Douglas Mercer
November 13 2024
Macbeth is a proleptic play (proleptic: the representation of a thing as existing before it actually does; late Middle English as a term in rhetoric via late Latin from Greek prolepsis, to be clairvoyant). The protagonist is always vaulting ahead and jumping the life to come and trying to see which grains of time will grow and which will not in the future; he exists on the banks and shoals of time where they eddy and swirl and the fog rolls in so that whatever is is not and vice versa.
The three weird sisters are the Norns or the arbiters of fate as weird in Old English means destiny; they are said to have strange intelligence; the witches peer into the future and prophesy and are believed all too simply and readily; and this future is seen through fog and filthy air and thrice three make up Nine; and into the air what seems corporeal melts; the whole play is about supernatural soliciting in which one seeks the favor of the gods. And the prophecies work like trick questions where you cannot take them literally and not even really figuratively; but one has to use one’s imagination as the predictions come from vaporous apparitions.
The quote that Macbeth shall never be vanquished until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him means that Macbeth will not be conquered until the trees from Birnam Wood approach his castle on Dunsinane Hill. Macbeth takes this literally and believes this statement offers him security, since trees cannot walk, but it is actually deceptively worded to make Macbeth only feel secure.
That will never be
Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earth-bound root?
Whoever says what can and cannot occur is always speaking foolishly, the corporeal is always melting into an apparition. This message is actually an enigmatically worded statement of destiny: the Weird Sisters evidently do have some power to see the future, and they predict (correctly) that there is a way for the trees to seem to move up the hill. Malcolm will instruct his soldiers to hew boughs to hold up as they march, thereby concealing their real numbers until they are close to attack. Only then will Macbeth realize what the Sisters’ words truly meant and that they meant what they said and that it was true.
Malcolm is aware that anyone who sees a line of trees coming for the castle will be scorned and scoffed at. That is exactly what happens for the speaker of truth will seem to the untrained eye preposterous and of inhabiting a fool’s paradise (see Wild And Whirring Words, WB October 29 2024). Which is why hiding in plain sight is always best; and putting a metaphor into a literal statement will baffle them to the end.
The second apparition tells him that no man of woman born will harm him; Macbeth (complacent as ever in his power of interpretation) figures that since every man is born of a woman, that this means that no one will be able to hurt or kill him.
Macduff charges into the main castle and confronts Macbeth. Although Macbeth believes that he cannot be killed by any man born of a woman, he soon learns that Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped — meaning that Macduff was born by Caesarean section (so named for Julius Ceasar who, it is claimed, was the first to be born by this operation). And so the fated prophecy comes exactly true to the letter but in a way that was all but unforeseeable.
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Soren Kierkegaard famously said that there is no direct transition from world history to eternity. For his metaphor he used Lessing’s concept of the ditch, and turned it into his leap, which is his signature saying. He said that between life and eternity there is a kind of cordon sanitaire, or a chasm, but no point of contact; he said that no amount of historical research could help you peer into the immortal world, no amount of rooting around in the past, or the present, and that there was no point of contact between the one and the other.
This is all certainly wrong. There is no other world, there is only this world, it adapts itself and transitions and transforms and changes modes but it is always the selfsame river. As for historical research history may be one thing after another but what it is most of all is the mother of truth. Indeed it is simply existence and life, that is it is the domain which subsumes all other domains; as one of the nine muses Clio is history, the name stemming from the word to recount, or to make famous or to praise or celebrate; she is sometimes known as the proclaimer and is represented as holding an open book and possesses a trumpet and water clock (which uses the flow of water to measure time as an hour glass uses sand) and her head is ringed with laurel.
That is history is the annals of dead men’s deeds and the fable which we agree upon, and from its store can be deduced all one needs to know of the future, from it one can make the necessary connections, establish the needed context, and understand the shifting winds of force and value; for one day from out of machine the god will simply appear or show up, untimely ripped like Caesar, as it were.
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We don’t use the phrase of woman born anymore. But if one were to decide if one who had undergone a Cesarean section was born of woman we would likely say yes; so what Shakespeare was likely getting at was not the cleverness of the riddle but the suddenness of the action, the lack of complete gestating and the cutting off in the middle and the lack of formal completeness; he also probably liked the phrase untimely ripped, it giving a somewhat ominous tenor to his other portentous phrase, that one about the last syllable of recorded time. Untimeliness and suddenness, a transition, an event, a birth. And perfect completion.
Dreams will come but it will never be quite what it seems.
Strange Days, indeed.
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Notes:
The Shape Of Things To Come is a science fiction novel written by H.G. Wells written in 1933. It speculates on future event from 1933 until 2016 envisioning a world state as the solution to humanity’s problems.
