Poem of the Week 2024/45

Our legions are brimful, our cause is ripe.

The enemy increaseth every day;

We, at the height, are ready to decline.

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.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

– William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene 3, ll 214 - 223

I had a different poem planned for today, but agitation over the presidential election has gotten the better of me & my original selection will have to wait. This passage jumped into my mind, because Shakespeare has something to say to every moment, & this does feel like a turning point in the country's history, a pretty clear choice between a backward-looking – well, that's not quite the right phrase; backward, yes, but looking to a past that was invented, or merely hallucinated, by some citizens, to the exclusion & often intense suffering of many other citizens – rage-filled fascist (who is also, quite clearly, in cognitive decline, & I do not say that lightly or callously) versus, you know, an actual functioning adult, who has a track record of trying to help her fellow citizens. And yet it's close. I remain baffled & frankly disgusted. I guess this election, like the Civil War (of which it is, in fact, another manifestation) will never end, but only continue in different mutations.

Brutus makes this speech to persuade his fellow conspirators to join battle at Philippi with the forces of Octavius Caesar (later to be Caesar Augustus), Marc Anthony, & the negligible Lepidus. Brutus, famously described in his funeral oration for Caesar by Marc Anthony with searing, sneering irony as "an honorable man", is, in actual fact, an honorable man, brought in my Cassius to lend moral & intellectual respectability to their plot to assassinate Caesar, thereby ending his burgeoning power. The alliance between the conspirators is already fraying, but Cassius gives in to Brutus, to conciliate him, with disastrous results for their cause.

Yet Brutus really isn't wrong in his assessment: he knows their alliance, their armies, their power, are all starting to fall apart, while the strength of Octavius & Anthony is growing. Strike while the iron is hot, in other words, & strike before your enemy gets out of your control. Brutus, being a philosophically inclined politician, speaks not of strategy or military advantage, as a politician or a general would, but of things a philosopher would talk of: how to live in the world, how to judge the unknowable ways of Fortune (& of History). The metaphors are grand: the ocean, the tide rising & falling, the full sea, & we in our uncertain little ship, trying to negotiate the hazards around us. Brutus knows that the events around us are uncontrollable; it's how we respond that makes a successful life. We are on a voyage, separated from the deep & powerful sea only by our relatively frail ship, trying to negotiate often unseen dangers. Brutus's advice here is actually quite sound; it turns out to be exactly the wrong thing to do, as the more realistic & calculating Cassius had tried to say, but still: good advice. But the mysterious turns of Fortune (or, as we might say, of History) are as unfathomable as the sea.

When I was young, Julius Caesar used to be featured on high school reading lists (which is not where I read it; I read all of Shakespeare on my own); I suspect the real reason is that the verse is fairly straightforward (plus there's a stabbing, & ghosts, & it's "historical", but not about English kings we don't care about anymore unless it's through Shakespeare's words), but it used to be presented as showing "Shakespeare supported democracy", because we like to believe that great artists believe what we claim to believe. This struck juvenile & precocious me as, you know, implausible: even the American revolutionaries, two centuries after Shakespeare's birth, didn't believe in "democracy" the way we understand it (which is one of the reasons we're saddled with the goddam Electoral College), & even if Shakespeare (the all-seeing!) had somehow decided democracy was the way to go, it's unlikely that he could present a work defending it under a monarchy vigilant of its prerogatives & on the constant look-out for subversion.

So Julius Caesar is not about "supporting democracy"; as always with Shakespeare, any interpretation can be undercut, even if it's the official resolution of the play (think of the happy ending of The Merchant of Venice; after what we've experienced of Shylock, & why he acts the way he does, & how he's treated (& how in turn he treats others), it's difficult to take the "happy ending" without some reservations; even the end of Twelfth Night leads some people I know to a feeling of sadness for the madly-used Malvolio). We can come away concluding that it was wrong to assassinate Julius Caesar, but Caesar himself is presented as a superstitious, flawed man with a constant politician's eye on the main chance – he often seems like a performative Noble Roman, in such moments as the one in which someone urges on him a petition concerning his own safety & he grandly announced that that one will be considered last.

So if you need to find a "meaning" or "moral" in this play, perhaps it's only that we are all wandering, lost, through the mysteries of life. Noble, well-meant actions end up in murder, deceit, & treachery; cruelty & cunning result in peace & prosperity. Much depends on chance & actions & outcomes we don't control. Brutus & Cassius thought they were saving the Republic, or (for Cassius), maybe just themselves; centuries later, Dante stuck each of them, along with the arch-traitor Judas Iscariot, each in one of Satan's three mouths. Others consider them heroes &, despite their aristocratic standing, revolutionary role models.

All we can do is try for the best. That means choosing openness, respect, accountability, mutual support. If my deluded fellow citizens & our semi-functioning system do put the fascist back in power, it's important to remember that we still don't know how things will turn out. Keep hopeful, keep fighting.

Perhaps by the time this entry is posted, we will know if Americans chose, to be blunt, Right or Wrong. But it's good to keep in mind, for purposes of checking our own egos, that everybody thinks their choice is for the Right. The essential thing is to look clearly, widely, & compassionately (to see, in short, with the sort of vision Shakespeare had).