I have no spur
to prick the sides of my intent, but only
the vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself,
and falls on th'other...
—Macbeth Act I, Scene 7 .25-28
While hopefully not
quite at Macbeth-level, I admit
to being driven
by the vaulting ambition
to someday write
the greatest poem ever
concerning the heights of human folly.
With each new stab
of the rhetorical knife, I feel
I'm getting closer to
glimpsing the top,
though strangely, not any better
equipped to explain
after the fact, the path by which
I marched up there—because
the worst trait in the world
keeps changing day to day
and minute by minute
(not to mention
those inevitable handicaps
of subjectivity
and translation; character defects
being so disparate
person to person
and place to place).
My latest strategy
is to approach the mood
obliquely—not face to face,
but through a glass
darkly. That is: I take a few sips
of iced coffee each morning
on the back patio while
perusing a few tragedies,
purloining certain key phrases
and re-triangulating
their inclinations. In fact,
as the great Thane
of Cawdor himself discovered
fairly quickly,
the whole endeavor
seems to boil down
to a solitary game
of keeping the plates spinning
and explaining any
cognitive dissonances
not as madness,
but as part of life's
dynamism—for example,
privately plotting
to rid oneself eventually
of those indwelling gremlins
which one hates most,
while still staying faithfully
married to them in the interim.
