Shakespeare’s Words

He found he was in the vast rail yards outside of Chi-town; the biggest and busiest yard a seeker of fortune such as Filch Burgoo could ever want. Because it was the biggest and busiest, it was also the best place to find more of your pals collected in one place than any other yard in the country. More than one big jungle was set up pretty near permanent in hidden corners and vacant lots near the rails. Filch himself had arrived in a comfortable boxcar in the middle of a slow freight out of St Louie riding the Big 4 road; the CCC&StL, so he was in a jungle on the outskirts of the east side. It was a busy enough place, sure enough, and as he made his way around, doing the old meet and greet as it were, he ran across Old Red Slim, Busco, and Little Frank. It was easy to find Little Frank, of course; just fix your eyes up above any crowd you’re in and if you see somebody’s head way up there, well, chances are that’s him.

On this fine Chi-town afternoon Filch heard in the buzz of voices all around that there might be a show that evening. Some of his fellow wanderers, after all, had plied their acting trade before all the jobs faded away, and he’d jawed with enough of those fellas to know they’d be eager to do what they did wherever an audience could be found, cash money or no cash money.

“Say fellas,” said Filch, “sounds like a show’s comin’ together tonight under the red water tank; what say we mosey in that direction?”

“Sure thing,” said Busco, “I’m all for it. What’s on the bill?”

“Heard it’s something by Bill Shakespeare,” said Old Red Slim. “Can’t be the whole thing, but those barnstormers are forever quotin’ this or that line, so they can prob’ly glue somethin’ together just outa what they remember.”

“Say, there’s Inkpot,” said Little Frank, who was usually the first to spot anybody they knew thanks to his elevated vantage point.

“So it is,” said Filch. “Hey Inkpot! Over here!”

The four shook hands with Inkpot, who most of them hadn’t seen in a couple months, and then the four were five. Busco was particular pleased to see Inkpot; back in the old days when people went to jobs every day they’d been in the same game, loosely speaking. Busco had put in time as a perfessor, and Inkpot had been a big shot in the dictionary and reference book business. They hadn’t known each other existed back then, but nowadays they always found lots to talk about.

Sure enough, as the pals walked toward the big red tank where the steam locomotives took on water, Busco and Inkpot got into it about Shakespeare. The others listened in.

“Thing about Shakespeare is,” Busco was saying, “we’re quoting from him every day of the week. English wouldn’t be what it is today without old Bill.”

“Ah, claptrap,” said Inkpot. “The man gets credit he don’t deserve. Go ahead, name me something he gets credit for putting into the language.”

“All righty then,” said Busco, rubbing his hands together as if to warm up for the challenge. “How about ‘manager’; Shakespeare came up with that one.”

“Nope,” said Inkpot. “Another fella named John Leslie used that very word in, lemme see, 1572 I think it was, when he wrote something with the line ‘the chief manager of your affairs.’ Bill wasn’t writing anything much then, if he’d even been born yet.”

“That’s one for Inkpot,” chuckled Filch. “You’re gonna have to reach deeper, Busco.”

“I’ve got that covered easy,” said Busco. “Pageantry. That one I’m sure of.”

“Sorry,” said Inkpot. “You’re makin’ this too easy, Busco. I wrote the dictionary entry for this one myself way back when. That word shows up in the play Pericles, and it’s well known Shakespeare didn’t write that one all by himself, if he even wrote any of it. But besides that, Ben Johnson had already used the word more than once by then.”

“Try agin, Busco,” urged Old Red Slim.

“Okay, okay,” said Busco, scratching his head so’s he could think better. “Give me a minute…here it comes. ‘Fashionable.’ Now, you might not know this one Inkpot, ‘cause it comes from Troilus and Cressida, which ain’t one of Will’s better-known works.”

“Sure enough, ‘fashionable’ is in Troilus and Cressida,” said Inkpot. “It’s prob’ly there because Shakey read it in something William Averell wrote a good five years before.”

“Consarn it all,” muttered Busco, “I’m 0-for-3 here, boys.”

“You can do it, Busco!” urged Little Frank, who thought it would be better sport if Busco could manage to keep the score close until the final innings.

“What would you say to ‘arch-villain’, Busco? That’s in Timon of Athens; you must remember that, and old Bill came out with that one in 1605,” said Inkpot.

“Sounds like a trap to me,” said Busco. “Say, didn’t you tell me one time you were the editor on that Shakespeare Compendium that came out in ‘28?”

“Did I mention that?” said Inkpot. “Can’t think why I woulda told you about it.” He chuckled.

“Well, in for a dime in for a dollar,” sighed Busco. “Yup, I’d say the evidence is in that Shakespeare came up with ‘arch-villain’.”

“You’re right about one thing,” said Busco, “Will came up with it for Timon of Athens in 1605. But there’s also the little detail that you can find the same word in The Malcontent, writ up by by John Marsten in 1604.”

“You only get a half point for that one, Inkpot,” laughed Filch, “seeing as how you suggested it in the first place.”

“Inaudible,” said Busco.

“George Puttenham in 1589,” replied Inkpot.

“Multitudinous,” said Busco, who was starting to sound desperate.

“Thomas Dekker, in a 1603 pamphlet,” replied Inkpot triumphantly.

“Newfangled?” said Busco, whose spirit was pretty much broken at that point.

“Proverbs of Hendyng from the 1300s, my good fellow,” said Inkpot with a bow.

Filch, Old Red Slim, and Little Frank were clamping their jaws shut as mightily as they could to stifle the laughs that wanted to come out.

“Well you win this one, Inkpot,” said Busco with a sigh. “I just hope they have some scenes from Romeo and Juliet tonight; only the ladybird could lift my spirits at this point.”

“And in the 11th hour you’ve pulled it out!” said Inkpot. “Shakespeare was the first to use ‘ladybird’, and in Romeo and Juliet, too. Honorary win goes to Busco!”

The group roared with laughter; even Busco. And nobody was disappointed that the show that evening was old vaudeville routines without a single line from Shakespeare, original or not.

Wandering, Wondering

I was going to start this with “there have always been wanderers,” but I’m not sure that’s true. There have certainly been wanderers recently, if “recent” means the past few centuries. And before that, in the deep past of humanity, who knows. If we all lived pretty much like the tribes in the Amazon, then maybe there wasn’t a lot of wandering. But in other places, like across the Pacific ocean, wandering seems like it might have been around a long, long time.

The way it works recently, I think, is that there are a couple kinds of wanderers. Some people are forced into wandering by war or famine or persecution. Maybe they’re hoping to arrive in a better place, or at least one that’s less bad. Less lethal, maybe, or with a bit more opportunity. And some people wander because they want to. Particularly in the US, they might load themselves into a van or an RV or even a boat, and keep moving.

You can find out a lot about the wanderers-by-choice lately because one of the things it seems like you do, if you’re a wanderer, is post videos on YouTube. There are metric tons of those videos, and they can be pretty educational. Some of them will teach you all about the niceties of the different sorts of vehicles you can choose for your wandering. We all being human, there are the inevitable formal classifications and subclassifications, but I think of them as just three: vans, trucks, and buses.

The buses are the fancy, up-market editions, and there seem to be fewer bus-wanderers making videos. That might be simply because there are fewer bus wanderers overall, seeing as how the things can cost as much as a house. They can be, though monumentally fancy with cool lights and power-controlled chairs and TV screens all over the place.

The trucks are more middle-class, and they’re everything from a unit you load onto the back of your trusty pickup truck to purpose-built monstrosities that aspire to some of the glitz of the bus crowd, but with a more reasonable price tag. They can still cost more than you might think, though. At least more than I would have thought.

Vans are the wild card choice, and the one that I think appeals the most to the pure wandering impulse. The thing about the buses and the trucks is that they’re enormous, and you can’t just drive them anywhere. But a van isn’t that big, so you can wander up that dirt road just to see what’s at the other end. Some vans are even four-wheel-drive, and you can drive off into the wilderness without a road at all. Now that’s real wandering. Without, you know, the effort and exertion.

The thing that makes vans the wild card is that while you can buy a purpose-built one and spend a great deal of money on it, you can also (theoretically) just spend a small amount on a used cargo vehicle and fit it out yourself. The people who do that, who have the skills to build their own van, and the impulse to live in it, are the champions at posting videos of their exploits. But vans are small, compared to buses and most trucks, and what you trade for your greater wandering ability is much less in your mobile residence. The buses have kitchens and bedrooms and bathrooms very much like you’d find in a nice suburban house. The trucks have kitchens and bedrooms and bathrooms that are clearly mobile editions, but can still be very serviceable and accommodating. But in a van, your bathroom might not even exist. Your kitchen might be a portable camp stove. Your bedroom might be your dining room reconfigured just for the night.

There are other wanderers — some of them live on boats, but that’s outside my frame of reference. I know hardly anything about boats, and little interest. All wanderers are, necessarily, minimalists, but some take it even further than limiting their traveling quarters to a motor vehicle or boat. I admire minimalism in writing and art, but the minimalism involved in being a wanderer on a bicycle, or on foot, or even hopping onto freight trains and hiding until the train stops is not anything I aspire to. Although the YouTube video mojo can be strong with all of these groups as well, and I do sometimes enjoy their films.

The hobos who ride the rails are probably my favorite, mostly because to me they embody the pure essence of wandering. They travel with hardly anything — only what they can carry, and carry quickly and hide in the apparently numerous nooks and crannies of working freight trains. The trains constrain their wandering a bit. They’re injecting themselves into the inner workings of what’s really one vast machine; the network of rails and locomotives and freight cars (and myriad control systems) that now span the majority of the North American continent. And yet the rails don’t lead everywhere. If your wanderlust directs you toward the real wilderness, you’ll probably find yourself on foot.

For many years I’ve wondered whether I really have a wanderlust. It’s a striking word, “wanderlust.” The irresistible urge embodied in “lust” and the open-ended romanticism of wandering. I’ve enjoyed stories about wanderers, from Jack London’s writing to the much deeper and stranger works by the likes of Joseph Conrad and Alan Moore. And I do sometimes like to follow the faithfully recorded (and edited) adventures of various YouTube wanderers. I even followed, years ago, the adventures of Steven Roberts, who in the 1990s built a couple of ridiculous, technology-packed bicycle-like-things that he pedaled around the country, then later settled in the Pacific northwest and got involved in some very unusual boats that he designed, built, and sailed around Puget Sound. I was never really driven to actually do much wandering myself though.

My family went on camping vacations when I was a boy, and I remember them as great fun. I went camping myself as an adult, and I remember it as much less fun. It wasn’t repellant, but there was nothing about it that drew me in. I feel more comfortable at a sidewalk cafe than I do around a campfire. I don’t seem to have any innate desire to see a different landscape every day upon awakening, and I don’t yearn to see what’s beyond the next bend in the road or path or river. Whatever it is, it won’t be as interesting as what I can conjure up out of basically nothing, by writing about it.

And yet I am drawn, a little bit, to the idea of wandering. It makes me wonder whether there are kinds of wandering that don’t involve relocating your body in space. The late guitarist Michael Hedges described himself as a “musical hunter gatherer.” Authors from Jack Kerouac to Robert Pirsig use the dynamism of travel to energize and propel their stories. And yet the same question can arise in writing as well; a story can travel in more ways than just in space. Even  intensely introspective work like something by Alan Watts (Become What You Are) or Joan Didion (The White Album) can evoke the idea of wandering, even when everything that “happens” is internal and perceptual.

So you might not meet me out on the road, quartered in a van or a truck or a bus, heading down the road to the next sunrise. On the other hand, you never know what’s just beyond the next bend, or over the next hill. It might be you. It might be me.

Share

Leave a comment