McB3

McB3
by Petri Salin


1.
The first bombs wipe Norcea's HQ off the face of Titan
Destroy them, the CEO's yells echo - destroy every last one of them/ and we do not question his orders, we question nothing
When our killer robots land the survivors arise from their underground/ bunkers like the undead and begin their resistance but we beat them on that/ terrible day, with terrible casualties, and when everything is well nigh over/ I take a hit and my plane is lost in a void and that is when I see them/ the three hag mongrels, holograms, appearing out of the vacuum
I hear them salute me and utter my name

All hail McB3, hail to the Lunar Marketing Director
All hail McB3, hail to Operational Head of Martian Ventures
All hail McB3, that shalt be the Company's CEO hereafter

What are you and how know you who I am? say I and
they laugh and say that they know what I am and
they laugh and say that they know what I shall be and
they laugh and laugh and laugh
so I fire my last missiles at them
but one cannot kill holograms

When they are gone I find my squadron and we return to HQ
where the CEO gives a short speech lauding the Company spirit and/ thanking us for our selfless sacrifices to obtain a crucial competetive edge/ in this strained business atmosphere wherein the unethical acts of competitors/ force a company with higher ethical standards to combat evil and/ set the entire trade a positive example with its noble corporate principles
Our market share within the Solar system, says the CEO, is now a record breaking/ forty-seven percent and beyond its parameters even greater
We shall not rest, says the CEO, until we have absolute market leadership/ for that is our prerogative and our duty and our mission in life
Those fallen in the line of labour are taken leave of with proper circumstance/ and the vacancies left after them filled equally properly

McB3, says the CEO, excellent marketing, quite excellent indeed
The Operational Head of Martian Ventures, says the CEO, was
caught red-handed doing a spot of industrial espionage for Norcea
wherefore he now fertilizes Titan's crisply burnt ground
Thou, McB3, art now Operational Head of Martian Ventures

Which slightly surprises me and gets my thought circuits going
If the holograms are right about my becoming Head of Martian Ventures/ why, then, not about the other matter as well?
the matter of which I dare not speak aloud?
If the holos, the weird sisters, can look into the seeds of time
and say which grain will grow and which will not
know they which path the future does choose, which it does discard/ there is nothing anyone can do about it/ nor can any man flee his destiny
If they are but dream or nightmare
if everything is but coincidence
better were it for me to wipe from my mind the hollow echoes of their words

Of course you will be the new CEO, says my wife
think not otherwise
dare not believe otherwise
you shall become the Company's CEO
I guarantee it
says she
and I loose myself in her embrace and she
looses herself in mine which is the same
as her embrace
and no one can stop the continuum of space and time
nor revoke the future
for at this very moment the future has chosen itself for eternity

If it were done when it is done
then it were well it were done quickly
When it is done
it will be done quickly

When the CEO arrives to inspect the Martian HQ
he stays at our home, as our guest
and in the name of hospitality my wife hands me a dagger
and in the name of hospitality I wield it
for so I must
for it is so written
I have no option

The CEO is dead, I proclaim, and the Company without a lawful ruler
The Assistant CEO, I proclaim, has betrayed the Company and fled the planet/ his minions' hands soiled with our CEO's blood
And we deal them swift Company justice before anyone
has time to question my authority
The CEO is dead! Long live the CEO!

I do what I have to, with heavy heart, with cold hands
no longer closing my eyes for I do not wish to see my deeds anew
nor do I have to close them to see my ghosts stand afore me

2.
During my inauguration I give a speech to clarify the Company's future code
As the new CEO of SolarMcDonald's I would, my dear staff, say
a few words: We are entering a new age, a good age
An age of heretofore unforeseen expansion and fruitfulness
No more shall the Company policy be governed by sporadic bestiality/ but, dear friends, by logic and reason and fairmindedness
The Company tree shall be cleansed and sanitized and pruned
All branches with insufficient profit margin shall be taken care of
terminated with extreme prejudice
Every obstacle standing in the way of an ever increasing profit margin/ shall be removed and obliterated and ground to dust
Our new market will be the fabrication of a hamburger based on oil for robots/ and a hamburger for inhabitants of other stars - were such creatures ever found
Our new corporate strategy is to exploit the resources of our competitors/ in the form of utilizing their staff as raw material for our nourishing/ and superlatively delicious and very reasonably priced product
It is my duty to see to it that the Company's expansion never ceases but goes on
The Universe knows no boundaries
Neither time nor eternity know limits
Therefore the Company must know none
We shall not rest until the Company and the Universe are one

The wars go on and we form new alliances
destroy former allies, present allies
devour them before they devour us
grow so big that none can threaten us
not even BurgerKingHut, now shrivelled miserably into a white dwarf/ grow so mighty we have no external enemy
We are a black hole that gobbles up everything
until nothing is left

In honour of our victory I give my lackeys a great banquet
invite them to the new HQ I have erected on Mars where
I can rely on the loyalty of my underlings
unlike on other planets and moons and satellites
My wife oversees the arrangements for the banquet but
suddenly the sight of bloody hamburger meat makes her sick
it will pass, it always does pass
I let set a plate for those of my guests whom I trust and just the blade for the/ renegades, those who have masticated their last hamburger
Only a minority of the guests leave on their own two feet while the rest, the/ happy ones, now get to serve the Company's revenues with their bodies/ get to serve the Company to the last
Their sacrifice is not in vain
Their unselfishness guarantees the Company eternal life

Life, say I unto my wife, is now as good as it gets
Better than this, say I, it cannot get
This I know, says my wife, nothing will ever get better
Then we toast and accept the adulation of our grateful subjects

And each night I am awakened by my wife's cries
and each night she walks in her sleep
in her white nightgown
attempting to wash her hands
never getting them clean, the blood never coming off
her creamy white hands
the constant rubbing has torn them to a bloody pulp
her medication can no longer bless her with artificial rest

She mourns the offspring we never had
She mourns our last attempt at cloning, the last of many
but not every seed takes, not every embryo flourishes
not all blood is meant to flow forward through the rivers of time
McB4 may we never hold in our arms
nor his clone, nor his clone's clone
The brightest stars burn but a brief while
leaving behind them a chaos of heavenly coldness
the brightest star burns but a brief while

How brief?
Once the question is voiced the words keep haunting me
How brief?

I take the Company jet and return to Titan
Where are you, shout I
Come forward! shout I
Show yourselves! shout I
I circle Titan and try to find the enchanted cursed place
where last I encountered them, but cannot
I cannot find them for they do not exist
I turn my vessel to return and there they are
in my monitors, smiling their toothless smile
Tell me what I wish to know, say I
And they step out of the monitors
And they tell me

Beware McD9, whispers the first holo
Be bloody, bold, and resolute, whispers the second holo
laugh to scorn the power of man for none of woman born shall harm you
Be lion-mettled, proud, and take no care, whispers the third holo
McB3 shall never vanquished be until Pluto collides with Mars
and they grab each other by the hand and form a circle and start
dancing faster and faster until one can no longer tell them apart
then they are gone, my darkened monitors exhaling a foul black smoke

I laugh, I am invincible
no human can touch me
I shall never vanquished be until Pluto collides with Mars
(how could Pluto collide with Mars? impossible!)
McD9 cannot defy me and I may as well let him live
or not

3.
Company vessels find me in space and escort me home
My lord, says my head of intelligence, McD9 has fled and
along with the others, gone forth and joined the forces of BurgerKingHut
Destroy his offices, say I, and all his employees
and his family
and his children
destroy them all
and they do it
I cannot revoke my orders nor bring back anyone I have slain
not even imagine it

Nor do we still become absolute market leaders
not even when we slaughter all our opposition
Do we have to, shout I at my underlings, slaughter all our customers as well?
Why do they not love me? I shout and see a steward stand before me/ he bends over and whispers in my ear and I smite him with my sword/ but one cannot kill a robot

I hasten to my wife's chambers and behold it with my own eyes
a sight not for this world
nor for the next nor for the next
She is dead, bereft of life, has abandoned me in this wasteland
Why did you leave me my love? I whisper in her ear
she answers not even though I carry her in my arms and rock her so very gently
She should have died hereafter
with this I must live
tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
now I am alone and know not where to turn
and know the blame is mine and mine alone
I press her against my heart
maybe she will awaken
press I hard enough

It takes a long time before they dare tell me
Norcea's survivors have teamed up with BurgerKingHut's survivors/ and the Company traitors have, along with McD9 and the assistant CEO, joined them/ now their fleet of war is on its way here
Let them come, say I, they cannot touch me
I hardly recall what fear tastes like and what horror tastes like and/ what humanity tastes like
No one can touch me, shout I and bare my sword
To the final battle, say I and look around me and see how
most of my men have deserted the Company and deserted me and
joined Norcea/BurgerKingHut's gigantic fleet
Go all, I do not need you, I do not need any of you
McB3 shall remain unvanquished until Pluto collides with Mars
The traitor fleet approaches the planet and their foremost fighter gets hit/ starts to wobble, the pilot loosing his control of the craft completely/ the craft getting hurled on Martian ground, setting the world on fire
I behold the name of the fighter and it is Pluto XIII

I leap into my fighter and charge the enemy
the front lines oscillate and the enemy keeps coming on all sectors/ the fight is terrible, in a frenzy I blow away fighter after fighter but/their numbers never diminish
Where are you McD9! Show yourself, coward! Come out and fight me!/ and McD9's vessel floats in front of me and we go at it like crazed bulls/ hammer one another like two/ blood-thirsty boars
I strike and he receives my blow, he strikes and I receive his blow
there is no one else in this war, only I and he, and none else is needed
Suddenly McD9 veers away, I lock my cannons on his tail and fire
but it's a trick - he swirls and then he's behind me and I can't
shake him nor can I escape before his rockets tear off my wings
I spiral downward and can't straighten my fighter, can't
escape, no way out, I fire my last missiles and somehow they hit his/ side and an immense explosion tears the vessel apart/ he falls from the sky like a rock, as do I

McD9! I shout and dig my way out of my fighter's smoking carcass, where are you?
Fight like a man if you are one!
Let me rip the flesh from your bones and irrigate the ground with your blood!
McD9 stands before me, sword hoisted, face devoid of expression
I strike him and his armour holds, I switch up to full power
he strikes back and I ward him off, smiting heaven and earth for
I fight them as well, I fight the Universe
McD9 strikes, I strike, he strikes, I strike
we dance the terminal dance

I never wanted you against me, say I, lay down your sword
walk away, I have waded in blood deep enough already and want not you on my soul/as I have on my soul your wife and your children and hundreds more/ lay down your sword and save yourself and live
McD9 lets his sword answer my words and on we dance

I am battered and bloody and don't even notice it
McD9's concentration sways for a second, only a second
My sword cuts through his body armour, cuts to his heart
pierces it and the force of my blow fells him on his knees, then
on his back - none of woman born shall harm McB3
The blood pumping from his chest is no blood
it is black and thick and almost like - oil

My sword's power is nearly down to zero
yet there is still enough for one last strike
McD9 gets up, I bury my sword in his back
he turns, he smiles, he raises his sword
None of woman born shall harm McB3, says he
his armour is split and his chest is open and -
His entire torso is full of tubes and wires and computer circuits
One cannot kill a robot
I can't escape nor do I wish to

He lifts his sword and smiles

I do not feel a thing

(Published in Portti Special English Issue 2003)

Stackars Yorick

Petri Salin:
Stackars Yorick



Shanghai 11-04-2119 - Minnesbilderna är klara och hopplöst fragmentariska. Fastän de syns tydligt på skärmen är det fullständigt omöjligt att säga vilka fragment hör ihop och vilken helhet de bildar.

Ifall de, de facto, bildar en helhet.

* * * * *

. . . bäbägbäbägbäbäggägärree . . . giften . . . i bägäa . . . gifififgi . . . ibägagagäbagäb . . . i bäägararaeeen . . .

* * * * *

Folk, ansikten, rörelse. Färger, röster. Smärta, glädje, sorg. Kärlek. Allt i en dränkande svallvåg, allt i ett skrämmande ofokuserat kaos.

Minnena.

Minnena flyr.

Minnena vill inte återuppstå, men ändå vill de det.

Experimentets resultat är, för att säga det milt, högst oväntat. Klart är dock att det rör sig om ett enormt framsteg, ett verkligt genombrott. Ett så här ypperligt resultat hade vi aldrig kunnat hoppas på, aldrig vågat hoppas på. Av de tiotusentals skallar vi grävt upp överallt i världen, i Asien, i Afrika, i Australien, i Europa, på Månen – urgamla skallar, färska skallar, skallfragment – var vi tvungna att så gott som genast kassera den största delen. Av de skallar vi lät genomgå den fullständiga behandlingen visade sig endast några hundra vara ens potentiellt optimala. Av de hjärnor vi genom utförlig DNA-analys och psykogenetisk interpolering och regeneration lyckades återskapa var största delen så gott som totalt livlösa – hjärnor bara till synes, inte funktionellt.

Av alla hjärnor har blott en enda visat sig vara kapabel att kunna producera genuin tankeverksamhet. Och inte endast det, den exceptionella hjärnan kan inte endast tänka utan även minnas.

Vilket är omöjligt.

* * * * *

. . . nej! . . . intr dri . . . inte dric . . . inte inte driiiiii . . . nejinteintenejintedrdrdrdrdrdrdr . . .

* * * * *

Skallen är en av dem som grävdes upp i Helsingör. Enligt uträkningarna är den sjuhundra år gammal, kanske betydligt äldre. Först trodde vi att det rör sig om en skalle som tillhört ett barn men efter noggrannare undersökningar är det uppenbart att skallen hört till en dvärg av det manliga könet. Det är ett under att dvärgen överhuvudtaget överlevt födseln, så förvrängt är hans kranium. Tänderna visar att dvärgen nått över tjugo års ålder. Om hans liv varit ett normalt liv, ja det är en helt annan fråga.

* * * * *

. . . min . . . son . . . min . . . sssssssssss . . . ssss . . . sonnnnnnsssso . . . sossso . . . sossssoonnsssosssnn . . .

* * * * *

Efter utförlig preparation kopplar vi in dvärgens hjärna i datormatrisen och börjar köra hans till en början ytterst haltande hjärnverksamhet genom reningsprogram, gång på gång. De kontaminerade bitarna elimineras, de bristfälliga sekvenserna kompletteras, det som knappt går att upptäcka förstärks. Programmet spårar upp relevanta mönster, förvandlar dem till algoritmer och sedan tillbaka till neural information. För varje körning renas och förädlas minnesbilderna. Processen är ytterst långsam. Hjärncellerna stretar emot neuron för neuron. Förgäves.

* * * * *

. . . älskskr dgggiiggg GGGGGGGGGG . . . G . . .

* * * * *

Kan det verkligen röra sig om autentiska minnen? Den nya hjärnan är en jungfruligt tom tavla, tabula rasa, kanske rör det sig endast om abstrakt hjärnbrus? Kanske den nyfödda hjärnan producerar, av någon ännu okänd orsak, en viss rudimentär tankeverksamhet i form av irrationell synaptisk neuronblixtring som därefter av datorns algoritmsonder tolkas fel och tvingas sedan in i artificiella och färdigt definierade mönster. Detta förvränger hjärnbruset ytterligare och bortom all rimlighet. Men ändå är hjärnans verksamhet ständigt samma vilket betyder att den inte kan vara aleatorisk. Det vore omöjligt. Gång på gång upprepar sig hjärnan. Ingen tvekan om saken – verksamheten är tankeverksamhet. För att den jungfruliga hjärnan är jungfrulig kan den därför omöjligtvis spontant generera nya tankar. Detta i sin tur betyder att det så kallade brus som hjärnan producerar måste vara gamla tankar.

Och det kan inte röra sig om egentliga tankar i begreppets reella mening för att bilderna dvärgens hjärna åstadkommer om och om igen, i lite varierande form, är alltid samma bilder. Alltid samma situationer. Alltid samma personer. Alltid samma känslor.

Därför måste det vara minnen. Hur osannolikt detta än är.

Till och med om det är – som det måste vara – omöjligt.

* * * * *

. . . kunkunnknukgnekunugunenkukugunugunenkungkungmungkunenekugugunknennnn . . .

* * * * *

Efter kontinuerliga körningar och mångfacetterade rensningar i flera olika faser börjar minnesbilderna till slut forma sig på ett någorlunda identifierbart sätt. Till slut kombineras de med ett program som klär en del av de diffusare och mera abstrakta elementen i ord. Dvärgen får en röst och samtidigt en personlighet, han får en skärande gäll röst som får alla att le. Och samtidigt rysa.

Fragmentens ordning är, på grund av en avsaknad av all lineär kontinuitet, måste det än en gång påpekas, fullständigt godtycklig.

* * * * *

. . . tolv år . . . hon . . . flicka liten flicka ung flicka . . . ser henne för första gången ute i slottsparken under den stora eken . . . eken som jag brukar klättra i . . . hämtats till hovet . . . sommarklänning . . . vit ren . . . flätor i håret . . . rud heter hon . . . trud . . . hon skrattar inte åt mig som alla andra brukar göra när de ser mig . . . skrattar inte . . . hånar inte . . . ler bara . . . mitt hjärta . . . när hon ler . . . med hela sin varelse . . solen bleknar . . . hon ler . . . och jag . . . hjärtat . . . jag . . . gråter . . . av glädje . . . vi . . .

(Brott –)

. . . vänner? . . . enda vännen . . . lekkamrater . . . springer runt slottet . . . när jag berättar en vits skrattar hon och varje gång hon skrattar känner jag hur mitt grepp om hennes själ blir hårdare och fastare . . . far . . . hårdare . . . far . . . fastare . . . tycker inte om det . . . hennes far . . . som vore jag en hund . . . hennes husdjur . . . sparkas . . . piskas . . . men priset . . . få vara nära henne . . . förstår inte . . . kan inte förstå . . . hur kunde . . .

(Brott –)

. . . framför kungen . . . som min far före mig och hans far före honom . . . konungens broder . . . värre även än konungen . . . förnedrar mig framför hovet och hela hovet ylar och hånar som . . . utom . . . Ger . . . utom Ge . . . utom . . .slår det mig att en dag kommer hon att . . . en dag måste hon . . . hon med konungen kungen med henne hon med konungen kungen med henne med henne med henne . . . hon med honom . . . med . . . jag går fram till kungen . . . Eders Majestät vet Vi vad skillnaden är mellan en hovman och en apa och efter en stunds tystnad säger han vad då? och därpå säger jag jasså Eders Majestät vet inte heller det och kungen börjar skratta häftigt och hela hovet tvingas göra likaså . . . fruktar mig . . . min giftiga tunga som blixtsnabbt kan slå ihjäl . . . vem som helst . . . giften . . .

(Brott –)

. . . jag tror det . . . jag vågar inte tro det men jag tror det . . . jag som aldrig haft . . . jag som aldrig . . . någon . . . haft . . . inte någon . . . ser på henne . . . ser på mig . . . inte längre barn . . . inte längre flicka . . .barn . . . när vi . . . tillsammans . . . att hon . . . att hon med en sådan som jag . . . förvrängd . . . missbildad . . . med en dvärg . . . hon med mig . . . men det gör hon . . . med mig . . . den föraktade . . . och hon en . . . och jag en . . . och aldrig hade jag kunnat drömma om en . . . om något så . . . hela sommaren . . . femton år . . . är . . . varje kväll när det blir mörkt . . . smyger . . . klättrar upp . . . muren . . . vakterna . . . osynlig . . . och sedan . . . i natten . . . vi . . . varje natt . . . Gertr . . . min Ge . . .

(Brott –)

. . . bror . . . kungens bror . . . hatar . . . jag hatar också . . . hans blick när han beskådar Ger . . . akta dig var försiktig säger han men . . . jag tror . . . blott svartsjuk . . . häller . . . vinet . . . rhenvinet . . . på honom på honom på . . . honom . . . clownen . . . narren . . . avundsjuk . . . hans hår . . . som badat han i vin . . . som rött blod . . . skrattar . . .

(Brott –)

. . . jag sjunger . . . av glädje . . . att vara vid liv . . . att få leva . . .

(Brott –)

. . . konungens bror . . . lyfter sin bägare sin kalk dricker ur den tittar på mig tittar på henne . . . på henne . . . hans blick behagar mig ej . . . något skurkaktigt i blicken . . . alltid snokar nosar . . .

(Brott –)

. . . slut . . . mitt liv . . . slut . . . vill inte längre . . . livet . . . slut . . . hon gråter och hennes tårar fräter gapande hål i mitt hjärta . . . giftermålet . . . med odjuret . . . besten . . . vi visste . . . att dagen kommer . . . en dag . . . i framtiden . . . hennes öde . . . att det händer . . . olyckan . . . när som sexton . . . sexton år . . . som hennes far kommit överens med besten när hon var liten . . . men nu . . . för tidigt . . . alltför tidigt . . . stor fest . . . högtid . . . hovet . . . gäster . . . mat . . . uppträda för gästerna . . . dansa . . . roa dem . . . roa besten . . . kvickheter och löjligheter . . . roa dem medan jag internt förblöder . . . roa medan jag dör . . . jag gör det . . . dricker vin dricker mycket mycket mycket vin . . . förlöjligar kungen och förnedrar och skändar henne den nygifta jungfruliga bruden som nu är drottning hans drottning min drottning i verkligheten som hon alltid varit min drottning privat i under nattens täcke. . . inte jungfrulig inte längre jungfru inte inte jungfru . . . och alla skrattar . . . åt dvärgen . . . den löjliga dvärgen . . . narren . . . dvärgen den föraktade . . . som denna afton förlorar sin kärlek . . . sitt liv . . . allting . . . jag kastar upp vinet framför tronen . . .värre än att aldrig ha haft något ha känt något ha varit något . . . än att aldrig ha . . . levat . . .

(Brott –)

. . . SVARTA TANKAR! . . .

(Brott –)

. . . SVARTA SVARTA . . . TANKAR! . . .

(Brott –)

. . . barnet . . . Gertruds son . . . nyfödd . . . vacker . . . ljus som hon . . . perfekt . . . besten tar honom i sin famn . . . måste titta på när besten . . . henne . . . drottning nu . . . hjälplös . . . pojken . . . så liten . . . så liten . . . rider på min rygg på min puckel . . . jag är . . .

(Brott –)

. . . hon kommer. . . min drottning . . . jag dansar för henne . . . druckit vin . . . glad . . . sorgsen . . . hon kommer till mig . . . drottningen . . . natt . . . slottets kalla murar glöder is . . . medan . . . ute och krigar . . . bortaborta . . . vi . . . igen . . . härligt . . . som tidigare . . . som om inget . . . skrattar . . . livsfarligt . . . avbryta sluta avbryta . . . nej . . . aldrig!. . . lever igen . . . igen . . . vi . . . på nytt . . . ända tills . . . kommer . . . kommer tillbaka . . . Stupar! . . . hon säger hon säger min älskade säger . . . hon säger det . . . varför kan han inte . . . varför kan inte kungen . . . hon säger det . . . som vi båda tänker . . . stupa . . . stupa stupa stupa stupa stupa stupa . . . varför . . .varför inte . . . varför kunde inte kungen! . . . varför? . . .

(Brott –)

. . . kan inte . . . vara . . . utan . . . hopplöst . . . vet inte vad jag ska . . . vet ej . . . jag måste . . . göra . . . inte fortsätta på det här sättet . . . inte . . . kan inte . . . vill inte . . . måste . . . ha henne . . . min egen . . . min . . . egen . . .

(Brott –)

. . . lösningen . . . så lätt . . .

(Brott –)

. . . i hans juvelprydda bägare . . . i kungens blodröda vin . . . ingen ser . . . lätt . . . ett par små osynliga befriande droppar . . . pärlor . . . och sedan . . . väntar . . . på det ofrånkomliga . . . oundvikliga . . . ödet . . . befrielsen . . . sedan är vi fria . . . jag roar kungen . . . en sista gång . . . gör mig lustigare elakare värre elakare värre än någonsin . . . än någonsin . . . får honom att skratta så hårt att han faller från tronen . . . så hårt att han knappt kan andas . . . han lyfter bägaren . . . jag . . . han lyfter bägaren till sina läppar . . . jag . . . nu . . . NU! . . . nej! . . . drottningen kommer . . . plötsligt . . . oväntat . . . drottningen . . . hon kommer . . . kungen . . . han lägger ifrån sig bägaren . . . nej! . . . lägger undan bägaren . . . nej! . . . ställer den på bordet . . . drottningen . . . nej! . . . sätter sig bredvid honom . . . hon har pojken i sin famn . . . tjänaren häller upp vin hon tar bägaren . . . drottningen drottningen . . . pojken . . . drottningen . . . pojken . . . drottningen . . . pojken börjar plötsligt gråta spjärnar emot slår omkring med sina armar . . . träffar hennes bägare . . . slår omkull den . . . drottningens bägare drottningens bägare . . . bägaren . . . kungen . . . hon min drottning . . . kungen . . . hon min drottning nej . . . kungen . . . hon . . . hon . . . kungen . . . nej . . . jag ser på . . . när . . . . kungen . . . kungen . . . nej . . . ger henne sin egen bägare . . . ger henne . . . sin bägare . . . och hon . . . hon tar den . . . hans bägare . . . nej . . . kungens bägare . . . nej . . . hans juvelprydda bägare . . . hans . . . kungen ger henne sin bägare hon tar emot den . . . och . . . nej . . . sedan inget val . . . inget val . . . istället för att dricka . . . själv . . . istället . . . lyfter hon bägaren till pojkens läppar . . . nej nej nej . . . pojkens läppar som jag kysst tusen gånger . . . pojkens . . . läppar . . . för att lugna ned honom . . . stilla honom med en droppe . . . vin . . . och jag . . . nej! . . . inget val . . . jag . . . Eders Majestät säger jag Eders Majestät tillåter säkerligen att jag som hovets primus inter pares hovets främste representant så gott som en kunglig person själv först med en så gott som nästan kunglig skål hedrar och hyllar Eder Fru Drottningen jämte Eder Herr Son Prinsen den blivande konungen . . . Blivande Konungen . . . blivande . . . konungen . . . och jag tar bägaren ifrån pojken innan han hinner smaka en droppe . . . vin . . . och för att rädda pojken . . . för att rädda Gertruds son . . . för att rädda pojken . . . rädda Hamlet . . . mina läppar kysser den kalla bägaren . . . och fylld av kärlek . . . tårar av glädje . . . tömmer jag bägaren . . . tömmer jag giftbägaren . . . i den fasta vetskapen . . . att . . . Hamlet . . . min älskade Hamlet min son Hamlet min egen son Hamlet min älskade Hamlet min son min son ska få leva . . . ska få bli kung ska olikt sin far få ett långt . . . få ett långt . . . få . . . ett . . . långt och lyckligt . . . liv . . . liv . . . liv . . .

* * * * *

Efter det, ingenting.

Tystnad.

Metsämiehen tarina

Petri Salin:
Metsämiehen tarina



Taverna on pimeä ja oudon tyhjä, mutta isännän sherris sitäkin väkevämpää ja riittoisampaa; toisin kuin hänen kärsivällisyytensä, puhumattakaan hänen luotostaan: hyvä tuntematon, arvoisa matkamies, veljeni hengessä ja lihassa, sanon ääntäni korottaen ja osoitan sulavat sanani nurkkapöydän hämärässä istuvalle tummalle synkälle hahmolle, jonka vyöltä roikkuu kilisevä rahamassi; katsotte minua ja näette silmää miellyttävän muhkean olemukseni, kirkkaan rehellisen katseeni ja älystä ja hengen jaloudesta kiistatta kielivän korkean otsani, mutta ette kenties ole täysin tietoinen siitä, että teillä on tässä ja nyt ainutkertainen etuoikeus istua samassa tavernassa sangen maankuulun miehen kanssa; totisesti, hyvä herra, totisesti näin on, siinä suhteessa teitä on tänä päivänä todellakin onnistanut: jos tarjoatte minulle mukillisen – ei kanarianviiniä vaan hyväntahtoisen isäntämme oivallista sherristä, juuri sherristä, sitä parempaa laatua – niin tahdon teille kertoa kerrassaan uskomattoman tarinan, joll’ ei ole vertoa ei tässä maassa eikä muuallakaan tämän pilvisen taivaan alla; tarinan, joka tapahtui täällä Windsorin lähimetsissä ja jonka fantastiset käänteet saavat teidät haukkomaan henkeänne hämmästyksestä ja silkasta epäuskosta, mutta tarinan – minä vakuutan teille pyhästi kunniani ja omantuntoni kautta – jonka jokainen sana on mitä totisinta totta, sillä kaikki tämä tapahtui prinssien suosikille ja ruhtinaiden henkiystävälle, maallisen oppineisuuden heleälle henkilöitymälle, sotilaiden sotilaalle, naisten lempeälle mutta armottomalle kaatajalle, luotettavuuden ja nuhteettomuuden ja kaikenlaisen hyvämaineisuuden täydelliselle perikuvalle, kunnon ritari sir John Falstaffille; tapahtui siis, lyhyesti sanoen, koruttomasti kerrottuna, suoraan asian ytimeen mennäkseni, ollakseni täydellisen rehellinen, minulle itselleni: kiitos, suurkiitos, ystävä hyvä, luoja teitä siunatkoon ja katseensa teidän puoleenne kääntäköön, sanon ja upotan kasvoni eteeni tuotuun kolpakkoon; takaan teille, että tulette tarinani muodossa saamaan rahoillenne täyden vastineen ja paljon enemmän kuin rohkenitte edes toivoakaan: kuten aikaisemmin mainitsin, tahtomatta sillä kuitenkaan millään muotoa kehuskella tahi muutenkaan rahvaanomaisella tavalla rehvastella, kauniimpi sukupuoli ei ole koskaan eikä mitenkään eikä millään tavalla voinut vastustaa minua; se on aina janonnut lemmenpalveluksiani sellaisella kiihkolla ja raa’alla rakkauden raivolla, että se minua itseänikin joskus yön hiljaisina tunteina melkein peloittaa; mutta lähiseudun makean rusoposkiset ja mehevän pyöreäpoviset rouvasihmiset uskovat ja luottavat sokeasti omaan lemmen ritariinsa, kunnon sir Johniinsa, enkä minä heitä voi pettää vaikka välillä joutuisinkin tanakoine aseineni uurastamaan päivin öin heidän onnensa ja täydellisen tyytyväisyytensä eteen – ei, sitä en tahdo, sitä en voi; ei, en voi heidän hurskaita toiveitaan siten julmasti kylmästi karkeasti pettää: siis maailma mun olkoon osterini, jonk’ avaan miekallani: terveydeksenne, hyvä herra, olkoot kaikki taivaan jumalat teille suopeita, tienne suora ja tasainen ja matkanne menestystä täynnä – tarinani, siis, alkaa varsinaisesti siitä kerrassaan merkillisestä ja epätodennäköisen tuntuisesta tilanteesta, kun keskiyön lyödessä seison Windsorin synkeässä aarnimetsässä, metsän hurjimman puun alla, valtavat hirvensarvet aatelisen ylhäissyntyiseen kerrassaan jalosukuiseen päähäni köysin ja nahkahihnoin sidottuina; sarvet kuin metsän kuninkaan kruunu tahi myyttisten alkuaikojen jättiläismäinen kelohonka; aivan niin, kelpo ystäväiseni, seison odottamassa samanaikaisesti kahta lähiseudun innokasta naarasta eli emää eli rouvaa saapuvaksi kiihkeisiin lemmenleikkeihin; kahta hekuman raskaasti riivaavaa rouvaa, joiden siveyden lainahunnun olen säälittä repinyt: muista Jupiter, että tulit häräksi Europan tähden – lempi pani sarvet päähäsi; oi kaikkivaltias lempi, joka jossakin määrin tekee luontokappaleesta ihmisen, jossakin määrin ihmisestä luontokappaleen; oi kaikkivoipa lempi: ken se tuossa tulee, naaraaniko? – ottakaa osanne minusta, niin kuin lahjapeurasta, reisi kumpikin, itse pidän kyljet, lavat saa puistonvartija ja sarveni testamenttaan miehillenne! – hyvä hiljainen seuralaiseni, matkamiehenä ja muukalaisena ette varmaankaan tunne paikallisen metsämme paikallisia taruja, myyttejä, legendoja eli muita satuja ja levottoman mielen keksintöjä; sallikaa minun siis selittää hieman tarinani taustaa ja tehdä sitä sekä yleisesti että yksityisesti ymmärrettäväksi: mahtava puu, jonka alla odotan pääsyä rajuihin lemmenleikkeihin – suunnattomat sarveni tiukasti tukevasti tanassa – tunnetaan paikallisten keskuudessa Hernen puuna; Herne taasen oli vuosisatoja sitten elänyt kuninkaan metsämies ja metsänvartija, joka yksinkertaisen ja taikauskoon taipuvaisen kansan uskomuksen mukaan joutui jonkin ammoisina aikoina eläneen metsästyksen jumalan riivaamaksi – muuan kelttien jo ammoin unohtuneen Cernunnoksen, saanen lisätä, sillä jumaluusoppikaan ei teidän nöyrimmälle palvelijallenne sir John Falstaffille ole millään muotoa vierasta, ei suinkaan – ja jolle, näin kylällä yhäti kerrotaan, kasvoi päähän hirven sarvet ja joka sittemmin ja siitä samaisesta syystä epätoivoissaan hirtti itsensä samaiseen puuhun; ”kesk’öisin kiertää, suuret sarvet päässä, erästä tammipuuta talvet pitkät; puun kuivaa, karjan noituu, lehmäin maidon vereksi muuttaa hän ja kamalasti kalistaa kahleita”, kuten täälläpäin tavataan yhä sanoa; juuri hänen puunsa alla siis minä, kunnon ritari sir John Falstaff, seison – hieman hävyttömästi, mutta hyvillä mielin – metsämies Herneksi pukeutuneena ja odotan kiihkosta väriseviä pullukoitani saapuviksi: oma mustasaparoinen naaraaniko? – soittakoon ukkonen, nouskoon myrskynä kiihokkeita; tässä on minun turvapaikkani! – ajatus, voin kertoa teille näin herrasmiesten kesken ja perin luottamuksellisesti; ajatus sarvien kiinnittämisestä päähäni ei ole suinkaan omani, vaan se on peräisin riemukkaan riettailta rouviltani, ja mitäpä ei kaltaiseni leikkisä härkä tekisi taatakseen kaatamilleen naaraille mahdollisimman paljon iloa ja lemmekkään lihan kiihkoa; ja huvittaapa se minua kovastikin sarvipäisenä uroona tehdä aisankannattajia runsaiden rouvieni aviomiehistä – ha! – ha ja ha ja ha! – kippis, skåål, terveydeksenne, hyvä herraseni, ja pitkää ikää; niinpä seison tämän kirjaimellisestikin kirotun puun alla ja odotan ja odotan ja ilta tummenee ja vaihtuu pimeäksi lempeän samettiseksi yöksi ja vihdoin kuulen kaivattuja ääniä ja lähestyviä askelia ja ai, ai, ai, ai! – tulkaa tyköni pikku metsähiireni, pikku emakkoni; suo minulle, Jupiter, vilpoinen kiima-aika; metsän kuningas mylvii kiihkosta niin, että puista lähtevät lehdet, lihasta luut; antakaa sarvipäisen pukkinne, petomaisen pässinne teidät astua nyt ja nyt ja taas heti uudelleen! – äänet lähestyvät lähestymistään – mutta missä saaliini; missä pienet herkkupalani; missä missä? – metsän morsioideni, suloisten pikku helmikanojeni sijasta näen karkeita kylän miehiä vertani janoavat miekat koholla, sisäelimiäni saalistavat seipäät pystyssä, komeat kepit tanassa kuin suurilla suunnattomilla jättiläisrakastajilla konsanaan; nyt kuumaveriset jumalat mua auttakoot: minut nähdessään he käyvät hyökkäykseen – mutta niin käy arvon sarvihullu ritarinnekin! – tunnistan oitis etuimmaiset epatot ja kurjat konnat; aviomiehiä, kelvottomia katalia aviomiehiä, jotka kateellisina siitä, että heidän impyensä ja naidut naisensa heti jalkoihini lankeavat, ovat houkutellet minut metsään ja asettaneet minulle, lemmen lempeälle ritarille ansan; ja he yrittävät ajaa minut kiinni ja johdattaa karitsana teuraalle; mutta viekkaasti pusken sarveni ensimmäisen aviomiehen löysän hyllyvän vatsan perukoille ja kaadan hänet maahan; samoin toisen, samoin kolmannen; kuin kuivat ruohonkorret he lakoavat edessäni; kuin kaiken edestään polttava tuuli käyn heidän ylitsensä vailla armon häivää: tunnen kuinka vereni pauhaa kiehuu; raivostuneita aviomiehiä on leegio; missä pusken yhden maahan, siitä kaksi nousee ylös, missä pusken kaksi, siitä nousee neljä; en voi heitä kaikkia kukistaa – mestarillisena strategina ja sotilaana näen ja osaan oitis hahmottaa, ettei minulle ei ole muuta vaihtoehtoa kuin pako; pako, joka tässä tilanteessa ei ole pelkurimainen, ei raukkamainen vaihtoehto, vaan taktisesti älykäs ja yllättävä välttämättömyys; niinpä pakenen; ja savuavin soihduin ja vertahyytävästi haukkuvin ajokoirin he lähtevät perääni, solvauksiaan solkenaan syytäen – houkat! – yrittäkää saada minut kiinni, te narrit, te ruojat, te punaisten perseiden partasuiset paviaanit! – ha – yrittäkää! – kuin jalopeura laukkaan puiden ja puskien välistä, väistän kiven siellä kannon täällä sortuman tuolla; ei ole koiraa kasvatettu, joka minut ajaisi kiinni, ei metsästäjää synnytetty, joka minut kaataisi, ei elollista luotu, joka minut saalikseen saisi; takaa-ajajieni äänet heikkenevät kadotakseen taivaan sfäärien olemattomuuksiin ja minä laukkaan eteenpäin halki metsän sankkenevan viheriän hameen, laukkaan eteenpäin alati eteenpäin aina puuston syvimpään siimekseen ja vielä syvemmälle; aina sieluni syvimpään yöhön saakka; raastan vaatteet yltäni ja ulvon taivaankannen pimeyttä pirstovaa kuuta ja sinne tänne korkealle yläpuolelleni siroteltuja tähtiä, joita eivät voi kavioni tallata, joihin eivät sarveni yllä puskea; ulvon sisuksistani kaiken, mikä siellä piileksii ja lymyää; ja ulvottuani itseni tyhjäksi kuoreksi havahdun raastavaan riipivään repivään nälän tunteeseen, jota lääkitsen syömällä turpani ulottuvilla kasvavia huumaavan tuoksuvia lehtiä ja versoja; kieriskelen ruohossa ja loikkaan lapojani myöten puron viileyteen; uudet joka puolelta sieraimiin tunkevat hajut villitsevät minut; vesi, kylmää, kahlaan ylävirtaan, nousen ylös kuivattamaan turkkiani tuulessa auringossa; hankaan kylkiäni puita vasten kuori kutittaa pusken kaadan puita; en tiedä montako tuntia päivää viikkoa juoksen juoksen; nukkumatta lepäämättä syömättä juoksen; minä sarvipäinen uroshirvi minä juoksee juoksee juoksee; ja äkkiä, pysähtyy; kääntää päätä, äkkiä – haistaa: naaras – sukukypsä, valmiina, peurakaurishirvi, jossain lähistöllä, jossain todella lähellä; tuolla? – kääntää turpaa nuuhkii – tuolla? – kääntää turpaa nuuhkii – tuolla? – kääntää turpaa nuuhkii nuuhkii – tuolla? – tuolla; sinne; kääntyy; sinne; juoksee; sinne; laukkaa; sinne; kutsu leviää suoraan sieraimiin vetää sisään hengittää keuhkot täyteen naaraan kiimaa hengittää joka kerralla enemmän naaraan kiimaa laukkaa näkee naaraan valmiin valmiin; näkee naaraan toisen isosarvisen uroon alla syöksyy uroon kimppuun puskee urosta kaataa uroksen uros nousee puolustautuu hyökkää käy päälle puskee sarvet sarvia vasten – pam! – maa järisee – pam! – painaa yrittää kaataa alistaa – pam! – tarttuu sarvi sarveen luiskahtaa raapaisee lihaa avaa kyljen työntyy veren haju – pam! pam! – uudestaan suoraan päin – pam! – jänne kiristyy lihas jännittyy kavio ottaa vauhtia sarvi halkeaa jyrähtäen – pam! – pam! – Pam! sanon ja isken tyhjän mukini koko voimallani pöytään, niin että jysähdys on kaataa sen; isäntä hätkähtää, vaan muukalainen hän ei reagoi mitenkään – ei hätkähdä, ei edes tarjoudu täyttämään sisällön puutteesta surullisen orvoksi jäänyttä mukiani, oih! janoisen raukan tyhjyyttään kärsivää mukia, voih! – jatkan: kaksintaistelu kestää koko päivän ja koko yön ja koko seuraavan päivän, eikä kumpikaan mahtavista sarvipäisistä metsän ritareista tahdo toiselle luovuttaa metsän kuninkaan kruunua, valtikkaa eikä valtakunnan omenaa; voittajalle kuuluu naaras ja koko metsän kaikki naaraat; häviäjälle ei muuta kuin nöyrä alisteinen vasallin asema tai parhaimmassa tapauksessa armollisempi kuolema – taistelu jatkuu ritareiden uupumuksesta ja nääntyneisyydestä huolimatta; voimat heikkenevät, mutta tahto ei milloinkaan, ei hetkeksikään; taistelu jatkuu vaikka tietoisuus sumenee – ja, jalo herraseni, jos minulta tohditte kysyä kumpi kuolontaiston voitti, tahdon teille suoraan ja rehellisesti ja kiertelemättä vastata, että en tiedä; tiedän vain, että tietoisuuteni hitaasti hiipiessä takaisin kiusattuun runneltuun olemukseeni kylän punanenäinen puunhakkaaja ja puunhakkaajan kitukasvuinen apuri nostavat minut täriseville rattaille haisevien halkojen ja mätänevien puunraatojen sekaan; havahdun ja yritän pyristellä vastaan, mutta heikon tilani takia voimani ovat poissa ja metsän ritari ponneton ja avuton kuin pieni vastasyntynyt lapsi, ja niin puunhakkaaja vetää minut – kruunuprinssin rakkaan opettajan ja hänen rakkaimman ystävänsä – kotiinsa matalaan vaatimattomaan majaansa jossakin metsän laitamilla; tiedottomuus sulkee minut jälleen pehmeään viettelevään syliinsä; kun herään löydän mahtavan sarvipäisen olomuotoni puunhakkaajan vajasta röyhkeästi ja tiukasti sidottuna; riuhtomisesta ja riehumisesta huolimatta irtipääsy tahi pako ei ole mahdollista; nöyryytettynä täytyy minun vain todeta kiistattomat tosiasiat: olen satimessa; suuri sir John Falstaff, kuninkaan ylväs suosikkiritari, on vangittu ja tyrmään teljetty – ja traagisesti, melkein ironisesti kyllä teljetty metsän alhaisimmasta alhaisimman olennon eli surkean puunhakkaajan toimesta; voi onnetonta kohtaloani! – voi tukalaa tilannettani! – mylvin tuskaani maailman kuultavaksi, jotta maailma voi surra ja itkeä kanssani – ja yllättäen vajan ovi avataan ja puunhakkaajan nuori verevä vaimo astuu sisälle, sylissään kopallinen herkullisia nauriita minun syödä ja viileää vettä minun juoda; syötyäni ja saatuani hieman voimiani takaisin ihanainen puunhakkaajanrouva pesee veriset haavani ja sitoo ne; sen jälkeen hän pehmeillä käsillään silittää sarviani, kuiskaa suloisia lohdun sanoja korvaani ja löysää köysiäni; ei paljon, mutta tarpeeksi, niin että minun on helppo riistäytyä vapaaksi; yksi päättäväinen riuhtaisu ja jalosyntyistä ritarianne eivät enää minkään valtakunnan köydet pidättele; puunhakkaajan omenilta ja hunajalta tuoksuva rouva hätääntyy ja huudahtaa apua; hän ei koskaan ehdi ovelle saakka; etusorkillani työnnän hänet kumoon halkopinon päälle, sarvilla nostan hänen karkeaa hamettaan; pusken hänen päälleen ja työnnyn perille ja hän kirkuu; ensin kauhusta, sitten ilosta; nyt se Cupido on tunnokas lapsi; hän antaa vahingonkorvausta; satakoon nyt taivaasta perunoita, soittakoon ukkonen vihreän hameen nuottia; nouskoon myrskynä kiihokkeita; tässä on minun turvapaikkani! – ja samalla hetkellä, kun tuo edellinen ajatus kulkee lävitseni, tunnen kuinka lapaani vihloo ilkeimmän mukaan; katsahdan ylös kiihkeistä lemmenleikeistäni ja näen kuinka puunhakkaajan apupoika hakkaa minua mahtavalla puunhalolla; väkevä pään heilautus ja sarveni lennättävät apurin vajan kattoon; kuulen ulkoa huutoa; ymmärrän, että minun on pakko päästä ulos vajasta, etten jää ansaan; työnnän pääni sarvineen ulos oviaukosta; ennen kuin täyteläinen ruhoni ehti seurata perässä, oviaukon vieressä lymyilevän puunhakkaajan suunnaton kirves heilahtaa – kuulen kuivan terävän napsahduksen; puunhakkaajaa nostaa kirveen uuteen iskuun, mutta ennen kuin hän ehtii upottaa vasta teroitetun metallinsa selkääni, olen jo laukannut turvaan metsän suojiin; vasta laukattuani itseni uuvuksiin huomaan, että puunhakkaajan tappavaksi tarkoitettu sivallus on erottanut kalliit sarveni päästäni: olen täysin nutipää! – ja näyttääkseni hiljaiselle muukalaiselle, mistä kohtaa puunhakkaajan työkalu on haukannut päänahkaani, riisun lakkini ja kallistan alastonta sarvetonta päätäni hänen tykönsä; mutta samassa huomaan, etten enää olekaan tavernassa vaan takaisin metsässä, Hernen puun edessä; salama iskee ja sen valossa näen, että puun latvasta roikkuu hirtetty sarvipäinen mies: Herne; salama iskee uudestaan ja näen, että puu on jälleen tyhjä; puun alla joku istuu jalat ristissä; hurtat haukkuvat, verikoirat ulvovat; lähden juoksemaan; ne seuraavat perässäni, ajavat minua takaa – yökoira ajaa kaikenlaista riistaa; kuulen huutoja, kavioiden kopsetta; vaikka kuinka juoksen, en pääse minnekään; koko ajan olen puun lähettyvillä minne tahansa yritänkin suunnata; myrsky yltyy; salamat iskevät ympärilleni; koirat ajavat minut lähemmäksi puuta, lähemmäksi miestä, joka istuu puun alla; mutta ei hän mikään mies ole, tämä pelottava sarvipäinen hahmo, jolla on kädessään sarvipäinen käärme: hän on muinoinen metsänjumala, metsästyksen ja saalistuksen julma jumala, Cernunnos, nyt ja ikuisesti; koirat ajavat minua kuin saaliseläintä kunnes en enää jaksa juosta; kohtaloni hyväksyen heittäydyn maahan hyllyvänä muumiavuorena; ja kun avaan silmäni olen taas jälleen hämärän tavernan suojissa; läähätän, pyyhin lakilla hikeä otsaltani ja tunnustelen toisella kädellä paljasta päälakeani – hyvä herraseni, olette kuullut uskomattoman tarinani, jonka joka sana on taivaan totta; niin vannoo hetken Windsorin hirvenä juossut täydellisen ritarin perikuva sir John Falstaff, sanon kunhan henkeni jälleen alkaa hieman kulkea, samalla kun nyt tunnistan edessäni istuvan muukalaisen aikaisemmin näkemäkseni metsän sarvipääksi muinaisjumalaksi; vanhaksi ikuiseksi jumalaksi, jonka nimen mystisesti äsken muistin, mutta joka nyt lienee jo aikaa sitten unohtunut: peljästyn näkemääni niin, että luulen viimeisen hetkeni koittaneen; metsänjumala suvaitsi aikansa leikitellä kanssani metsässä ja nyt hän aikoo päättää huvituksensa ja päästää minut päiviltä; mutta metsänjumala ei tee elettäkään siihen suuntaan ja ymmärrän, että ei hän täällä tavernassa ajaisi minua koirillaan hengiltä ja sen päätteeksi minut vielä puuhunsa hirttäisi sekä lopuksi sisälmyksiäni puunsa oksien koristeeksi sirottelisi, vaan tekisi sen tietenkin ja luonnollisesti omassa rakkaassa metsässään, oman puunsa äärellä; joten päätän röyhkeästi tarttua härkää sarvista ja sanon hänelle miellyttävintä hymyäni hymyillen, sillä mitäpä minulla tässä enää olisi menetettävää: hyvä ystäväinen, parahin poisunohdettu metsänjumala, tuskinpa tohditte tai edes voitte olla kanssani eri mieltä siitä kiistattomasta tosiseikasta, että sellainen ainutlaatuinen, liioittelematon ja vieläpä kaupan päälle harvinaisen eläväisesti kerrottu tarina, jolla juuri äsken teitä viihdytin ja ilahdutin, on totta kai toisenkin mukillisen arvoinen – ehkäpä, ellen aivan tavattomasti erehdy, jopa kolmannenkin? – seuralaiseni ei sano mitään, hymyilee vain arvoituksellista hymyään; suljen silmäni ja tartun molemmin käsin mukiini, joka huomaamattani on täyttynyt; en tiedä, mitä minulle aiotte tehdä, sanon kun sherris jälleen saa vereni kiertämään ja tasaa lepattavan henkeni, mutta mitä minulle teettekään, niin yksi pieni toive minulla on: ennen kuin teette sen, voitteko palauttaa kruununi ja muuttaa minut taas takaisin metsän sarvipäiseksi kuninkaaksi, edes hetken ajaksi.

(Julkaistu Finnzinen numerossa 2/2007)

Anonymous

The Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, I don't mind telling you, seems like rather a good candidate. He was a courtier, a soldier and a favourite of the Queen - in fact one of the highest ranking noblemen in the Realm. He spoke several languages and was educated beyond belief. He loved books and spent fortunes on them. He had tight literary connections: Edmund Spenser, Anthony Munday, John Lyly and Arthur Golding dedicated works to him. Lyly, one of the first English playwrights, worked as his secretary and Golding, who translated Ovid's Metamorphoses, was his uncle. He travelled in the right places in Italy and Europe, had three daughters just like Lear, was captured by pirates just like Hamlet. His father-in-law was exactly like Polonius and his wife like Ofelia.

He was an accomplished poet and much involved with theatre. Maybe he even wrote plays.

But was he Shakespeare?

The theory was first proposed by the English school teacher J.T. Looney in his 1920 book Shakespeare Identified. Even before that there had been candidates galore: Marlowe, Bacon, Queen Elizabeth - or maybe all of then in cahoots?

There seems to be, among some parties, a great urge to explain away Shakespeare's authorship. I do wonder why? Because he wasn't of noble birth? But he was as his mother was an Arden. The Ardens were one of only three noble families that could trace their lineage, with documents, to before the Norman conquest. (It's also worth noting that Shakespere's father John was the mayor of Stratford, so William wasn't exactly your typical country yokel.) Because he was ill educated or even uneducated? But the grammar school in Stratford was excellent and taught both Greek and Latin. Because he probaby never travelled abroad, nor fought in a war, nor studied law, nor practised falconry, nor sailed the seven seas? Writing isn't really a question of what the author has done but what he can imagine and then put on paper.

Now de Vere is in many ways an excellent candidate if one wants someone other than Shakespeare to have authored Shakespeare's works. There really is a plethora of facts or factoids that makes one wonder. Could it be? Could it?

But, whatever the circumstantial evidence, two solid arguments against his being Shakespeare remain: 1) de Vere died in 1604, far too early considering such plays as Henry VIII and The Tempest, and 2) no written document links de Vere to the plays. Nothing.

The first argument is iffier, simply because very rarely do we know when the plays were written. Hardly ever, in fact. In some cases we know when they were performed, though not necessarily first performed. All dates for when Shakespeare's plays were written are pretty much estimates, educated guesses or pure conjecture. Henry VIII was performed in 1613. This is well known. In one performance a spark from a canon used in the play ignited the thatch roof of of the theatre and The Globe burned down. At the time, according to one source, the play was new and had been performed only a few times.

Not the strongest evidence. It wasn't uncommon for Elizabethan and Jacobean play-goers to think of a play as new if it was being performed after a longish hiatus. And nobody knows when Henry VIII was written, even if it premiered in 1613. Could have been written years before. There seems to be evidence of two authors, Shakespeare and another - maybe Fletcher, maybe Massinger. Maybe the other fellow simply patched it up years after it had been written or even abandoned by Shakespeare? Macbeth was tampered with after Shakespeare's death. It needn't have been the only case of suchlike villainy.

What about The Tempest? A great deal seems to hang on what sources were used when writing the play. Scholars seem to disagree violently. Some scholars even claim it was never written by Shakespeare at all. These scholars, however, seem a bit biased of course. If it was written after 1604, they claim, then someone else wrote it. Couldn't have been Shakespeare. Why not? Because at that time de Vere was quite dead and not writing anything. Hardly a persuading argument.

No, it's all extremely hazy and blurry, this dating of the plays.

The more serious argument is the lack of any textual evidence linking de Vere and the works of Shakespeare. Without any documents it's all conjecture. However persuasive it may be.

This, in fact, is where a great deal of the charm of the Oxfordian theory lies. It's all a cover-up, it's all a massive conspiracy. And we do love our conspiracy, don't we. What makes the conspiracy theory even more delectable, not to say downright irresistible, is the fact that de Vere's father-in-law was none other than Lord Burghley.

Burghley, William Cecil, was Elizabeth's prime minister and just about the only man in England who could pull off such a cover-up operation successfully. There was no archive to which Burghley didn't have access, no document he couldn't tamper with or make disappear. No doors were closed to him. Disobey him and your life was worth not a farthing. Burghley was the man Walsingham obeyed. Burghley was England's most influential man. If it was his wish that every trace that de Vere was Shakespeare would vanish, then they would vanish. Plain and simple.

The Oxfordians have another theory, an even more outrageous one. de Vere was in fact Elizabeth's son. Or she had an affair with the Queen who bore him a son. No evidence, of course, but it's a good story.

This is apparently what the Emmerich de Vere movie is going to be about. A conspiracy to conceal information lethally dangerous to the crown. This is what the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Shapiro (author of 1599 and Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare) writes about the Emmerich project called Anonymous in the Los Angeles Times: "When Emmerich says his movie will be about incest and bastards, he means that the story line follows a popular spinoff of Looney's undocumented theory, in which the Earl of Oxford was not only the secret son of the not-so-virginal Queen Elizabeth, but also, when he came of age, her lover. There's more fantasy: the Earl of Southampton was their illegitimate child and likely heir to the throne of England, until he was imprisoned for his role in the Essex Rebellion. And the explanation as to why Shakespeare would have gotten credit for plays and poems the Earl of Oxford wrote? The "real facts" had to be hushed up because a Tudor prince could never be seen to stoop to the lowly business of playwriting. "

Now that's what I call a reason to hush it all up.

But back to the facts. We know hardly anything about Shakespeare's past. We know next to nothing about Shakespeare's life. We don't know much at all when the plays were written or first performed.

That's not a good story.

A conspiracy is a good story. That's why most people will always prefer the cover-ups and the conspiracies to the next to perfect vacuum that is Will's story. As long as we know next to nothing about him or his story, as long as Shakespeare is an anonymous nonentity without a life, people will look for and find a substitute - someone who does have a good story, with the added bonus of a ripping conspiracy.

Because we all do love a good story. Especially one that could be true, well almost anyway.

Goring Dash

Joe Gores's newish prequel to The Maltese Falcon, Spade & Archer, makes me wonder. It's not that I automatically resent the idea of a prequel.

Or, well, maybe I do a bit.

Part, a great part in fact, of what makes a work of art work is the underlying tension beneath the surface and between the characters, and the things that never are explained or clarified. Just what is the relationship between Spade and Archer? What's Effie's story? How did Spade become Spade? What sort of an affair did Iva Archer and Spade have? We don't know. There are hints. This is implied, that may be deduced, the other almost revealed. But nothing definite.

The more clarifications and explanations we have the less interesting it becomes.

Do I really need to know what Spade's father did for a living or where Spade served during the Great War and exactly how he started his own agency? Is it important for me to know everything about Spade and Effie's first encounter? Does it somehow enhance The Maltese Falcon that I be made aware of how Spade and Iva Archer conduct their extra-marital affair behind Archer's back? Do I need it spelled out that Archer's a bit of a card, do I in fact need Archer exposed as an unequivocal rogue?

No.

I'm not denying that I quite enjoyed Spade & Archer and found it a good read, but there was far too much unnecessary exposition and back story that was right on the nose for it to be a really good book. It seemed like Gores's brief was to cover everything up till that magic moment when Miss Wonderly makes her unforgettable appearance and cover it he jolly well did with a vengeance!

That's what made it an embarrasingly semi-autonomous unit and therefore a bit redundant. We were told things that we neither need nor want to know. (Or, actually, we do want to know them, desperately even, that's the whole point, but once we do know them they become unimportant.)

It's a bit like someone writing a prequel to Hamlet (been done, I know I know) and painstakingly connecting every dot and filling every single blank space: showing what the relationship between old Hamlet and Gertrude is like, what the relationship between Hamlet and his father is like, what the relationship between Gertrude and Claudius is like, what the relationship between Hamlet and Claudius is like, how Hamlet's courtship of Ofelia commences and blooms. Everything. Leaving no stone unturned and no worms lurking in the dark damp crevices. Everything is out in the open. And suddenly it's all plain and unambiguous, trite and banal.

The ambiguities are what make it interesting and worthwhile. The ambiguities are what bring it alive.

Without the ambiguities, the unexplained tensions, the unclarified relationships, The Maltese Falcon would be a forgotten book. And justly so. Just like nobody would give a toss about why the fat Dane just doesn't revenge his father and get it over with.

Maybe I'm being rather too hard on Spade & Archer. It's just that I can't help but measure it against Gores's excellent 1975 novel Hammett, which by a curious chance I stumbled upon and read just a couple of weeks before reading Spade & Archer.

It's 1928. Hammett lives in San Francisco and is writing The Dain Curse. Public opinon is turning against the corruption and immorality that permeates the whole town. Brothel keeper Molly Farr is in the eye of the storm and disappears. Were she to talk it would be embarrasing for a lot of influential gentlemen. Hammett's old Pinkerton Buddy Vic Atkinson gets a delicate assignment: to investigate wrong-doings in the San Francisco police department. Vic gets killed early on in the game - no surprises there - and it's up to Hammett to crack the case and hunt down the culprit.

Who turns out to be not quite what Hammett expected. Quite chilly, really. But stays true to the gruesome world of Hammett where no punches are pulled. Ever.

Right after I finished Hammett I had another look at the Wenders/Coppola movie based on the book. What I still can't stand about it is its artificiality, its sterility, its almost hermetic quality. It doesn't breathe. And this is because most of it seems to be filmed in some ghastly studio instead of on location. Shooting scenes on the windy streets of San Francisco would have made it come alive. Now several scenes are almost unwatchable. I don't know if Coppola was going for a claustrophobic noirish feel, maybe he was. But if so he got it terribly wrong. In fact I'm not at all convinced it's particularly wise to try to see Hammett's work (and by proxy Hammett, both the book and movie) in terms of noir. There is a definite kinship, this cannot be denied, but Hammett's stuff transcends noir. The shoe just don't fit.

What Spade & Archer did do for me, and for this reason alone I cannot condemn nor censure the book, was to create the urge to re-read The Maltese Falcon and maybe the entire works of Hammett. And obviously to have another go at the Huston film. I still haven't seen the first two versions, Roy Del Ruth's Satan Met a Lady (1931) and William Dieterle's The Maltese Falcon (1936) in which Sam Spade for some strange reason becomes the rather less well named Ted Shane. Miss Wonderly has the not so enchanting moniker Valerie Purvis but is played by the glorious Bette Davis. Whose birthday, by the way, it seems to be today if Imdb may be trusted.

These two films seem annoyingly, damnably, elusive.

I Want to Believe?

Having purchased seasons 6 and 7 of The X Files on DVD, and thus been watching several episodes a day, I find these seasons a curiously bothersome experience. It's not that the episodes all seem derivative and tautological (well they do because they are), it's not that the episodes are rubbish (some of them are quite surprisingly good actually), it's that now the core and essence of the series is made so abundantly clear. There were hints, oh yes there were plenty of hints all along the way, but now there can be no doubt about it: it's all about faith and belief.

This is what the entire series is founded upon.

Mulder knows the way things are. Mulder knows what is what, he just cannot prove anything. So his sayings and claims have to be taken on faith.

We, the viewers, are given some glimpses of the truth. Sometimes these are explained away, sometimes they aren't. But clearly we are given to understand that Mulder is right. He holds the truth.

Fair enough.

But this doesn't seem to satisfy the powers that be. This is the point where The X Files ceases to be science fiction, falls flat on its face and becomes soap opera. Or religious soap opera, which is much worse. Not to say embarrassingly banal.

Mulder isn't simply the fellow who tries to get to the bottom of things and expose the corruption. Oh no. Mulder is given saint like properties. Mulder is a Holy Prophet. And to underline this, to make it clear as a bell, he, time and again, dies and comes back through resurrection. He suffers for our sins. He is crucified. He preaches the truth but no one will listen to him. He is mocked. He is ridiculed. He is silenced. But he will not, cannot be silenced. He will suffer any consequence, withstand any torture, to get his truth out. His truth. The truth.

Believe and ye shall be saved. Question and ye shall perish.

Mulder is, to put it quite bluntly, Messiah. Even Scully, who's supposed to be the rational partner, isn't really convinced that science can provide any real answers. She relies on religion. "Are you asking me to pray?"Belief is the key. Believe and ye shall be saved.

This makes me right miffed.

It's cheating. I don't want my science fiction to be sugar-coated religion masquerading as bold, independent and intellectually valid art.

I'm perfectly willing to accept the core truth of almost all religions, that essential truth that is akin to mythology and must be understood as a metaphor of the soul and mankind's spiritual journey, and I'm quite willing to accept the theological framework that lies at the heart of The X Files as a perfectly legitimate and indeed compelling dramaturgical and emotional construction. But when it comes down to a question or rather a demand of personal and unquestioned and blind belief I tend to get extremely irritated. Sometimes even hostile. And when it comes to scientific thought having to yield to faith I am at a loss for words.

It offends my sense of rationality, it offends everything I hold true. It offends common sense.

And, this is the cruncher, it makes for poor art. The religious undertones in The X Files completely ruin any chance of it being taken seriously, its hubristic Messianic tendencies only serve to make it a piece of juvenile and unsound propaganda. Propaganda is never good art. Propaganda is never art at all.

"You're not Christ," says the Smoking Man to Mulder in an early season 7 episode. But of course the opposite is true and this is the way we are to understand it. He is Christ and meant to be seen as such. The Smoking man is of course Satan - "May I offer you a cigarette?" - and the ominous red glow of his ever present cigarette tip a little piece of Hell. He tries to lead Mulder astray with his lies and mendacious rationalizations, and by showing him a false picture of how life could be if only he gave up his foolish quest. He could have a normal life, just like anybody else. Mulder remains strong in his faith, with a little help fron Scully.

Mulder is the one man who stands between us and extinction. He cannot waver. He must believe or else comes the Apocalypse. The Smoking Man crucifies Mulder, literally, and on his head Mulder wears the Crown of Thorns - suitably updated for a cyber age. Behold the man.

Good stuff, powerful imagery. But. This is what it comes down to and this is what makes me rather less than happy - the preaching. What The X Files preaches is: belief is good, science and rationality are bad. I'll repeat: belief good, science and rationality bad.

And now I see Mulder's motto and the motto of the entire series - "I want to believe" - in a totally new light and it gives me the shivers. Was it this blatant from the start?

Any work of art that preaches such truths is rubbish, complete and utter, not to say intellectually dishonest. No further explanations necessary.

I'm not entirely certain this is Chris Carter's intention. But - if it isn't he's a pretty confused fellow and doesn't quite know what he's up to. Any which way it doesn't make him look particularly good.

What really amazes me is that it took so long for me to spot the obvious. I suppose I just didn't want to believe.

"Extremely Distasteful"

I've never particularly cared for Hitchcock. The films are quite entertaining as such but afterwards one inevitably gets an empty, almost nauseating feeling; just like after having eaten something dodgy or read a Christie novel. There's something off, there's something fundamental lacking; they both have this frighteningly chilly core at the centre of their art, this inhuman vacuum where a human soul of some description ought to reside.

However, I do love a few Hitchcock movies. Psycho. Vertigo. North by Northwest. It took me long while to see just what it was that made me adore these films in particular, even view them as masterpieces. Then the obvious suddenly struck me: Bernard Herrmann.

It's Herrmann's music that transforms these movies into gripping cinematic experiences and singular works of art.

Herrmann (born in 1911) was a native New Yorker and attended New York University and the Juilliard School. He was a member of Aaron Copland's circle and tried his hand at composing, writing his first dramatic score at 22, La Belle Dame sans Merci. In the early '30s he joined the CBS orchestra as a conductor and avidly performed new and unknown works. Like those of Charles Ives, who was still alive at the time and whom he soon befriended. Ives was at this point in time almost entirely unplayed and quite unknown. Certainly nobody had any idea he was the greatest composer the United States had produced - still is - and the New World's equivalent of Arnold Schönberg. Herrmann understood it.

CBS also broadcast a lot of radio plays, like those put on by the Mercury Theatre and the Campbell Playhouse, both of which operated under the auspices of that controversial theatrical wunderkind Orson Welles. The radio plays of course needed music. Herrmann suplied it. He conducted the music for Welles's best known and most poignant radio play The War of the Worlds in 1938 and scored many other productions. It naturally befell Hermann to score Welles's first venture into the world of cinema, an almost forgotten little effort called Citizen Kane.He also did the score for The Magnificent Ambersons but pulled it when the studio in a dastardly fashion slaughtered the film in Welles's absence. A few bits of it remain in the carnage that the studio released, much against Herrmann's wishes.

After that there was no turning back. In the '40s he scored Robert Stevens's Jane Eyre (with Joan Fontaine in the title role and Welles as the dark and brooding Rochester), John Brahm's Hangover Square (with Laird Cregar and George Sanders), John Cromwell's Anna and the King of Siam (with Irene Dunne and Rex Harrison) and Joseph Mankiewicz's The Ghost and Mrs Muir (with Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison). Among his highlights in the '50s were the science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (by Robert Wise), Mankiewicz's spy thriller 5 Fingers (with James Mason and Danielle Darrieux), Henry King's Hemingway picture The Snows of Kimanjaro (with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner), and Michael Curtiz's Mika Waltari epic The Egyptian (with Peter Ustinov and Gene Tierney).

In 1955 the collaboration with Hitchcock started with The Trouble With Harry and the following year he did both the re-make of The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Wrong Man. Then it came: the truly unsurpassed masterpieces - Vertigo in 1958 and North by Northwest in 1959. Then Psycho in 1960 and J. Lee Thompson's Cape Fear in 1962.

The collaboration with Hitchcock ended in 1964 and Torn Curtain. Hitchcock wanted a jazz and pop influenced score, Herrmann wanted to do it his own way. Like always. He would not be dictated to. If he couldn't do it exactly like he wanted, if he wasn't in total control of the music and in on the making of the movie from the word go, then he didn't want to do it. Quite sensibly, I might add. Hitchcock and Herrmann parted on not too amicable terms. After Hitchcock Herrmann did write a couple of important scores but the entire industry was changing and not all for the better. He wrote the scores for Fahrenheit 451 (1966, based on the Bardbury novel) and The Bride Wore Black (1968, based on the Cornell Woolrich novel) for Truffaut and Taxi Driver (1976) for Martin Scorcese. He died just a few hours after having finished recording the soundtrack for Taxi Driver.

I have a particular fondness for North by Northwest. Maybe there we have the finest film music he wrote. Or even: the finest film music ever written. The fandango that begins the film is right on the money and let's us know the name of the game at once. It's repetitive, simple, obsessive and frustrating. The effect is at the same time both dizzying and hypnotic. It's like we're in this spinning carousel and can't get off. In Psycho there are the unforgettable stabbing pizzicati and screeching birdlike violins. And again the repetition: the anxiety and the frustration grow and grow till we can no longer bear it. The it starts anew. There can be no solace. Something bad is about to happen, every note is a harbinger of doom. Nothing can avert the evil. It is like the rain in the driving scene: all-permeating and absolute. We can do nothing but await its coming and accept it when it does come.

What Herrmann realised is that film music doesn't have to be complex or stand on its own two feet. What is needed is impact. This is more often than not acheived by doing quite simple things. But doing them just at the right time. And repetition is the key - breaking down the viewer's every last resistance.

Herrmann goes for the gut reaction and by Jove he gets it.

In Vertigo we have the haunting Tristan like theme that keeps repeating itself and the frustration keeps building. It's never in the pictures or the lines - it's all in the music. This is probably something of which Hitchcock was acutely aware and disliked immensely. It has been suggested that a great part in the rift between Hitchcock and Herrmann was played by the possible fact that Hitchcock on some level, subliminal or not, resented the immense impact Herrmann had on his movies.

Herrmann's second unsurpassed masterpiece is the score of Cape Fear. The theme is simplicity itself. And it spells doom. It never relents, it never gives up, it never goes away. It immediately goes for the jugular. Four chords that keep on repeating. And repeating. And repeating. Till the bitter end. Right from the first note we know it's going to be a tragedy of epic Greek proportions with proper carnage. It can end only in cathartic death. But in a Herrmann score not even death brings us an escape from the frustration and anxiety he's built up. There is no escape. There is no relief. Not in the movie, not in life.

The last work, Taxi Driver, is a departure from the usual Herrmann. The jazzy score is softer, moodier, less anxious and neurotic. But again he unerringly captures not only the mood but the essence of the film - the hopeless cosmic loneliness of Travis Bickle. The music insulates him from the rest of humanity. They cannot hear it nor understand it just like they cannot understand or connect with him. The saxophone plays only for him. He's alone.

The title of this entry comes from a letter Herrmann wrote to his first wife, the author Lucille Fletcher (who wrote the briliant radio play Sorry, Wrong Number, which later was made into not quite as brilliant a movie with Burt Lancaster and Barbara Stanwyck): "I entered into work that was extremely distasteful to me . . . I never had time for my own reflection and work . . ." According to Lucille he wanted to be a conductor and conduct those pieces of music by Ives and Bartok and the other big boys he truly loved. He wrote one symphony, one opera and a cantata dedicated to Ives.

So this is his tragedy. He didn't really want to be a composer of film music at all. It's just that he was so incredibly good at it, so exceptional. He might have become a conductor of note - but we have those. We have many many brilliant conductors. We have no other film composer like Herrmann. Not even close.

Herrmann's only screen appearance is in The Man Who Knew Too Much. The scene takes place in Albert Hall and in it Herrmann plays - a conductor.

The Rabbit and the Hound

In The Norwood Builder Jonas Oldacre fakes his own death and frames the "unhappy John Hector Macfarlane" for murder.

Oldacre seems like a thoroughly unpleasant fellow. "He was a strange, little, ferret-like man, with white eyelashes," is how Macfarlane describes him. Macfarlane's mother, who once was engaged to Oldacre, gives the following description: "He was more like a malignant and cunning ape than a human being". This is the first impression Watson receives: "It was an odious face - crafty, vicious, malignant, with shifty, light-grey eyes and white eyelashes."

In his preface to my edition of The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Pan, 1979) Angus Wilson draws attention to the fact how much animal imagery there in the tales that make up this particular collection: "the world of beasts is never far away as a shadow world behind the strange or dreadful events which Holmes reduces to questions of orderly reason."

A ferret, an ape. "A little, wizened man" who darted out of his cubby-hole "like a rabbit out of its burrow."

So perhaps it's quite in order that Oldacre uses animal remains when he fakes his own death. Chicken bones? That's the way I always remember it. No. I check the story and it seems my memory is incorrect. "By the way," Holmes asks Oldacre in the end, "what was it you put into the wood-pile besides your old trousers? A dead dog, rabbits, or what?" Oldacre gives no reply. "Well, well, I dare say that a couple of rabbits would account for the blood and the charred ashes", Holmes concludes.

Still, this point has always made me wonder. Is it really viable to mistake charred rabbit bones for human remains? What medical examiner would make such a dismal error? Would Dr Watson, as a trained professional, fall for such a clumsy device? Hardly. But Watson never gets to see the remains, unless I'm much mistaken. Does Holmes see them? The story isn't entirely clear on that point.

Holmes says: "They had spent the morning raking among the ashes of the burned wood-pile and besides the charred organic remains they had secured several discoloured metal discs. I examined them with care, and there was no doubt that they were trouser buttons." So he has access to what the police found. Surely that would include a glance at the organic remains?

Now the bones are charred. Ashes really, is what Doyle writes. But is that possible? Can bones be thus annihilated in a mere wood-fire? I doubt it. It seems extremely unlikely. No, I'll venture a bold statement: It's entirely impossible.

There is absolutely no way a whole human corpse can be reduced entirely to ashes and cinder in a smallish wood-fire. The temperatures required for that are far higher. Surely Doyle as a professional medical gentleman was aware of this. Dear old Bertie Wooster is fond of quoting Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade, but unfortunately he never can remember more than "ta-dum ta-dum ta-dum - someone had blunder'd." And that someone, in this case, is Arthur Conan Doyle. He, putting it bluntly, blundered. He slipped up. He stepped into it. No two ways about it. Well, that sort of thing tends to happen when the pace one writes at is fast and furious.

The Granada television series acknowledges the problem and the script tweaks the story a bit. In the episode Oldacre lures a tramp to his house, murders him and burns his body. As the remains of the tramp are clad in Oldacre's clothes, it is naturally assumed that the dead man is Oldacre.

This is all good and well and settles the matter of the unconvincing animal remains. However. Doyle's Oldacre is clearly a timid, shifty, cunning man. A man who in cold blood frames someone and takes a sadistic pleasure from doing it. But he's a ferret, a rabbit. Not someone who would or indeed could murder a man, not with his own hands. Only cowardly by proxy. Therefore in the episode they have a big, strong and bullish Oldacre - the antithesis of Doyle's intention. It throws the whole episode off for me, as the plan is still quite clearly a timid coward's sadistic plan and therefore not at all in synch with this new he-man Oldacre.

By the way, there's a rather remarkable thing about The Norwood Builder. Doyle didn't write the story alone. This, I believe is a pretty unique occurrence in the Canon. His partner was called Fletcher Robinson, but I'm not entirely certain if Robinson ever did more than help with the plotting.

Fletcher Robinson's name is important because of another thing he did. He's the man who came up with the original idea that produced The Hound of the Baskervilles. It was originally supposed to be a collaboration between Doyle and Robinson but then somehow Holmes crept in. This is curious. Holmes was, at this point, quite dead. Doyle certainly had no intention of resurrecting him, none at all. Yet Holmes managed to worm his way into The Hound of the Baskervilles and transform the entire novel into a vehicle for himself. Now there was no turning back and it didn't take too long before the short stories started to appear once more in the Strand and Holmes was officially returned to the fold, resurrected and back in business.

When Holmes came in, Robinson was out. But how much of the story did he write? Any of it? We don't quite know. Doyle kept it pretty schtumm and Robinson himself died shortly afterwards. It surely isn't too much of a stretch to wonder if he wrote some bits of the legend of the Hound. That was after all his main contribution to Doyle - the Legend of the Hound. At least some of the plotting must have come from him. I think we may take for granted that Doyle wrote all the bits with Holmes and/or Watson in them. Or may we? What was the book to be like before Holmes stepped in? Who was to be the hero? How far did Robinson and Doyle get in their planning? They commenced the writing, that much seems certain, but how far did they in fact get? Have any parts of the book been modified and was Holmes perchance inserted into already existing scenes? I don't find it at all impossible, at least in the latter parts of the book.

Anyway, interesting fact: Fletcher Robinson was involved in the writing of two Canonical Sherlock Holmes stories. The only outsider who ever was, I believe.

Scottish Curse

J.L. Carrell's The Shakespeare Curse isn't that bad. Really. There are quite interesting things in it. A lot of them, in fact. There's also a lot of rather annoying and embarrassing nonsense, and, what's more, the dramaturgy is once again "borrowed" from that eternal masterpiece of esoteric prose and flawless scholarship The Da Vinci Code.

Ok, so the plot is pretty boring and plodding. The Wiccan twaddle is insufferable. But still.

Macbeth is what it's all about. A lot of strange things and spooky happenings tend to cluster around the play and performances thereof. Mentioning its name, the names of the principal characters or quoting from it is considered to be bad form and even dangerous. It will bring bad luck, at least that's the impression in theatrical circles. Some suppose it cursed. Death and misery seem to follow it everywhere. This, according to Carrell, is because Shakespeare - while in Scotland in 1585 as an itinerant player - witnessed the rites of a coven of witches and pinched their secret spells for his play. A play what he then wrote twenty years later. Right. The spells are also what made Will such a hot writer. Right.

There is obviously a magic object and everybody wants it to perform their rite. No, there's three actually. A magic mirror which once belonged to the notorious Dr Dee, a sacred cauldron and the original manuscript of Macbeth with the potent spells still in it. Oh, and of course an ancient knife with an unslaked thirst for blood.

Our heroine, the theatre director Kate Stanley, well remembered from The Shakespeare Secret, must recover these objects or a young girl dies. And she's only got 48 hours. Or something. And, of course, there's a crazed killer around, killing his innocent victims left right and centre. Much hilarity ensues.

What I do like is the obvious homework Carrell has done on and around her subject. That's the core and essence of the book, the yummy stuff. She's found some quite fascinating things and used a lot of her materials rather well, inventively even. There is of course a wealth of material when it comes to Macbeth. Too much, in fact, if you try to use most every scrap of it in a single novel. Carrell seems to believe that her book becomes the better the more of it she uses. The opposite is true. Now the novel drowns in a swamp of quaint factoids, none of them really relevant or properly developed.

But. Interesting factoids: Dr Dee owned an Aztec mirror. Did it have magical properties? Is it the same mirror which is currently in the British Museum? That's what Horace Walpole claimed. Dee is perennially interesting, the archetype of both the consummate scholar and proto-scientist and the magician. Carrell makes Shakespeare his pupil. Not bad. Did Walsingham and Lord Salisbury use itinerant players as their wandering spies? Marlowe certainly was one, so too maybe Kyd. Which is of course what got them into trouble and what got Marlowe very dead indeed. What about Shakespeare? Was he in the cloak and dagger business? Good stuff. Did Hal Berridge, who played the Queen in the first performance, die in that performance or just after it? And did Shakespeare have to jump in to finish the role? So legend has it. What happened to Berridge? The curse? Is that how it originated? But, hang on, was there a Hal Berridge? Surely he's mentioned in some list of players? No. Nobody seems to mention him, apart from Aubrey. Or does Aubrey ever mention Berridge? Could it all just be a huge joke on the theatrical world, a succesful prank perpetrated by the sardonic Max Beerbohm? And speaking of Beerbohms, what happened to the early film version of Macbeth with Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in the title role? Tree died soon after having finished the film - any connection there?

Tree's Lady Macbeth was, by the way, Constance Collier in one of her first screen appearances. Today Collier is perhaps best remembered as the tipsy aunt in Hitchcock's Rope. I'd quite like to see her Lady M.

Carrell clearly is extremely knowledgeable in the field of early American Shakespeare tradition and once again displays it wonderfully. Like when she fishes out the macabre case of Forrest vs. Macready - a feud about Macbeth interpretations that started the lamentable Astor Place riot in 1849 and got nearly thirty people killed.

Edwin Forrest was perhaps the earliest great American Shakespeare actor. He befriended his English colleague Charles Macready and they became fast friends. Macready toured the United States, Forrest toured Britain. It was all a great success. On a tour of England the public suddenly turned on Forrest and wouldn't buy his Macbeth, and Forrest blamed it on Macready and started to hound the baffled Englishman. Once when Macready did a Hamlet Forrest stood up, during the To Be or Not To Be monologue, naturally, and started hissing and booing Macready and ruined the entire performance. He started to sabotage Macready's productions. When Macready appeared in a play, Forrest would arrange to appear in a play in the same town and at the exact same time. Often it was even the same play.

In May 1849 Macready was doing Macbeth in New York at the Astor Place Opera House quite near the Bowery - a tough neighbourhood where the dreaded gangs of New York resided. The lethal Five Points weren't far off either. Forrest was doing Macbeth the same night only a few blocks away on Broadway. The lines were drawn and clear as a bell. Macready was favoured by the anglophile upper crust while Forrest was to the liking of the lower orders to whom Forrest was one of them. Three nights before the riot a number of tough Forrest aficionados bought several hundreds of tickets to Macready's performance and belted the poor man with rotten lettuce and eggs and potatoes and rotten tomatoes and shoes and stenching foul liquids; with anything basically they could hurl at the despised foreign toff. They also pretty much gutted the theatre in the process. Macready knew a hint when he saw one. Time to shift. However, he was talked out of going back to England by such members of the cultural elite of New York as Herman Melville and Washington Irving. He stayed and once more he braved the New York stage as the Scottish King.

That's when things got really nasty.

When the performance commenced there was an enraged rabble of thousands outside the theatre, maybe 20 000 people, drummed up by posters and word of mouth, howling for the Englishman's blood. They stoned the theatre and tried to set it on fire. The Police were pretty helpless against such numbers so the National Guard was called in. The crowd would not settle down so the National Guard fired into it. Nearly thirty died and hundreds were injured.

And I don't think it quite settled the matter of whose Macbeth was better.

Funny thing. Shakespeare seems to have been staggeringly popular and well known in America in the 19th century, even among ill-educated people, and really meant something to them. And in those days there was no mass entertainment and therefore no great divide between low and high art. That came later. So what they had were the classics, above all Shakespeare. It is, by the way, quite impossible to imagine a riot getting started today over whose Macbeth is the better. Not in America, not anywhere is such a thing within the realm of possibility or even the scope of imagination. Not even close.

But back to The Shakespeare Curse. Not an entire waste of time. In parts quite entertaining. But as a novel hopelessly muddled. Rather as one did expect.

What Price Shakespeare

Watching that very splendid study in Shakespearean gore, Theatre of Blood, with Vincent Price as the ageing Shakespeare ham who's the butt of every critic's joke, got me wondering if Price ever had done any Shakespeare for real.

A quick glance at his movie credits seems to turn up precious few roles in tights. Surprisingly few, in fact. In the early The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex he plays Sir Walter Raleigh and then there are the Poe movies, several of which might fit the bill. The closest he gets, apart from Theatre of Blood that is, is the Corman low-budget Tower of London, a ghost movie in which he plays a Richard of Gloucester haunted by those he's murdered. I also have a clear recollection of him doing Osric in Laurence Olivier's film version of Hamlet. I am of course wrong and it was in fact Peter Cushing. Close but no cigar.

He never did much work on the stage. In the 30s he was, briefly, with Orson Welles's legendary Mercury Theatre and appeared in Thomas Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday and Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House. The total sum of the stage productions he took part in is a round dozen; the most interesting of which is Richard III in New York in 1953. He appears, perhaps slightly surprisingly, as the Duke of Buckingham and not the hunchback.

Richard III would of course have been the ideal role for him. Oh how low and dastardly he would have been, oh how vile and scheming and how delighted at his own villainy. He played Richard in Tower of London and even in Theatre of Blood, in the scene where he drowned one of the hated critics in a butt of not Malmsey but Claret. Poetic justice, that.

Another role he was born to play was Iago. The problem there would be this: his Iago would probably destroy the tragedy of the tragedy. He would be so charming, so witty, have such underlying good humour that we'd be on his side and not really care a tinker's cuss what happens to the silly Moor and his bit of fluff. So the play would no longer be Othello but Iago.

In Hamlet he'd be an excellently foppish Osric, a wonderfully annoying Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, and most likely a fine and remarkably dangerous Polonius. And, this goes without saying, a superbly loathsome Claudius. But as Hamlet? Now there would be a fascinating study, I'm willing to bet. Not everyone's cup of tea, but interesting.

As a straight hero Price is impossible. He doesn't look the part. He's odd, his long and narrow Puritan face is somehow rubbery, like a Halloween mask. He's off and that's what makes him so fascinating. And he's got a voice. It's a blend of honey and poison. His manner is always sarcastic, bordering on the insolent and even malicious. We never can trust him. At the same time we never can completely dislike him either, even at his most dastardly. Particularly at his most dastardly.

Other leads? A stranded and more than slightly diabolical Prospero (the imprisonment of whom seems entirely just), a Julius Caesar who rather deserves what he's getting, a Timon who hates mankind with unsurpassable intensity and is out to get each and every one of its members. Put a false belly on him and he's the drunken braggart Falstaff, downing cups and felling wenches like nobody's business, completely enamoured with his own excellence.

Twelfth Night might have been an excellent vehicle for him. I see him doing a scathing Sir Toby Belch and also a tragic Malvolio. In the comedy tragedy and horror, and naturally vice versa. Which obviously is his forte.

What about Macbeth? Is there much room for dark comedy in Macbeth? Perhaps more than at first one might suppose. It would however alter the entire dynamics of the play. Not perhaps such a bad thing. And the witches are often played for comedy, justly or not. The more I think about Vincent Price as Macbeth the more the notion appeals to me.

Such a great pity he never did much Shakespeare to speak of. Still, Theatre of Blood almost makes up for it. Or perhaps even more than makes up for it.

In Memory Yet Green

There is a quite fascinating article in the spanking new Clarkesworld Magazine about brains and how they function. In it Luc Reid makes a couple of very salient points.

Firstly: our memories are very incomplete. By and large a lot of them are, partially, synthetic constructions. We have certain facts stored in the vaults of the brain and a lot of facts we don't have stored. Thus, when we remember the mind fills in the blanks and so we have what we imagine to be complete and unadulturated memories. The appearance of what happened instead of what actually did happen.

This, interestingly enough, is rather how fiction works. The author throws out a few important facts. He, for instance, describes a scene by pointing out this tree and that house and yonder barking mutt. And the mind of the reader fills in the gaps and gets a full and rich picture of what is going on and what it looks like and how it feels and smells and tastes.

Our mind works like this the whole time, constantly filling in and completing pictures, finding patterns and regularities where none in fact exist. Creating them out of very little. That's why we see faces on the surface of Mars or in omelettes - our brains are wired to see them.

Seasoned neurologists like Lurija and Sacks go a bit beyond this. They claim that our whole consciousness is filled with gaps and glaring holes. They claim that each day we construct our consciousness anew - each day we construct who we are. They claim that our consciousness is not so much a state but a process. Like Phoenix we arise each morning from the ashes of oblivion. Except when we don't. It never may be taken for granted. And the mind is such a delicate instrument, the most delicate there is. No wonder then when things go wrong with it. Miracle that it functions at all.

Those whose consciousness functions poorly may construct a new past for themselves, a new history and a new persona. The flawed mind still connects the dots and where no dots exist it creates them. Usually that works almost as well as the genuine article. Which, as we've seen, isn't all that genuine, to be honest.

But if this gaps in the consciousness theory holds water, then Aldous Huxley was very seriously wrong in his theory. In his book The Doors of Perception he claimed that we see and hear everything, far more than we ever are aware of, and store all of it in the brain. He also believed that the chief function of the mind was to filter most of that unnecessary and unimportant information so it wouldn't clog our consciousness. If we saw and heard and were aware of everything, all the time, saw every tiny detail as through a magnifying glass, and had to notice everything on a conscious level, we'd very soon go mad. Drugs, he thought, disabled the filter and allowed us to experience everything our senses took in, and for once be aware of every tiny detail around us.

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks in his cavern."

Secondly: each time we access a memory we in essence rewrite it. Remembering something tampers with that memory and ultimately alters it. So the memory is never static, our memories live with us. And importantly, "anything that interferes with the re-writing turns recollection into erasure".

Thirdly, and this is an amusing thought: were somebody to try to copy one's brain (or remove it from one's head and plant it in somebody else's head, which is always a dreaded risk), they would have to recreate one's entire endocrinology as well. For the brain does not operate in a vacuum. All the chemicals we have are individual and are part of how our brain functions. So copying (or removing) only one's brain would be futile without the neurotransmitters and organs that operate the whole system. There's a relief.

It's a curiously haunting thought: every time we remeber something that memory is, if ever so slightly altered. You never can go back. You never can step into the same river twice.

The mind is a fragile and incomplete thing and we are largely our own constructions.

38:38

What ho. Today, it seems, it begins. The madness.

A group of intrepid people are attempting to read all of Shakespeare's plays in only thirty-eight days. Here's a link: http://www.shicho.net/38/

Now this is insanity of the first water (even the name smacks of a horror movie) so obviously I'm severely tempted.

The number of the plays, I notice, is thirty-eight. This includes the late collaboration with Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen. As a bonus there's the slightly iffy case Edward III, which I haven't read or at least can't recall having read. The attribution to Shakespeare isn't universally accepted but portions of it may well have been penned by the Swan of Avon. Who wrote the rest of it - meaning the rubbish bits - remains unclear.

Edmund Ironside is noticeably absent. Around twenty or twenty-five years ago it was widely trumpeted that Edmund Ironside was indeed a lost play by Shakespeare, nowadays not so much. I read it when it first came out - as by Shakespeare - but honestly can't remember much of it. So it probably made no immortal impression with its deathless blank verse or its spectacular plotting. I really have to re-read it and make up my own mind about it and especially about who wrote it. Or the pertinent fact may well be who didn't write it. There don't seem to be many editions out and about, maybe there's only the very one I read around 1986 or so. Edward III is quite definitely another must-read.

This is what my trusted Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964 has to say about Edward III: "An anonymous historical play published by Cuthbert Burby in 1596 as 'The True Raigne of King Edward the Third: As it hath bin sundrie times plaied about the Citie of London'. There is no external evidence of Shakespeare's authorship save its ascription to Shakespeare in the play-list of Rogers and Ley (1656). Capell reprinted it in his Prolusions in 1760, and described it as 'thought to be writ by Shakespeare', on the grounds that he was the only man who could have written so well in 1595. Tennyson agreed with Capell, and Swinburne disagreed. There seem to be two hands in the play, one of which may be Shakespeare's. The best writing is in Act II and IV, iv. The line 'Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds' occurs in II, i as well as in Sonnet 94. But we cannot assign any part in the play to Shakespeare with any confidence on the basis of internal evidence only."

It would indeed seem to me that the quotation from the sonnet speaks against Shakespeare's authorship of the play. On the other hand it may well have been an inside joke or a dig at Shakespeare by the play's other author.

About Edmund Ironside Halliday has not a sausage to say. Fair enough.

Maybe this will be my tiny contribution to this delightful Shakespearean March madness - reading and/or re-reading the two dubious newcomers Edmund Ironside and Edward III. And announcing to the yet unknowing world what I think about their literary pedigree. I also have J.L. Carrell's new Shakespeare thriller The Shakespeare Curse to tackle. This time around Carrell does a number on Macbeth. It's a hefty tome but could be amusing. If, that is, one as a reader is willing to overlook the somewhat verbally challenged prose the authoress, for reasons best known to herself, appears to favour.

Good luck to all those brave enough to take on Old Will - I salute you: Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!