Could it be that we were all in Kronborg?

Ricardo T. Ricci

riccirt@fm.unt.edu.ar

There is a beautiful construction at the mouth of Oresund, the strait that separates Denmark from Sweden. Properly speaking, the great island of Sealandia (Denmark) is off the Swedish coast. 

This is a strategic place, of great economic value, where taxes had to be paid to enter into Malmö, one of the most famous ports in the south of Sweden. The strait must also be traveled to access Copenhagen, the Capital of Denmark, opposite to Malmö. Both cities are today connected by an important bridge.

There, in this crucial area, the imposing Kronborg Castle has stood since the Middle Ages. Shakespeare does not mention it directly, but instead, he refers very precisely to the area in which the castle is located. To delve us into the drama, Shakespeare places us in Elsinor.

Kronborg Castle on Elsinore, engraving from around 1688.

Two of the most important physicists of the 20th century, founders of Quantum Mechanics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, at some unknown point around the 1930s went out for a walk in the Danish countryside and suddenly found themselves in front of the famous castle. Both were members of the strictest mainstream scientific thought of Theoretical Physics, and without a doubt, stellar representatives of hard science and strict rationality. Suddenly, standing in front of Kronborg Castle, Bohr said to Heisenberg:

“Isn't it strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines that Hamlet lived here? As scientists we believe that a castle consists only of stones, and admire the way the architect put them together. The stones, the green roof with its patina, the wood carvings in the church, constitute the whole castle. None of this should be changed by the fact that Hamlet lived here, and yet it is changed completely. Suddenly the walls and the ramparts speak a quite different language. The courtyard becomes an entire world, a dark corner reminds us of the darkness in the human soul, we hear Hamlet's "To be or not to be." Yet all we really know about Hamlet is that his name appears in a thirteenth-century chronicle. No one can prove that he really lived, let alone that he lived here. But everyone knows the questions Shakespeare had him ask, the human depth he was made to reveal, and so he, too, had to find a place on earth, here in Kronberg. And once we know that, Kronberg becomes quite a different castle for us.” 

Suddenly, the advancement of fiction over reality, of dreams over wake, of the ancestral over the conjunctural, of the emotional over the rational, are all present. In the 'real' Kromborg the words of Hamlet resonate:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep, to say we end

The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks

That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep.

(Act three, scene four).

These stones, these walls, these courtyards simply pose to us the crucial question of the human intellect, the access to reality. The imagined presence of Hamlet roaming the galleries and battlements. The vicious picture of Gertrude, Queen of Denmark and mother of Hamlet in licentious agreement with Claudius, current King, and uncle of Hamlet. Behind one of these curtains is the corpse of Polonius, whom the prince of Denmark mistakenly kills. We perceive Ophelia, maddened with grief, drowning in the river when she believes that Hamlet deliberately murdered her father. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern circulate silently there, showing themselves friends and executing treasons.

In Kronborg, throughout both day and night, human miseries occupy every space; passion, shame, anger, jealousy, and thirst for revenge permeate the ornaments. Desires for power give an everlasting luster to every physical object in its immediate vicinity. An innocent stone found on the side of the path we are walking on is both an inconsequential piece of mineral and a symbolic memory of our presence within those walls, of our participation in the drama.

These are the reasons that enable me to maintain that the so-called reality is the hidden and imperceptible sum of what occupies a place in space and the intangibility of the sign. Elsinor, Hamlet, Oresund, and ourselves are that inseparable mix of nature and culture, of flesh and symbol, of the definite and the imprecise.

I have never been to the castle myself, yet I can taste every emotion, every feeling, every passion. Plot and betrayal alienate Hamlet. I can understand it, it impacts me, it irritates me. I can even imagine myself crying, I can feel my irrepressible helplessness and anger, in a cold and dark corner of that mass of stones.

Yes, somehow, we were all in Kronborg! Humanity was there.

Author: Ricardo T. Ricci 

Translation: Mariana Dittborn

Publish in: https://ars-medica.mn.co/posts/could-it-be-that-we-were-all-in-kronborg

Crossroads

CROSSROADS

My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young —

love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised —

My soul has been so fearful, so violent;
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,

not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:

it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.

Louise Elisabeth Glück

The most varied flowers can be found in the vast garden of poetry. In the everyday self-absorbed walks, we pass by the most beautiful gardens without even noticing them, sometimes even through them without realizing that they are something radically different from the stiff and impersonal cement that covers our cities.

From time to time, a flower of extreme beauty knocks intensively on the door of our senses and makes the needle of our perceptions jump. This is what happened to me when I came across the poem “Crossroads”. It caught my attention because it reminded me of the great story by Jorge Luis Borges: "The Garden of Forking Paths". It attracted me, even more, when I realized its author was Louise Glück, who had been recently awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2020.

An American, born in 1943 in New York City, she has an enormous career in letters and has received the most important awards during her long and very fertile career. She is said to be the poet of everyday things, of the simple events of every day, an explorer of the beauty of everyday life and simple emotions. One of those people who, following my previous metaphor, never passes through the gardens without perceiving the flowers, never ceasing to be stunned by the beauty, without evading sadness, without fear of emotional storms.

This poem shows us a crossroads; the inevitable forced bifurcation from which soul and body will forever follow different paths. Let's avoid observing it from our own beliefs, ontologies, and epistemologies. Let ourselves be impressed by the acknowledgments, the apologies, and the intensity of the farewell of these two dear friends - perhaps the most endearing friendship of all. So betrothed, that we walk through life without recognizing its limits, but rather seeing them as a single and unique entity that is not even apparent to our eyes due to its extreme familiarity.

Aware that the moment of the farewell is imminently close, Glück values the body as the material reality of being in the world and does so by evoking the youthful loves, full of passion and excess. She acknowledges the limitations imposed by nature and culture to that unconditional and passionate love that often suffers from the pruning of what "should be", "what is used" and what "for now is not accepted".

My body, forgive the brutality of my soul, its ancestral fears, its extreme limitations. In these conditions of vulnerability, my soul has exercised violence against you, demanding from you beyond your possibilities, or beyond your potential. She subdued you, disciplined you, rationalized you. Now she doubts that this has been the most convenient, the most appropriate.

That combative and demanding soul, belatedly valuing you and glimpsing your absence, now approaches you solicitously, softly, carefully to confess that what life is to miss is not to stop being, but not to be able to count on you.

By Ricardo Teodoro Ricci

October 2020

Baltimore, MD·Posted Thu, January 14

Publicado en: https://ars-medica.mn.co/posts/crossroads