Note
by Billy Glass
When I was much more awake, I found some things I wanted to change. To those who have already suffered through the other, take no heed. Those who haven't yet, whaddya waitin' on already?
On the occasion of his birthday, I have been reflecting and meditating on the lessons that the art of Shakespeare teaches us. Shakespeare criticism is a mind-numbingly immense industry. Endless politicizing seems to be the current trend in engaging him. But what the sheer size of his industry shows us, as far as I can tell, is that quite a strong case can be made for the ways in which Shakespeare has invented the language of human being for the European world. That may seem a bit anglo-centric, but one need only be familiar with the rest of Euro-American literature to see that it is not. It was Borges who said "todos los autores son un solo: Shakespeare." Yet how many people, looking at my post on him today, had never spent any real time getting familiar enough with him to let him affect them in the ways he affected their ancestors? This lack of engagement by those who are not paid to do so with Shakespeare, in my view, is a general symptom of the gradual attenuation of humanities studies in the
The technical sciences overwhelm university studies throughout the nation. In my alma mater, the humanities departments have been made the scapegoats for a fiscally irresponsible liberal arts college. Moreover, I read everyday things that convince me that this is the status quo in the American university. A tougher job market is paying less and less for more and more, and, in the light of that, students are choosing highly specialized technical (better paying) degrees, a financial force to which universities respond. The humanities departments of the nation's colleges are increasingly seen as irrelevant, and their contributions to 'everyday' appear to grow smaller as time passes.
Since the humanities were once the common denominator of a university education, their loss has resulted in the alienation from one another of the disciplines. There is a consequent distrust of each other and an unceasing competition for funds. When other modes of study are seen to be detrimental rather than complimentary, there can be no well-wishing. But one wonders why? If there is no great anti-humanitarian conspiracy, and I am not willing to go so far as to posit one, then there must have been a point at which study of the great human questions began to disinterest us. When? Why?
On a personal note, I guess that the beginnings of the shift must have been rooted in the removal of the dimension of transcendence from the discussion of being. Being itself was once said to be BEYOND the actual existence of anything that is. So long as that was true, humanities departments had a tremendous bargaining chip with which to negotiate their way into the studies of students who specialized in other disciplines. Almost since it was said, however, that simple axiom has been challenged by politicians and pundits and professors alike, few of whom want to admit that anything "beyond" can invade existence. The university, once the repository of a great body of universal knowledge, now chokes on the lack of material with which it is designed to work.
It is not hard to understand why this is done; the presence of an Existence which goes beyond anything that is, in the sense that we can apprehend, would mean that no one person, study, or theory could actually claim to contain everything. There would always be something outside of the scope, admitting further discussion, before which everyone would have to humble themselves. This is not easy to do, for anyone, the present writer included. But the alternative has been a diminishing, in the work currently done in universities, of any sense of contribution to a greater endeavor. Instead, as I see it at least, academic study has grown progressively miserly, and each person is compelled to Scrooge his/her own work while defending the rightness of his/her position to those who no longer even have the language with which to engage that position.
But if the cost for the specialized disciplines has been great, the cost for humanities departments has been nearly immeasurable. Insisting on the supremacy of the study over the thing studied, humanities programs have found themselves growing insignificant to the rest of the world. And no one feels the burden like the students of those departments, as they prepare for a vocation whose study brings little pleasure to those who cannot affirm any experience with Being, and which doesn't even offer the promise of lucre to ease the burden of meaninglessness.
It is clear that Shakespeare felt a sense of great mystery before the language he used. Sometimes he romanced it like a mystic, and other times he fought it like Jacob insisting on a blessing he knew would cost him his vitality; but it is clear that it haunted him. He loved and distrusted its power, but the end of his oeuvre shows us an author who has glimpsed within the chaos of the language a quietly pulsing, deep reality. In contrast, those who study languages today are quickly disabused of the notion that there is anything essential to language, or to anything at all. All being can be comprehended in the sensible, the student is told. The implications of this are staggering and tragic, and it is a wonder that no one, on the way to the madness, stopped to realize that the very logic with which university students are inseminated is what underlies the horrific and childish evils perpetrated by Shakespeare's worst villains.
If indeed there were no Being in the absolute, transcendent sense of that word, then integrity would demand--and I would insist--that we be true to what we know, whatever the cost. But I don't think that reality even suggests this to be true, and, having read Macbeth, if I were in the position to teach anyone, I would tremble many nights in agony before I would ever assert the nihilism that is deconstructing, or just destroying, humanities study in the university. The prevailing logic of our day was responsible, in Shakespeare's theater, for a man's murder of his wife on pure hearsay, another man's banishment and the resulting death of his daughter for refusing to play a kiddish game, and the murder of a King and his whole family by an ambitious upstart whose wife realized that if the real doesn't exist, she could wear his pants as well as he could. Sex is replaced on Shakespeare's tragic stage by blood. It pains me greatly that nobody in the last 50 years has taken the poet very seriously, when what he endeavored so painstakingly to show us was that humans would ACTUALLY do these kinds of things, would ACTUALLY perpetrate tragedies, if there were nothing before which they were compelled to humble themselves.
In the light of last week's unforgettable tragedy, it is helpful therefore to mention that Seung-Hui Cho was an english major, a student of modern humanities in its deteriorating state. A sentence from his manifesto has haunted me since I heard it: "you have raped my heart," he says, "vandalized my soul, and torched my conscience." However mentally twisted this young man was, it would be foolish not to note the rhetorical power of that sentence. Cho's was the kind of language being cultivated by an academic world in which questions of ultimate Being are ignored: a language full of expressive power but utterly without substance. The literature departments of the
Humanities as it once existed, rooted in theology, language, literature, and history, occasioned a world in which the big questions were asked, and fostered. My guess is that long ago Cho asked those questions and was not so much unanswered as ignored. It is the harrowing characteristic of our world that so many people sleep at night without asking them. Restoring those dimensions, those questions of Being in its absolute sense, will not diminish the number of guns in the world or the number of bullets; but it might give those who have them a moment of pause before they decide how to use them. And that moment, in Cho's case, would probably have bought back more than a score of innocent lives.
Now, lest I be misunderstood, let me clarify and say that I deplore the actions perpetrated on the innocent students and faculty of Virginia Tech last week. I cried on the way to work several times as I heard the news accounts of those who only just survived, and who will never rid themselves of the memory of their classmates, teachers, and friends, dying nearby. I mourn on behalf of every lost life, including Cho's, and regret that our society had to be reminded in this way of the dangerous spiritual road we are taking. But if in fact there is no real Being beyond all the beings on this earth, I cite Shakespeare and admit that I am puzzled that it doesn't happen more often. That in itself must speak to the grace of God who will not allow us, even in denying him, to press on to the destruction that logically follows from that denial. It is a tragedy of our entire society and of humanities studies in particular, that one of its own apprentices was nevertheless blinded to the precious humanity in nearly three dozen other beautiful and sacred beings.
I pray that the spiritual tide in this country will run ahead of the academic one and turn us before another Shakespearean agony befalls us.
