Forcing fate…
In my rereading of Macbeth tonight I am struck by how bad an idea it is
to try and “force fate”. Macbeth starts off with three
witches–or wyrd sisters–who meet with Macbeth on the road and give
him a glimpse into his future by calling him Thane of Cawdor and King
(which he was neither). Now wyrd is a concept I have been interested in
for quite some time, since reading Brian Bate’s book titled, The Way of Wyrd a great many years ago (and on more than one occasion since then). **Warning: relevent detour about to occur:
Wyrd, according to Bates is:
Wyrd is the unfolding of our personal destiny. It has
sometimes been translated into modern English as ‘fate’. But it is much
deeper than that. It does not see our lives as ‘pre-determined’.
Rather, it is an all-encompassing view which connects us to all things,
thoughts, emotions, events in the cosmos as if through the threads of
an enormous, invisible but dynamic web. Today, scientists know
intellectually that all things are interconnected. But the power of
Wyrd is to realise this in our inner being, and to know how to use it
to manifest our personal destiny.
From the book itself, Wyrd is defined as:
The threads of wyrd are a dimension of ourselves that we
cannot grasp with words. We spin webs of words, yet wyrd slips through
like the wind. The secrets of wyrd do not lie in our word-hoards, but
are locked in the soul.
**Moving back on track:
While the wyrd sisters are often looked at as being “evil”, the only
thing they are guilty of is giving Macbeth a glimpse into his future.
Macbeth then had a choice in what he was going to do. His instincts
were right and honorable, telling his wife they would go no further
than their speculations and not act on what they had learned. He
understood that he had a double debt as both kinsmen and host to the
King–but he couldn’t leave it alone. Instead he made a choice to force
fate into being by setting off a chain of events started with the
murder of the King in order to make himself the King as foretold. With
this forcing and twisting of fate to suite his vision of what it
“should be”, he hears a voice say “Sleep no more! Macbeth doth murder
sleep”:
…the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.
I think that we are often guilty of trying to fit our
vision of what our life “should be” into reality–by means that might
be suspect but we so badly want the “end” that we do whatever we must
to justify the “means”. If it is truly fated, it will come about
without all the kneading, pushing, proding, and molding to force it
into our concept of what should be. Had Macbeth followed his instincts
and simply tucked the knowledge the sisters had given him into the back
of his mind, fate might have given him the crown without the blood on
his hands that would never wash off (as he understood: “Will all great
Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No.”)
Two lessons of many learned through Macbeth: follow your instincts and don’t force fate
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