i “live tweeted” macbeth
next up: Othello
tweets:
goal. identify feelings. looking at shakespeare as a template for the reporting of human emotion.
the theory i am playing with has to do with feelings as entities that are evolving. that feelings are not unlike viruses or bacteria. and stories, literature, movies. these things are human feelings trying to understand themselves. through their human hosts.
how do you tweet and watch at the same time.
witches came and went. scary? manipulative? meddling? vicious?
pride. smug pride. self congratulatory pride.
witches again. conniving love. occult bullies. meta-sexual and therefore grateful and powerful. what’s the feeling? ick? disgust?
impotent anger. it’s so frustrating not to know the future
hail most worthy thane. CONFUSION, which is a form of fear.
here’s a feeling: macbeth is scared of his own success. convinced that his promotion is gonna be bad news and sure enough it is.
feeling: trusting someone because you have to. not because you want to.
feeling: hugging someone because he’s the king but you don’t really want to touch him but you have to because he’s the king so you tell yourself you want to but you don’t really want to. what is that feeling? haha. excitement i think. adrenalin.
don’t know what to make of lady macbeth swooning over husband’s success and panting over her schemes to help him get ahead. “unsex me. stop up remorse. take my milk for gore.” really really getting off on her evil plans. hmmm…THE TOXIC RELATIONSHIP
macbeth wants to jump ahead through time and look back with hindsight before he decides what to do. “anxiety?” this is a tired word and not at all up to the task of reflecting this emotion’s many shades
feeling: scared that something will happen and scared that it won’t happen at the same time, and therefore split from one’s self and/or paralyzed
the wife talking the husband into the best mistake of his life and he’s sexually excited by the coercion, by her balls, by his own cowardice, by the inevitability of it. choicelessness. LOVE
hmm… these feelings are BIG AND HUGE and not universal or “relatable”…macbeth sneaking around with a dagger about to kill the king…. his wife all titillated by the crime… hmm, how to match these feelings without getting kicked off twitter
okay the deed is done now he’s having a panic attack. she’s bossing him around pretty good. oh boy. self hatred. ouch.
this is a smorgasbord of feelings. a buffet of marital bickering with bloody hands.
the difference between fear of something horrible happening and the fear of something horrible that has already happened. fear after the fact. fear that it could happen again. fear that it could happen at all.
fear of losing what we have.. insecurity… remorse. are these “bad” feelings? it’s like macbeth is sitting on a pinecone on his throne.
(how we judge feelings..good, bad… maybe we are wrong about all that)
maybe it only makes sense to live tweet shows like the emmys or the grammys …not a staged version of macbeth from circa 1978 watched alone on a saturday night on amazon prime. i not care.
macbeth’s underlings not feeling so good about their orders. mmm… resentment? smoldering discontent…
we’ve scorched the snake not killed it
“shame itself, why do you make such faces?”
“quite unmanly folly.”
LADY MACBETH is not having it. Man up, Macbeth. Then again, she didn’t wield the dagger.
now she’s her own husband’s prisoner and he’s wildly disorganized in his thinking and she can’t escape because it’s her fault that he is losing his shit and she knows it…what do you call that… fear? god, our “feeling” labels are woefully weak. “fear.” blah. so one-dimensional
all is the fear and nothing is the love…Macbeth is a serial killer, is a slobodan milosevic… women and children..the grief goes wide, opens its arms, to the group level…feelings at group level not as detailed, graphic, not as real? as individual feelings. (INTERESTING!)
GRIEF. all my pretty chickens.
did heaven look on and would not take their part?
do we learn grief from stories or does grief write the same story over and over again?
what, will these hands ne’er be clean? guilt and shame and guilt and shame. need new words. maybe we can find them in shakespeare. this disease is beyond my practice.
macbeth begs the doctor to fix his wife’s broken head…is that hope? blah. hope. what a dud word. hope in the heart of an evil sinner is something other than hope in a nice person. what is hope in a bad heart? a curse. a joke.
“to the last syllable of recorded time”
