at a time when the students at SU were in more of a party-mode. They would use any excuse to riot at midnight on a Sunday. I was not in a celebrating mood, however. In fact I was a little wary at the very idea of celebrating a death. Now a few days later I am reminded even more of how complex the situation is. I am reassured in my knowledge that to celebrate without considering these complexities is wrong. I can't even attempt to write about the complexities of the political situation because there are so many and they are so closely intertwined that I can't make sense of them. I suppose this is how you know some moments in history are important, because when they move from present to past you are left with more questions than answers.
This introduction did go a little off topic but I can still make it to the reason I took a break from writing my final papers. I came to the blog, once again in response to a video and also in response to the day of my life that I just began to describe. I will link to Rosianna's video at the end of this post*, but basically it is a thoughtful analysis of the worth of an unsent letter. A topic I've thought a lot about over this year.
On Monday morning, I woke up from very little sleep and somehow made it through my lecture presentation.** I was feeling stressed and zombie-like as I attended my last Shakespeare class of the semester. Now, I know there are a lot of English majors out there. And I know there are a lot of Shakespeare lovers out there. But sometimes people underestimate just how much I loved my Shakespeare class this semester. Last year I took the lower-division Shakespeare course with this professor and was inspired by her passion for early modern theater to take this advanced Shakespeare course with her. This was one of those classes that I didn't just look forward to going to, I took time away from my other classes to do extra reading and I went to my professor's office hours every week just to talk more about the plays (I'M A NERD). I've written multiple blog posts about topics discussed in the class. This single class took my love of Shakespeare and transformed it into an all-out passion (borderig on obsession). I'm the biggest Shakespeare nerd I know and I'm friends with a lot of English majors. It's not normal.
Anyway, in our last class we discussed the last act of The Tempest. I had never read the play before this semester and I can't say it's one of my favorites*** but after our final class discussion I went home and I wrote a letter.
I am a person who incessantly writes down her thoughts. I don't just keep this awkward and pointless blog. I also have a ridiculously narcisstic Tumblr and an even more pathetic Twitter. Then, of course, I keep the most private of all written journals, the kind of journal that you write in to unapologetically let loose the craziness of your uncensored mind. Despite all of that, however, I also write a lot of letters.
Some of the letters I do actually send. I try to keep up written correspondence with a few of my best friends who are away at different colleges. I've written here about my feelings on the worth of the written word. Well, writing letters is something I do to show my devotion to the power of words written by hand in pen and ink. And yet most of the letters I write are never sent.
And here is where I will attempt to tie the video, my Shakespeare class, and that letter all together.
The letter I wrote on Monday was addressed to a person who has been the intended recipient of several other unsent letters. This year there has been a lot I haven't been able to say and what I have said (in this blog, for example) has never been to the right people. Some of the letters I wrote in the dead of night over the course of the year I actually planned on sending at the time. I wrote them with impassioned abandon, unable to sleep until the words were out of my head. But whenever I finished the letter and signed my name, I would leave it sitting on my desk and go to sleep. And of course in the light of day those letters could never be sent. With those first letters I was unknowingly participating in a cathartic act even Shakespeare considered worthy of attention.
In Act 5 of The Tempest, Shakespeare's final play and certainly a very puzzling ending to his writing career, Prospero gathers the characters he has brought to the island and immobilizes them for an act of selfishness. For me, one of the troubling aspects of this play is that I didn't find the ending to be properly cathartic. As an audience we expect a certain kind of resolution to occur on stage. We want the bad guys to be punished**** and the good guys to be rewarded. This doesn't exactly happen. At the end of The Tempest, Prospero and his usurping brother make up and everyone goes back to Milan to live happily ever after. I don't know how Shakespeare's first audience reacted to this ending but especially since I know it to be his last play, I am somewhat unsatisfied with it (also, I didn't really like Prospero all that much?).
Before this scene of reconciliation occurs, though, Prospero takes the time to address his brother and the others while they are frozen by his magic. This is Prospero writing his unsent letter. He needs to freeze time and the complexities of life in order to have a cathartic release that is just his own. He does this for the same reason we don't send those letters we write in the middle of the night. If the letter is sent, if the addressee has a chance to respond, we will have to view the world more complexly and take into account the feelings of the other person. But we don't want to imagine the other person complexly. We just want to "get it out," say what we need to say because we need to say it. Those words, the ones spoken by Prospero in this scene and the ones written in a letter that is never sent, are selfish.
A play is supposed to be cathartic for the audience. A playwright is not supposed to be selfish. Why then does Shakespeare give us this ending? Prospero (the playwright/God figure) gets his cathartic release but the audience is left unsatisfied by an ending that seems too simple. And then in the epilogue we are asked to release Prospero by telling him how great his magic was? What the hell, Shakespeare?
I don't have an answer. But whatever else The Tempest makes us think about, it also beautifully captures the flawed, selfishness of the unsent letter. Of course, it is flawed. To the world, writing a letter in the dead of night and then never sending it seems pointless. If something is so important, say it! But sometimes it's not the reading of the letter that is important. It is the writing of the letter. Putting the words down on paper makes them real. It also makes them something that can be balled up and thrown in the waste basket. Those letters aren't written for the "Dear Whomever," they are written for the writer.
It becomes more complicated if you stop to think about whether or not this flawed sensibility is detrimental to the overall story of your life. In the same way that we're left puzzled by the ending of The Tempest.
Now, I have to go write 4 papers in 4 days. While listening to annoyingly upbead songs on repeat and stuffing my face with candy.
*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df77_6CiRZU&feature=feedu
**I had to give a 3 minutes speech in front of a 100 person lecture
***Othello and King Lear. Cliched perhaps but for good reason. I mean, come on. I'm a tragedy kinda girl.
****Interesting that I read this play just as the ultimate 21st century bad guy was given a final punishment.
*****Had this part in the blog post proper but decided to move it down here. Kinda off topic: We re-read the ending of the Book of Jonah in class as we discussed Act 5. It was very interesting to read the actual text (St. James' Bible, I believe?) from the perspective of a student of literature instead of from the perspective of student being taught a religion. I went to 12 years of Catholic school. When we talked about Bible stories, it was to teach us how to be good Catholics. Reading the Bible as a piece of literature is a completely different experience, and not necessarily one that eliminates all spirituality from the text. At the end of the Book of Jonah, the language particularly causes the reader to question the lesson of the story. The meaning we were given in our elementary school religion classes was flat and flimsy. There's mystery in the story of Jonah. I still don't totally understand it and it was intensely interesting to consider this particular Bible story in relation to the themes of The Tempest.
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