Says Prospero of savage, tragic and ill-used Caliban. Of course there has grown up around Shakespeare's wizard and slave a rather intemperate notoriety, most notably of the sort that holds up the pair as a model of colonial oppression. Which is fair enough so far as it goes. But what to make of this last line Prospero speaks regarding Caliban? This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine. It's shattering, no? Absolutely shattering, heart-breaking, pregnant with aching regret and sorrow. Or so it seems to me. I can't get it out of my mind.
And to that end, I've been tinkering with the idea of doing a novel-length reinvention of The Tempest (because nobody's ever had that idea before). With an ambassador, a woman, (thanks Julie Taymor and Helen Mirren for that inspiration: watch here) playing restlessly at the magic and misdirection of international relations, as the title character. The following paragraph came to me, the opening:
The Ambassador, the Honorable Helena Whitaker (ne Prospejo) is a woman of incantations. Also of elaborate, loud curses, prognoses, inducements. Storms of reminiscence. Finally, of bindings. Each day, most often straightaway in the morning, in company of her ice water and mysteriously scented underthings, she is forced to acknowledge anew her connection with all the rigors of attachment and corrective orthodoxy that haunt her so, that define her. She sees, in her inner projections and outlines, a universe of these bindings, damned bindings, bindings both tender and accursed, exquisite, necessary, destitute and unsustainable.
I don't know. What do you think?
Brilliant, though the themes are _too_familiar...'rigors of attachment;...corrective orthodoxy'...
ReplyDeleteMight the working title suggest something of trappings (or trapped) in Lincoln?
I never know where this stuff is going to take me. That's the thrill and the agony of it. Sometimes it lifts you, sometimes it dumps you in the river, ass up. Traps. Responsibilities. Bindings. It's all in the hopper.
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