Dan Fishback: Remember honestly

Next weekend on College Green, I will perform in the Underground Shakespeare Company's As You Like It. I will, somewhat begrudgingly, recite the famous "All the world's a stage" speech. Even if you don't know the speech, even if you never had to memorize it for a class, even if you've never seen the blasted play, you know generally that there exists a monologue that begins, "All the world's a stage..." And I wish you'd all forget it.

It's torture to deliver famous lines. Everyone says it the same way -- we practically sing it the same way. Particularly if it's in iambic pentameter: "ALL the WORLD'S a STAGE." And last year, as Puck, I had to say: "What FOOLS these MORtals BE!" There's the temptation to say it completely differently: "All the world's A STAGE!" "What fools THESE mortals be!" But mess with it too much and you destroy the illusion: the play disappears, and all the audience can think about is how weird you're being.

Then again, say it normal and you still have an audience somewhat distracted from the stage action: "Oh look Honey -- he just said that famous line!" The real nerds will even mouth it along with you. Elderly nerds will say it out loud. Groups of nerds will sway along with the iambs.

It's torture -- absolute torture. You feel like an utter clown. You are no longer in service of the muse -- you are in service of a mass need to feel well-versed in Shakespeare. Say a famous line and everyone thinks they're scholars. Sigh, "Romeo, oh Romeo," and everyone misses the point. Your act becomes historical, contextual, garishly naked in its artifice. There are no more real people with real emotions -- no more developed characters. Just "Shakespeare."

"ALL the WORLD'S a STAGE." I'm dreading this speech.

And in a similar way, I've been dreading this column. The week of Sept. 11, 2002. There will be so many speeches, so many articles, and the real struggle for every speaker and every writer won't be, "How do I best express what I want to say?" but rather, "How do I refrain from sounding entirely cliched?"

The speeches delivered on Wednesday and the various verbal dedications that will occur all week long, might as well be, "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" It hardly means anything anymore. Everyone knows the spiel. All of us at ready soapboxes will be hard-pressed to present emotional honesty this week.

If we do something entirely unexpected, we will draw attention to ourselves as rhetoricians. If we flow with the tropes, then we might as well have shut up in the first place, stayed at home, left our keyboards untouched.

Yet, avoiding the subject entirely seems disrespectful somehow. I think most of us feel a genuine desire to honor the dead and make gestures of resistance to a potentially bloody future.

And we can. Without, thankfully, the help of writers like me. Times like these do not lend themselves to the soapbox, nor the podium, nor anything with a single voice. I was heartened to read that, this Wednesday, there will be a community art project, a blood drive, a humanitarian information fair. Bells will toll. Our community has not given up on the power of the gesture.

And while these are all gestures to commemorate and honor, they also seem to gesture towards the less nuanced media -- the networks that have capitalized on this anniversary as though they were advertising for the next blockbuster action movie. The contrast borders on the absurd. This Wednesday, a silent, personal act of mourning or hope will prove that we will not let our lives be commodified, squeezed into cliches, rendered too generic to take seriously.

All the world's a stage, indeed. And, like all art forms, we can only hope that force propelling our lives remains as genuine and unblemished by devious forces as possible. A commitment to that sort of honesty would bring us one step closer to getting us out of this mess in the first place, don't you think?

Dan Fishback is a senior American Identities major from Olney, Md.

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