Beware the ides of March, said the soothsayer to Caesar. Beware the soothsayer, say I. If you should run into one on your way to throwing out the garbage you may soon become part of that garbage.
Oracles, witches and assorted seers allegedly have a vision around the corner. You would be particularly advised to avoid walking with a murder of crows overhead. More often than not they convey bad news. There is enough bad news without their cauldron and cackle.
On the page, stage or big screen the palmists and gazers into crystal balls are a device to move the plot. They are never-ever wrong. Our fate is sealed.
Homer did it. Shakespeare did it. B-Movies do it. More and more it is done less and less. Now such prophecies get a laugh from Woody Allen or Mel Brooks films.
However, in the hands of the Bard, as in Macbeth, the witches give us more of a shiver than a snicker. They seem to have taken possession of mild-mannered Macbeth. In my hopelessly rational mind, I regard them as an apparition, a projection of Macbeth’s overreaching ambitions. Those prognosticators only tapped into his darkest chamber. His innocence is transformed to megalomania and finally into madness accompanied by some of the greatest poetic prose ever spoken in the English language.
Macbeth and I had that same burning ambition. I saw myself as leader among my peers which is why I managed to get a gold star on my nose vaulting me to the not insignificant position of milk monitor in first grade. This was a mere steppingstone for the campaign to demonstrate my rule as class president in second grade. I stood outside the door with Diana D'arienzo while the votes were counted. Records will show I lost by one vote which may have been my own when I cast it for my opponent being the gentlemanly thing to do or so it seemed.
As I recall I did not drink any smoking potion. However, I may have inhaled the fumes from my father's drugstore escaping from tinctures, elixirs and fluidextracts.
I suppose it all comes down to free will versus fate. As science provides explanations for such events as eclipses or lightning storms the less authority is assigned to Zeus. One more time it is a matter of attribution. Sorry, Reverend, but Katrina was not retribution for gay behavior or abortions. Rather it is tied to our heedless behavior as custodians of this habitat.
Room must be made for the serendipity and synchronistic and other happy accidents, but they don't measure up to the level of causation. We are given to over-reach and even act possessed as when in love or otherwise impassioned but these are not super natural dictates. If we have a destiny, by virtue of DNA, our script is only a first draft subject to revision. Ask any astrologer.
We can live our well-examined lives without fear of being hit by a runaway trolley no matter what is foretold by tea leaves or the arrangement of soft skin inside our fists. Stuff happens beyond the scope of even a high intuitive. For those who require answers try randomness.
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