"You Must Wear Your Rue with a Difference" Regret, and the Coming Hard Times by JR McCarthy

The common rue has greenish-yellow flowers, blue-green leaves, a very strong odor and a bitter taste. In Europe, where it is found everywhere, it has long been used as an antidote for poisons and a bane for pernicious influences.;Not surprisingly, it is also a symbol for regret and lamentation.

When Ophelia brings rue, and a bevy of other talismanic flowers,
onto the stage in Act IV, scene five, of Hamlet, she has become
insane. Ophelia is delusional, and Shakespeare, as a rule,
provides next-to-no specific stage directions, so Ophelia usually
enters carrying, not a bouquet of flowers, but an assortment of
sticks and weeds. She distributes these to her brother, Laertes,
Hamlet''s mother, Queen Gertrude, and Hamlet''s murderous
uncle/stepfather, King Claudius. It is the second time in this scene
that Ophelia, the most blameless of all the doomed characters in
Shakespeare''s longest and most multi-layered tragedy, shares the
stage with Claudius, the most blood-stained. A director will often
use this scene to make a little allegorical hay, and Ophelia will
hand a weed to Claudius as she says:

"There''s rue for you, and here''s some for me. We may call it herb
of grace o'' Sundays. You must wear your rue with a difference."

Insufferable rides again. I want to break down Hamlet for an
audience that probably doesn''t want, and certainly doesn''t need
my help. Nevertheless, if you are willing to go along with me, for
the first time in a while, or for the first time ever, through the
twisted complexity of the Danish Tragedy, you will have a sense of
how I feel myself as I try to fathom both the depth and the
implications of the world-wide financial crisis. I am neither fond
of nor adept at untangling messes. This is particularly true when
each tendril of the tangle is articulated in jargon with which I am
less than familiar. If I take refuge from the messes that I cannot
fathom by trying to relate them to the messes that I can, I''m
certainly not hurting anyone, including myself. Also, who knows?
Some pale light may shine, and some consolation may be found if
an infuriating conundrum begins to become food for thought.

Come back with me to Elsinore for a spell.

Claudius is a regicidal, fratricidal lecher. He is about to beguile
Laertes into a new conspiracy to kill Hamlet. (This one will
succeed.) Laertes is only too willing to oblige, because Hamlet
recently killed Laertes'' father, Polonius, in a case of mistaken
identity. Ophelia may have become unhinged because Hamlet
killed her father, and there is also powerful evidence that she is
carrying Hamlet''s child. ( Laertes is apparently her older brother,
and the fact that no mention is ever made anywhere in the play of
their mother has led some scholars to speculate that she died
bringing Ophelia into the world.) The hypocritical windbag
Polonius was both heartless and ruthless when it came to his
daughter: he was dismissive of her feelings for Hamlet, but he
used her to spy on Hamlet in order to curry favor with Claudius. In
a tale where just about every monster of the human psyche is
dragged up into the cold light of day, nothing that transpires is
more predictable or inevitable than the annihilation of poor,
powerless Ophelia.

Rue is the only flower that the beleaguered Ophelia keeps for
herself. This may be as eloquent a statement on the nature of
regret as may be found in our literature. Ophelia is a victim of
both ruthless opportunism and callous indifference. Having
systematically lost everyone and everything about which she ever
cared, always through forces beyond her control and for reasons
that have nothing to do with her, she now begins to lose herself .
Made mad by betrayal and desolation, it is only a matter of time
before she falls, weedy trophies and all, into a brook and down to
muddy death. Ophelia is the collateral casualty of a protracted
abomination. How is it, even in madness, as she is passing out the
rue, that she has the subtlety to put a little rue aside for herself ?
and to wear it with a difference?

America seems, in these difficult days, to be living in the age of
rue. Some of us rue the things we failed to do in that epochal time
when there did not seem to be an end to prosperity and plenty.
Some of us rue the things we did ? the vain and greedy things we
did ? when we believed that the gravy train was either never
going to derail, or would derail at some point in the distant future
when we had managed to get ourselves off of it. Whether this
time of piquant financial anxiety was thrust upon us by forces
beyond our control, or thrust upon others by forces we had a
hand in unleashing, there is no doubt that we''d all do things
differently if we had them to do over again ? or at least, we''d try to
do things differently if we could only have one more chance......

In this age of rue, some of us have approached the role of
Claudius, which is to say that we were rapacious in our appetites
and abusive of our powers. In this age of rue, some of us have
enacted the roles of Polonius, or Laertes, or Gertrude, and we
were too weak or clueless to do anything but go along for the ride.
In this age of rue, some of us, like the Mournful Dane himself, are
bright and likeable souls who are paralyzed by the dilemma of
action vs. inaction. In this age of rue, we did or failed to do, and
we said or failed to say, while forces we never quite understood
hurled beyond our control.

Now in this age of rue, many, many of us will play the role of
Ophelia: bereft of comfort and despairing of place because people
who should have considered us did not, and people who had no
business trifling with us trifled just the same. Some of us may
even descend into madness. Most of us, hopefully, will grasp at
the shreds of our identity, and assert autonomy by taking stock.
That''s how you wear your rue with a difference.

The root of the English word regret is the French word for
"bewail" or "cry over" . The fact that we regret something does
not necessarily mean that we are even remotely responsible for
the fact that it occurred. It is neither seemly nor useful to assume
blame for misfortune one did not cause, or to troll along the banks
of misfortune in search of someone who will tell us that we are
blameless ? which is of course, something that we already know.
Far less seemly, and considerably less useful, is being all about
blame. It is the depth of both calumny and cowardice when it is
the guilty party who points the finger, or tries to mitigate his guilt
by sending us in the direction of those he deigns guiltier than
himself, Such behavior always out-Herods Herod. What is difficult
to admit, and even more difficult to accept, is that once the
damage is done, fixing the blame rarely does anything to
illuminate the finer points, and is never anything but cold
comfort. Fix the problem, the Japanese say, not the blame.

When the problem is universal, and we have not yet plumbed its
depth, introspection is as good a place as any to begin the fix:
what can I learn, about myself and about everything else that is
truly important, from the coming hard times? How can I wear my
rue with a difference? I regret to say that I don''t yet know ? but
I''ll get back to you.

J.R. McCarthy

JR McCarthy is a published author and also a staff writer for ArtistsILove.com