Hamlet (4,5) Ophelia Falling

“I think Shakespeare would agree that madness is not random behavior but efforts to make sense of happenings and doings that do not conform to expectations, to traditions, to rules of order.”

-- Theodore Sarbin, psychologist

If the displays of madness by Hamlet were feigned, Ophelia’s insanity is quite real. She does not have a friendly ghost to explain what is going on. Nothing makes sense and all is viciously cruel.

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the death of her father, killed by her lover … the [earlier] harsh treatment by her lover, and his rejection of her. The warnings from brother and father that this would happen. Her role in the spying on Hamlet. Her part in driving him mad, and then apart from her. Her sense of a world out of joint, corrupt, loveless, loyalties abraded.

-- Marvin Rosenberg, “The Masks of Hamlet”

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The Natural World

Artist: Andre Villeneuve

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Chikungunya

As if killer bees and bedbugs were not bad enough, now we have another new import from globalization: a mosquito-borne disease that will make you envy death.

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Chikungunya virus seems, at first, to have a lot in common with dengue virus, another mosquito-borne pathogen. Both cause extremely painful diseases—chikungunya’s name comes from a Makonde word meaning “that which bends up,” referring to the contortions sufferers put themselves through due to intense joint pain. Dengue’s nickname is breakbone fever. Both viruses are primarily transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, and both have been moving slowly closer to the United States over the past decades, with local cases of dengue fever already found in Florida and Texas.

Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the first locally acquired cases of chikungunya in the United States. A woman in Miami-Dade County and a man in Palm Beach County, neither of whom had left the country recently, both came down with the dreaded disease.

-- Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart at Slate.com

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