Macbeth, the forest and the trees

"The forest shall come to Dunsinane" - the prophecy of the Weird Sisters at the beginning of Macbeth. A quotable tragedy, written superbly, giving life and audience experience. Zounds!

"Let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky." - Sean Connery (1989 - misattributed to Charlemagne but it sounded good)

Shakespeare tragedies are great cos everyone cops it in style. and the humble gravediggers at work make jokes about the great so and so ending up underneath their shovels. But the monarchs always cop it. The cheaply seated at the Globe Theatre in Elizabethan London - the groundlings - look up to stage as aristocrat after aristocrat, prince, betrothed, Kings, Queens, usurper, adulterer, magician, as if in a ring, The Globe, they all fall down. Small pockets with posies and the cheapseats.

It is as if chess pieces upon a chessboard, from pawn, knight, King castles Queen side, openings Nimzo-Indian, middlegame, and the endgame of the third act - are wiped off the board. A board of little squares, with each piece playing a role but bound by the rules of the game, predicated upon a ground of boxes in rows and diagonals.

Other games of warfare, like Battleship, or the Japanese game Go work on different principles. Battleship works on reasoned guesses and pinpointing the opposition nasty nasty little war boat. So, the reasoned guesses can be said to imbue the game with guess as radar technology. The lovely thing about Battleship is that reasonable people don't jump up and down when they win and say "I am the best radar killing machine in the world" and then do their little dance.



- this is a play, this is no game, this is no war, this is Chaos!

The history of Chess is different - decapitation by King to knight are part of the history, after the Liege was defeated at the Chess by the knight instant beheadings were common place. These were no cafe games.

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure Part 2 where Death is beaten by the dudes in Battleship and Twister is a my best friend in this theory. Beautiful though the Seventh Seal is, it is unwatchable, and the existentialism in it would get knotted up in Twister. Existential knight, puerile party-on dudes having a laugh - this is just one cute choice from a whole raft of games and idiocies whispish or waspish.

But back to the fray! Bring your discuses (discusses? discii?) Javelins (javelii?) and good high and long jumping selves is this pentathlon of warfare - not of targets, but how far will the discii travel or will the arrow land...

If I could turn back time, I would, with a volley of men, bind Heraclitus for these fragments of his works - "Life is War" and "The Universe is like a child at play."



So from play to game. The win and the loss. There cultures where loss is celebrated sounding like a great nightclub. Where I am from loss is bad. The Iphone 4 commercial is a great loss, I mean in a hot nightclub celebration way - I don't have one, and if I don't I am losing out on things like losing them at nightclubs. So I better get one, and there goes a week's rent. This is what The Most Beautiful Economist in the World calls "Sunk Costs" - that missing out possessing something will cost more to you than the price of the product. At the moment buying an Iphone 4 would sink my own private Bismarck.

But come back -  "the forest shall come to Dunsinane" - "man not born of woman" and all those wild sylvan allusions and cthonic enuncations from the weird sisters at the beginning of Macbeth- those incantations delight me darkly. The beginnings of jungle warfare. In so many ways, that it's not funny.

To use the trees as camouflage on the assault on Macbeth's castle is guerrilla tactics in the manner of the Sean Connery quote. Let us delve into the magical aspect of this prophesy whilst keeping out tin foil wizard hats on.

A warlike forest? Silviculture through a frame of systems ecology, maps out for us growth relationships, sustenances and toxicities of forest ecosystems. Enough water and soils, the forests grow for ever. A warlike Tree, just one of them, is Middel Oerth lore-like. The Treant in the works of Tolkein is the major. A californian redwood on legs with a terminator attitude and on southside a californian bluewood on legs rapping and putting a cap in yo' ass. Colors and One Red one and One Blue one, relate. I will disentangle from the strangler vines of pop culture, Tolkein included.


If a sovereign state, or sovereign corporations* (what is this?) stopped deforestation then forests would recuperate and grow. Tree planters, bushies, regeneration volunteers, Government Environmental Protection policies and families simply camping would collaborate in the spread of forests, and start planting seeds of espionage in the Silvicultural Resistance and Counterbalance. Forests in a strategic manner, with branches everywhere, rooted in public space, leafing through our daily lives would govern us. That kind of warfare I would like, and let the accursed Dunsinane be damned!