Bottom, Dreams, Students, Shakespeare

Thursday, September 26th, 2002

My apologies — Trobriand on Indians of Dakota in the 1860s has to wait for another day, because I've been waylaid by Shakespeare, specifically Bottom from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Tomorrow, perhaps.

About as many years ago as the number Jesus of Nazareth drew breath as a human, some thirty-three and a few more months, I trod the boards heavily at what was then Lake Region Junior College at Devils Lake between teaching some twenty-four or twenty-eight hours, including five sections of freshman composition, 150 students, and a world literature class and a couple of others. On Lake Region's stage, I played Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream — very badly, I recall — ah, but what a great time!

This past month, I have begun to understand the ineffable nature and meaning of certain humanities texts and the way in which they serve as instruments of grace when we need them most and how they come to us almost miraculously from someone who offers them as a totally undeserved gift and how totally appropriate they may be — it’s enough to leave one breathless and hopeful, even optimistic, in the face of death itself — for as Lysander and Theseus exchange after Bottom’s long death scene as Pyramus in a play within the play:

Lysander: Less than an ace, man; for he is dead; he is nothing.

Theseus: With the help of a surgeon he might yet recover, and prove an ass.

Many of my friends are probably thinking, “Albers, you’ve alredy proved that.” I mean to rise to my full potential, however — and to get to the bottom of some curious coincidences that would appear to be a bit strange.

Among my family’s good friends are Jerry & Jean Waldera, retired from teaching at Dickinson State where Jerry taught political science and history and Jean theatre arts — where both mentored so many over decades of service. They summer at a cabin on Lake Melissa outside Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, and at this place of refuge my wife, Leslie, our children, Albert & Gretchen, and I would come for a glorious week most summers for fishing, fine food, great stories, and the kind of fellowship that only happens with the finest of friends.

Recently, Jean, who keeps in touch with former students and a host of folk who call wherever the Walderas are their second home, sent out a note to some of her students, including Robbi Neal of Ponte Vedra, Florida — who remembered me as a humanities teacher at Dickinson State some thirty years past. Robbi has written me several kind notes, including one invoking Dylan Thomas and another wishing me all of the courtesies Titania commanded her fairies give Bottom. Turns out that Robbi played Titania recently. She also recalled lines from A Merchant of Venice, a play that was presented at Dickinson State about thirty years past — with Sam Jaffe as the guest actor in the role of Shylock.

I really don't care to discuss how bad I was in the role of Antonio, thank you very much. Probably not too many folks remember Sam, although he did live long and prosper — born in 1891, he lived to 1984. Among other roles, he played Dr. David Zorba in the Ben Casey series in the early 60s — who can forget Sam intoning “Man, woman, birth, death, infinity,” as he wrote the symbols on the blackboard in the opening of the programs?

But back to Shakespeare — when a student from thirty years past takes a moment to write with thanks for introducing her to Dylan Thomas and wishing me the sentiment of his “Do Not Go Gentle” and then finds a way to remind me to seek the wisdom of the fool ala the Shakespeare I spouted — well, folks, there's something going on that warms the cockles of my heart on this autumn day.

It is, after all, the birth date of George Gershwin, and I've been reminded of the great contralto voices who have sung the blues — but today's featured music is "Nice Work If You Can Get It," the Gershwin tune rendered by Carroll Gibbons and The Savoy Hotel Orpheans (not to be confused with any orphans, mind you — these are Orpheans.

We are not born with minds tabula rasa. Carl Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious is among the best of the human attempts to explain how it can be that we come into this world with ideas: “Our mind has its history, just as our body has its history. You might be just as astonished that man has an appendix, for instance. Does he know he ought to have an appendix? He is just born with it. . . . Our unconscious mind, like our body, is a storehouse of relics and memories of the past. A study of the structure of the unconscious collective mind would reveal the same discoveries as you make in comparative anatomy. We do not need to think that there is anything mystical about it.”

The notion of an unconscious collective mind, nonetheless, has profound implications for how we see ourselves in relation to others. It gives a new twist to the old idea, “Mitakuye Oyasin!” - “we are all related.”

Moreover, the concept transcends time and space. It explains, in part, the complexity of human encounter and the enormous possibilities of learning from each other, of transcending the prison of our egos and the loneliness of ourselves — those moments when humans recognize each other; when, together, they explore a common mind.

Most often, we are no more than vaguely aware of such moments of communion. We may feel profoundly moved - as was Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He awakes from his transformation into an ass beloved by the doting fairy queen, Titania, and her attendants and proclaims:

“I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was — there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, — and methought I had, —but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom. . . .”

In the words of Walt Whitman, “I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.”

Put another way — there’s no getting to the bottom of this business.

Walt was visited by Ralph Waldo Emerson, by the way — on a March day in 1860, the year Emerson published his Conduct of Life. Although Emerson had written Whitman praising his Leaves of Grass four years before, he spent two hours in 1860 on the Boston Commons trying to convince Walt to tone down the sex in Leaves.

And just what does that have to do with anything? — you well may ask. Only this, and nothing more — this tidbit is part of the official chronology of Emerson's life in the Library of America edition of Emerson's essays, a project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Why some scholar chose this tidbit over all else that happened to Emerson in 1860 is curious, indeed — but that's the glorious nature of the humanities.

To all the teachers of literature and philosophy — to all those of you who toil in the vineyard of the humanities, ’tis nice work if you can get it, indeed, indeed.