Cakravartin

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.

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This article was written by Arthur Osborne and is taken from the January 1964 edition of the journal ‘Mountain Path’ available at www.ramana-maharshi.org

Despite the secular spirit which swept over Europe at the Renaissance and has spread to the rest of the world in the present century, it would still be true to say that the greater part of the world’s art and poetry has been religious in inspiration and origin. Why?

It has been suggested that the reason is simply that in past ages the churches have been the principal or only patrons; that, however, is a shallow explanation, looking at the past through modern spectacles. It does not explain why Hindu life and literature were dominated for centuries by the great religious epics (and let us remember that the Greeks also considered the Homeric poems the basis of their religion, although they show little of the profundity of the Hindu epics). It does not fit the Taoist painters, who were largely amateurs in no need of a patron, or the sculptors and painters of Buddhist cave temples, at Ajanta and elsewhere, who were world-renouncers. It would be laughed at by the Persian poet-saints who scandalised the orthodox. It does not even apply to the great temples of Mediaeval India or the gothic cathedrals of Christendom, in complying with whose intricate symbolism and shaping whose exquisite figures the builders were hammering out the lineaments of their own true nature. Continue reading »

The modernistic definition of art is that art is a mirror of our society. Society - and nowadays also the global world - should be reflected in art. It is considered its duty and its very purpose, together with the firm apprehension - typical of modernism - that through progress, art has developed this important role of giving a critical and different view of how to solve societies’ imperfections. This is totally false. The problem is that art is totally drained of its sacred content and divine purpose. Art is lying on its very deathbed and is waiting to receive the last rite.

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