Hour approaching twilight. King making his way through the castle. Sword arm aching. Tired. Sword heavy. Crown heavy.
King. Not like he thought.
Distant battle sounds barely register. Scraping metal. Crashes. Thumps. Muffled shouts. Footsteps. Faint smell of smoke.
Push her away. Her absence looms. Push away her being gone.
No matter. Trees have come to Dunsinane.
MACDUFF: Turn, hellhound, turn!
Macbeth 5.8.4-10
MACBETH:
Of all men else I have avoided thee.
But get thee back. My soul is too much charged
With blood of thine already.
MACDUFF: I have no words;
My voice is in my sword, thou bloodier villain
Than terms can give thee out.
We know this moment. High noon. Midnight. Where time stops. What registers by the watch ceases to matter. This is our collective moment of the final clash, the gunfight, the battle for ourselves, whomever our opponent may seem to be.
The showdown embodies our own dark night of the soul. As San Juan De La Cruz put it:
Once in the dark of night,
Inflamed with love and yearning, I arose
(O coming of delight!)
And went, as no one knows,
When all my house lay long in deep repose
All in the dark went right,
Down secret steps, disguised in other clothes,
(O coming of delight!)
In dark when no one knows,
When all my house lay long in deep repose.
And in the luck of night
In secret places where no other spied
I went without my sight
Without a light to guide
Except the heart that lit me from inside.
It guided me and shone
Surer than noonday sunlight over me,
And led me to the one
Whom only I could see
Deep in a place where only we could be.
O guiding dark of night!
O dark of night more darling than the dawn!
O night that can unite
A lover and loved one,
Lover and loved one moved in unison.
And on my flowering breast
Which I had kept for him and him alone
He slept as I caressed
And loved him for my own,
Breathing an air from redolent cedars blown.
And from the castle wall
The wind came down to winnow through his hair
Bidding his fingers fall,
Searing my throat with air
And all my senses were suspended there.
I stayed there to forget.
There on my lover, face to face, I lay.
All ended, and I let
My cares all fall away
Forgotten in the lilies on that day.
“Dark Night of the Soul” by St. John of the Cross. 16th Century. Trans. A.Z. Foreman.*
Humans are torn by our dualistic nature. Polarization seethes within us like soft ice cream, both delicious and deadly. Sexual reproduction saves us and damns us. Our very regeneration arrives through temptation and potential damnation. Our pure spiritual aspirations don’t always hang so well on the frame of our needy, greedy flesh. Spirit yearns for one kind of being, flesh for another. Spirit seeks more spirit. Flesh hankers after more flesh. Why are the tastiest foods always so bad for us?
Naturally, “once you get used to them, the healthy foods actually taste better!”
Yes. Yes. We know. But the beer may also taste awfully good.
Our subsequent restlessness becomes tortured sleeplessness, only to be resolved by confrontation and union, in the darkness. The soul meeting with the Soul. Union of the self with the Self. This can be peaceful, but it is also, especially in literature and the arts, so often represented as being violent.
We struggle over the soul of our own humanity, whether that presents itself as the soul of a nation, of a village, or of an individual. Whether internal or external, this meeting of dark and light in flux is often a battle. And only on the other side of that, “when the battle’s lost and won” may we find eventual salvation or peace.**
Our struggle may be with aspects within ourselves, or with an intractable social fabric. Here’s a scene from 42 with the very recently departed Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson:
Of course, there is no permanent solution. Not until we meet the solace of the grave (and perhaps not even then). The ongoing nature of this struggle is the reason we remain perenially obsessed with this opposition–writing it and reframing it again and again, the strange violence within it appealing to our more bestial natures. Grimly fascinated by the violence within ourselves.
In Macbeth, the struggle of the self with the self becomes apparent on multiple levels. For example, the characters of Macbeth and Macduff are strikingly similar. Like the fungible male lovers, Demetrius and Lysander, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not much really distinguishes the two thanes in Macbeth. In many respects, they are almost interchangeable. Both men initially serve King Duncan. Both are married. Prone to similar kinds of introspection, they often speak in similar ways, and with similar cadences. Both live according to similar moral codes, and even their names are parallel, although Macduff has children while Macbeth does not.
Yet, Macbeth is shown a prophecy which drives him off course. His glimpse of the future drags him forwards in the same way that memory sometimes drags us into retrospection. The witches’ mention of the word ‘king’ tugs at the short hairs of Macbeth’s ambition, making him impatient with obsession. Macbeth finds himself unwilling to wait for his future to arrive in its own time, and of its own accord. Lady Macbeth’s nudging renders his present less immediate, less material. Ends begin to justify means.
If we extend the old metaphor of devil and angel dwelling inside each of us, we may see Macbeth and Macduff as embodying these two aspects of humanity. Each has positive and less positive qualities, but one appears to keep himself on the road, while the other departs into the rooky wood. Two roads diverge in Birnham Wood, and I, sorry I am only one traveler seeking both, abandon the white whale for the throne, the crown.
In the vernacular of the American western, the metaphor becomes a gunfight. And it represents the culmination of a profound mixture of memory, both sweet and vicious, and often a predatory kind of vengeance. There are many cinematic examples of this duel, but this one, directed by Sergio Leone, and scored by Ennio Morricone, captures the bittersweetness of human polarity. It shows us the ways in which the past often intrudes upon the present and renders the immediacy of the pull of memory with strong cinematic style:
In such moments, leave taking remains literal. In these stories, as in Macbeth, someone has died, and in a kind of exchange, someone else must die for that. Often, we sacrifice the dark parts of our own soul, cutting away our painful memories, our transgressions, our rages, and our sorrows. For it is only after our negatives have been expunged that a new king is able to again ascend the throne of humanity. The Christ story, the idea of one (a King) who dies for the sins of all humankind, is naturally one of the most familiar examples.
As for our sorrows, as for sins against our humanity, against our loves, these are so profound that they leave us incredulous in their aftermath. When Ross tells Macduff that his family is dead, Macduff almost cannot, at first, comprehend the words:
ROSS:
Macbeth 4.3.236-64
Let not your ears despise my tongue forever,
Which shall possess them with the heaviest sound
That ever yet they heard.
MACDUFF: Hum! I guess at it.
ROSS:
Your castle is surprised, your wife and babes
Savagely slaughtered. To relate the manner
Were on the quarry of these murdered deer
To add the death of you.
MALCOLM: Merciful heaven!—
What, man, ne’er pull your hat upon your brows.
Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.
MACDUFF: My children too?
ROSS:
Wife, children, servants, all that could be found.
MACDUFF:
And I must be from thence? My wife killed too?
ROSS: I have said.
MALCOLM: Be comforted.
Let’s make us med’cines of our great revenge
To cure this deadly grief.
MACDUFF:
He has no children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say “all’? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?
MALCOLM: Dispute it like a man.
MACDUFF: I shall do so,
But I must also feel it as a man.
I cannot but remember such things were
That were most precious to me. Did heaven look on
And would not take their part?
Our perceived duties and obligations may haunt us in such cases, turning to guilt. How we might have been here or there at such a moment, at such a time. How we might have handled things differently. Hindsight. What might have been. Regret. Bitterness.
The eventual resolution may offer an uneasy kind of peace, but it usually comes at a price, with a wounding or a sacrifice, and throughout the struggle, the self faces the threat of annihilation:
But the air was too full of noise and gun smoke for me to notice pain. Wasn’t bad pain anyway. I got the sights up for another shot, and heard bullets hit metal as Frenchy and Pablo fired. The chair swung around and there he was–or there it was–with both colts cocked and pointed at me.
The Devil & Streak Wilson by Daniel Boyd.***
American culture, with its undercurrent of violence, lends itself easily to the western genre. In the mythos of the fictional American West, one lives and dies by the sword, or by the six gun. Still, the fact that weapons have become such cultural talismans also remains deeply problematic. While those of us in the United States may imagine ourselves as dragon slayers, as gun toting protectors who maintain law and order, our social proliferation of weapons (currently supported by the NRA and a president who panders shamelessly to the ignorant side of American personal mythology) releases more dragons than all our weapons could slay.
Although I cannot know, it has been said that many modern Japanese people, especially males, tend to view themselves as modern day Samurai, adhering to a social and moral code of Bushido. Considering the ways in which corporate and self improvement protocols strive to foster carefully crafted ‘inner warrior’ ideals in the boardroom or in the psyche, such aspirations appear to remain only modern mythical constructs that hearken back to a set of bygone ideals which are themselves also constructs. Heightened rhetoric about guns and the Second Ammendment to the United States Constitution suggests that a fair number of Americans (usually males) view themselves somehow as heroic gunslingers, potentially representing little candles of law throwing beams in a naughty world.
The Second Ammendment to the United States Constitution actually says:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.****
This speaks nothing to deeper morality or responsibility, let alone the dark night conjurations of those for whom firearms have become mythic totems for ideas of motley coated individual freedoms. The ongoing American fascination with firearms speaks its own dire warnings. Breonna Taylor? Jacob Blake? Brandon Laducer? That’s just a list of people shot by officers. What about the people shot while protesting, by others like Kyle Rittenhouse, who believed that they were maintaining law and order? “From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word.” “[Y]ea, they have slain the servants with the edge of the sword, and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”***** How easily ideas may become dangerous, especially when wrapped in rhetoric about God, family, dreams, prosperity, and all the security blankets of our dreams, and placed into the hands of the misguided.
Perhaps we have seen too many vigilante moments in our plays and films. Some people attempt to act out these fictions in real life, forgetting that they are fictions, and the underlying cutural structure of racism too often rises to the surface in such cases as well. People have always been suspicious of ‘others’, and that suspicion seems to grow with our collective social guilt–increasing in direct proportion to how much the social and cultural fabrics we inhabit have wronged one group or another. And sadly, the history of individually and communally committed wrongs based on racial characteristics runs long a deep. Our stories present our cultural vernacular–seeking to present ourselves to ourselves, incorporating myths with which we explain ourselves and justify our actions. Yet, when the mythology of our own nobility, or our own heroism breaks down, we are often left facing ourselves again in the darkness as our own guilt rises up before us. The gunfight becomes a gunfight with the self, but some will always displace the shadow self–projecting it onto others, onto those who we believe ‘look’ different from us or believe differently from the way we believe.
Because fewer and fewer of us seem to be trained in critical thinking these days, perhaps because our educational budgets remain in tatters in the face of more capitalist centered political agendas, fewer people seem to have the proper capacity to evaluate words, behavior, and events. We begin to see Macbeth and Macduff not as characters in a cautionary tale, but as warriors to emulate. We begin to believe that we are samurai. Inwardly, we picture ourselves as characters portrayed by Clint Eastwood, and we fail to recall that those characters are fictive portrayals of a larger mythic structure.
If gunfighters or swordsmen illustrate anything for us, it should be to help us remember that the lives of real gunfighters in the historical American West were seldom glamorous or exciting. In fact, they were usually only really remarkable in being incredibly brief. Anger and vengeance as an actual lifestyle are almost never anything like they are in the movies, as even the movies often indicate:
Had the United States not worked so hard for so long at fostering its anti-intellect strains, more people might see how ludicrous such emulation is. Had people been taught to think, been schooled in recognizing misleading sales pitches, we might not be where we are. Yet, here we are.
Many Americans retain a strong sense of ‘cowboy’ identity, and romanticized versions of history and identity can be difficult to shake when they become so deeply ingrained:
Yet, our general idea of cowboys derives from the cinema. We forget that, historically speaking, few cowboys carried sidearms. They couldn’t afford them, and a pistol isn’t all that useful when driving cattle. And rifles were for bagging small game for dinner, not for shooting protestors just because you somehow disagree with their message.
At the same time, many of us also fancy ourselves as ideological freedom fighters. Some of us babble incoherently about ‘freedom’ and ‘rights’ while seeming to have only the dimmest reptilian understanding of what those concepts might be or what responsibilities they might entail. Also, apparently surprising numbers of people think only of their own rights–as if rights were something assured in a vaccuum, even at the expense of fellow citizens or our communities. The right to carry firearms. The right not to wear a mask.
Yet, in spite of our independent freedom fighting, we seem to so easily fall for a confidence games. We believe what we perceive as the underlying substance in political speeches that are really only rhetorical tools–so often meaningless oral smoke and mirrors specifically designed to make us follow meekly while under the illusion that we might be asserting ourselves.
But what about the rugged individualist? Oh, the idea of that character is still out there too, and still a cowboy. The talismanic weapons have been updated, but the cowboy remains much the same:
These are fiction, of course, but they are fictions of an especially deep and resonant kind, because, in ways both good and bad, they speak to the personal mythology of identity. And it is important to note that politicians use these ideas repeatedly everywhere.
If a politician proclaims that an “America First” agenda must include putting immigrant children in cages and destroying their families, one has to wonder how anyone can support it. Yet, chillingly, people do. Perhaps because those children–really just children–are cast through tricks of political rhetoric into the menacing role of the ‘others’ in our mythology. Administrations that threaten legal protestors–their own citizens–with federal troops can espouse no real concerns about human liberty or safety, but once those protestors have been cast as ‘others’ the perspective changes. Such policy and rhetorical perspective, substituting words like “riot” in place of “protest”, results in a consistent erosion of real human rights beneath the subterfuge of rhetorical posturing. This is how people like Hitler rise to power.
It becomes difficult to overstate how wrong headed such unevaluated mythical thinking is. We are not really our myths. We make them. And we can either choose to take the myths that others would craft for us at face value, and follow like sheep into the fold, or we can forge our own–recrafting our own myths and our own understanding as true warriors, as those who think for ourselves.
The real truth is (whether you choose to believe it or not) is that people need each other. We need other people, we need other cultures, we need other faiths, and we need other countries. People everywhere should take care of each other and not just of themselves. Needless to say, reasonable people, don’t shoot each other.
This is not to say that our inclusion should be blind. We should not encourage untreated hemophiliacs to work with kitchen knives. But when we begin to cast people whom we may not truly understand as malevolent others, then we begin to stray from the true path of understanding. For our smaller concerns are just that. They are small.
Exclusion really only cuts away our own humanitiy, leaving us pitifully diminished in its wake. On the other hand, inclusion supports the better side of us, nurturing the angel in our human natures. Inclusion allows us not only to see different people more clearly, but also to treat them as they really are–as part of us in the larger sense, as part of the greater whole that comprises the global human community.
Of course governments and policies may shift, as they have in the past. However, should the political system in the U.S. keep to its present course in the next election (which, sadly, looks entirely possible at present), Birnham Wood will eventually come to Dunsinane again.
In one sense, Macduff may be understood as a representation of our flawed but nobly striving humanity. An as long as we survive, he will always be out there. Should things take a turn for the worse, he will eventually appear again on the doorstep, voice in his sword, ready for change. When that day comes, our most important task will be to stand with him.
For now, we can do our best to stand with humanity today. For all my readers worldwide, I urge you to continue to observe safety protocols, recycle what you can, and try to minimise practices which might contribute more to climate change. Tell your family and friends that you love them. Tell them today and remind them often.
For readers in the U.S., I encourage everyone to try to take fewer postal shipments in October and early November to help alleviate postal congestion at those times. Also, most of all, please remember to cast your vote either by mail (which mail ballots may most often be dropped off at your local election office), or in person for the November 3rd presidential election. Remember that you may register, check your voter’s registration and/or request a voter’s ballot by mail at vote.org.
Take good care out there, and best of luck to you all.
*Saint John of the Cross. “The Dark Night of the Soul”. 16th century. A.Z. Foreman, trans. http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2009/09/saint-john-of-cross-dark-night-of-soul.html In the original Spanish:
La Noche Oscura Del Alma
San Juan De La Cruz
Cançiones del alma que se goça d’auer llegado al alto estado de la perfecçion, que es la union con Dios, por el camino de la negaçion espiritual
En una noche obscura,
con ansias en amores imflamada,
¡oh dichosa uentura!
sali sin ser notada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada.
A escuras y segura,
por la secreta escala disfraçada,
¡oh dichosa uentura!
a escuras y ençelada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada.
En la noche dichosa,
en secreto, que nadie me ueya,
ni yo miraua cosa,
sin otra luz ni guia
sino la que en el coraçon ardia.
Aquesta me guiaua
mas cierto que la luz del mediodia,
adonde me esperaua
quien yo bien me sabia,
en parte donde nadie parecia.
¡Oh noche que me guiaste!
¡oh noche amable mas que el aluorada!,
¡oh noche que juntaste
amado con amada,
amada en el amado transformada!
Y en mi pecho florido,
que entero para el solo se guardaua,
alli quedo dormido,
y yo le regalaua,
y el ventalle de cedros ayre daua.
El ayre de la almena,
cuando ya sus cabellos esparzia,
con su mano serena
en mi cuello heria,
y todos mis sentidos suspendia.
Quedeme y oluideme,
el rostro recline sobre el amado,
ceso todo, y dexeme,
dexando mi cuidado
entre las açucenas olvidado.
**Macbeth 1.1.4
***Daniel Boyd. The Devil & Streak Wilson. (Oakland: Montag Press, 2020), ebook. Also available in paperback on Amazon. Boyd’s tale presents the metaphor of self struggle in a significant way, by couching the duel with the devil in the western vernacular.
****This is arguably the earliest version, and the one ratified by Delaware. Other states have ratified different versions, often changing the placement of the commas. The original idea stems from the English Bill of Rights of 1869 which says, in part, “That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defense suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law”.
*****The first line comes from Robert Ingersoll’s words spoken at the grave of his brother, Ebon. The entire oratory is recorded in the Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, collected by his brother, Clinton P. Farrell, and may be read here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/961082-robert-s-eulogy-at-his-brother-ebon-c-ingersoll-s-grave-even The second line comes from Job 1:15 in the King James version of the Bible.