You pursue the matter
as yet an edgeless
ghost glimpsed
through a tangle of trees
- Thom Gunn, ‘The Conversation’
Formless. Or form without form. Sex. The protean. Shapeless blanket-like shape. Either a heap or neatly folded in quarters. Put it in a bucket; the lost cave. In darkness; in light. Without limits or dimensions. Uncanny even. Its colour seems to be red, but in its absence it seems blue or green – but nothing but this, this, all vague associations! Nothing but the sticky sweet wrapper. Nothing nearer than these 60s style colour machines: these vague greens! Blues! Reds! Proteus! Son of Poseidon; the liquid of it teems with impossibility. Thick as plankton. A waterfall; fountain; a void. What is it really – ? This jealousy? Desire! Response? Feeling.
In a drama something happens to something else. That is of the essence. Things happen to things. Because something can’t happen to nothing. But nothing happens! There have to be identifiable objects of some sort, usually people or sometimes animals or places. Something happens to them. Something! Not nothing! But nothing happens!
An ‘identity that is not an identity’: one searches high and low; but there he is: Hamlet for example. Unfit to be a king. Or anybody at all. He doesn’t know who he is, can’t say who he is, or – finally - he can’t say what it is that he sees. What he has witnessed. Someone whose words have no constituency, no audience but fools and clouds. A state of protean fixity defines him. (He can’t alter his being protean …)
So one could say that Hamlet is like sex. To be or not to be.
Molly Bloom’s ‘protean’ soliloquy – this kind of flowing free- associating, freely connecting reverie – is too contained; too restricted; to much an instrument. It lacks madness.
Tags: Hamlet, Sex, The Protean
