To Be, Without Question

Hamlet was not a very interesting play, in the universe where he was totally sure about everything. Rather than being haunted by ghost and suspecting and eventually feeling sufficient certainty after a theater production ploy, his chief marketing officer would have the head of PR review the press release about his uncle’s official execution, so that it could be kingdom-crier’d out to the people exactly fifteen minutes after the well-planned kinsmanicide. Rosencrantz would have say “hey” and Guildenstern would have said “sup” as they both sipped coffee and passed each other in the hall. So would it have been better? If Hamlet had just allowed the preponderance of the evidence to aim his royal dagger (or really just the sword of a reasonably trustworthy guardsman) to take care of the emotionally-laden plot in just one stanza? Certainly not in its entertainment value. But also not in its accurateness. Humans that experience excess levels of sureness are usually trying to get you to invest in their SPAC or pretending to be certain (or both). It’s a sure thing that one cannot live a life where nothing is predictable. That would be tantamount to a video game with a physics engine that had all the constants set to random (extremely hard to hit a bad guy with an arrow if the acceleration of gravity is jumping around from 9.8 to -20 to 100 m/s/s). If Descartes were actually right about the thinking being conclusive evidence of the I’s being and Hamlet had been paying attention, then it wouldn’t be so fucking confusing to be a person. And one wouldn’t hem and haw so much when they followed their heart to their fingers and used “fucking” as an adjective. To curse or not to curse? I’ll be tortured in my dreams tonight by a vision of a ghostly 4th grade teacher who gave me a hard time when I said I was “pissed” at Eddy. Shudder. So let’s say Descartes was wrong (he was) and that our multiplicity of thought drafts are neither pin-down-able nor identity-clarity-able. You don’t have to be drunk to have no idea, or too many ideas with no system for saying which is better, or too many systems to say what even anything means. Sure, apples typically seem to go down. But does that mean I should revenge murder the uncle that probably killed my father and become king? Or give my life’s energy to something that will give me the kind of freedoms money can buy but very few of the freedoms that it can’t? Some scientific theories being independently testable does not mean life is a matter of simple math. Avogadro’s number doesn’t specify how many cups of coffee I should drink tomorrow (or how many Zoom hours I should accept as humane). But perhaps to be or not to be is a little extreme, a little all or nothing in therapy speak. Maybe there’s a bunch of middle grounds. Asking for a trial and publicly making an accusation, rather than uncloaking and daggering curtains that smell Poloniusy and having catastrophic duels. But maybe when you’re in a society with weak institutions and a rule-by-fiat those middle ways are a little harder. But creativity remains in even the stickiest situations. So be dramatic if you want to cut to the quick of the human experience in writing (nice work, William), but if that’s your actual human experience, consider remaining in the either or, or even finding a new way through without resorting to unbeing.