Genius Practice

How to Have a Heartbeat  I am so far apart from my body, So deep within my own self, That I can no longer touch my own skin; That the six feet of DNA in each of my cells Has uncoiled from around their hardworking histones And been unzipped And deconstructed. My body is one single overlapping line, One continuous directional path To blue eyes and strong legs and a strange mind. And as the methodically wound yarn unravels and flattens itself into obscurity, My life falls away from me Like zooming out from a satellite image, Until houses and streets become another innocuous shade of green. The immaculate system of life unwinds from within me Until my heart forgets how to have a heartbeat, And my blood forgets how to be blood, And my tongue forgets how to taste, And it is all somehow both utterly obsolete and still completely, fantastically, Universal. Unravel Unravel is the most beautiful word. The most beautiful part of being; The final state of coming...

Of course Hamlet is the main character and steals the show, his massive word count alone cements that, but, Ophelia is right up there next to Hamlet in terms of  interesting characters and is too often overlooked. Hamlet is too obviously obsessed with death in the most clichè manner and wants to commit suicide to escape his suffering, but can't find the courage because he doesn't know what will come after death, posing an existential question and causing his inability to act. This lack of courage fills him with self loathing and adds to his angst over the whole situation. Ophelia also suffers similarly after the death of her father but she is able to do what Hamlet can't convince himself to do- she commits suicide, though this death is a bit debatable. Gertrude describes her death in heaps of detail and presents it as an accident but most believe think that's disputable; given the contempt for those who commit suicide at the time, it seems likely she is fabricating the ...

If you asked someone what proof there is of the existence of time, they’d say “well, people age and the sun sets and the tide comes in and plants grow,” and so and so forth. They’d keep giving you these examples of patterns. Patterns of life and of death and ultimately, patterns of change. We speak of these phenomena as though driven by an invisible, external force, a force which propels all matter through the universe in a forward motion. We speak of time as if it is an ever-lengthening ruler, with which the entire universe measures itself, keeps its rhythm. See, what I’m getting at is that maybe there is no external force, maybe there is no such thing as “time”. And I don’t just mean that “time” is obviously a concept created by humans to map out the simultaneous linear progression of everything that happens; I mean that perhaps there is no simultaneous linear progression of things at all. Perhaps every plant that grows, every tide that inches up on every shore, every sunrise, every ...

Existentialism is a philosophy concerned with finding self and the meaning of life through free will, choice, and personal responsibility. The belief is that people are searching to find out who and what they are throughout life as they make choices based on their experiences, beliefs, and outlook. I find that Hamlet, in his questioning of life or death and to take action or not, fulfills many existentialist ideals. Though existentialism wasn’t labeled until the 20rh century, Shakespeare can almost be viewed as existentialism’s prolific precursor, as a writer who focuses on existentialist ideas in his own theatrical and poetic terms before they were fully developed in the philosophical and literary terms of the 20th century. This is especially exemplified in “Hamlet”, and even more specifically in the “To Be or Not To Be” speech, in which Hamlet questions death and human existence, and the choices every person makes regarding those. In his soliloquy, Hamlet is confused with the absurdi...

I absolutely adore Ophelia in “Hamlet”. There are so many interpretations of her and her actions that she can be spun many different ways, and it is often argued whether she’s a strong, tragic heroine, or a weak plaything. Shakespeare often wrote fairly progressive women for his time,  However, Ophelia , is often criticized for not being able to think for herself and her eventual decline into madness. This criticism is so intense that there’s even a condition named after her called  the Ophelia Syndrome, where a person relies upon another’s thoughts and opinions to form their own action. Despite this, I believe Ophelia to generally be ambiguous and open to interpretation for the reader or director. One can argue that she truly is a strong character full of depth, and that her romance with Hamlet was real.  As I said, it is said that Ophelia displays lack of thinking for herself. Twice in the text, she says that she does not know what to think.  While one may tak...