Having attended the new production of G. Verdi’s opera Macbeth at The Gothenburg Opera, I was quite surprised by the unexpected chosen interpretation of this great adaptation of Shakespeare’s masterpiece. (…) The main question I must raise is this: Why is it morally wrong of Macbeth to kill Duncan, if they are the same and why then is it morally right of Malcolm (through Macduff) to kill Macbeth? If they are the same, as they are displayed in Mr. Radok’s concept, then where is the conflict? What is the purpose of writing such a play?
Macbeth’s guilt, agony, pain and nightmare-like visions would be entirely unmotivated if Duncan and Malcolm where displaying the same inferior moral or psychological nature as himself.
The esoteric core of both the play and the opera is manipulated and altered in order to provide room for the director’s outlook of the world and this outlook is a false one. (…) It must be noted at this point that it is not the actual killing that is the supreme conflict, since Macbeth is a general in Duncan’s service and we must expect that in holding such an office death is an everyday occurrence; ordering soldiers to kill other soldiers is something a general must be capable of handling. (…) The very heart of the entire play, however, is the killing of the righteous king; not only because of Duncan’s legitimacy to the throne based on blood heredity but rather from the aspect of what kind of material a righteous king should be made of in order to have a rightful claim to the throne according to universal law.
Author Archives: victor
Modesty, Intimacy and Routine
This article is entirely written by Karlo Z. Valois and is used by kind permission.
People today live in a world that lacks any trace of modesty, intimacy and is build mostly on routine. Routine is the visible cause of the other two factors. If we don’t look at the situation linearly, but from a point of view that precedes all three elements, it is rationalism and a material weltanschauung that stems from the general tendency of involution, that could be identified as the main cause, but we spoke about this elsewhere.
Routine is the opposite of ritual. It is important to start with this, because when looked at it from „below”, the two looks the same. In reality however the two represent two different forms. The content of a ritual is a symbol, the content of routine is an object or a practical act (performance). The difference between an object and a symbol is the observer. Only a superior observer sees symbol in an object or an act: a symbol is always the precipitation of something higher, the representation of the superior on an lower plane.
Style Elements of Negative Tendencies
The following text is entirely written by Karlo Z Valois and is used by permission.
1. The War
In the current era there’s a constant war between the superior and the inferior.
Peace is achieved only by intellectual dominance, where hierarchical integration is perfect and the inferior, according to its degree of distance from the pure (formless) intellect is positioned appropriately.
We can only talk about inferiority from the stand point of the superior. The superior, realizing a range of potentials unavailable to the inferior does not in any way depend on the inferior.
The saying that you can become whatever you want is only true when it comes to inferior positions; the inferior however can never become superior and the superior wanting to become inferior is a logical impossibility. Today inferiority is pervasive and positions in life and especially at work do not enable the realization of potentials, instead they purposefully prevent any chance of realization: their purpose is degradation and destruction on all levels.