Down the drain

Have you ever been led down the primrose path?

Shakespeare might have created that phrase. Even if not the originator, he certainly manifested one of the phrase's earliest appearances when he put it into the mouth of Ophelia. She rebuffed her brother, Laertes, for insisting that she resist the advances of Hamlet. All the while, from her point of view, her libertine brother was inclined to be not as stringent with parameters for his own behavior. For Ophelia, as well as for the porter in Macbeth who also spoke of the primrose way, this path represented the deceptively lovely going down to the everlasting bonfire.

Primroses are easy. They come early. They bring to the very beginning of spring a display of vibrant and gaudy color. The eyes of their chrome yellow cores are surrounded by deep purple or dark ruby margins. There are also gentler lavenders and pinks for the fainthearted.

While walking a real primrose path may be lovely and non-problematic, the phrase implies a hidden cost. The phrase also implies that the speaker is suggesting this path does so with the intention of deceitful trickery.

Some suggest that the real Ophelia, the historical inspiration for the Shakespearean character, was a Katherine Hamnet. Ms. Hamnet fell into the Avon River to her death in December 1579. An inquest was conducted to determine if her death was a suicide. Kate was suffering, it seems, from what is referred to as a broken heart. The inquest ruled that she merely overbalanced while carrying heavy pails, and so accidentally fell to her watery death.

Was Kate's falling Ophelia's falling? And what of her surname being the given name of Shakespeare's only son, a fraternal twin who died at 11 years of age?

Perhaps the hazy boundary between narrative and history is lined with primroses whose centers are like blank high definition wide screens of psychoanalytic pseudo tabula rasa observation with surround sound. And in those centers we might find in the smoky fog emerging hypnagogic images. Ophelia, Kate, Hamnet and maybe Hepburn, rise and fall, dance and sing, do lines and say whatever.

We might expect this sort of behavior in Chinese opium dens, dense with smoke and bony bodies going down, not the primrose path, but, so to speak, the drain.

But would you expect it in classes of scientific study in American schools?

It might shock you, but do you realize that the water going down the tub drain does NOT necessarily go down counter clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern hemisphere? Were you taught this? I have spent many tub moments in the north and in the south watching the drainage corroborate this teaching. Yet now I am learning that the Coriolis Force is too weak to effect bodies of water as small as those found in bathing tubs.

The Coriolis Force, caused by the earth's rotation, is the apparent deflection of air from its path as seen by an observer on earth. There is deflection to the right in the northern hemisphere, and to the left in the southern hemisphere. But none of this matters in matters as intimate as waters for bathing.

So, once again, misinformed and malformed, bony and breathless, I find myself in the fourth down, down on my luck. I want to be in the downy comfort, down my own alley. I really want to be down the rabbit hole, and so I am. All along, I have been off, on an adventure. Into the unknown, I am. And I am in good apophatic company, all emerging amidst the primroses. We are all the dancing down, rings around, primrosy.

Don't be silly.

Woody Allen gets down: "More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly mu se who hopes to inspire profound mutiny in all those who care to read. Our Rx ma y be wearing a pir ate cloak of in visibility, but emanating fr om within this shado w is hope that readers will feel free to respond. Who kno ws: You may e ven inspir e the muse. Make contact if you dare.