Popular Culture Review 30.2 real ” stretching off just out of frame , a simulacra of a better world we might imagine . Perhaps this is what it means to go mad like Hamlet . The music now becomes crowd noises , nothing particularly “ sensical ” coming from them , no liberal reason emerging . Until the epitaph is sung�with swords and debts and blood . It is like a revolution ( number nine ), a day in the life that leads directly into the sudden epiphany of “ BEACHTOWEL ”: the child that we have ( or that we are ) has been injured , and it is suddenly clear that the liberal view of a monadic , solipsistic self is utterly false . “ Your pain is my pain .” A “ single harp ” empathically ties us together . It is a truth we once knew before being born to this world . “ Don ’ t you remember ?” The question keeps repeating . When logos was communal , consanguine ? You have cut it out , cut out the way in which we were all together before , before life tricked us into thinking we are all isolated selves . The music changes and changes again . It sounds as if it is several different songs , yet it is all one song , all wrapped up together in a beach towel .
Hamlet ’ s father ’ s ghost begins his time with his son by commanding that he listen , and the ghost ends it with the command , “ REMEMBER .” We remember . We remember Algernon in the maze , no longer remembering . We remember the force of the world that acts upon us demanding we forget how intertwined we are . And so we forget our enmeshment . It might seem we have dementia�that we are literally “ out of our minds ” �but the real truth is that we all have it , that society is based on it . It is a collective madness that we cannot see clearly any longer . We are all “ ass-naked in the backyard ,” but we are the Emperors of our own new clothes , unable to see the madness . We are all feral wolf-children , putting out fires with gasoline , the punishment being the same as the crime as we splice in fugues where they don ’ t belong . When the self becomes a black hole bending everything back into
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