I just got back from an excellent production of Macbeth at Indiana University. When I think of Macbeth, I think of ambition, the lust for power, and violence (and the play is certainly full of those). But I had forgotten that so much of it is about the source of all these things: the mind, and in particular the murky territory of the troubled mind. “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,” Macbeth asks the doctor, “Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain…?” Even with less damning and horrible memories than those that drove Lady Macbeth insane, we sometimes ask medicine that question today. In other places in the play mental states are rendered brilliantly: “O, full of scorpions is my mind” says Macbeth; and when he envisions a phantom dagger shortly before murdering Duncan, he calls it “a dagger of the mind”.
I’m prone to see thinking meat ideas in unexpected places; it certainly looks to me like Shakespeare has a lot of things to say about the problems and the mental and emotional strategies of thinking meat. There are places in the play where characters give each other advice on managing troublesome emotions and memories: Lady Macbeth urging her husband not to think of things that can’t be undone and will only drive them mad if they dwell on them (and look where that got her); Macduff, after his wife and children are killed, being counselled to turn his sorrow to rage and revenge. The characters also examine their own motivations, the effects of fear and of ambition on their behavior. And of course toward the end we get Macbeth’s ruminations on the meaning of life:
“…all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
It’s full of extreme and disturbing situations, but even so Macbeth shows aspects of the human condition that we can all recognize. There’s plenty of mind food there for thinking meat to ponder.
