The Hamlet Factory: Famlet | adult swim smalls
MEANING – is there?
There are more things in Heaven and Earth than can be counted, locked in a drawer, kissed or beaten into unconsciousness. Not everything we know to be real is amenable to weighing and measuring.
We speak not of supernatural entities, for which we can offer no proof of existence outside our prodigious imaginations and capacity for invention; instead we refer to far more interesting ghosts which, immaterial though they may be, are irrefutably real.
We may conjure up, for instance, the prominent ghost in William Shakespeare's blockbusting Hamlet. Not the wraith of Hamlet's dad who turns up all inciting-incident and vengeful-like in the first act but the genuine non-material presence which haunts the play and illustrates my point.
I’m talking about the meaning of the text. The “soul” of Hamlet.
In our undeniably mechanistic Universe what is the weight, in ounces, or tons, of the meaning of Hamlet?
The Truth is that not one of the many “meanings” of Hamlet can be squeezed, frozen, heated, photographed or used as a tool to construct a table and yet it’s impossible to deny that this entity – this “Meaning of Hamlet” exists; The Meaning of Hamlet cannot be exorcised by Empirical Science by dint of lacking mass or velocity.
What then is the nature and substance, the “objective reality” of the meaning of Hamlet?
Real enough to incite vigorous debate, it exists only as cousin to the phantom, companion to the Bogeyman, sidekick to Will O' The Wisp. The meaning of Hamlet, while undeniably and demonstrably a real “thing”, is also an intangible, which can, despite its non-material status, exert an undeniable influence on human minds and lives. Some enthusiasts might devote a lifetime's career to the examination and explication of this utterly immaterial “thing”. We may hesitate to call these scholars parapsychologists or ghost-hunters but their quarry can no more be touched than the spectres of Borley Rectory. The prey they hunt is no more substantial.
In other news, it's safe to say that while a zealous handful may or may not have given up their lives for the meaning of Hamlet, armies of millions have undoubtedly perished in defense, or in the name, of "God", an equivalently hard to punch, kiss, or shave abstraction.
God too is hewn of the same substance from which we have fashioned the meaning of Hamlet, the idea of Freedom, or The Rights of Man; which is to say that God is made of something very like nothing at all except a profound, culturally-ubiquitous agreement to acknowledge this mysterious, powerfully-charged nothing which can nevertheless effect change in the material world and which still uses all too-physical bully boys to do the work of its venomous militant wing.
A warning to us and a reminder, if nothing else, that some ghosts can kill people.
The decision to "make" meaning and to assign value or significance is the most Mag!cal decision we can make; Meaning is what conjures something from nothing. Meaning does not objectively exist, yet we can use it to ensoul and bring inert matter to dancing articulate life.
Meaning is the untouchable uncanny stuff of which Mag!c is made. It provides Mag!c with the mercurial elusive shiftiness that contributes to its showbiz glamour, its freak show, big top aura of illusion and deception and sex. It is this quality of being real and not real at the same which can dazzle and confuse strict materialists.
I hope I have adequately explained how something can be real and powerful without being solid.
