Out out, brief candle
Or how Macbeth helps me get through the day
One thing I know is that positive thinking doesn’t work. Not in the long run. Not in the moments when you need to grieve and to be your worst self. When you want to enact violence against another human being but you have to hold yourself back; not for them, but for you.
Positive thinking is a ruse and a machination because it ultimately distorts what is natural and negates our simple humanness; and to make matters worse, it creates an added layer of unnecessary guilt when you aren’t strong enough to “just smile; be happy; think positive thoughts”.
When Macbeth in Act 5 Sc 5 says:
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And 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 is one of the most poignant soliloquies in Shakespeare’s repertoire. He questions not only his existence in the time before and after his imminent death, but his past actions and how they have lead to this potent existential moment.
He has, of course, killed the king — which is like attempting to usurp the throne of God — but, even more than that, he has done so in a vacuous grab at power and now sees the purposelessness of his entire existence and the absurdity of it, which is arguably worse.
He uses the word “struts” which implies hubris or excessive pride and the motif of the candle is the transience of life — brief and lit for but a moment in time — then blown out or melted down to its wick. We humans are the shadow, dark and flickering, produced from the lighted candle’s flame.
Macbeth’s aspirations were ultimately impotent and futile and so are ours and we are all fools to believe otherwise. This was what Shakespeare was articulating through his great tragic hero; a good man, both lovable and flawed, ultimately brought low by his own base human desires and greed.
It’s a pessimistic concept, and the opposite of the Positive Thinking Movement (or New Thought as it came to be known in the Christian Science Movement — an oxymoron if there ever was one!) spawned by Dale Carnegie in his 1936 book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” and continued by Norman Peale in his 1952 “The Power of Positive Thinking”: but there are times in life when pessimism is required. There are times when Nihilism is necessary. Sometimes things happen and the brain needs time to process them and part of that process is grief and longing for what once was, what can never be again, and for the foolish arrogance we felt when we still had everything in front of us and never took the time to notice or appreciate it.
There is a place for such emotions emanating from futility and uselessness. There is a place to let those feelings come to rest for a brief time and just accept them for what they are. Pushing them away and distracting yourself can come later. Flicking yourself with a rubber band or squeezing your nails into your palms when you think awful things is something for down the track when you need to move on and begin a new path out of the wilderness. For now it’s okay to just accept that misery is going to be living with you for awhile so you might as well be friends (or at least frenemies).
Acceptance Commitment Therapy (or ACT) espouses the acceptance of thoughts as just that — thoughts. They are not in and of themselves negative or positive. They just are. You are having a thought that life is really shit and you are shit and your life is going down the shitter. A positive thinking proponent would say, “Come on! Turn that frown upside down!” and make you feel worse than you already do (if that’s possible). A proponent of ACT would sit with you and say, “That’s a thought. Now accept it and let it go.” And they would remain sitting with you, silent, together with you in your pain, holding your hand until you were able to keep going.
This is not wallowing in the nihilistic or embracing the terrible; it is simply acknowledging that being human — getting to be that shadow flickering in the brief candle’s flame — is, in fact, a gift that brings with it both pain and suffering, as well as joy and transcendence. Sometimes right now is the time to recognise that life indeed signifies nothing at all and we signify nothing and then we are gone “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”. But even that thought is just a thought and we can accept it, sit with it awhile, and let it free while we go walk in the sun and cast our long and timeless shadows against the earth’s surface.
