THE WORDS THAT FORMED ME

CHAPTER 3

To Be, or Perhaps Not Today

To be or not to be, maybe even 3B. That was the sort of addition a schoolboy could make to Shakespeare before anybody had properly explained why the original words mattered. At high school, numbers and letters determined where we went, who sat beside us and, despite official assurances to the contrary, where the system thought we belonged. Later, the familiar class letters were replaced by X and Y, supposedly so nobody would assume that one class contained more academic ability than another. This may have satisfied the person designing the timetable, but it did not deceive the children named upon it.

Children are remarkably good at detecting distinctions adults insist do not exist. We noticed which teachers entered which rooms, which lessons moved quickly and which pupils were expected to need everything explained twice. Changing the label did not change the judgement beneath it, although it gave the judgement a respectable administrative disguise. Long before I understood Hamlet’s question about existence, I understood that being often came with a classification attached. The system did not merely ask whether we were; it quietly recorded what sort of being it expected us to become.

“To be or not to be” comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet¹, although it escaped the play centuries ago and found employment in almost every minor decision imaginable. It could apply to mowing the lawn, making a telephone call or deciding whether another biscuit constituted hunger or merely opportunity. The phrase had become ordinary shorthand for indecision, stripped of death, suffering and the possibility of an afterlife about which no reliable information had been supplied. Shakespeare offered one of the central questions of human existence, and we used it to explain why we had not yet chosen a shirt.

I suspect that was how the line first stayed with me. It had rhythm, recognition and enough inherited solemnity to make tampering with it almost compulsory. “Maybe even 3B” brought the Prince of Denmark down from the castle and placed him beside a school timetable, wondering whether he had been assigned to the correct room. The joke required very little knowledge of the play, which was fortunate because the younger me had very little knowledge to offer. What I possessed instead was an instinct that important words became less threatening once somebody had allowed a little air out of them.

At this point, Vincent Price could have stepped from the arachnid display in Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare², raised one elegant finger and announced, “If I might put forward a piece of personal philosophy.”³ Nobody would have invited him, but men with voices like Vincent Price did not require invitations. He would then have proceeded, with the grave courtesy of somebody addressing a learned society, to explain why the black widow spider represented a fitting successor to humanity. Somewhere off to the side, Hamlet would have listened to the proposal, considered its implications and finally muttered, “Ay, there’s the rub.”

The scene is ridiculous, which is precisely why it works. We have Horatius left behind at the bridge, Hamlet conducting an internal review of existence and Vincent Price preparing an orderly transfer of planetary control to a spider. Horatius wants volunteers to save civilisation, Hamlet is uncertain whether civilisation is worth enduring, and Price has already found somebody to replace it. The black widow has not lodged an application, but Price seems confident she possesses the necessary qualifications. Compared with humanity, her lack of sentimentality may even count as governance experience.

Horatius had the advantage of a visible problem. An army was approaching, the bridge was narrow and the number of men required to defend it could be calculated without advanced mathematics. Once the bridge was destroyed, the immediate danger would be reduced and the surviving defenders could worry about the next problem when it arrived. Hamlet received no such neat arrangement. His enemies included grief, suspicion, injustice, uncertainty and a mind capable of finding another complication every time it approached a conclusion.

That was the continuation from Horatius I wanted. Courage sounds reasonably straightforward when the enemy can be seen crossing a bridge, but it becomes less tidy when the bridge is inside the person expected to defend it. Horatius asks who will stand at his right and left hands, and two men answer. Hamlet speaks largely to himself, which may be one reason the speech has travelled so far beyond the theatre. Many of the most exhausting battles are fought without anybody else being entirely certain a battle has begun.

Price’s black widow brings another complication. Horatius is prepared to die so the established order might survive, whereas Price surveys the established order and wonders whether survival has been overvalued. His curator describes mankind as an immature ruler who has occupied the throne long enough and nominates the spider as the more fitting heir. The reasoning is magnificently absurd, but the performance gives absurdity the confidence of settled fact. Doom sounds more persuasive when delivered by somebody who appears to have inspected the paperwork.

“If I might put forward a piece of personal philosophy” is almost too polite an introduction for the extinction of human authority. It sounds like the beginning of a suggestion about office procedure or the correct arrangement of cutlery. Price then expands the proposition until humanity is reduced to a temporary inconvenience between one ruling species and the next. The black widow waits in the wings, presumably practising her acceptance speech. Hamlet, meanwhile, is caught on the word “might” because possibilities are where most of his trouble begins.

“Ay, there’s the rub” is not the first line of the soliloquy, but it is where the feasibility study starts to fail. Death may resemble sleep, and sleep may appear to end the troubles attached to life, but the possibility of dreams after death changes the calculation. The proposed solution contains an unquantified risk. The alternative may remove the present burden, but no trustworthy information exists about the conditions following implementation. Even Hamlet, for all his distress, is reluctant to approve a transaction without adequate due diligence.

Seen through the eyes of an accountant, his soliloquy resembles a feasibility study on the continuation of existence. The current operation is carrying excessive liabilities, working conditions have deteriorated and management cannot be trusted. The list of unresolved complaints includes injustice, arrogance, rejected love, delay and the repeated advancement of people whose entitlement exceeds their merit. An exit appears available, but the consequences cannot be verified. The responsible recommendation is therefore to continue trading while further evidence is sought.

Hamlet does not lack reasons for closing the business. He methodically identifies the burdens, places them on the table and asks why anybody would continue carrying them when release seems possible. He is not simply expressing sadness; he is constructing an argument. The case almost succeeds because the evidence from this life is extensive. It is only when he reaches the undiscovered country beyond death that the evidence becomes speculation.

Accountants tend to distrust unverified assumptions, even though many impressive financial collapses have been built upon them. We can sometimes tolerate an established loss more readily than an uncertainty because the loss can at least be measured and entered into the correct column. Hamlet knows the suffering already recorded in the accounts, but the contingent liability attached to death cannot be calculated. There is no returning traveller prepared to provide a reference and no regulator offering guidance. The proposal must therefore be deferred, not because life has been found attractive but because the alternative remains insufficiently documented.

The silliness of treating Hamlet as an accountant does not diminish the seriousness of his question. Humour can create enough distance for the mind to approach something it might otherwise refuse to touch. It allows the discussion to enter wearing an ill-fitting disguise, then remain after the disguise has become transparent. I can laugh at Hamlet preparing a feasibility study because I recognise the habit of testing emotion with logic. I can also recognise that logic does not always rescue the person doing the testing.

As a schoolboy, I doubt I heard any of that. I heard a famous opening line, recognised an opportunity to attach 3B and allowed the remaining words to become the property of teachers and examination papers. School often introduces great questions long before life has supplied the experiences needed to understand them. We remember fragments because memory has no obligation to retain the lesson plan surrounding them. The words wait until age, sorrow or disappointment provides a better explanation.

Some words are extraordinarily patient. They can sit unnoticed for decades while we assume we have finished with them, then return carrying meanings they could not safely have delivered earlier. Hamlet’s question changed once depression was no longer something that belonged to other people or to the more dramatic corners of fiction. “To be or not to be” stopped being merely a theatrical phrase, although it did not become a literal description of every difficult morning. Its deeper relevance lay in the discovery that endurance itself could become something requiring consideration.

That distinction matters. The Black Dog should not be turned into a more impressive character than it was simply because impressive characters make better chapters. My difficult mornings did not all contain a direct intention to die, and it would be dishonest to reshape them now as though I had stood continually at Hamlet’s final frontier. Often the struggle was smaller, duller and harder to explain. It involved getting out of bed, moving between rooms, answering a telephone or beginning work I understood perfectly well but could not summon myself to start.

The Black Dog did not always enter carrying a dagger. Sometimes it simply lay across the day and made every movement appear to require negotiations. There were mornings when death was not the question, but participation seemed beyond the available energy. The choice was not between life and its ending, but between being present and being absent while still occupying the same chair. Hamlet’s grand question therefore reduced itself again, but this time the reduction did not make it trivial.

To be, or perhaps not today. To be useful, or perhaps not before lunch. To be the man who could answer the question, settle the client and explain what everybody else had made unnecessarily complicated, or to let the telephone ring because competence had temporarily lost access to the body expected to perform it. These were not the decisions of a tragic prince, but they belonged to the same territory of endurance. They asked how long a person could continue carrying what had become ordinary to everybody except the person carrying it.

“Perhaps not today” contains more mercy than it first appears to offer. Depression has a habit of demanding permanent conclusions from temporary conditions, as though this morning has been appointed to give evidence about every morning still to come. Postponement interrupts that false authority. It does not promise that tomorrow will be wonderful or that the burden will disappear overnight. It merely refuses to allow an impaired moment to issue a final judgement.

The analytical Jeff finds comfort in describing the matter as an adjournment. Decisions may be deferred pending further information, assumptions may be reviewed and forecasts prepared during unstable conditions should be clearly marked. The human Jeff knows depression cannot be defeated with procedural language, but he also knows that language can create a little space where none seemed available. I did not always need a convincing case for the beauty of life. Sometimes I needed only to recognise that the present witness was unreliable.

Hamlet is less helpful when treated as an instruction manual. His intelligence does not lead him neatly towards health, action or a sensible resolution. Thought circles the problem, qualifies each possibility and discovers a new obstacle whenever movement becomes likely. Intelligence can illuminate a path, but it can also illuminate every reason the path may fail. Anybody who has remained motionless while conducting a complete internal audit of movement will understand the difficulty.

The arrival of Vincent Price provides a different kind of relief. His spoken curator on “Devil’s Food,” leading into “The Black Widow,”⁴ does not agonise over humanity’s future; he appears delighted to have found a replacement. The black widow is admired for her patience, her venom and her unsentimental treatment of the smaller male who has mistaken romance for security. Price broadens the natural history lesson into a theory of succession in which humanity has ruled badly and should make way for something more suitable. He speaks as though the spider’s coronation has already been catered.

The performance works because Price treats nonsense with absolute seriousness. His voice does not need to shout, threaten or prove itself. It sounds as though it has access to information withheld from the general public, including the date upon which the spiders intend to assume control. He could describe a blocked drain and make it sound like the final weakness in human civilisation. By the time he offers his personal philosophy, we are inclined to listen even though the proposed ruler has eight legs and no discernible economic policy.

Hamlet’s “Ay, there’s the rub” becomes the perfect reply. The spider may be a fitting successor, but there are practical matters to consider. Will the transfer of power occur peacefully, and has anybody consulted the ants, cockroaches or various species likely to contest the result? Does the black widow possess the temperament required for international diplomacy, or will unsuccessful negotiations conclude with the consumption of the visiting delegation? Price does not provide those details because personal philosophy rarely survives too much due diligence.

The absurd pairing exposes something serious about persuasive voices. Price can make the collapse of humanity sound elegant because his performance carries authority, timing and certainty. Modern news often uses the same tools without the saving grace of theatrical honesty. It presents each new danger as though the species has finally reached the crisis from which no recovery is possible. Unlike Price, it rarely admits that doom is part of the entertainment.

We now live inside a permanent emergency bulletin. Wars, economic threats, political stupidity, health concerns, predictions and scandals arrive without enough separation for the mind to distinguish one from another. Every story is presented at the volume required to compete with every other story. Tomorrow’s catastrophe must sound larger than yesterday’s or the audience may wander away before the advertisements. Doom has become a commercial format.

Vincent Price at least enjoyed himself. He did not pretend that the black widow’s succession was a neutral public-service announcement. The dramatic music, the cultivated menace and the absurd expansion from spider exhibit to planetary takeover allowed us to recognise the performance as performance. Modern white noise often disguises its theatre beneath the language of responsibility. Fear captures attention, attention can be measured and whatever can be measured will eventually be sold.

I am not suggesting the world contains no genuine danger. Wars are real, people suffer, economies fail and political decisions made at great distance can enter an ordinary household without knocking. Optimism becomes dishonest when it refuses to inspect the evidence. The problem is not that bad news is reported but that all news is required to sound equally urgent. When everything is presented as catastrophe, the mind loses the capacity to decide what deserves its fear.

White noise is not harmless merely because no single sound can be isolated. It settles around private concerns and increases their apparent weight. A person dealing with depression may not possess the spare capacity required to separate a distant possibility from an immediate threat. The Black Dog is not an experienced media analyst. It accepts almost any supporting material suggesting the future is narrowing.

The analytical Jeff understands the machinery behind it. Newspapers require readers, television requires viewers and online platforms require engagement that can be counted, packaged and offered to advertisers. He can question the headline, examine the source and ask whether the forecast has any meaningful connection with the life being lived that day. He can recognise emotional manipulation and speculation dressed as certainty. He can perform all those tasks and still discover that the human Jeff has absorbed the atmosphere.

Understanding the web does not guarantee release from it. I may know that a headline has been constructed to provoke me, but the provocation often arrives before the analysis. I may recognise that civilisation is not ending as frequently as the news has announced, yet the accumulated endings can still press against a difficult morning. Logic can expose the mechanism without immediately undoing its effect. The mind knows it is being manipulated while the body continues reacting as though the threat were standing in the room.

The spider’s web may be the most useful part of Price’s personal philosophy. A web is constructed from individual threads, each of which appears too weak to hold very much on its own. Illness, financial uncertainty, unfinished work, family concern, ageing, regret and fear about the wider world can each seem manageable when examined separately. Depression binds them into a structure stronger than any one thread deserves to be. The person caught inside may understand how the web was made without being able to step free of it.

Hamlet builds a similar web from the injuries of life. He gathers injustice, rejection, delay, arrogance and disappointment into a single argument for release. Each burden is real, but the method of presentation changes their force. A set of accounts containing only liabilities will always produce an alarming conclusion. The assets may still exist even when the mind has temporarily lost the ability to recognise or value them.

That observation can become insulting if handled carelessly. Depression is not cured by encouraging somebody to write a list of good things, just as insolvency is not repaired by moving a number into a more attractive column. The missing assets may be inaccessible rather than forgotten. Reminding a sufferer of family, responsibility and opportunity can sound less like encouragement than an accusation of ingratitude. I knew there were people I loved and tasks still worth doing, but knowledge and access were not always the same thing.

Hamlet’s hesitation therefore deserves more respect than it often receives. He does not leap from suffering to a confident answer, nor does he pretend that courage has removed uncertainty. His mind pauses because the unknown matters. That pause may become destructive when it prevents all action, but the instinct to consider consequence is not itself a weakness. The confident fool has often caused more damage than the doubtful thinker.

I spent much of my professional life around people who wanted decisions simplified. They did not always want the full answer; they wanted certainty stripped of the qualifications that made the answer honest. The same pressure can arise inside the self when distress demands a verdict. Continue or stop, fight or surrender, speak or remain silent, remain useful or disappear from the role. Life rarely respects the boxes into which urgent thinking tries to force it.

The school timetable understood boxes better than life did. It could replace familiar class designations with X and Y and declare the new arrangement free from judgement. The children still recognised who was expected to achieve, who was expected to comply and whose different way of thinking would be treated as an inconvenience. Long before depression gave Hamlet’s question another meaning, the classroom had taught me that “to be” could require adjustment. Being fully oneself was not always the same as being welcome.

To be accepted, one might need to be quieter. To be heard, one might need to reduce the thought until the most important part had been removed. To belong, one might need to pretend that the room had not already decided which contributions it was prepared to recognise. That is where the joke about 3B becomes more than a schoolboy’s interference with Shakespeare. The designation may have been administrative, but repeated administration can become identity.

Hamlet is articulate, intelligent and almost paralysed by the number of things he can see. He possesses words but no guarantee they will be heard in the way he intends. Other people observe, interpret and repurpose his behaviour according to their own needs. His voice became one of the most famous in literature, yet within his own world it did not give him control. There is something familiar in that contradiction.

The desire to lead and the suspicion that nobody is listening can produce an awkward mixture of anger and retreat. One part of the mind wants to explain the logic again with greater clarity, while another suspects the problem was never a failure of explanation. People do not always reject an idea because they misunderstand it. Sometimes they understand perfectly well that accepting it would require them to change. No additional volume will make the change more attractive.

Horatius did not face that particular difficulty. He asked for two men to stand beside him and received them, allowing the defence to proceed. Hamlet conducts most of his consultation internally, which may be less efficient but is perhaps more recognisable. Vincent Price requires no accomplices because his voice arrives already carrying authority, atmosphere and a fully developed succession plan. I spent years searching for a position somewhere between them.

I wanted to be clear enough to invite others onto the bridge, doubtful enough to inspect whether the bridge deserved defending and flippant enough to prevent the whole performance from becoming unbearable. That combination eventually became part of my professional voice. I could take the serious matter apart, expose the absurdity hidden inside it and then return to the serious consequence without pretending the joke had solved the problem. The silliness was not an escape from thought. It was often the means by which thought was allowed to continue.

The danger of white noise is that it makes every bridge appear worthy of defence. Each headline demands outrage, every public argument requests allegiance and each forecast announces itself as the defining issue of the age. A person who responds to every call will be exhausted before reaching the battle that genuinely matters. The media may describe that condition as engagement. The Black Dog recognises it as additional weight.

There must be a right to decline some of the world’s invitations to despair. That is not indifference to suffering but recognition that attention is limited and fear carries a cost. I cannot bring every war, scandal, market fall, political absurdity and predicted collapse into the room where I am already trying to begin the day. Vincent Price may nominate the spider as humanity’s successor, but I am not obliged to help organise the coronation. Some predictions deserve nothing more than the disdain appropriate to a theatrical arachnid with an excellent publicity department.

The same principle applies to the mind’s private news service. Not every thought deserves to be accepted as verified merely because it arrives in my own voice. Depression can present its forecasts with the confidence of a newsreader and the evidentiary standards of an advertisement. It can announce that usefulness has ended, that the future contains nothing not already exhausted and that today has proved the point. The fact that the bulletin originates inside the building does not make it true.

This is where Hamlet the accountant becomes useful once more. A feasibility study is only as reliable as its assumptions, and assumptions prepared during a storm should carry a warning. Present suffering may be real while the forecast built from it remains distorted. A decision with permanent consequences should not be based entirely upon figures prepared while the system is impaired. Even the most exhausted board is entitled to adjourn.

There were no trumpets on the mornings when endurance meant standing up and moving into another room. Horatius did not call from the bridge, and Vincent Price did not emerge from the wardrobe to announce that humanity had retained its position for another day. The next action was generally too ordinary to deserve heroic language. It might involve opening a file, replying to somebody or doing one task before deciding whether another could follow. Life continued in increments unlikely to interest Shakespeare.

That ordinariness may have been its strength. Endurance is often portrayed as a clenched fist, a determined stride or a declaration delivered beneath a stormy sky. Mine was more likely to resemble delay, reduced expectations and the refusal to let the larger question demand an immediate answer. “Perhaps not today” could apply to work, conversation, courage, certainty and despair’s insistence upon a conclusion. It was not an answer to Hamlet so much as a refusal to close his file.

Age and retirement have not made the question disappear. The loss or reduction of work can reopen the matter of what it means simply to be. Work supplied structure, identity, usefulness and reasons for other people to seek me out, even when it also supplied pressure and a convenient hiding place. When those structures weaken, existence can appear to require a fresh feasibility study. The future remains as poorly documented as Hamlet found the undiscovered country.

The analytical Jeff would prefer projections, milestones and a properly funded succession arrangement. He would like to know what lies beyond usefulness as he once defined it and whether meaning can continue producing an acceptable return. The human Jeff is beginning to suspect that some forms of existence do not need to justify themselves through output. He can understand that proposition intellectually while still struggling to live comfortably inside it. The accounts have not yet been finalised.

Perhaps this is why the schoolroom joke deserves to remain at the centre of the chapter. “Maybe even 3B” refuses to leave the great question entirely in the possession of princes, scholars and actors standing beneath carefully arranged lighting. It returns being to the rooms where children are classified and begin learning which parts of themselves will be encouraged. The joke was not merely avoidance. It was an early refusal to accept that somebody else had the exclusive right to frame the question.

Vincent Price belongs there for much the same reason. His personal philosophy takes doom so seriously that seriousness turns back into comedy. Humanity may indeed behave like an unstable child given dangerous toys, and the daily news offers no shortage of supporting examples. Even so, replacing the species with a black widow appears to be a proposal requiring further consultation. Hamlet would certainly request more information, and Horatius would probably want to know which bridge the spider intended to cross.

I now hear all three voices together. Horatius asks what is worth defending, Hamlet asks whether endurance is worth the cost, and Price asks whether humanity has shown enough competence to remain in charge. None offers a complete answer, but together they prevent the question from becoming too tidy. Courage without examination may waste a life, examination without movement may imprison it, and doom delivered with sufficient confidence may simply be entertainment seeking an audience.

“To be or not to be” no longer sounds like a single fork in a dramatic road. It sounds like a question that arrives repeatedly in smaller and less theatrical forms. To be present, to be heard, to be useful, to be still, to be uncertain and to remain are not the same decision, although depression may try to compress them into one. The Black Dog prefers final conclusions because they leave no room for contradictory evidence. I have learned to distrust anything inside me demanding that the audit be completed before morning.

So the answer may still begin in silliness, because silliness has earned its place beside seriousness. To be or not to be, maybe even 3B, provided somebody can locate the timetable and explain why X and Y were ever expected to deceive us. Vincent Price may continue putting forward his personal philosophy, Hamlet may continue identifying the rub and the black widow may wait patiently for humanity to vacate the throne. As for me, I am prepared to leave the grand conclusion unfiled. To be, certainly, although some days perhaps not all at once and never again solely according to the class into which somebody else decided my existence should fit.

Notes

1. Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy appears in Act 3, Scene 1 of Hamlet by William Shakespeare. The play was probably written around 1599–1601 and first appeared in print in 1603.
2. Welcome to My Nightmare was released by Alice Cooper in 1975. The album was produced by Bob Ezrin and includes the connected tracks “Devil’s Food” and “The Black Widow.”
3. Vincent Price performs the spoken curator’s narration heard during “Devil’s Food.” His theatrical discussion of the black widow develops into a broader reflection upon humanity before leading into “The Black Widow.”
4. “Devil’s Food” was written by Alice Cooper, Bob Ezrin and Kelley Jay. “The Black Widow” was written by Alice Cooper, Bob Ezrin and Dick Wagner; both recordings appeared on Welcome to My Nightmare in 1975.