Macbeth: "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red."
Lear: I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall -- I will do such things --
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth!
Titus Andronicus: "These words are razors to my wounded heart."
In the 16th and 17th Centuries, painters and playwrights in England and on the Continent rediscovered Greek Humanism, preserved by Arabs and lost to the West for centuries. Those artists created words and images of extraordinary beauty and violence. Titus Andronicus is typical.
In the 18th Century, we invented "due process" and "equal protection of the law": the Rule of Law. The Rule of Law is a practice of great power and beauty; and we still live in a world of extraordinary violence.
Titus Andronicus, repressed in Queen Victoria's day in favor of a more repressed violence, is revived in our time, for we are drenched blood -- in overseas prisons, wars, and "renditions," and in our most private home entertainment. The Web shows any five-year-old who wants to see it macabre scenes of cruelty and horror, done according to strict, even aesthetic, rules.
Our ideals and often our practices are glorious and maniacal, as were the ideals and practices of those who went before us, so long ago.
Glory and madness -- sit uneasily on our wounded hearts, even yet.
This blog, with digressions that please me, shows some of the beauty that lived along-side deceit and violence five centuries ago.
As we move from nation-states to a one-world society, can the Rule of Law survive? Will the levels of violence decline? Will freedom ring out? What can heal our wounded hearts?
