Shakespeare and Burns - chapter five

Scene five or Chapter five

in which our poets re-explore the element from which
came all of life on earth



There is this mighty, wondrous orchestra. Down on the seabed all sounds echo
whether emanating from sources nearby or from far, far away. Great whales communicate,
booming, although a thousand sea miles apart. You can hear them alongside the
clicks and squeaks of shrimps, the small sucking of a million limpets, the
trumpeting of codfish, the sibilance of rock-bound conger eels, etcetera,
etcetera. All sea-creatures great and small thus add their voices to the Song
of the Sea, the Song of the Sea naturally being a direct descendant of the Music
of the Spheres.  Our literary heroes are wandering
down below, full fathom five.



WS: It is from the oceans that we came. It is to the
oceans that our kind at last returned.



RB: But oh, what might have been: There is a tide in the affairs of men, /
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of
their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries. / etcetera.



WS: Brutus; my dangerous Roman. But that applied to the
whole of humankind as much as to each his own. In the actuality there were seven
of those big Spring tides of human behaviour across the millennia that
followed our migrations forth from the Great Rift valley.
Seven chances for glorious sweetness, indeed for heaven itself. Shakes
his head, disturbing the host of minute fishes who’d taken shelter in his hair.



RB: And none, not one of those tides taken at the
flood. All of them denied, hence all of our earthly miseries.



They sit upon a rock, the better to see and be a part of everything. A group
of sleek, graceful spiny dogfish approaches, shark-tails waving idly side to
side, pectoral fins spread wide, gliding slow through gin clear water. One of
them speaks. Her voice is as the yelp of her dryland canine namesake; Gentlemen, we watched you. Our kind was a
million of your years ahead of you - then a mere thousand more after
you finally extinguished yourselves and so many others - and mortally wounded our
planet in the process.



WS: Sorry: we were at the close so very sorry.



Dogfish leader: ‘so sorry’, yes of
course; but for your kind alone, I would suggest. Suddenly she
accelerates, turning in a tight circle low on the seabed, clouds of sand
arising behind her. Let us remind ourselves
of the seven things that brought you so low as to destroy yourselves and then in time
all else …




Dogfish
one: A proud look. The time of the
Persians. Shoots upwards to break surface then splashes down and descends
to rejoin the group.

Dogfish
two: A lying tongue. The time of the Greeks.
Swoops and takes in his power-razor jaws a crab then sets him back down, but gently.
Good day, Mister Cancer, she adds.

Dogfish
three: Hands that shed innocent blood.
The time of the Romans. She circles like the leader but high in the water
column and at breakneck speed.

Dogfish
four: A heart that devises wicked plots.
The time of the European Crusaders. Slithers undulating across the sandy
bottom in imitation of an itinerant conger eel.

Dogfish
five: Feet that are swift to run into
mischief. The time of British and Spanish colonisation. Slow-rolls over, his
creamy belly gleaming in the light from above.

Dogfish
six: A deceitful witness that uttereth
lies. The time of American media. He stands vertically, his head just touching
on a rock, motionless save for the water currents created by the movement of the
others.

Dogfish
seven: Him that soweth discord among
brethren. The time of the Islamists and the Jews. She dives to the seabed, burrows into
the sand, disappears from sight.
Dogfish leader: King Soloman told you
those things. Dammit, Shakespeare and Burns, I’ll add another: you could have
stopped your eternal seeking after The Meaning of Life and The Meaning of
Everything. You could have been
content with your natural state and the state of all things. She swims
closer, yet closer, touches each of them lightly, rubber lips to their lips. But all is now well. Come on, my friends. They
swim (or fly) off, disappear over the lip of a precipice, go down, down into
the abyss. The leader’s voice comes back to them, faint from far away. So sad. For there were so, so many things
about Man’s earthly doings of which you may be justly proud. Oh, the glory that
might have been! ‘And if the while I think on thee, dear friends, / All losses
are restored and sorrow ends’.



RB: Speaks up; Pride?
We do not here do such a thing as pride, dogfish!



WS: Speaks
soft;  Who made the heart, 'tis He alone / Decidedly
can try us; / He knows each chord, its various tone, /  Each spring, its various bias: / Then at the
balance let's be mute, / We never can adjust it; / What's done we partly may
compute, /  Yet know not what's resisted.
Rob, your Address To The Rigidly Righteous, final stanza. 

RB: Above The Music of the Seas now sounds the tinkle of bells. Six tiny girls
and one female teenager, bigger but still small, gossamer winged Ah, here she is; my own fair favourite. Your spritely little
Ariel. Ariel swim-dances around a human skeleton clad in rotted,
tattered remnants. She speaks, her tiny voice as the midnight song of the
nightingale: Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral
made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes; / Nothing of him that doth fade / But
doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange. / Sea-nymphs hourly
ring his knell: / Hark! now I hear them, - Ding-dong, bell. Yes something rich and strange indeed, William.



WS:
Robert, those bones are what remains of John Shakespeare, my father and one
time Alderman, leather worker, dealer in wool; perennial, perennial tryer. I
loved him, Rob. I did love my father.



RB:
He died so sad, fleeing like his son although from creditors rather than from the
distaff, his ship driven ashore and drowning with all other hands. You knew
this when you wrote The Tempest?



WS:
No, not then.




RB: Something subliminal, perhaps … I too loved my father, though all
too often he loved me not. I tried to please him with the assiduity of my studies
or my work upon the land or at the flax or later on with the Revenue. Sighs. But it was for my work in the bawdy houses and with the
ladies for which he loved me not. I wonder, Will, what purpose had the urge that blotted out all else that there
might be, that drained the male mind of all except a certain she?

WS: Questions like your shadow always
leapt ahead across your way. Answers always swirled round; no black, no white, just
in chaotic shades of grey.
The two chant
in unison: our fathers which art in heaven. They get down off their
rock. Shakespeare plucks a brightly coloured seaweed, places it with care upon
his father’s grinning skull. The two of them stroll over to the edge of the
deep, look down. They are saying nothing. Then …



WS:
It is as well that we can summon and commune with no person from our own family
- nor, indeed, with any person alive during our own times on Earth.



RB:
Such contact could be good but would be vexacious.



WS:
Certainly: Rob, should we follow our fishy friends down there, think you?



RB:
Down there strange creatures carry within themselves their own lights and warm
eruptions mutate life forms, change mineral salts into bacteria and bacteria
into life somewhat as we knew it. Go down? I think perhaps not now. Let’s sally
forth from all this salty origin into the purest of our early, earthly air.



WS:
So very pleasing. I know a bank where the wild
thyme blows: / Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows; / Quite over-canopied
with luscious woodbine, / With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine ...



RB:
Continues
… There sleeps
Titania, sometime of the night. / Lulled in these flowers with dances and
delight.



The two
friends saunter together up the seabed slope, reciting one to the other the
other one’s lines. Their heads break surface, dry haired. They walk on, leaving
the water without a ripple, yet footmarks in the sand as they traverse the
beach. Soon they are within a forest, although not a forest as the one before.
This is a forest of massive mangroves unknown in their own times. Great leaves
blot out the light and roots rise, writhing, from the sodden ground. A giant
brontosaurus lumbers by, huge feet sucking from the mud. They have no trouble
making their way. Soon enough they come upon their dry-earth flowery clearing, there
to sleep unbothered by the warmth, the strangest of insects large and small,
the foetid smell of creation, the grunts and calls of prehistoric life both
near and far. They sleep because they want to sleep but they do need it not.



RB: Murmurs: Sleep that knits up the
revell’d sleave of care /  The death of
each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, / Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s
second course, / Chief nourisher in life’s feast (Shakespeare’s Macbeth)



WS:
Murmurs
in response: Thou giv'st the word: Thy creature, man, / Is
to existence brought; / Again Thou say'st, "Ye sons of men, / Return ye
into nought!" / Thou layest them, with all their cares, / In everlasting
sleep; / As with a flood Thou tak'st them off / With overwhelming sweep.(Burns’
Ninetieth Psalm Versified.)