lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.
(T.S.Eliot, The waste land)
Roman Polanski - Macbeth (Banquo's ghost)
Yes, it is conference season once again, that cruel season when the dead are being dug up from their shallow and restless graves. This year the choice is between the conferences I should have been invited to and was not because the Lord and Lady Macbeth do not like their banquets disturbed by bleeding ghosts, and those I was forced to turn down myself, because, after some time, even a ghost runs out of blood to smear more banquets with. So far I had kept only one last conference in the list, a small physics conference I had erroneously thought would be a safe space for me to go to, until I realized that even that last corner of existence is denied. I'll let that go as well: I am tired of this endless war, this endless bleeding out. Tired of perennially fighting back, with the last hope gone of a moment in a future history of the universe, a remote corner of space and time, where I may finally be at peace.
Roman Polanski - Macbeth (Banquo's ghost)
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
you cannot say, or guess, for you know only
a heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
and the dry stone no sound of water.
(T.S.Eliot, The waste land)
Where is the Birnam wood? Why comes it not? Or have the witches now deceiving words for us, the dead, as well as for the living? We, ghosts, will keep on fighting, will keep returning to haunt the Thane of Cawdor, because there is nothing else that keeps us afloat between this world and the night. When all is done and said, when all my blood is drained and all your talks are given, and the curtain falls once more upon this darkness, there will be left but a barren landscape of desolation, a scanty meal for the worms, and the same unspoken question: "What for?" Were your insatiable ambitions, your unrelenting egos, worth the destruction of friendship, trust, intellectual affinities, and ultimately human lives?
Roman Polanski - Macbeth (Birnam wood)
When fight is to life what ghosts are to shadows, when the swamps of memory harbor a decaying hostage conscience and desire, and blind windows stare upon a petrified world of nightmares -the burnt out desert that you casually and carelessly left behind you- all that survives is a long and meaningless wait for improbable signs of walking forests.
Roman Polanski - Macbeth (Banquo's ghost)
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh keep the dog far hence, that's friend to men,
or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frère!
(T.S.Eliot, The waste land)
