Elegy for the Kissing Carrion

[Ray Eston Smith]

I was struck by an idea so bizarre and so sick that I vowed to take it to my grave without ever giving it voice. And yet that hideous thought grew in my diseased brain like a canker, an abscess, a mole of birth, for which I am not guilty. Now I must pour my contagion into the unsuspecting ear of Earth.

The Ghost walked the night in search of treasure in the womb of earth. He usurped the sovereignty of reason of his son and namesake until, at last, that dutiful son brought him into the bride-bed and grave of filial fidelity, Ophelia, and her chaste treasure in the womb of earth.

For thirty years, the son had spun in dizzying orbit, glowing with the bloody borrowed sheen of his warlike father. He cursed his mother, imperial jointress to this warlike state and breeder of sinners, for ever giving him birth. On the very day his mother had ejected him from her womb into the raw air, his father had vanquished a man into the womb of earth, and won a piece of dirt scarcely big enough for the new gravedigger to bury the dead. To that graveyard, the son fell heir. He was doomed to walk in the air, into his gravid grave. How pregnant his replies were.

Let not your daughter walk in the sun. But her father kept her from the son and kept her for the sun-god Hyperion and she, that god-kissing carrion, did breed maggots in the womb of earth. She let her father tell her what to think and let her brother keep the key to her memory. Her father went round and became the wheel, the knave of majestic Fortune's wheel, down, down in the secret parts of strumpet Fortune, Ophelia's chaste treasure in the womb of earth.

His mother did think to strew her marriage-bed, and indeed she did, her marriage-bed in the womb of earth. Into that final chamber, she entered a virgin, nevermore to depart, virgin or not. But whose grave and marriage-bed was it? The daughter who had once sucked the honey of the son's music vows? The son and heir who had leaped into his inheritance? Or his pompous father who had been licked by the candied tongue of her father, who had gone down, down with pregnant hinges of the knee into the secret parts of strumpet Fortune, Ophelia's chaste treasure in the womb of earth.

- Ray Eston Smith Jr

[Gladys]

An ingenious construction.

[Janine]

Clever, very clever; like your play on the words.

[Ray Eston Smith]

Thanks, Gladys and Janine, for the compliments, but I cannot accept them. It's Shakespeare's construction and his play on words. I merely extracted one of his motifs. (Although maybe this time I was guilty of a little extrapolation.)

Anyway, I'm glad to hear somebody appreciates it. I was afraid that everybody would interpret all that posthumous hanky-panky literally instead of metaphorically.

Ray Eston Smith Jr

[Beewulf]

Obscure, yet lyrical. I like it; reminds me of Gingsberg's Howl, or some of Bob Dylan's best songs, Gates of Eden, Subterrean Homesick Blues, or Idiot Wind.

[Ray Eston Smith]

Thanks, Beewulf. I will accept your high praise on Shakespeare's behalf. Any lyricism in the Elegy was a result of flagrant plagiarism from the Bard. I'll take the blame for the obscurity, although my intent was enlightenment.
- Ray

[Beewulf]

Hi Ray,

The inspiration for you speech may have been Shakespeare, and certainly some of the language was borrowed from Hamlet, but the final product was indelibly marked with the singular style of Mr. Ray Eston Smith. Though I frequently take issue with your interpretative positions, you put it out there in all your raging glory.

Rock on.

[Ray Eston Smith]

Last night I posted this Elegy on Yahoo Answers (in the Theater and Acting category) with the question, "Would anybody like to perform the monologue I wrote?" Yahoo removed the question and the attached Elegy for "violation of community standards." I had shamelessly plagiarized most of the phrases (and in my opinion the ideas) directly from Hamlet. But Yahoo has "Community Guidelines" - "Because kids as young as 13 may participate in Yahoo! Answers, sexually explicit and vulgar language and images are not welcome on the site." The children must be protected from Shakespeare. He might stir dangerous thoughts.

- Ray Censored Smith

[Gladys]

Yahoo removed the question and the attached Elegy for "violation of community standards." I had shamelessly plagiarized most of the phrases (and in my opinion the ideas) directly from Hamlet.

Surely you can see, Ray - or should I say Shakespeare - that accusing Hamlet's paternal ghost of necrophiliac attraction to 'Ophelia's chaste treasure [now strewed] in the womb of earth', involves vulgar images if not language.

[Ray Eston Smith]

Surely you can see, Ray - or should I say Shakespeare - that accusing Hamlet's paternal ghost of necrophiliac attraction to 'Ophelia's chaste treasure [now strewed] in the womb of earth', involves vulgar images if not language.

I can see that Yahoo's "Community Standards" forbid any serious discussion of Shakespeare, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and many other great authors. Yahoo is promoting a repressive atmosphere worse than we had a hundred years ago. All to "protect the children," who are turned off Shakespeare and instead turn on their radios to listen to rap music that glorifies rape and murder. (The antidote to that poison is not censorship, but serious discussion.)

"For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a god kissing carrion,--Have you a daughter?" is indeed necrophiliac imagery. But that imagery is part of Shakespeare's effort to de-glamorize war.

Here's a truly vulgar image: Back in 1991 I was taking an evening class at the state college. One evening before class I dropped by the student union where I saw a bunch of college students gathered around a TV and cheering. What were they cheering? Bombs dropping on the city of Baghdad.

- Ray

[Beewulf]

I agree with the idea that the United States has some apparently contradictory standards concerning violence and sexuality. For example, few people would object to a live broadcast of two muscular men, dressed only in shorts or briefs, who punch, kick, and grapple each other until one is knocked into a bloody stupor or even complete unconscious. On the other hand, equally vivid displays of affection and sexuality are considered pornographic and perceived as a threat--notwithstanding, the immense popularity of such images.

Our nation is dominated by moral hypocrites, by men who use religious and moral arguments in the service of death, and who denounce Eros and its associative arts (literature, poetry, theatre, film, painting, and aesthetic pleasure in general), as a dangerous enemy.

[Ray Eston Smith]

Our nation is dominated by moral hypocrites, by men who use religious and moral arguments in the service of death, and who denounce Eros and its associative arts (literature, poetry, theatre, film, painting, and aesthetic pleasure in general), as a dangerous enemy.

I think Shakespeare had similar problems with the Puritans of his own day. I remember reading about public whippings of "scarlet women" in America in the 1600s. It was absolutely illegal for a woman to expose her breasts in public, except when she was being whipped, when bare breasts were mandatory.

(My Elegy mixes sexual imagery with death imagery, so it really is ugly. But I believe that Shakespeare intentionally mixed those images in order to make a point about the royal tradition of violence being inherited from generation to generation. Ugly images reflect ugly reality. "Kissing carrion" wasn't meant to appeal to prurient interest, although Shakespeare didn't hesitate to appeal to prurient interest in other contexts.)

[Beewulf]

Hi Ray,

Regarding the expression of death and sex in art . . . I'm not the first to observe that since the time of the classical Greeks, plays that gain recognition as masterpieces are interwoven with powerful depictions of two basic human drives: the desire to kill and destroy, and the desire to fornicate and create. If your monologue combines these you are simply following in the footsteps of, among others:

Classical Greece
Aeschylus The Orestia
Sophocles Antigone
Euripides Hippolytus

Classical Rome
Seneca Medea

Medieval Europe
Hrosvitha Paphnutius
Anonymous The Towneley Cycle

Renaissance England
Shakespeare Hamlet
Webser The Duchess of Malfi

Neoclassical France
Racine Phaedra

Spanish Golden Age
de Vega Fuente Ovejuna

Restoration England
Dryden All for Love

and on, and on, and on. In pointing this out, I mean neither to approve nor condemn the artistic merit of what you've written, but to argue that your piece shouldn't be rejected out of hand for dealing with sex and/or violence. What bothers me about this topic is not that writers include conflicts about death and sex in their work, but that people confuse the imaginative examination of such conflicts as an endorsement of them.