A fellow of infinite jest

(Goat Rope is almost done with a long jag on Hamlet. If you like this kind of thing, click on earlier posts. If not, scroll on down to the links and comments section below.)

If you ask just about anyone what image comes to mind when he or she thinks about Hamlet, chances are it is the prince holding Yorick's skull so there's no way I can pass by the graveyard scene in act 5 without including it.

Hamlet and the gravedigger have been bantering back and forth when the former picks up a skull and asks who it belonged to.

First Clown: A whoreson mad fellow's it was: whose do you think it was?

HAMLET: Nay, I know not.

First Clown: A pestilence on him for a mad rogue! a' poured a
flagon of Rhenish on my head once. This same skull,
sir, was Yorick's skull, the king's jester.

HAMLET: This?

First Clown: E'en that.

You know what comes next. He takes the skull and launches into the second most famous speech in English literature:

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let
her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must
come; make her laugh at that.

The thing is, that back that bore him a thousand times was probably the major--and possibly the only--source of affection in his childhood. Hamlet Senior seemed to be pretty busy smiting the sledded Poles and engaging in combat with Norway to get too involved and his mother was probably preoccupied with her own affairs (no pun intended).

A NEW KIND OF BUSINESS? Here's an interesting item from NPR about how lawyers are working to create some kind of legal status for corporations that are more interested in positive social outcomes that the bottom line.

FREE LUNCH OR FREE MARKET. In this piece, Dean Baker takes on the misconception that conservatives rely on the market while progressives rely on government intervention. In fact, both groups use government to pursue their ends. The real question is, who benefits?

PAY EQUITY. Here's a new look at the gender gap in wages.

MORE THAN LINES. This National Geographic article looks at the Nasca culture in ancient Peru.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

JUNGER DAYS

The cover of the new edition of MDR, courtesy of wikipedia.

When I was very young, I had a brief and passing infatuation with the psychological ideas of Carl G. Jung, the Swiss psychologist. It didn't take too long to outgrow it, but I have to admit that every few years I take another look at it.

It's a sporadic bad habit of mine, like occasionally gorging on Cheetos or secretly listening to Abba--which I will always publicly deny.

I hadn't thought about Jung for a while until I stumbled on Deirdre Bair's 2003 Jung: A Biography, a 647 page mammoth (not counting notes) that took me months to get through. Bair didn't have any particular axes to grind, which is not often the case with this subject. I also revisited Jung's "autobiography," Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which was largely written with the help of his follower Aniela Jaffe, and Man and His Symbols, his last work which also contained contributions by various followers.

Jung books tend to come in at least two main flavors: hagiography as written by followers and de-bunking by others. The best example of the latter is Richard Noll's The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung and The Jung Cult, both of which were a hoot. Noll focused on Jung's alleged Nazi sympathies and described Jung's ideas as a carefully disguised "Aryans-only cult of redemption and rebirth."

Jung was born in 1875, the son of Swiss Reformed pastor Paul Jung and the former Emilie Preiswerk. Jung was named for his paternal grandfather, a prominent physician and professor. He also did nothing to deny rumors that he was an illegitimate descendant of the German writer Goethe. His mother's side was the most interesting; they were what my hillbilly ancestors would have called a little "tetched" or "keen," given to spiritualism, seeing ghosts, and telling strange stories.

Jung became a physician himself and specialized in psychiatry, working for a number of years at the Burgholzli, a mental institution. He became a correspondent and ally of Sigmund Freud, who was interested in gaining non-Jewish converts to psychoanalysis. For a while, Jung was the "crown prince" and heir-apparent, but the alliance fell apart with some bitterness.

There are two main versions of the split. Jung's would be that he was uncomfortable with Freud's dogmatic insistence on the central importance of sexuality or the libido. The other side was Freud's determination to prevent psychoanalysis from being contaminated by "the black tide of mud," i.e. Jung's tendency towards occultism.

For what it's worth, I think they were both right...

After the break with Freud, Jung's ideas definitely tended towards the weird, as he pondered through mythology, alchemy, astrology, and various sources of arcane lore for what he considered to be their psychological insights. In time, he gathered quite a cult following (in almost every sense of the word).

He wrote voluminously and largely (in my opinion) unintelligibly, although towards the end of his life he was able to reach a wide public audience through the two books mentioned above and appearances on the BBC.

I'll try to summarize what I think his basic ideas were tomorrow.

IRAQ WRAPUP. Here's a good summary of the various strands of the Iraq war mess.

EQUAL PAY DAY is today, but many women are doing worse as the economy tanks.

ENVIRONMENTALISM, VOLUNTARY OR OTHERWISE. This item from Alternet suggests you may start acting like one soon, like it or not.

E. COLI INDIVIDUALISM. Genes may not determine everything, even for bacteria.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE FLEXIBILITY OF MEMORY

Caption: This guy can't remember where he was going but won't admit it.

In addition to comments and links about current events, this week's Goat Rope provides a daily dose of Nietzschean nuggets for your dining and dancing pleasure from his odd little book Beyond Good and Evil.

Even though Nietzsche had a mental breakdown in his later years and was arguably unsteady all along, he had some occasional great psychological insights which have been appreciated by Freud, Jung and many others.

Today's selection highlights the pliability of our memory. It's long been known that autobiographies are anything but objective accounts of past events and that two or more people who experienced the same events will have widely differing memories of them.

How does that happen?

'I have done that,' says my memory. 'I cannot have done that'--says my pride, and remains adamant. At last--memory yields.

CALLING CONGRESS. If you haven't already, please consider calling your representatives today using AFSC’s toll free number: 1-800-965-4701 and urge them to override President Bush's CHIP veto. All WV's delegation is on board but congresspeople from other states need a push.

THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR ECONOMICS went to members of the reality-based community this year. Winners included Eric Maskin, Leonid Hurwicz, and Roger Myerson who studied the limits of the market for delivering public goods (like education and health care). Here's an excerpt from Reuters:

Societies should not rely on market forces to protect the environment or provide quality health care for all citizens, a winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for economics said on Monday.

Professor Eric Maskin, one of three American economists to receive the award, said that he "to some extent" takes issue with free-market orthodoxy championed by U.S President George W. Bush and some other western leaders.

"The market doesn't work very well when it comes to public goods," said Maskin, a slight, soft-spoken 57-year-old who lives in a house once occupied by Albert Einstein.

Adam Smith said pretty much the same thing in his 1776 Wealth of Nations, but this empirical work is welcome and needed these days.

WOMEN STILL LAG behind men in earnings despite gains in educational attainment. One equalizer seems to be a union card.

CORPORATE WELFARE DEPARTMENT. According to the AP,

Seniors and other taxpayers could have saved nearly $15 billion this year if the government slashed administrative costs in the Medicare drug program and negotiated the same kind of discounts it does for poor people under Medicaid...

BONUS VAMPIRE FEATURE. If you're wired for sound, here's an amusing NPR story on the many faces of Dracula.

DINOSAUR UPDATE. We interrupt previously scheduled programming to report on the discovery of a new dinosaur that

was as tall as a four-story building. From nose to tail it was longer than a pair of tractor trailer trucks laid end-to-end -- or, if you're a dinosaur junkie, half again the length of a small brontosaurus.

The beast was unearthed in Patagonia and is believed to have lived around 80 million years ago.

UNEMPLOYMENT AT RECORD LOW IN WV. WV's Chicken Littles keep trying to create a climate of panic in the hope that this will give them the opening to unleash their version of economic shock and awe. Alas for them, the news isn't all bad all the time.

SINCE YOU GUYS HAVE BEEN PRETTY GOOD TODAY, here's a special treat via YouTube: Jesse Jackson reading from Green Eggs and Ham.

YOU TELL ME where else you can find a blog with Nietzsche, dinosaurs, Dracula, and Dr. Seuss all in the same post...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: MUY ALTO