If this post seems random it is not for sure. It leans on the previous one and my pondering on mortality. My conversation with the death led me to one of my favorite painters, who was one of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood members, Sir John Everett Millais. My train of thoughts that have been running me over for the past few years and especially days led me to tell myself that not everything is lost. After all, I am a fighter.
This train also led me to be reminded of Ophelia. Not Shakespeare's nor Millais` Ofelia but the song by Roo Panes. Take heart, Ana. This is what I tell myself in the absence of friends who actually do not know what is going on. This is why they are absent in the first place. Incidentally, as I write this I realize my fingers are not listening to me and they are doing their own typing by permuting the words or making them inverted as if they are in the mirror. Strange.
Actually, this is my brain`s business. There is no synchronization between my fingers and my brain. So be it. Who cares. Back to the song. I love it and place the link here. I realize I am dispensable. Life goes on and not everything is lost.
A quote from Tate.org., "Shakespeare was a favourite source for Victorian painters, and the tragic-romantic figure of Ophelia from Hamlet was an especially popular subject, featuring regularly in Royal Academy exhibitions. Arthur Hughes exhibited his version of her death scene in the same year as this picture was shown (Manchester City Art Gallery)."The general opinion is that Ophelia killed herself while Gertrude claims some branch cracked underneath her and she drowned in a brook. Well, I can hardly buy into that. My Sherlock mind starts asking questions. Was she intoxicated or poisoned? How can one get drowned in a brook unassisted?
Why would anyone fall into a brook and die unless they had an oxycodone prior to, or were inebriated or drugged, or poisoned? Was there an intent on her part to end her life and if not, who would have enough motive to kill her? Or the brook had a whirlpool that caught some of Ophelia's garbs?
There is no actual scene depicting her death. Shakespeare leaves it to his characters to retell it to the audience. Incidentally, can you imagine Hitchkook skipping the scene of Ophelia`s drowning? I cannot imagine that ever. Albeit, Gertrude says
"There is a willow grows aslant a brook,That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death."
Is Gertrude a secret poet? What a recount. Shakespeare uses the word "drink". Maybe implying that Ophelia did drink something to speed up her drowning. If she did drink something it could be some herbal concoction that put her to sleep and made her unaware of the fact that the branch was not safe for her to be on it in the first place. If the latter is the case it means that she did drink something and maybe fell asleep and drowned. Could be a premeditated suicide.
The reason would be because she was very young and infatuated with Hamlet who treated her grossly. Sounds familiar. In my opinion, "love" is not worth dying for, because it is infatuation which is an overrated type of love. Anyway, I think she probably wanted to end her life due to her own madness and tender age.
Be as it may, I hope Hamlet missed her badly because you cannot find the same person twice. Hamlet had his own agenda to pursue which in his hatred led him to forsake his true love. He was also at a tender age where blood boils and prevails easily over using the prefrontal cortex.
Maybe our fallacy is the fact that we are trying to figure out from a modern perspective what the Shakerspeare`s intention was. Maybe he just wanted to entertain and open different subjects and questions without any further need for elaboration or answers. Human nature is ambiguous anyway and unfathomable so what even bother to find the underlying reasons.
So Hamlet is actually a love story gone wrong because of Hamlet`s plan to enforce his blind revenge and the cold execution of the plan. Oxymoronic, contradictory and therefore unfathomable. Like humans are.
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