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Miranda "We are such stuff As dreams are made on..." The Tempest, William Shakespekare
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Miranda's Invitation By Eileen M. Ciesla
"O wonder! How many goodly creatures there are here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world That has such people in't!" -Miranda, Act V, Scene I. The Tempest, by William Shakespeare
"I want God. I want poetry. I want real danger. I want freedom. I want goodness. I want sin." -John the Savage, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley Shakespeare's words spoken by Miranda, borrowed by Huxley, for the title of his most famous novel, have come to signify the horrors of a world where mankind has allowed technology to rule the human soul. Huxley's novel, written in 1932, imagines a futuristic, totalitarian society where the individual exists for the state. Sex and soma are the opiates of the people. Children are grown in test tubes, sorted according to their eventual function in society. In this world, man has lost the ability to feel anything except constant, mind-numbing pleasure, rendered in the form of soma, a mood-altering drug, the "feelies", an interactive (virtual reality?) entertainment, and promiscuous sex. Marriage does not exist. Childbirth is considered primitive. God is dead. Love is dead. Pain is dead. Mankind has been stripped of his humanity. He is nothing but a slave to his hallowed technology and an addict to his pleasure. Huxley's hero, John the Savage, has managed to escape all of this. Born accidentally by a woman, who had gotten lost on an Indian Reservation, he is self-taught in the wilderness on the Complete Works of Shakespeare and The Bible. He embodies the forgotten virtues of spirituality, chivalry, honor and passion. He feels pain and has the stain of original sin. After coming into contact with this new, Godless and artificial civilization he is driven to suicide realizing that his beliefs in God, love and the soul, and his human appetites, curiosities and physical desires, are simply incompatible with the worship of technology and clinically-derived pleasure. Huxley's view is a pessimistic, but terribly familiar, conceit. Mankind is doomed by Huxley's reckoning, as he does not have the ability to change this inevitable march towards dehumanization. There is certainly enough evidence to suggest this in the year 2000. Blissfully ignorant of the technology that threatens to change our very humanity, we plunge forward, exclaiming only words of astonishment at all the improvement that science has brought to us. We care very little for the soul and very much for sex. Sex is easily divorced from its potentially inconvenient outcome. And technology further ensures that this divorce remain uncontested as we find other ways to reproduce (or not reproduce) ourselves. We care very little for our progeny and very much for our own convenience and happiness. John the Savage is Huxley's Miranda, mutated by a world that has been twisted by technology and separated from the soul. He exclaims honestly, in the faces of those who would do him harm, and later drive him to suicide, those oft-quoted words of wonderment, "Brave New World, that has such people in't!" But Shakespeare's words originally meant something far different. Though Huxley's vision seems, to the cynic or to the defeatist, to have prevailed in this strange age, it is Shakespeare's vision that resonates more strongly in its deep perception, in its profundity and in its power to inspire. Miranda, daughter of the wise magician (and deposed Duke of Milan) Prospero are the exiled and sole inhabitants of an enchanted isle, which they share with Prospero's spirit servant, Ariel and the beast-like slave, Caliban. Prospero as the embodiment of pure intellect, works his magic and tutors his innocent daughter, (whose adopted mother is Nature). The play itself hovers between Dream State and Reality as the two worlds converge by Prospero's hand, which orchestrates a shipwreck bearing Prospero's enemies and Miranda's future fiancee, Ferdinand. Prospero's actions are meant to bring resolution as well as regeneration, so that he may finally end his exile and that his daughter might begin her life. By the play's end, the treacherous plot is revealed and foiled. Miranda is betrothed to the good-hearted and royal-blooded Ferdinand. Only then is Prospero prepared to relinquish his wand, knowing that his work is finished and that Miranda will carry his kingdom forth. He sets his servant, Ariel, free. Miranda and Ferdinand, together with the shipwrecked, face this Brave New World with a dual sense of uncertainty and excitement. The magic and the realities of the island have transformed them. The spiritual and the natural have converged. The men are bewildered, bewitched, ennobled, educated, and their senses are more finely tuned to what they see around them. It is no Utopia that this place offers, but rather a virginal, unchartered landscape, filled with frightening uncertainties and enchanting discoveries. This is the world that Miranda sees in her untainted eyes. This is the world that causes her to burst forth with those lines of pure-hearted astonishment. These two Brave New Worlds compete in this time. Those who perceive them, straddle daily, between the realities of post-modern secularism as a virtue, and promiscuity as a mark of distinction and the dreams of love as transcendent, and of God as eternal. We fear an ascendant, dehumanizing technology, yet somehow also marvel over the frontier it sets before us. The freedom of the Internet, one of several new technological frontiers that we face competes with Huxley's oversexed, genetically managed police state for dominance in this new age. But what makes Huxley's vision more nightmare than reality is his belief that man is absolutely incapable of goodness: that when He falls, He falls in total. For this reason, Shakespeare's vision may prove to be immutable. If one person can speak out, and not fear to utter words of wonderment, there is hope enough that man can salvage his soul from the community of cynics that threaten to cast the world into total darkness. There is much left to salvage from this shipwrecked post-modern culture of broken souls, and there is much left to build on the foundations of our forebearers. This electronic, literary pirate ship has come across Miranda's isle. Offering hope to its isolated inhabitants, and a challenge to those seafarers who are prepared to see the world in a new light. For those who are ready, to capture in words, the essence of the eternal, contained in every human soul ...the time to write is now! This dream needs much nurturing, as Huxley's nightmare competes for dominance in our collective conscience. The key is to turn a blind eye to an empty post-modern vision, and to feed on the stuff of which dreams are made. Somewhere between a dream-state and the demoralizing reality of what exists outside of this haven there are Miranda and Ferdinand who are part of the rising generation. Miranda invites the world weary, the haunted and fallen to allow the magic to do its work. Cast your cynicism and vulgarity back into the gutters from which it was conceived. Free yourself. Look skyward, inward and beyond for your inspiration. See the world anew! The Jolly Roger, as it sails on the high seas of literary discourse picking up so many new voices, is invited to anchor alongside Miranda's shores. Its seafarers may rest awhile, look around, rejuvenate and refresh, perhaps leave your reflections behind, before continuing on your poets' course.
For information on submissions, please contact Eileen M. Ciesla at: eileen@femmesoul.com. We invite you to also visit her website: Femme Soul
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