Trying To Be Whole Only Makes It Worse (Macbeth, Again)

Macbeth has a plan.

He’s killed Duncan and got the crown, like the witches said, but they also spoke of Banquo, Macbeth’s friend and right hand man, as a father of kings. So he hires three murderers to cut off the threat. They kill Banquo but his son, Fleance, escapes. A good news/bad news situation.

For the new king the botched operation means a return to anxiety:

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.

Whole as the marble. When the play uses natural imagery and metaphors they are usually active or in motion: horses thrashing in the night, upset birds, Birnam Wood on the move. External unrest signalling internal chaos.

But stone is solid bulk. Dead weight.

A stone person is unfeeling, unthinking. Unafraid. And in their unafraidness seem to be not like a person at all.

This is a fantasy of impenetrability. A wholeness that is impractical for the living, and difficult even for the dead.

Insecurity, Made Worse By Its Remedies

The specifics of Macbeth’s situation are extreme, but his conflicted impulses about security and insecurity are common ones.

His fixation on elusive marble perfection is a longing for an end to insecurity — a fortified position, cleared of political rivals and challengers — and for an end more generally. For the peace and finality that comes with certainty.

Everything Macbeth does to achieve this security makes it less likely. His scheming and assassinations spawn more trouble, more sources of conflict. He is stuck in a feedback cycle of action and effect, where every attempt to shore up the throne actually destabilises it, which in turn requires more audacious action, which in turn causes greater uncertainty, and so on.

The closest modern example is the paranoid mafia don who buries everyone in his inner circle until no-one loyal is left. Eventually Tony kills Christopher and has nothing left.

Almost everyone wants some kind of security, some sure footing, and we pursue the things we’ve been taught will give us it. And for the majority of Western social animals, security is bound up in ideas like marriage, career, home ownership, children and savings.

A girl has been cheated on in the past and struggles with weight and self-esteem. She’s terrified her boyfriend will leave, and when he seems distant because he’s tired from work she doubles down and won’t give him a moment of peace. He recoils further, sending her head spinning.

Here’s Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch:

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release. The problem of recidivism ought to have shown young men like John Greenaway just what sort of a notion security is, but there is no indication that he would understand it. Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life. Human beings are better equipped to cope with disaster and hardship than they are with unvarying security, but as long as security is the highest value in a community they can have little opportunity to decide this for themselves.

Or, as she states later: ‘security is the denial of life’.

Think of the old school friend flooding your Facebook stream with hostage-smile family portraits. Perfectionism as a control neurosis.

But the plumbing rots and companies consolidate and one night the perfect son hits his girlfriend. We have to come to terms with how vulnerable we are against the essential unpredictability of things.

(This is not an argument against the social contract.)

What Macbeth lacks is the only thing that can give us peace: acceptance. Which isn’t that same as “passivity.”

If the scrambling for security, whatever form it takes, cannot provide the craved-for relief it’s because the problem isn’t the specifics of the situation, but rather the desperation in ourselves. Scorpions tip-tap through Macbeth’s mind, and we wants them expelled.

An End To Change Is a Form of Death

By the end, Macbeth is depressed, isolated and sick of it all:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;

Nothing but repetition from here on in: the horror of an eternal present.

Time is dead, and Macbeth’s the one that killed it.

“Macbeth hath murdered sleep”, go the cries in the night. But what does it mean to lose sleep? Sleep is, on one level, a form of integrated death. You close your eyes and you get to leave the world. The body recuperates and the night elves go to work and when you wake up you might not be the exact same person. Sleep is a daily renewal, a minor metamorphosis, a rest that brings the chance for growth and newness.

Sleep represents the cycles of death and rebirth that animate the arcs of body and nature. Night, day. Winter, spring. Hibernation, then emergence. A fresh harvest in the soil.

We strut and we fret, and the Great Wheel spins.

For Macbeth, desperate for control and finality, this is unacceptable. Growth, renewal and transformation are threats his tenuously-achieved power status. And so he banishes them, as an observer reports:

Alas, poor country!
Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot
Be call’d 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 mark’d; where violent sorrow seems
A modern ecstasy; the dead man’s knell
Is there scarce ask’d for who; and good men’s lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps,
Dying or ere they sicken.

Macbeth’s Scotland is a death state.

Here, the invocation of maternal language recalls Lady Macbeth’s rejection of maternal instincts early in the play, her shocking imagery of babies’ heads bashed out on walls. Men, like flowers, simply expire.

Earlier — much earlier — Macbeth described Duncan to his fresh orphans as ‘the spring, the head, the fountain of your blood’, the spring of goodness from which new life is possible. His murder is a desecration of the very source of things itself, an unthinkable disruption of time’s normal flow, a sudden arrest of the world’s beating heart.

It’s not just an attempt to guard against an particular unwelcome future but an elimination of the future itself as a concept.

And Then, Fascism

Politically, a mass discomfort with insecurity makes authoritarianism more likely. The frustrated betas look to a Trump or an Erdogan to cleanse strangeness and newness and difference.

Difference means the possibility that our way — our being — may not be the right one; other cultures may want something that conflicts with what we want; or, if not kept under the boot, will unleash upon us the violence we keep secret in ourselves.

Close the borders, build the walls, separate the races, restore the lost golden age. Then — and only then — can clarity be guaranteed. Then we will be perfect and whole, our triumph frozen in amber.

Macbeth’s feedback loops of escalating horror mirrors fascism’s logic of violent escalation. No action against the undesirables is ever enough, because what animates fascism is an impossible-in-the-world etho-emotional fantasy. When you’ve already put the Jews in ghettos, and the war’s still not won, of course the camps seem like a reasonable next step.

In all of this is a swerve from reality, a flight from disappointment, from vulnerability and the essential arbitrariness of the things that happen to us.

The impurities and insecurities are ultimately unresolvable. And the barbarism enters terminal velocity.

The Pressure To Be Medium-Perfect

A mania for wholeness is not confined to the steel-booted Bannon-bot. Much of contemporary self-help ideology pivots on the essential idea that stable internal regulation is the ideal state, and emotional messiness is a marker of inadequate self-care.

In this line of thinking, normal emotional experiences like anger, sadness, disappointment, confusion and self-doubt are signs of a managerial lapse. We are supposed to cultivate energy, to power through the demands of the day with gratitude and robust motivation. Eliminate negativity.

The optimal self promoted by the internet’s white, articulate, entrepreneurial self-soothers is a smooth, self-regulating machine. Those who have internalised this self-image are more likely to view messy feelings as unhelpful, unwelcome intruders in their internal garden, ones who gained entry because we were asleep on the job. We didn’t cull the right friends. We didn’t mediate enough. We have too much baggage. We don’t practice “outcome independence”.

James Altucher has a good phrase he uses in his writing: the first arrow wounds, the second arrow kills. Macbeth’s saucy fears and doubts are the first arrow; his aggressive over-reaction is the second.

Part of dealing with our shit is learning to cope with, interpret and unpack strong negative feelings. A culture of perma-positivity encourages us to deflect, ignore or squash.

Not being your Best Self is a form of failure, another source of shame for the list.

The ‘saucy fears and doubts’ that Macbeth is so desperate to resolve and externalise are not just natural parts of our emotional cycles. They can also be useful kinds of emotional information. And yeah, it’s generally not nice having them knocking about inside our head, spiking stress hormones, but there isn’t much alternative.

Sometimes you have to wait out the fear. Or at least acknowledge it, put it carefully to one side, and act regardless.

To be without it is to be a perfect psychopath, whole as rock.