The Hamlet

I drove my car – fast – through a pile of leaves this morning – I enjoyed watching them ride in the air current that curled around the rear of the car and then disappear.

Before - when I used to read things other people wrote that had nothing to do with what might become a resource for my students or a direction for my art - I used to read William Faulkner.

I have a terrible memory for novels and can barely recall the plot-lines of any of his stories although I believe I’ve read nearly every one. I don't think I was ever really taught how to read properly. I guess I’m content in knowing that I enjoyed them while I read them. I do remember several characters but only in the same way I remember high-school friends – in their general actions and apart from details that provide definition – except for Ike Snopes.

Ike is an idiot. He is an amoral being incapable of comprehending his own existence in the dark. Ike lacks connectivity to an agreed upon code of time and he is entirely without moral sensibility. Ike is responsible for two things – sweeping the porch and making his bed. Two things are important to him, a block of wood he constantly drags behind him with a string and a cow with which he is quite intimate.

Ike’s time is the immediate moment and, if anything else, merely comprehensions of the familiar. No memories, no recollections. “Yesterday was not, tomorrow is not, today is nearly a placid and virginal astonishment at the creeping ridge of dust and trash in front of the broom and the sheet coming smooth.” ("The Hamlet") He can see no further in the past than the block he drags behind him.

How wonderful it would be to be entirely unaware of what we should have done, to live only in the moment we inhabit, in a space that is amoral and amorphous – edges rounded naturally from a flow that is undetectable – spared from all consequence. How horrible it would be too.