A New Relationship With Time and Literature – “Macbeth”

Posted on by rydero

As I noted in my Manhattan project blog post, I believe everyone is connected. And I don’t mean in the Airy fairy, “I feel the pain of the person 5000 miles away from me”, kind of way. I mean the connection that defines what it means to be human. It’s what defines our identity and how we intermingle with the common human experience. Honestly, this might mean feeling the pain of someone 5000 miles away, because one of our human traits is empathy. Empathy can feel rare in our chaotic world, but the truth that I have come to believe is that empathy is quite unavoidable. As much as we would like to think we are living our safe, happy lives disconnected from the war in Ukraine or the thought of a nuclear war, just having the awareness of what is happing, impacts us on a subconscious level. Looking at case studies such as the Cold War or WWII, it is clear that a lack of comfortability in the moment can juristically affect one’s mental state and the choices one makes. This empathy is what I believe makes so much of the good in this world, inspiring action, changing our perspectives, and standing in solidarity, but like that subconscious fear I mentioned earlier, our instinctual caring can often lead us blindfolded through life.

geralt / Pixabay

 

The path we choose in life often has unknown twists and turns, some taking us farther from our desired destination, and some leading us straight to it. In my learning journey with PLP, that desired destination has changed very often. The truth is, I don’t know that desired destination, and no matter how much my brain tries to convince me that I do, I can only crumble to the feet of the truth that life has no guarantees. It’s hard, especially when time seems so limited and choices seem so important. Especially after learning about WWI, then WWII, then the Atomic Age. For a while I have been dealing with the overwhelming chaos that my mind makes me believe is reality but only in this past couple of months have I realized that my struggle with fate is all too common in human existence. Looking as far back as Greek mythology, we can find stories of the dangers of being aware of fate and believing that with free will one can change the truth of fate. In the time of stoicism, a philosopher named Epictetus believed fate is the world happening around you and the only power one holds over fate is the view one has on it. It was incredible to see that the conclusion that I made through this project was something part of the human consciousness since before Christianity, but it also made me fall back into my chair, dumbfounded and confused, asking myself “why” once again.

The driving question for this project Is “What do the timeless themes of “Macbeth” reveal about our society today?” After asking “why” for the majority of our time learning about “Macbeth”, I have come to realize that the play’s themes do not only reveal that we are connected to our 17th-century relatives, but that we still struggle with the same problems, and more importantly, that we are not alone in the struggles we face on the path of life today. It felt like a bedtime story when I originally skimmed through the pages of “Macbeth”; making little sense, yet still calming my thoughts with the poetic language. For me, it has pretty much only been bedtime stories to pick from in my remembrance of literature. It’s not that I haven’t read a book, but I just never had a connection to literature. I have always thought that there is just too much to learn about to spend my time reading a story that isn’t real. It felt like a disconnection from reality. It wasn’t until my grade 11 year that I realized why literature is not only real but can teach us who we are and what the heck we want to do in this world. I often forget that. Too easily do I fall into the paradigm that we only learn by taking notes and memorizing, forgetting that more important is the act of feeling. I forget that feeling is what makes you ask questions that properly direct your quest for answers. I forget that feeling is what creates our human individuality, yet all the while connecting us to a greater understanding of each other.

 

PublicDomainPictures / Pixabay

 

Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” was written in the 1600s, yet I read his words and can’t help but question the state of the world today. Our first examination of the text was through understanding the themes and the plot of the story. My first thought of “Macbeth” was that it was over-the-top entertainment to please the ego-driven minds of the time, but as I continued to examine the text, I realized that it was almost the opposite. The themes of the play reveal our flaws as human beings and show us the power of the mind. I believe that this play tells a common tale of the fight of understanding reality and connects to every person’s life in some way. At least it does to mine. I think that’s why it felt so hard to feel proud of the work I completed in this project; because the understanding I gained felt almost like the effort I was putting in to understand my path through life. It felt like understanding the choices Macbeth made would be the end all and the be all of my perplexities in life. I realized this after doing multiple quote analyses and diving deep into the themes of Macbeth and as I did so, it felt as if the constructs of time and societal change began to fade into the solemn yet instinctually connected humanity.

Connecting to my past project, I learnt that time only changes our perception of the past but doesn’t disconnect us from it. I concluded that we overlap in many ways with people 100 or so years ago and sometimes all that has changed is time. But what I found in my search to make sense of chaos is a perspective that allows me to see where we went wrong. It wasn’t just seeing the surface-level news headings, but really understanding the underlying connections and patterns in the event. It is an instinctual tendency, but it can also see where our instincts have done us wrong. It was very interesting to see this idea play out again in this project during our final product. To show our understanding at the winter exhibition, we were asked to create an adaptation of the original play and present it to a live audience. The themes would be what was adapted, using the original text and storyline. We were given a scene and with our understanding of the themes of Macbeth, we were asked to choose one that best fit the scene and adapt it to a contemporary setting.

 

In “Macbeth”, Shakespeare tells the story of a brave war general who falls to the blinding power of knowing his fate. In the scene I chose, Act 1 scene 3, Macbeth is confronted by three witches who give Macbeth and Banquo predictions of the future. The predictions tell Macbeth that he will become Thane (lord) of Cawdor (a place in Scotland) and that he will become king of Scotland as well. He does not trust their predictions until Ross and Angus who are both lords as well come to tell Macbeth the news that he is now thane of Cawdor because the other thane of Cawdor had betrayed the King. I realized that this scene was quite close to my life. Macbeth struggles with the awareness of fate throughout the play and being someone who is quite aware of the hard truths of time passing, I find myself struggling to not control what I think is Fate. That can be hard, and as I said, it makes everything much larger and more important and it makes the passing of time seem so unnatural and scary. Although fictional, I think that Macbeth was going through similar challenges. Connecting that theme to a contemporary setting wasn’t hard because I already knew the emotions conveyed in the story all too well. It was part of me and it just meant accessing that confusion that I feel, connecting it to the story, and then using the text and the conclusions made in the story to share the message I was trying to convey. I tell the story of a human’s struggle with the climate crisis and the fate it entails. Like Macbeth’s struggle with fate when he realizes he may become king, my character struggles with the fate of the climate crisis when he is told that the government went ahead with a pipeline expansion that it had promised to cancel. It is this connection to the realization that half the prediction of the witches is already true, that makes my character fall into a trance where the thought of the world around him degrading overpowers his perception of reality. This ultimately sends him into a state of despair. He debates whether the prediction was good or bad. If it was bad then why has it made him realize that things need to change, but if it was good then why does the thought of the fate he shared make me feel so powerless? He losses hope, a grasp on reality, on real, “present fears”, and like many of our world’s population, a deep sense of powerlessness. Macbeth in the original play snaps back into reality in a flustered state, still unsure of what is real and what is fake. He then forces himself to believe the words he says. He is unsure, and like many unsure people, he looks for a sense of comfort in his chaotic perception of life. Something changes though. As he looks around he realizes the passing of time and returns to the actuality of the moment. It was that choice, that single decision that could have changed the impact he had on the world. In my adaptation, my character in his haze returns to his now depressing reality and feels an utter sense of hopelessness. He looks around as the horrible images in his head begin to fall into the bright mourning that surrounds him. He notices a small Plant sprout In between the dusty cracks on the sidewalk. He looks down and realizes that Like the cycle of life, “Time and the hour runs through the roughest day” and all he can do is feel this moment and connect to it. He realizes that often perception can be false but the truth of the sadness and pain of the future is always real. It is all that he can trust, and a painful yet beautiful passion envelopes his perception of fate. The perception came from an understanding of the blindness fear can cause. The rest of the play shows what happens when that discomfort with fate goes unchecked, but in this scene, I believe that Shakespeare tells us that we are not alone, and our experience with this uncomfortable fate, is not a first in our struggles as humanity. Like my character touching the new sprout on the ground, sometimes the best we can do is feel, notice, and appreciate the moment we are in. As I learned, you can only change reality if you can feel the reality you are trying to change. That is something that I have not quite figured out yet, and it’s not easy to know what reality is in a world where so much is based on the possible state of our future. Our awareness keeps us alive, but it can also very easily lead us straight to confusion, losing our optimism, and hope in the maze of life.

 

I knew performing this would not be easy. Not just because I had to memorize Shakespeare, but because my connection felt so important in my life. As I said, it felt like the “be all and end all” but what I had come to understand is that just because something in the future is negative, it doesn’t mean that it has to be something you’re scared of. I didn’t need to procrastinate writing this blog post because I don’t know how hard it was going to be to write it. The truth is that I don’t know. I don’t know when something scary may happen, but I do know that I am here now, in this moment with this world around me. That’s all I can change and as Macbeth figured out, life is only a walking shadow when we are too afraid to look in the direction of the light and let our eyes adjust. When we are too afraid to confront our fears in the moment, too scared to just let yourself be scared. It is when we are to afraid to remember why we are afraid and why our love has built this shield of fear to protect us.  My teacher said that literature helps us understand what it means to be human, but I think it helps us understand what it means to live. Macbeth’s story is constantly repeated through time. It is why it was so easy to connect to Avatar which holds many themes that describe the state of our world today.

 

 

 

 

 

Comment (1)

One Reply to “A New Relationship With Time and Literature – “Macbeth””

  1. Jordan says: Reply
    January 19, 2023 at 10:42 pm

    This is very lucid

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