Tread

A journey twisted
             nonsensical, airy
growing intense
             beat heart beat
faster down 
             the corridor
amongst bewildered and frightened questioning
             dream intent and pluck
a forever natural right to architect a dream 
             or cow in fear of a horrific construct

Kurt Vonnegut on Writing

“Novelists…have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale’s department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.”

- Kurt Vonnegut, 1984

Titus Andronicus: A Revenge Cycle

Titus Andronicus opens a curtain on revenge, plotting, and counter revenge turning carnage forward in increasingly violent and barbaric segments, pushing the boundaries of dark comedy while revenge runs self-destructive over man and nature. No matter the justification revenge ends inevitably in violence, an ever-growing cycle eroding away justifications and successes. Ripples and perceptions of vengeance fuel, ratchet up the cycle leaving all players mutilated, physically and emotionally.

The violence and revenge cycle sets in motion at Titus' killing of Tamora’s son, Alarbus.  The many sides of revenge and their inherent failure in perception make it all possible.  Titus' son, Lucius calls the killing a sacrifice, a sacrifice to appease his brother’s ghosts killed in the war twixt the Goths and Rome.  Titus and Lucius believe the killing justified, in effect not a killing, certainly not revenge.

“Give us the proudest prisoner of the Goths,
 That we may hew his limbs, and on a pile 
Ad manes fratrum sacrifice his flesh 
before this earthy prison of their bones,
 That so the shadows be not unappeased,
 Nor we disturbed with prodigies on earth,” says Lucius. (I.I 96-101) “I give him you, the noblest that survives,
 The eldest son of this distressed queen.” (I.I 102-103), Titus seconds.  This father and son have and see only their view.  Tamora’s perception fails to register.  The reasoned pleas for her son’s life fall on a King cold and hardended by war.

Tamora appeals to Titus’ parental instincts.
 “Stay, Roman brethren, gracious conqueror,
Victorious Titus, rue the tears I shed,
 A mother’s tears in passion for her son;
And if thy sons were ever dear to thee,
 O, think my son to be as dear to me.” (1.1 104-108) Of Titus she begs and pleads that her children and their actions are no different than his own children’s action.
“Sufficeth not that we are brought to Rome.
 To beautify thy triumphs, and return 
Captive to thee and to thy Roman yoke;
But must my sons be slaughtered in the streets
 For valiant doings in their country’s cause? 
O, if to fight for king and commonweal
 Were piety in thine, it is in these.” (1.1 109-115) She appeals to his higher principles and vanity.  
“Andronicus, stain not thy tomb with blood. 
Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods? 
Draw near them then in being merciful; 
Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge;
Thrice-noble Titus, spare my first-born son.” (I.I 116-120)

Tamora begs Titus to allow her family to remain prisoners of Rome as reasonable compromise to the murder of her son. Titus tells her to calm down,
“Patient yourself, madam, and pardon me. 
These are their brethren whom your Goths beheld
Alive and dead, and for their brethren slain
Religiously they ask a sacrifice. 
To this your son is marked, and die he must,
T’appease their groaning shadows that are gone.” (1.1 121-126) Tamora, of course, fails to see the religious ritual in the act, “O cruel, irreligious piety!” (1.1 130) Tamora simply sees a gruesome revenge killing by the victor of a war over the loser, it matters not that Titus and Lucius were justified in the killing of Alarbus by religion or Roman society. This scene demonstrates, the first of many examples in the play, that revenge is revenge and once the act is committed the justification or cause of it no longer matters because all that is left is the action and its effect on the victims and survivors. Revenge is a hollow venom, deadly but hollow and incapable of satisfaction or anything approaching equal weight.

The spiral immediately begins with Demetrius contemplating revenge, he tells Tamora,
“Then, madam, stand resolved, but hope withal
The selfsame gods that armed the Queen of Troy
with the opportunity of sharp revenge…
May favour Tamora, the Queen of Goths…
To quit the bloody wrongs upon her foes.” (1.1 135-141) Fortune steps into favor. Tamora, becomes empress and promptly plots against Titus,
“I’ll find a day to massacre them all,
And raze their faction and their family,
The cruel father and his traitorous sons,
To whom I sued for my dear son’s life;
And make them know what ‘tis to let a queen
Kneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain.” (1.1 450-455) The spiral escalates with a vow to destroy not just one son but Titus’ entire family.

Revenge ultimately erodes all the justifications and any successes gained from it. Titus tells Tamora the sacrifice must be made for the slain brethren of his children. As a direct result of Titus killing Alarbus, his family is slaughtered and the peace that the sacrifice sought is obliterated. The story of Titus engaging in revenge is the story of the mutilation of his physical body, his sense honor, and his sense of what is to be Roman. As the play goes on Titus more and more resorts to barbarous methods he and other Romans spurned the Goths for at the beginning of the play.

The rhythm of the play is established by the end of the first act. Revenge follows plotting follows counter revenge follows segments growing increasingly bloody and building a crescendo of violence where everyone loses. No winners. Those left have lost so much and learned so little.

Act two, Aaron the Moor’s dialogue presents a counterpoint to Titus’ brand of revenge. Witness Aaron’s wanton uncontrolled violence juxtaposed to Titus’ more justifiable revenge. Differences lead, but no matter the initial justification, violent, self-destructive ends sow change and slowly erode character sense of honor and justice. By the end of the play, Titus' baking men as food and feeding them to their mother is no different than Aaron's open madness.

Aaron plots to use Tamora’s new stature as empress to wreck all of Rome, violence for violence’s sake.
“To wanton with this queen,
This goddess, this Semiramis, this nymph,
This siren, that will charm Rome’s Saturnine,
And see his shipwrack and his commonweal’s,” Aaron says (2.1 21-24). He is even clearer in his intentions when later talking to Tamora after plotting Bassianus’s death, the rape and mutilation of Lavinia, and the framing of Titus son’s. 
“Vengance is in my heart, death in my hand,
Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.” (2.3 38-39) Aaron displays the opposite pole of violent madness that Titus, through violent revenge, is moving towards.

The other tenet of revenge the play displays is that each act is ramped up from the one it avenges so that the violence escalates with each successive episode in the revenge cycle. This is seen in Aaron’s plotting to Tamora,
“This is the day of doom for Bassianus;
His Philomel must lose her tongue today,
Thy sons make pillage of her chastity,
And wash their hands in Bassianus’ blood.” (2.3 42-45) The revenge for the mutilation killing of Alarbus and the shame of making a queen beg in vein on her knees is the rape and mutilation of Titus’ daughter, the murder of her husband, and the framing and eventual execution of Titus other two sons.

The difference in and importance of perception as the governing factor perpetuating the revenge cycle is again seen in Lavinia begging Tamora to spare her life by citing the mercy her father, Titus, showed to Tamora and her sons. 
“O, let me teach thee for my father’s sake,
That gave thee life when well he might have slain thee,
Be not obdurate; open thy deaf ears.” (2.3 158-160) That she thinks, following her previous denied pleas, that this is her last and best card to play speaks volumes about the gulf of perception that divides these characters. Obviously, they recall the return to Rome differently. Tamora responds,
“Hadst thou in person ne’er offended me,
Even for his sake am I pitiless. 
Remember, boys, I poured forth tears in vain
To save your brother from the sacrifice,
But fierce Andronicus would not relent.
Therefore away with her, and use her as you will;
The worse to her, the better loved of me.” (2.3 161-167)

That violent revenge creates more violent revenge is emphasized in the mirror like reflection of the mutilation of Lavina to the prior killing of Alarbus. The audience seeing Lavina on her knees begging in vain for her life and is meant to recognize the similarities and make the connection. Tamora tells her children, “Your mother’s hand shall make right your mother’s wrong.” (2.3 121)

The entrance of Aaron the Moor is also the entrance of dark comedy into the play. There is a shift towards dark comedy with Titus cutting off his own hand through Aaron’s trickery. The audience watches as Aaron laughing walks off with Titus’ hand,
“I, go, Andronicus; and for thy hand
Look by and by to have thy sons with thee. 
(Aside) Their heads, I mean. O, how this villainy
Doth fat me with the very thoughts of it.” (3.1 199-202) Beyond the surface level of entertainment, the element of dark comedy underscores the ridiculousness and waste of the continuing elevation of violence through the revenge cycle. Once you have a character willingly self-mutilating, even if it is to save his son from a situation his prior actions created, it underscores in the play that revenge always leads to self-destruction, physical self-mutilation in this case. The audience watches the violence escalate further and further and can only laugh. What is a more ridiculous example of the ill results of revenge than an entire family carrying away two heads in their hands and one hand in their mouth? Clearly, the audience sees this and sees the inherent folly in revenge no matter what the justification. And even still the cycle continues with another segment of plotting and counter revenge.
All the plotting builds to a final episode where almost all the participants in revenge throughout the play die quickly and violently at each other’s hands. Every character has had their body and character mutilated through the continuation of violent revenge. The only ones who remain quickly set up a system that made all the violent revenge possible in the first place. In the end no one has gained justice. Even those still alive at the end of the play have lost so much and learned nothing.

At the closing of the play, Marcus is speaking the Roman nobleman, Aemilius, and other Romans.
“Now judge what cause had Titus to revenge.
These wrongs unspeakable, past patience,
Or more than any living man could bear.
Now have you heard the truth; what say you, Romans?
Have we done aught amiss?” (5.3 124-128) Rome says, in naming Lucius the new royal emperor, that they learned nothing from the trail of bodies, heads, and hands trailing in the wake of the Andronicus family revenge cycle. One can only wonder how long before Aaron gets his wish that his son, “be a warrior, and command a camp,” (4.2 180) and lead an army on Rome to avenge his father and start the whole cycle over.

Shakespeare, William. The Oxford Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus. Ed. Eugene M.
Smith. New York: Oxford University Press. 1984.

The Valleys Ch.1

"An era has ended, crest and fell."

"What will replace it?”

“I can not see."

I think of this often. This conversation, some where at some time, took place, began or ended with these thoughts. At night, resting on the stump, the glassy waters running their pursuit green in the moonlit. I contemplate the words. Feet dangle in silence and swing out into the night, the unknown.   The cold waters swift curve sweep and plunge edge to a misty abyss. I hear a conversation between two curious and awe capable gods, ruminating over my adopted home and wonder where and how I fit.

Wild things grow when the moment will and everything rolls grand in tropical contempt or in spite of the storied bleak and cold, all the nasty, brutish, and short that's legend, that’s said to surround this our place.

Still I'm the only outsider in memory to enter the Valleys. Eight years give or take, keep a loose track of the phases and transitions in a journal, still holdin tight to it, reference or some lingering tug can’t drop, can’t let go.

Halcyon Divide my forced chosen home is a place of absolute wonder, here the imagination lends itself to possibility and limits surpassed. This place evokes light and and forges life conceived and sustained. Of the Divide vast stretches out remote and unexplored, waiting and calling tomorrows. Something of magic here grows daily works on every soul. Though bounded by earth it seems to grow and open up perpetual motion some hybrid sunflower onion defiant of maps and borders and a familiar.

Legend's a whaling port in the arctic rim, Halcyon, an ancient sea hub born a wayward Norseman. They say overnight mountains struck from the earth without notice rose to unimaginable and inescapable heights. Forever cut off the valleys, forever cut off the winters, forever cut off the world for time that time forgot Halcyon and no more never-thoughts never thought of Halcyon, now Halcyon Divide, again. And so bore an eternal spring and those that are here are here and those who come here new just become from and out of nothing as though they have always been here, always existed here. I am the first and only to ever come to Halcyon Divide from and through the sky scraping mountains.

What follows is my, our story........