11

The End of the Cold War and Shakespeare’s Macbeth

by Vladimir Golstein

It is naïve to think that Macbeth is only about some “vaulting” and murderous ambition. Macbeth does not acquire the throne with the intention of controlling his subjects. In fact, in his quest to secure his rule, he strives to control the very idea of time and change. It is thus hardly surprising that when he is killed, Macduff declares: “behold, where stands/The usurper’s cursed head: THE TIME IS FREE.”
Enslaving time, means stopping its flow; it means attacking the very idea of change, and therefore destroying the agents of change: the young. Thus, Macbeth’ speciality is butchering children.  He does so as he tries to achieve “security,” – which, obviously, means the elimination of rivals.  But the witches do inform us that: “security is mortals’ chiefest enemy.”  The quest for it is as deadly as its temporary possession.  Permanence, security, they are as futile as the desire to stop the time.
Now fast forward to the collapse of the Soviet Union.  That collapse meant that Russia, in fact, has re-entered time, that the country gave up its reliance on dead schemes that stifled change and innovation, that it has entered the real world, at last.
Not so with the USA, which went in the opposite direction by triumphantly declaring the END OF HISTORY.  Which means the end of time, and therefore the spasmodic need of the US to maintain its “full spectrum dominance.” That was the wet dream of neocons, articulated loud and clear in their PNAC documents.  This elusive dominance clearly implied the Macbeth route: the suppression of inevitable rivals, precluding any threat to the security of one’s rule.  This quest for security has resulted in endless wars and bullying in search of supremacy.  It has also resulted in the reign full of lies and deceptions: “ look like th’ innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t.”  One more war or treachery to end all wars, one more step, and one is fully secure, “perfect, whole as a marble, founded as a rock.”
Likewise, instead of achieving security, Macbeth’s own quest produces endless anxiety and lack of sleep.  At first, Macbeth grip on power seems secure.  He treacherously kills the king, Duncan.  The king’s legitimate children run away, feeling incapable of overcoming Macbeth’s skilful disassembling, which he utilized in his rise to the top and his hope to subvert time: “mock the time with fairest show, false face must hide what the false heart doth know.” Macbeth’s deceptions produce a real crisis in perception.  When vice looks like virtue, how is virtue supposed to look?  One of Duncan’s sons concludes: “though all things foul would wear the brows of grace, yet, Grace must still look so.”  Yet, knowing how ineffective their virtuous look appears at the moment, and incapable of resisting Macbeth’s bloody and deceitful rise to power, Duncan’s children ran away from Scotland, realizing that for them, “there’s daggers in men’s smiles, the near in blood, the nearer bloody.”  Indeed, Macbeth, whose name rhymes with death, obviously cannot stop.  He kills to secure his power, but as the result, produces more and more resistance. “To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus. Our fear is Banquo.”
History does not and cannot end.  For that reason, there is always rhyming (the activity that presupposes movement and unfolding).  Duncan (whom Macbeth kills) rhymes with Banquo (who was prophesied to produce future kings).  Consequently, the murder of Banquo does not solve anything, as there are his children.  The murder of MacDuff’s children does not solve anything as there is MacDuff.  The murder of Duncan brings in the crown, but there are Duncan children on the loose.  The quest for security can never be completed.  That’s how Macbeth responds to the news that his rival, Banquo, is killed, but his son escaped:

MACBETH: Then comes my fit again: I had else been PERFECT,
WHOLE AS THE MARBLE, FOUNDED AS THE ROCK,
As broad and general as the casing air:
But now I am cabin’d, cribb’d, confined, bound in
To saucy doubts and fears. But Banquo’s safe?
FIRST MURDERER:  Ay, my good lord: safe in a ditch he bides,
With twenty trenched gashes on his head;
The least a death to nature.
MACBETH Thanks for that: There the grown serpent lies; the worm that’s fled
Hath nature that IN TIME WILL VENOM BREED,
No teeth for the present.”

This quest for wholeness, for perfection, for the end of time cannot be sustained.  Time does not end.  Russia might be weakened, but China and Iran would arise, and the attempt to slow down Iran gives Russia a chance to grow.
In time, the toothless present grows into venomous future.  Macbeth eventually realizes the futility of his quest: “better be with the dead, whom we, to gain our peace have sent to peace, than on the torture of the mind, to lie in restless ecstasy.“  He does not want to give up, however, so the murder spree continues: “each new morn, new widows howl, new orphans cry; new sorrows strike heaven on the face.”  He is helped in his quest by the conniving witches, the masters of “the deed without name.”  Which of course, might exist in fantasy, but not in reality; eventually, all the deeds of Macbeth are named.  Instead of securing his reign, he kills his sleep, and destroys the very idea of meaningful time, that is the time that brings in changes.  He is stuck in the meaningless death-like existence so that the very word, “die,” loses its meaning.  What is left is the meaningless sequence of meaningless moments:

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.”

Life without any possibility of change and development obviously has no meaning: “it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  This sense of nothingness, for which he, in fact, killed hundreds, surely fills Macbeth with complete despair and anger at the world:

“I gin to be aweary of the sun,
And wish the estate o’ the world were now undone.
Ring the alarum-bell! Blow, wind! come, wrack!
At least we’ll die with harness on our back.”

While he and his wife enjoy their life of despair and murder, the country groans with pain:

“Alas, poor country!
Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot
Be called our mother, but our grave, where nothing,
But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile;
Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air
Are made, not marked; where violent sorrow seems
A modern ecstasy. The dead man’s knell
Is there scarce asked for who, and good men’s lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps,
Dying or ere they sicken.”

Macbeth recognizes, of course, that in his quest for security and full dominance, he went terribly wrong:

“And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not!”

Eventually, Macbeth has ostracised enough people, who then rise against him: “Macbeth is ripe for shaking, and the Powers above put on their instruments.”  His last days on the throne are marked by fear and hatred that he elicits even from his followers:

“What does the tyrant?
CAITHNESS: Some say he’s mad; others that lesser hate him
Do call it valiant fury: but, for certain,
He cannot buckle his distemper’d cause
Within the belt of rule.
ANGUS: Now does he feel
His secret murders sticking on his hands;
Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;
THOSE HE COMMANDS MOVE ONLY IN COMMAND
NOTHING IN LOVE: now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.

Macbeth’s attempt to control time is crushed by time.  The usurping nature of his quest is finally revealed, he is a dwarfish thief, too small for his kingly robe and for his giant ambitions.  Macbeth dies, having received the following epitaph from Malcolm:

“What’s more to do, Which would be planted newly with the TIME,
As calling home our exiled friends abroad
That fled the snares of watchful tyranny;
Producing forth the cruel ministers
Of this DEAD BUTCHER AND HIS FIEND-LIKE QUEEN,
Who, as ’tis thought, by self and violent hands
Took off her life.”

It will be naïve to think that Shakespeare’s insight applies only to Scotland and to its cruel ruler.  Shakespeare’s insights are timeless.


Vladimir Golstein is an associate professor of Russian Literature at Brown University.

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binra
binra
Oct 12, 2017 11:00 AM

Linear time operates the experience of narrative continuity. All time – or always – is now. But the focus in idea generates or creates ever shifting perspective – change.
Yet the always is in every now and every now is within always – but can seem to exist within its own idea as a result of focusing exclusively – ie blocking or filtering that temporarily maps out or denies the field of awareness in order to focus within specific attributes of self-differentiation.
Such mythic identity and narrative control is itself the expression of self-definition or self-image. The forms of such a focus become thus the model and meaning of accepted reality. The assertion of power being the attempt to conform expressions or symptoms of being, to idol or imaged identity construct.
The symbol-story of the Prodigal Son sets out the idea a break with with a ‘Living’ inheritance for a substitute reality experience – the usurping or stealing of an inclusive and shared ‘kingdom’ or communication within being – for a blind or private creation of coercive assertion that exchanges real relationship for private fantasy self-gratifications seeking validation and reinforcement at expense of the true. The story goes quickly to the utter bankruptcy and ruin of such self-depriving illusions invested true to the wake up or remembering of the true nature of connection and releases the grandiose tempt of ‘lording it’ as a willingness to serve the whole. This realignment allows the true nature of Inheritance to operate as extension of the gift – instead of getting and defending at expense of whole or from others. But the drama of the ‘separation experience’ is the history of the world – replicated in cycles of civilisations as of individuals and cultures within them.
The cosmology of the killing of the father of a heavenly alignment and subsequent division, destruction and loss of love and power is recorded in the mythic record of antiquity and somewhat recovered in the electric universe theories and correlations that Velikovsky raised to modern awareness and met extreme symptoms of denial – as does any messenger that re-opens awareness of trauma – outside the framework of ‘official control’. But even more so when opening to heal trauma – because all such power of ‘control’ is an adaptation learned within darkness of ‘separation’ so as to make it bearable – regardless the particular forms through which such ‘control’ operates its underlying predicate is to protect the ‘separation’ from threat – in the belief that separating is personal salvation or security – at least temporarily – for once accepted and identified the demands or costs of maintaining ‘power’ over life are ceaselessly usurping the true gift of being for the stamp of the past upon the face of the unborn.
Power struggle is always fighting over a loss of power or more exactly, the fear of the loss of power accorded reality and acted from. The power to observe the fear is not coercive but attempt to stamp out fears – projected out onto our world and assigned to others – sets up an action-reaction fragmentation of such entanglement and complexity as to operate a foolproof defence against ever being undone. Yet because its basis or foundation is false – it is forever being undone – now and always now, and must re-assert narrative control to maintain the allegiance to a sense of power and protection against wholeness of being.
Aligning or moving in presence is not power struggle but discernment. It is not so much a ‘martial’ art as living from the balance point of aligning within being – and not in self-image. Yet the abilities developed as the world we ‘know’ are not destroyed but repurposed. The reintegration of the individual within wholeness is not a coercive agenda – but it’s curriculum is set up by coercive thinking that arose from the feared belief in coercive source nature – and the dissociating attempts to escape it. The original error echoes throughout its consequences and does the very thing it purports to overcome, eradicate or escape. The end of historical baggage is the releasing to creative relationship.
All stories bring different experience and exploration of themes – but the creative is infinitely more than mythic dramatisations of good and evil – that substitute identity investment for self-honesty of being. Insane or self contradictory beliefs manifest in our experience to be release or undone of meaningful employ. If you accept thinking and acting from doublespeak – you succeed in blocking the true nature of thought – and generating a reversal in consciousness that seeks reinforcement and validation in external terms as Earthbound or trapped in (our own) defences that must mask such thinking in ‘fixed’ and asserted meanings or recognize the game is up – no matter the emotional investment that turns to wailing and gnashing of teeth. Learning to see things differently – with new eyes – is a natural result of willingness to look at the what we have made/are making without judgement. For the gift of discernment is beneath the noise of conflict engaged in as ‘power and protection’. Being is not thinking-led so much as supporting your desire to have it so – including the experience of consequence to the acceptance of your thinking. True desire calls forth unified purpose in which thinking is harmonized, renewed or abandoned according to its serving purpose not of your own private manufacture nor of ‘righteous’ emotional reaction to perception of poor choices in your ‘partners’. All choices have consequences and therefore a basis from which to be re-evaluated.

Dominic Pukallus
Dominic Pukallus
Oct 11, 2017 9:40 PM

When I saw that the idea of the End of History was given serious consideration a quarter of a century ago, I thought something was rotten. It seems I was thinking of the wrong play.

binra
binra
Oct 12, 2017 11:55 AM

History is a telling. Herstory was assigned a supporting role. Perhaps herstory has to be denied for history to seem independently credible – at least in the telling.
Yet the denied is no less active for being designated ‘unconscious’ and denial is coercive and suppressive upon the feeling being – and then ‘rationalises’ the call for true acceptance as irrational and chaotic – and thus a call for coercive intervention to ‘protect the peace’ of a false telling.
Whatever is moving as our experience of being is being interpreted through the filter of the mind. I did not say ‘our mind’ because that presumes we are aware of the framing definitions and beliefs that thought and deed automatically embody.
A coercive narrative identity is backwards. And yet it ‘works’ by usurping or overlaying a historical narrative upon the conditioned sense of self so as to ‘make sense’ of such self within the framing of the past. You have to learn the mask or develop a persona in order to participate in the human experience. But you do not have to lose awareness of who you are beneath the mask, forever.
Believing in our own spin is necessary in our formative experience – but being stuck in it is a rotten outcome. How much of the mind is engaged in replaying the past in fantasy? Or rehearsing the future as a vindication of the past – or the fear of its repeating?
Insight is timeless – regardless who it may be externally associated with. If we focus in the rotten – we give it energy and attention and that in advertising terms is mind-capture – the rest works subliminally.
The desire to throw it away (destroy) and start again, or to erase unwanted outcomes (rivals) is a kind of tantrum. But throwing away and attempting to eradicate or coerce reality is the generation of a denial reality experience in which the shadow power overwhelms one’s ‘creation’ from beneath. You know – this self-sabotaging scripts that chain you to who you hate or fear or are ashamed of being.
Fake history – like fake medicine, fake news, fake education and so forth – are telling – that is – they are signifying fakery. Fake righteousness pints to scapegoat to keep the story in play. If it is rotten – don’t eat the apple! Is there a precedent for not playing the game of blame? If the true level of responsibility is the definitions and beliefs we accept and deal in as currency – then is the dramatis personae a device of diversionary displacement.
If the ‘beginning’ is an entrancement – then so is the ‘exuent’ a release of entrancement. But within the structure of the script it is important to the playing out of the script to maintain its purpose – which is not the parts but the whole. Living in the world but not of it – is a sense of freedom to recognize beyond scripted appearances and thus a story of awakening from entrancement within the dream. Not of forcibly or coercively waking ‘others’ – but of witnessing to a quality of presence that is before history and true beneath its playing out, and revealed in its own undoing. But not recognised within the love affair with an ass! (Midsummer Night’s Dream).

Dominic Pukallus
Dominic Pukallus
Oct 12, 2017 10:11 PM
Reply to  binra

Perhaps Marshall Mathers could body us a “Raging rocks and shivering shocks” set. He IS pretty fly, after all.

tutisicecream
tutisicecream
Oct 11, 2017 8:17 AM

“it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” … The question is, will the POTUS (Personally Obnoxious Twitter-er of the US) understand the ideas being made here???

binra
binra
Oct 13, 2017 10:24 AM
Reply to  tutisicecream

tutisicecream
Shakespeare is talking of the human dream/drama in total is he not?
That mind-capture within the drama makes ‘sense’ of its ‘character’ by railing against the ‘justifiable’ provocations and causes of fury can be seen from other perspectives than when identified within its script.
How you choose to make sense of your world – in terms of who you are – is your freedom is it not?
Is that not what everyone is actively engaged in – beneath what they embody as a response in the terms they have set or been framed-in, without recognizing the choice that is operating that they know not what they do?
When your world seems to be a basis or call for being personally obnoxious – and when that becomes extremely frustrating – at some point the persistence in (what has become) an automatic habit gives way to a desire for a better way and a moment of insight can occur. The willingness to expand perspective in release of what does not work meets relevant and resonant events within the script of its world – such as bumping into a bit of Shakespeare – or any other trigger to recognition of the current situation and natural next step in freedom that extends sense to your world – in terms of who you are – as your renewed sense of who you are. Different strokes for different folks – so there is no better or worse as to what opens or wakes the mind from its own spin – the embodiment of the waking is the point – and that is you being more aligned in an integrity of you in terms of your wholeness – whatever ‘judgement’ anyone else may presume to put on you.
In this sense I believe brand Trump is designed to trigger exactly the reactions that it does in you and many others. And because so many voted for him AGAINST Clinton, they have an investment in him that either supports or holds back its open opposition. Those others who rail at him in obvious open hatred – then seem even more of a justified enemy to defend against. It all works seamlessly.
If btw brand Trump personifies the folly into which men are phished of their true identity – the key is not what he does – but that realising that the brash brinkmanship signifies nothing – frees you from giving the attention that it is designed to capture. When our world is no longer subject to a triggered reactive ‘identity’, the curtains are no longer hiding the wizard of oz .

elenits
elenits
Oct 10, 2017 9:30 AM

A brilliant piece and not the first time that the mad quest to arrest time in a Forever moment of the USA’s self-claimed ‘victory’ in the Cold war has been likened to MacBeth.
However you reap what you sew, starting with the Harvard Boys economic rape of Russia.

Peter
Peter
Oct 10, 2017 11:05 AM
Reply to  elenits

Reap what you sow, I think, or else it’s just a stitch-up.

Alan
Alan
Oct 10, 2017 12:34 AM

As a literally exercise I have learned something however I feel it is just an exercise.

elenits
elenits
Oct 10, 2017 9:25 AM
Reply to  Alan

Did you mean to say “literary” as in literature or “literally” as in life?

David Lee
David Lee
Oct 9, 2017 8:32 PM

Indeed, there are some very strong lines quoted in this piece.