I’ve been re-reading a book I found at the back of one of my bookshelves the other month: “Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being“, by the poet Ted Hughes.   I bought it in a remainder shop 30-odd years ago, so it can’t have been that popular, but it is well worth a read.

The first thing that struck me from the book was this:

“The whole business of art, which even at it’s most naturalistic is some kind of attempt at ‘ritualisation’, is to reopen negotiations with the mythic plane.  The artistic problem is to objectify the mythic plane satisfactorily – so that it produces those benefits of therapeutic catharsis, social bonding and psychological renewal – without becoming unintelligible, and without spoiling the audience for adaptive, practical life on the realistic plane.   The human problem is that life evolves at different speeds on the two planes.”

Shakespeare wrote and worked during what could be called the early Anthopocene – at the point where humans started to see themselves as separate from nature and the natural world as a free resource to be exploited.  Where we learned to separate mind and body, head and heart, individual and community, real and mythic, male and female, and decided that only one half of each pair was acceptable.  Violence, ‘the boar’s charge’ ensues.

According to Hughes, Shakespeare mapped the psychological consequences of this through his plays, and found a way to reconcile these pairs in a new configuration.   Unfortunately, no other artists took up his reconciliation, and the separation continued.  Which could be how we’ve ended up in Boardom.  A world of seemingly arbitrary human rage and disconnection from what makes us fully human.

It’s a poet’s view.  But I think he might be on to something.