The Archetype’s Plaything

I would have died to play Ophelia, but something greater said NO.

San Jeronimo Tlacochahupa, 2024

Have you ever had an experience of something greater than your personal self breaking through and taking over? Not necessarily talking about a psychotic break although that can happen. What was it like for you? Did it change you?

What follows is a poem about just such an experience. Plucked from a semi-autobiographical collection of poems,* writing it was like cutting the umbilical cord that had been wrapped around my neck for decades.

Note: Due to Substack’s formatting constraints, it was either butcher the line breaks or squash it into prose. 🙇🏻‍♀️ mgw grrr

Tennis isn’t happening, tho’ I’ve got the balls. Drama wasn’t worth getting involved. Yeah, I write for my life. I don’t market it, but there’s a point where it flows out, the dramatic voice rips through my minimal role and EVERYONE is astounded, including me.

It isn’t about me. I am its vehicle. It’s partly about how my love for Shakespeare was killed during my sophomore year in college. Damn it. I still haven’t read King Lear.

People didn’t get Nin. They couldn’t get past her Bohemian period and even when she let them read her journals could not understand how far she went beyond The Winter of Artifice.

The therapist I hoped could help me dissolve my writer’s block asks if I know the difference between the critic and the protector. The critic wouldn’t even consider letting me act again.

Players of the archetype seldom understand their roles--they didn’t write them. Hamlet grappled with that when he wrote the play within the play. I grappled with it when I was a girl of 20, laughing my way through a role I believed to be a throwaway.

A voice other than my own came through the floorboards, traveled up my limbs and torso till it reached my throat. Instead of choking, my throat opened. I knew by the way my arms remonstrated with the stars in heaven, I was suspended in the eternal moment. I knew by the absolute stillness beyond the lights, I was believed.

In the eternal moment the personal self dies away like last season’s leaves and the thing we call life takes over. The players are mostly unconscious, drugged by the music or the poetry or invoked by a desperate desire for love. At times I am a willing host.

Like the time I wandered into a woman’s conference that was happening at the student union took the mask of the Terrible Mother into my hands held it in front of my face and strutted in front of a roomful of lesbians. I remember the respect I got. Were it not for the fact I held the mask, I might have felt too threatened.

The archetype has no face. The archetype has to have a face, so the unconscious gives it one, whatever it takes. It isn’t the archetype, it’s the vocal image I listen to, it’s all part of this “play’s the thing” thing. When I am fixated on a role, the play has me unknowing. I am the archetype’s plaything.

Ophelia. I would have died to play Ophelia, but they wanted an Ophelia with no passion, an Ophelia who just memorized her lines and deferred to Hamlet, to her father, to the husband/wife director team, to whomever was part of her social milieu.

Even as she was losing it, she pretended to be fine.

How come all the GREAT female roles are suicides? Female impersonators, one might say. By that definition, strong women can’t play strong women. By that definition, not getting great female roles was no great loss but you couldn’t convince me of that.

Even when I would have died for those roles, something greater said NO. Terrible Mother handed me the mask and made me strut where there were no men and no mirrors, keening for a sensibility I had yet to grow into.

A sensibility, not a social milieu.

*The Stones I Choose, by Marilyn Manzanita, c. 2025