I sometimes wonder if there is one single thing that most strongly marks the difference between a Shakespearean character’s and a contemporary person’s experience of the world, other than one of them being, you know, fiction. It’s important to me, because I think my responsibility to the character is to make choices from within that gap, to take certain things and make them legible, or leave them alienated, and to care about what those decisions mean. Because I auditioned with him yesterday, I’m thinking of Edmund, from King Lear. His emotions are recognizable, his speech is my speech in so many ways, his social and political associations are of so much of the same stuff as mine—I don’t live in a kingly court, sure, but I know what power means, and inheritance, and desire. You want to know about capricious institutions, lives crushed under the idle curiosity of nations? Welcome to the border, baby.

The border is a zone of exception in modern life in a lot of ways, not least in its special ability to illustrate the role violence is granted in maintaining the state. There, at any moment, with the wrong word or the wrong piece of paper, the whole wonderful tower of ideas and stories that we call civilization tumbles away, revealing the bloody machinery.

Now, it was nothing crazy, but I’ve seen some violence. I’ve done some violence. I’ve cleaned up after violence. Accidental, intentional, necessary, arbitrary; whatever. It doesn’t really matter, because the sharp point of action carries meaning that words do not and cannot. In that way, violence is always stupid, and severely limited. It can’t speak, really, in any language other than itself. There’s no shortage of ideas for how to deploy violence toward intelligible ends, to write a sentence which violence then punctuates: foreign policy, the sovereignty of the state, personal self-defence, gambling, content. But we recognize that these things are not the thing itself, which is unique.

When Edmund invokes nature, he’s not really invoking nature. Hi, welcome to metaphor. What he’s trying to do is imagine a system other than the one he’s stuck within, because he feels quite rightly that the way things are ordered just isn’t working out. He feels the need to fix that, but can’t make the moves he wants to. So he tries to change the rules, to carve out an exception in exceptional times to take exceptional action. And you know what? Good for him. I get it, man.

There is just an astonishing amount of writing in the aftermath of the Patriot Act and the still-ongoing Global War on Terror that describes unambiguously the clear and specific dangers to American society if the zone of exception created to solve unsolvable problems overseas were to come home—which it did, fast, first in communities of colour and now universally. One thinks of the aftermath of the American invasion of Iraq. Society happens where violence doesn’t. When violence is everywhere, what becomes of a society? ISIS. When the violence of the border is everywhere, what becomes of the thing, that very society, which all that violence is meant to enclose?

For Edmund, he reaches for nature as his inspiration because it is, in his mind, the opposite of the very human flaws in the very human system he’s dealing with. That system is, after all, in terminal orbit around one very old, very sick human: Lear. Lear is in both metaphysical and political terms the totality of his society. Of course that doesn’t work, as Lear has just helpfully demonstrated with his failed partition, setting Edmund off on this line of thinking. Nature, though! It’s teeming, multifarious, complex, dynamic. Most importantly, it is stupid. The sun cannot speak. A plant cannot make laws or predictions or maps or marriages. A lion has no bastards. They can eat, they can fuck, and they can fight. Violence is the rule, not the exception. Now that’s something we can work with.

To be clear, I don’t think Edmund is making an intellectual appeal to the rhetorical-political options opened up by the engagement of ecological thought. I don’t think of him as a very bright guy. He’s not out here theorizing the revolution, he’s not Lenin; he’s just grasping for whatever language he can use as a tool to exert his will over the the world, to overpower the problems facing him. If we take a second to look at what his problem is, at its simplest, in his own words, it’s that he feels like some people he views as his lessers don’t respect him enough. He decides to blow it all up and try something new, so he can finally prove them wrong.

Yesterday morning, on January 7th, in Minneapolis, an as-yet-unnamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot a woman in her car. On camera, with her wife in the seat beside her, he shot her in the face. Her name was Renee Good, she was 37, she was present at an immigration raid as a legal observer and citizen looking out for her community. He murdered her. She’s dead.

For his mistakes, Edmund dies. Except not really. Cordelia dies, except not really. Lear dies, Gloucester dies, Cornwall dies, Regan dies, Goneril dies, the Fool dies; except not really. That’s one unbridgeable gap between the characters and me, I suppose. Show’s done, lights up, applause. But Renee Good is really dead, for real. That’s it. It’s over. 80 people were killed, really, for real, this weekend in Caracas, for as yet no greater purpose than entertainment. Except not even that, because death is the end of purpose. What purpose did the Afghans crushed in the wheel wells of American cargo planes fleeing Kandahar serve? What imperial narrative does their blood write? None that can be read. Besides, those planes long ago since landed.

What’s happening in this country and what it’s doing to the world is a brutal, savage farce. By any accounting, America has always been a deadly presence; a cemetery where the mausoleums are built from the dirt of freshly dug graves. There’s promise to it, so they say, but that’s your inheritance, not mine. Your White House is a slave house, your institutions are phantoms, your national story is a lie, and the foundations of your society have been usurped by a pack of braying rabid dogs, licking their haunches and ranging for prey. The metaphors are potent; if only language hadn’t failed at the sharp end of the stick. But their date with nature will come soon (not soon enough). Then what?

To bring it all the way back around, I think one thing that Shakespeare had access to was a keen sense that society and life itself were so incredibly fragile. Violence and death were everywhere in his world in a way that I think the Westerner (broadly construed; the sons of William) struggles to conceive of. We have it so fucking good, man, you don’t even know. I mean, right now, there’s a mass movement in favour of infectious disease, which certainly speaks to a certain failure of imagination of how bad things can get.

A failure of imagination. Is that what it is? Is that the thing that actually separates people living now from those visiting creatures of the mythic past? I used to think it was the knowledge of the waiting grave, and the short trip to it. Now I’m not so sure.

It’s not mine and I don’t want it. But if it’s yours, here:

Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes - Poems | Academy of American Poets

Let America be America again.