THESE FEW PRECEPTS.

...

POLONIUS

Yet here, Laertes? Aboard, aboard, for shame!

The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail

And you are stayed for. There, my blessing with thee.

And these few precepts in thy memory

Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,

Nor any unproportioned thought his act.

Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar.

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel,

But do not dull thy palm with entertainment

Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade. Beware

Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,

Bear ’t that th' opposèd may beware of thee.

Give every man thy ear but few thy voice.

Take each man’s censure but reserve thy judgment.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

But not expressed in fancy—rich, not gaudy,

For the apparel oft proclaims the man,

And they in France of the best rank and station

Are of a most select and generous chief in that.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be,

For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Farewell. My blessing season this in thee.

  Polonius to Laertes, Hamlet, Act 1, scene 3

 It is,  this achingly paternalistic stricture,  one of those seam-welded bundles of tut-tutting axiom and expansive duality, back and forthing yin and yang, resolving in smug I-Know-Bestism upon which, to an extent, rests the reputation  of William Shakespeare.

 That reputation, however,  bestows upon a rather ordinary man of rudimentary education a knowledge which could never have been his, now or then  - of travel, geography, politics, history, statespersons and diplomacy, of courts; of  languages and cultures, of scripture, classical literature and philosophy far - impossibly far - beyond the knowledge of a Warwickshire lad, come up to London, like Joe Orton in doublet and hose,  a-hustling. 

 No matter, there is no busisness like show business and to some, doubting the Bard is  Devilish heresy, as though the authorship was more important than that authored.  

Those, anyway, as bewildered as I for all my life by the array of competences displayed in these writings, the depths of knowledge, the surely classical adroitness and  specifity might usefully glance at the life and times of the seventeenth-century  Earl of Oxford, who, some contend, is - must be -  the author of much Shakespeariana.  Shakespearian scholars, of course,  abide steadfastly beyond any such uncertainty,  how could they do other?

But is it any good, that's the thing; does all this convoluted and showy moralising assist?  Oh,  it is true that we can fashion Hamlet to ourselves, we boy-men, can declaim in our own minds, in our own imagined cadences his perpetual, mutinous angst;  we can make tempestuous and extraordinary the mundane, we can see betrayal where none is;  we can all clutch at a tawdry nobility, its coat of arms rusted by  catastrophe and mayhem; it is the disreputable and unwholesome in us which Shakespeare ennobles with his fine, fine words but they are just show business and we should never see them as Virtue's repository. 

Above all, to thine own self be true is facetious dribbling,  the BigBrother, X-Factor argot of its day. Who, for God's sake, is thine own self? I'm fucked if I know, do you? Do any others, corporeal others,  know you as mongoose  or woman on a raft or noblest prospect or dyers garden?  I betcha they don't.

So, given the elasticity of identity, who's to blame, for sin and error and ruination?

By any index of human  error my early marriage was a disaster, calamitous to all involved  and for the longest time I blamed myself, even though it was I made ill, injured, impoverished and distressed; it was I crawled from the wreckage, supported only by native bloody-mindedness.  It was the launch of a  doomed vessel at which the wise would not have cheered and as these things do the sounds of its foundering reverberate down the years, its plates groaning,  its wreckage floating past, now and again, most recently in the shape of a Best Man, terminally ill, approaching me, clutching, after decades, hauling me back, dragging me down to the early wreckage  of my life.

It was the Prague Summer, did it; a Summer of Love did it; a uniform absence of Wisdom and Courage did it.  Love was all around. If only someone had found the loving but Love-less words with which to state the obvious, if only someone had held-out Jackson Browne's strong but gentle father's hand.... but it was all, then, about the recently-invented Individual and telling someone that their marriage was  doomed was, well, impolite; someone only needed to say, Look, you two are simply not compatible,  you may look very fine, but you won't be,  there is nothing wrong with either of you but by difference your union will cursed be.  Instead, everybody mouthed, Ah, bless them, being true to their own selves. going, as they used to say, with the flow. 

 A lot of them died young, that Wedding Group, some in their early sixties, some, a married couple, suddenlym,  in their forties; one by suicide,  there're only three left, now, and one of them is dying.  The guests were met, the table set and all turned to shit.

I, normally hyper-attuned to risk and peril,  should have known better; the vicar, Charles Nettleship, was as pissed as a rat, unsurprisingly,  as Mrs Nettleship was the village bicycle, some of those villagers present, in his church,  having ridden her up and down the lanes, bless her. I didn't know any of the hymns, not one, which says something because I have always known lots of hymns; indeed, I sometimes fear that Hymns, Ancient and Modern will die with me but I had never previously heard any of these caterwaulings. I didn't know any of the guests. I had never seen most of them, I still haven't. Too busy being to mine own self true to notice the bizarre incongruities of the ceremony.  Put me off weddings for life, that one.

But things change and  I stopped blaming myself or anyone else some time ago, now. 

I, for so long damned as matrimonial ruin's author, am happily married these twenty-five years;  whereas, well, never mind, save to say that irreconcileability to  married life - though not for lack of trying -  is another's portion.

This matters only inasmuch as it lays axiom waste, that of Polonious or anyone else.  It is personal reinvention in the very face of Ruin which distinguishes and redeems us, not a Fool's devotion to an imaginary self.

And that's what I came to talk about, this idea that we are inalienably who we are at any given moment when, so obviously, we are a  reactive continuum; which of us,  knowing the truth of this, has never thought: let me forget about today, until tomorrow.  Tomorrow is another day, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. In Macbeth's speech of ruin, Shakespeare contradicts the haughty Polonius and his  life-by-recipe:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
— Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)

Which is it, then, should guide us, is it judiciously chosen  apparel,  the carefully filtered word and the selectively screened comrade;  the avoidance of the random, all the infinite paranoias of Polonius, all dangerous yet avoidable by constant, watchful self-safeguarding or is it  the acceptance of Macbeth's wearily observed  futility - is there a self to which we should be true, and if there is, what is the point?

Well, there is no point to be determined, no reason;  such are mere constructs which we have devised to make intelligible for a moment what is utterly incomprehensible;  the need of a point to things is mother, father and midwife to Religions Incorporated and whether devout congregant or smirking  humanist it is pointlessness which hollows us out;  without a point, without a recognisable self, though both are a coward's confection, we would all be sprinting to Dignitas.

Yet a confected self, an identity imagined by others and enacted by the individual, is a dark master.  Yesterday, mr mirage made in heaven related the news that one Roy Harper

 was facing child abuse charges. Mr Harper is one  of that small army of distinctly British guitar players, called-up, originally, by post-war and 'fifties players like Davey Graham and Bert Jansch and which includes Richard Thompson, the late Nick Drake, John Martyn, Martin Simpson, Nic Jones, there's dozens of them and among them Harper was a determinedly original, forceful stylist, not a folk player, nor jazz, just a unique acoustic player;  his songs are often angry, sometimes poignant and one of his tunes, When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease, augmented my reporting of the loss of the late blogdog, Buster.

Even so, I never liked him, personally; he was too angry, too conceited but worst of all he was friendly with Messrs Led Zeppelin,  

a hugely over-rated rock four-piece from the 'seventies,  an ensemble whose off-stage, brutal, degrading  debauchery was and is widely known but indulged, bless, as is that of so many and none, yet, of Rock's household names has attracted the attention of the BeastPolice. Still, like Zepp, many will have low friends in high places, might even be knighted.

As well as competing among themselves  to photograph the largest head of celery inserted in a teenager, Led Zeppelin are the most comprehensively larcenous people in show business, having stolen  nearly all of their  material and impudenty claimed it as their own, even the massively lucrative Whole Lotta Love was lifted lyrically, musically and stylistically from Steve Mariott of the Small Faces.  There are channels on YouTube dedicated to exposing Zeppelin's thievery but as yet their star still shines, surviving members recently filling the Albert Hall with ageing fuckwits. Most of their peers despise them but Harper - a natural, original creative soul - was happy to associate and be associated with them.  Doesn't make him a nonce, although we should all be judged by the company we keep, over decades, grappled to our souls with hoops of steel.

When Rolf Harris was first accused  many, myself included,  were unprepared to give him the benefit of the doubt which Justice demands, well, she demands more than that but she demanded in vain.  Many of those so keen to crucify Harris now call for something else in Harper's case;  the charges are fewer in number but no less grave and they date, too,  from four decades back.  Since Harper is a  relative unknown and probably skint one can see little reason other than the pursuit of Justice  motivating the complainant and just because a man wrote and performed some genuinely original and accomplished songs, doesn't mean he isn't or wasn't a beast.  And so I differ from mr mirage and many of my contemporaries.  Hanging around with beasts, like Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, 

Harper is,  must be, to his own self being true.  

I think Harper is as guilty as Sin of, if nothing else, consorting with the extremities of  Wickedness and letting them go unreported. As we see at the PBC, it is the silent approval of others which makes all  these things possible, a conspiracy of men, generally men, being true to their selves,  their careers,  their almost certainly baseless idea of who they are.

In his defence,  the grossly obnoxious, talentless bully, Dave Lee Wotsaname, growls of a time when men were true to their own selves and groped and fondled and fucked women at will, just a birrafun,  tactile; this is all political correctness gone mad, he rages. He is now a convicted sex offender, let us see how true he can be to that self, now that his life is all used-to-bes.

Had I a young man to influence and direct I guess that I would find words inappropriate,  the tools of slippery lawyers, infinitely adaptable and corruptible.  I remember my Dad, in his cups, reciting from memory Grey's Elegy and I think that's the only thing he ever said to me which remains constant,  unassailable and precious;
 better drunken melancholy than pompous instruction. 

As the night follows day, he will be  a wrong 'un, so to thine own self be false and daily, start anew.