Shakespeare | Synaptic Circus of Kelli Jae Baeli

To Be or Not to Be

Damaged people live among us. They deny, they lament, they scream, and think no one hears them. So they self-medicate, create grand illusions of fictive comfort, and when those fictions fail them, then finally, they descend into the abyss of helpless despair.
When we hear our elders speak of “the good ol’ days”–we mustn’t dismiss the significance of those simpler times. They matter, because all those hordes of damaged people would have been fine in 1952, but now, they have to deal with chaos and war and complications and the economy and drugs and challenge and an ever-increasing onslaught of the global village.

I have often asked myself, is the world too much for me, or am I too much for the world? Years ago, and for a long time I thought the world was too much for me, but now I believe I’m too much for the world. And that doesn’t make me better, it just makes me aware. And awareness leads to knowledge and knowledge leads to power, and with power, we can overcome. Halleluiah, and pass the guacamole.

Shakespeare wrote the now-infamous lines,

to be or not to be; that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them…

There are those in this world who are trapped in between the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and the strength to resist and change their own outcome. That kind of strength is not something that comes to the meek. It comes only to those who can step away from their own pain long enough to see the possibilities, the beauty that can be had in this life. They are met again and again by cold reality, and their resistance to that truth ensures that they repeat the same behaviors. And in so doing, they ensure the same results, until all outcomes are predicated on a self fulfilling prophesy. This is how they sabotage themselves.

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March 14th, 2008

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Impatience, M-Theory & the Nihilistic Abyss

It’s a true sign of the times–the impatience that has us standing in front of the countdown of a microwave, shouting “Hurry up!”

Another version of this is jerking the coffee carafe out before brewing is complete, so you can just get some in a cup.

For a while now, this societal impatience has been recognized by java Research and Development teams worldwide. One feature we enjoy in modern life is a coffeemaker with a stop-flow gadget so the coffee won’t drip down onto the warming plate, like little hissing H-bombs in a very tropical Lilliputian¹ village. It bakes in a coffee stain. Unsightly.

As lifestyles have changed to reflect the ever-growing age of technology and convenience, we have ironically become more and more inconvenienced by more and more things. We, as a species, are” running out of time.” Or at least that’s how it feels, even to me. I’m always saying “There isn’t enough time” though we all enjoy the same 24 hours, and they all still last 60 minutes each. The only exception to this might be M-Theory which postulates that there are other membranes next to us that we can’t see, but are nonetheless there, and include variations on the existence we experience in our own time-space continuum. (You might visit this blog for an interesting presentation of this from an interesting doctor).

I explore some of these ideas in a novella I am currently writing (among others) called Quintessence. I am fascinated by the idea that there could be other realities we are not privy to, nor have the capacity to comprehend. As Shakespeare, my favorite bard, said, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Thus, in the only reality we know, our time-space continuum is for all intents and purposes, fixed, and so anytime a solution for time-wasting is developed, everyone has to have it. This is so that we can go about the business of living our lives with a self-serving delusion in place that will keep us from spiraling into the nihilistic abyss.

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¹The Lilliputians, for those of you who missed that Lit class, were miniature people who lived in a village called Lilliput. I recommend this book by Jonathan Swift highly, as well as his story A Modest Proposal, which is a satirical solution to Ireland’s famine in the 18th Century.

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February 2nd, 2008

PSYCHOLOGY, RELATIONSHIPS

Et Tu, Brute?

“You blocks, you stones,
you worse than senseless things!
O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome…”
-Shakespeare (Julius Caesar)

I am regularly dismayed by human behavior. It seems more and more difficult to find emotionally stable people–people who have a firm grip on character and integrity, a working knowledge of truth. Some folks are just plain mean.

Tonight, for instance, a person i thought was my friend turned on me, and although i think i know why, it still doesn’t make it easier to take. She was incapable of processing her emotions in a healthy way, and took her angst out on me. She chose to believe things that were not true, because it somehow explained the failure of our relationship; and effectively kept her from doing any self-examination. She then chose to inflict great personal harm and insult, with no provocation. If a certain switch gets flipped, people are capable of selecting the most harmful or hurtful things to say to you, with full knowledge that it will inflict pain. To make this action even more reprehensible, her accusation was no more than a hypocritical projection–she was guilty of that which she accused me. Psychology 101.

These are the people who look you in the eye and deny their ability to crush you, deflect your attempts to ease your mind, and destroy your faith in humankind. No matter how many times someone tells me “Oh, i would never treat you like that,” I have come to realize that those words mean precisely nothing to me. This is a level of cruelty i am not willing to have in my life–from friend nor foe.

You are not what you say,
you are what you do.

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December 25th, 2007

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Stupid & Happy VS. Smart & Troubled

I was asked, “Given the opportunity to choose between: (a). being delusional and believing in an intangible, even illogical, philosophy that brings you much peace and bliss or (b). seeing the “reality” of things and cutting straight into the truthful heart of all there is, yet along with that comes despair and grief . . . Which would you choose? Would you rather be “stupid and happy” or “smart and troubled”?

“Thou hast vexed me marvelous much,” as Shakespeare would say. (Though, i discovered he didn’t say, that, i must have made it up…but I’m sure he WOULD have said it, had we been hanging out). Questions like this tend to spiral me into the abyss of darkness and nail-biting.

My addendum to this, (which seems to be more a preface, at the moment) reflects the objection I have to the suggested absolute that there must necessarily be Despair and Grief. . . I feel there are few, if any, absolutes on this earth plane. (Except maybe that a Krispy Kreme Glazed donut is manna from heaven). Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to respond with a sufficient amount of brain cellage…

One cannot know or appreciate joy without experiencing the depths of despair. Happiness via stupidity is an artificial happiness. To go STUPIDLY amid the noise and haste and know what peace there may be in IDIOCY, smacks of a big fat waste of energy and a sad frittering away of a lifetime meant for learning and evolution. Thus, I’ll take Reality with a Truthful Heart of All There Is glaze, and a side of Despair and Grief. Since nothing short of severe head trauma would return me to ignorance, I am thus shackled/blessed with the task of creating the best result from the tools I have available to me. Reality is not always a tangible thing. Many things are real, and yet simultaneously invisible, misconstrued or beyond comprehension. Refer to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, String Theory, Unified Field Theory, the Power of positive thought, or wind for fine examples of this point.

Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I agree.

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August 21st, 2007

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All The World’s A Stage…

As a person who embraces Spiritual Metaphysics as a belief system, I always try to find correlations. I look for the details that will bring sense to the senseless, or enlightenment to the confusion. One thing I have recently added to my understanding is that astrology is much more than the position of a planet when your were born. There is a deeper meaning. I think we are all born under the signs that will facilitate the growth we need to have. So maybe it’s not so much “I’m a Gemini, I’m just that way” but “I’m a Gemini and those traits are things I need to look at, and bring into harmony in this life,” or “those are the traits that will allow me to experience certain dynamics that will cause my most beneficial growth…” This is in alignment with my belief in karma and Dharma and reincarnation. We have a purpose for being here in this life, and it is to work through the growth of our souls. I could not be here without purpose, and wouldn’t want to be. Our existence has to have meaning.

Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”

The infamous bard was referring to the seven types of parts we play within each life. But it occurred to me that this analogy can be stretched to encompass so much more. It can be a way to comprehend the greater purpose we all have in EACH life we live.

I view my place in this life as analogous to playing a part; me, on a stage, playing a role. The character I play is my self in this life, in this body, with the traits born in me. I understand that it’s just a role, but I have a responsibility to do a good job and to please my audience and to be supportive to the other actors. If I break character, I don’t honor my responsibility, and I mess it up for everyone else. The other players always include some antagonist too, but no matter what that antagonist did during the “play,” all the actors meet for the wrap party, and they were all friends, and they all talked about what a great experience they just had together. Because in that space, they know that it was a play, and now they were back to their true selves.

Quantum Physics tells us that reality is merely a projection of the human mind, but in this life, I need to pretend those other characters are real, as is the script, the stage, and the place it is being presented, because I am here to accomplish a task. In order to pull it off, I must willingly suspend my own disbelief. I also chose this part, (and the ones before, and the ones to come) and made a commitment to see it through. Opening Night is when I took my first breath at birth, and my Final Curtain is when this shell I know as my body takes its last breath. It won’t mean I can’t choose another part, it just means this one is finished. I will be moving on to bigger and better roles; becoming a better actor through experience, and perhaps mentoring other young actors along the way. There is method to the madness after all.

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