There was supposed to be the [King] Duncan killing here
- Indeed - Well, the funny thing is,
there’s no way for Shakespeare to be in this particular room.
So since the description of the room is so accurate,
there’s a lot of people who think that he must have known how the place was
through the description of the people.
- Absolutely. That is entirely fictitious.
Shakespeare really in some senses blackened Macbeth’s name and character
because he was actually rather a gentle and good king
- Oh, really? - so there’s some senses of this being swiped from history.
- Yeah well there’s something, still
there’s something dark about this particular place, no?
You can feel kind of a dark energy in this place.
- Do you think that’s the risk of association?
Do you think that’s - - Well, maybe, who knows?
With the bear maybe, who knows?
- Shakespeare retrospectively acting on us with the bear.
There’s certainly an ominous feeling in the architecture itself
which is very much indicative of the era.
It’s quite claustrophobic.
- Yeah - Yeah
So, what is this place? And what is this thing?
- This strange object we’ve found in the crypt or the servants quarters.
Well this looks to me like a scold’s bridle.
It was something used to tame quarrelsome women.
- Witches of England, really?
- Perhaps, I mean the term ‘witches’ we know is so contentious
but certainly Shakespeare’s treatment of the witch in ‘Macbeth’ is interesting.
- Well, yeah in this particular play the witches are like a main character
- They are. - because in the very beginning
this notion of the prophecy, the, “All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king…”
this is how life works actually for all of us, no?
We’ve been - naming is giving destiny, is giving a faith,
- Absolutely - no?
- Yes, and I think within Scottish cultural consciousness this is really strong
because we have so many references to ‘An da shealladh’ or ‘The second sight’,
you know, the idea of premonition.
If you do see something, if you visualise it with your third eye then it comes to pass
and interestingly, I think in the play, the witches aren’t actually ever
referenced as witches. They’re referenced as ‘weird women’
which brings them two shades closer maybe to Lady Macbeth, you know,
with her inciting Macbeth to such great levels of violence and bloodshed
you know, there’s a little bit of a strange relationship I think going on between
Lady Macbeth and the three foreseeing witch women.
- It looks like there are some stories that couldn’t ever happen in a dry place
or in a wet place, you know. Like, even the violence, for example,
you think as a subject, would be so different in a humid place than in a dry place.
- Yes - I feel that because my wife, she’s from Argentina,
she was born almost in the middle of the jungle, beside the Paraná River
- Oh my - and it shocks me a lot how different the
notion of violence is in a place like that.
- Yes.
- And how they relate with the natural violence of nature and how
this kind of violence is natural for them, for example.
So, how would you say this kind of landscape affects your writing?
- Well I was just thinking a little bit also then there about
what you were saying about violence and about, just going back to Macbeth again,
the idea of coldness, cutting through coldness,
whether that makes you make sharper decisions more quickly because of the cold
or whether that gives you this period of latent, not freezing maybe,
but a pause, whether heat would affect that or not.
It’s a very interesting question you’re asking about violence and writing.
Even sometimes, the act of writing is a violence, you know,
it’s a violence against all sorts of other degrees of possibility really.
- Why don’t you read something of your work? The perfect -
- Ok. - location.
- Yeah, because we’re here right by this really astonishingly beautiful river,
having been in the middle of a house which, in a lot of Scottish literature,
I don’t know about Spanish literature, maybe this is true or not,
but there’s a particular writer, George MacDonald
who would bring the river into the house, for example.
A kind of very early Victorian Magic Realism, perhaps but Fantasy really.
- Oh, Interesting.
- So, we’ve sort of done it the other way round.
We’ve taken the motif of the house with us out into the garden by the river.
The tidemark of the dream’s
secret is its own illusion the visitation is moving.
Her death wish flickers, beached, where Tutankhamun steeps,
and drunk on halo water, a welt of angels rises, rash red on
my vision to inform me of my mistake and they sing but it’s more a kind of
coagulation, a rising note of perished firing, a fire tone of back tense
pearlescent cindery bead, an own voice for stoning angels,
for I am half mad with angels and would syphon halo
water from my own eyes to desicate their
current sight that now runs wild,
turns to fissure, seeded long by white grasses,
parched by flickering long white grasses,
and I am down on my knees, o Nile.