The Severance of Vison - On Oedipos Rex
This is the second of a series of entries on Sophocles' Oedipos Rex. For the first entry, click here. Numbers in parenthesis represent line numbers. The translation used is by David Grene, from the University of Chicago's "Complete Greek Tragedies" series, 2nd edition, published 1991.

Oedipos is surrounded by people who are reluctant to know or to share the truth. Tiresias:

... Let me go home.
It will be easier for both of us
to bear our several destinies to the end
if you will follow my advice. (319-322)

Or the herdsman, when a messenger begins to reveal the daisy chain of hands that the infant Oedipos passed through on his way from Queen Jocasta to King Polybus:

Death take you! Won't you hold your tongue? (1146)

Or Jocasta herself, when she begins to surmise her relationship with her beloved husband:

God keep you from the knowledge of who you are! (1068)

Oedipos' grim determination to discover his identity, when that appears to hold the secret of his country's troubled fortunes, is evident by contrast. To Tiresias:

For God's sake if you know of anything,
do not turn from us; all of us kneel to you,
all of us here, your suppliants. (326-328)

To Jocasta:

I will not be persuaded to let be
the chance of finding out the whole thing clearly. (1065-66)

To the Chorus:

... Such is my breeding,
and I shall never prove so false to it,
as not to find the secret of my birth. (1084-1086)

In another exchange with the herdsman:

I [am on the brink] of frightful hearing. But I must hear. (1169-1170)

This unflinching desire to know is part and parcel with Oedipos' heroic character, and singles him out from others. It is what has made him king, and the method by which he brought prosperity to Thebes, because it was in solving riddles, in learning what no one else could discover, that Oedipos saved the city from the Sphinx.

But the situation lies differently this time. Solving this riddle will drive him to despair and drive him out of the city as the most piteous of men. It will drive him into a complete solitude. The city was held together on the basis of a tangle of secrets and ignorance. It must eject the bearer of its bad tidings to move on.

Once everything has been fully illuminated, Oedipos seeks darkness. He wants to be blind, not only in this life, but in the next:

I do not know with what eyes I could look
upon my father when I die and go
under the earth, nor yet my wretched mother --
those two to whom I have done things deserving
worse punishment than hanging. (1372-1375)

Thebes fully concurs with him, and keeps up the refrain of the desire not to know what's painful:

Unhappy in your mind and your misfortune,
would I had never known you! (1347-1348)

Because of his insatiable desire to know, Oedipos found out things hidden in darkness. Having faced darkness, Oedipos must face the world with darkened visage, irrevocably cut off from an intolerable world that no longer tolerates him.

Yet even in shunning the world that he once inspected so relentlessly, Oedipos heroically stays among the living. While Jocasta killed herself over the revelation, Oedipos lives on:

Approach and deign to touch me
for all my wretchedness, and do not fear.
No man but I can bear my evil doom. (1413-14155)

Even while cutting himself off from the city, he seeks to reconnect with it, this time on a different footing. He gets his wish. At the closing scene, Creon guides the helpless Oedipos out of the city. Even heroes need a hand.

Universal Man - On Oedipos Rex

This is the first of a series of entries on Sophocles' Oedipos Rex. More will follow. Numbers in parenthesis represent line numbers. The translation used is by David Grene, from the University of Chicago's "Complete Greek Tragedies" series, 2nd edition, published 1991.

At the beginning of Oedipos Rex, Oedipos is almost literally the life of the city of Thebes. He found Thebes in deeply distressed and preoccupied by the Sphinx, and, through solving the riddle, delivered them into prosperity and peace. The citizens recognize him as :

the first of men
in all the chances of this life, and when
we mortals have to do with more than man. (32-35)

So when the city comes under an even greater distress, they naturally look to him:

Once you have brought us luck with happy omen;
be no less now in fortune.(52-53)

They look to Oedipos because he represents their hopes and dreams, the fulfillment of their ideals, the best representative of their virtues and values. They vest themselves in him, utterly and completely.

Oedipos reciprocates. He accepts the life of the people, accepts responsibility as their protector, and sees their suffering as his own:

... My spirit groans
for city and myself and you at once. (63-64)

And again:

The grief I bear, I bear it more for these
than for my own heart. (93-94)

Both Thebes and Oedipos are operating on assumptions about how a king will solve the problem. He will consult with experts, find the bad guy, and get rid of him. It therefore comes as a great surprise when Tiresias announces to Oedipos that "you are the land's pollution" (353). Yet, when considered more deeply, there is a deep congruity to this revelation. Oedipos is the life of the city. He is not merely himself. His destiny is deeply and intimately intertwined with the destiny of Thebes. It is therefore clear that he must be the source of all of Thebes's fortunes, good and evil. It is a package deal.

Like Oedipos himself, Thebes was as blind to their king's vices as they were fixated on his virtues. Thebes suffers a great shock when they begin to see their king as vulnerable and defenseless:

Now when we look to him we are all afraid;
he's pilot of our ship and he's frightened. (923-924)

Once the shocking revelation has come, Oedipos the King must divorce himself from his people. His private life, his "old pain" (1033), the secrets of his personal destiny, have brought universal distress against the people he sought to serve. Now the only service he can perform for them, the only way that he can fulfill his role as king, is to enter into a private and secluded life. He must leave.

Oedipos, in his shame, desires this outcome just as strongly as the city does. Indeed, his violence against himself, his self-blinding, encapsulates the desire to be removed from contact with others, because he sees his presence as toxic to others:

To this guilt I bore witness against myself -
with what eyes shall I look upon my people? (1384-1385)

The situation is so piteous that the blindness and exile of a far-seeing hero are the only relief in sight.

But what about us? Is it Thebes alone that colludes with the hero, that must suffer his secret curses as it enjoys the radiance of his outer grandeur? No. All of us, as witnesses to the tragedy, drink from the cup of his fate. He leaves the stage because we can not bear to see him any more. What part of our hearts does he take with him?

Married to Endurance - On Ethan Frome

Ethan is brilliant, psychologically mature, receptive to beauty, heroic in form. His cultural resources are spare, but his vision is wide enough to let him know that he belongs elsewhere. His habitual silence indicates the abyss between the grandness of his conceptions and the limitations of his language. Even if he had language for his thoughts, the ears about him in Starkfield would not receive what he had to say.

His namesake, an ancestor, was married to a woman named Endurance, and died at Starkfield. This will be his fate, too, and he is welded to it all the more strongly after his attempt to escape fails. Endurance is the only virtue left in Starkfield. Every other virtue requires the hospitality of nature and culture to survive. Endurance thrives in us only when every other hospitable element is turned against us. Ethan's graces is the more admirable for the meanness around him, and his refinement more evident in the face of his own ignorance.

The landscape of the harsh New England climate is Ethan's only simpatico. His reflections on it are his only solace.

In view of the foregoing, we can see that Wharton is isolating and distilling the human spirit by showing what of it can survive the harshest conditions. This is what distinguishes it from her society novels in which her aim is to watch the decadence of the human spirit when every material comfort is at its beck and call. Language has never been so spare, so brilliant, or so utterly chilling. Like Ethan, it takes its cue perfectly from the cold geists of New England.

Review of a Dream (Untitled)

Johnson has done it again. In this new short film about the revenge of an ambitious file clerk against two women for their intolerable moral oblivion, Johnson merges a quasi-surrealistic narrative style with icy perceptions of human nature and society. His ability to find plausible junctures to interweave seemingly unrelated plotlines was especially cunning: witness the scene in which the anti-hero comes across two masons discussing the character of Papageno in The Magic Flute while practising their secret handshake. All of the themes of belonging, secrecy, and desire that will ultimately propel him towards mischief are at play in this little vignette.

Johnson has also managed to cross genres in this new film. Is it, after all, a comedy about mayhem in corporate America in the spirit of Jerry Louis, or is it a psychological thriller a la Hitchcock? Johnson cannily captures the claustrophobic cinematography of the latter filmaker throughout, while the accidents on the elevator are nothing less than daffy.

All of the actors are unknown and unnamed -- it is possible that many of them are playing themselves. The character playing the anti-hero expressed much without speaking: watching him look at himself in the mirror while trying to manage his rapidly growing hair was truly haunting. But he did not do justice to his few lines -- it appeared that he wanted all of his thoughts to just radiate from him without his having to speak expressively. The judge's attempts to get the facts straight while at the same time balancing all of the tense legal questions that were before her were very memorable and convincing. On the whole, the casting was brilliant.

It's hard to come to conclusions about a film like this. It has multiple centers of meaning, with lines radiating outwards, beyond themselves. It seems a shame that I was the only one to see it -- there really is too much to convey in one brief column. It's cliffhanger ending can only leave us asking: What will that Johnson dream up next?

On the Science and Mythology of the Cosmos

About a week ago I met a freelance cosmologer at a party. He had wild ideas about the life cycle of the universe. He sent me a draft of a chapter of a book he is writing, entitled "Cosmic Recycling Theory". I can't possibly synopsize it for you, and it's not necessary. I just wanted to record my response to him in an email I sent yesterday -- I've only edited it slightly:

I just finished your paper. It is very exciting. I had to skip the math, which was hieroglyphics to me. But the story of the world that you tell is a refreshing alternative. I'd love to talk to you about it more. Here are a few points:
1. Your introduction talks about the relationship of modern scientific cosmology to spiritual/mythological visions of the world and its "creation". As you may be aware of, the Dalai Lama is very interested in the discoveries of science, and he has basically said that they must be accepted. He remains a dualist, however, and so feels that scientists are only learning about one level of reality. The rest of them can only be known through meditation. So he reserves a playground for his pursuits that scientists can't get to.
   
   
2. The world view that we did not discuss in talking about spiritual traditions was the Ptolemaic/Aristotelian cosmology, which is indeed an eternal order subject to occasional disturbances. However they would not accept disturbances as great and destructive as black hole collisions!
   
   
3. Even in the context of an eternal physical universe, stories that discuss the "creation" of the world still may not be dismissed. Most of these stories are trying to conduct reconnaisance on the primal laws of the natural and moral universe, and "the beginning of time" becomes a metaphor for the primordial, archetypal structures that are at the heart of this universe. In other words, priority in time is only a metaphor for priority in being.
   
   
4. Your ideas about Jupiter are uncannily close to the climax of 2010, where Jupiter becomes a new star. Had you thought of that? Interesting that Jupiter is the king of heaven in greco-roman mythology -- could they have been intuiting its special status?
   
   
5. The ideas of consuming and ejection run through your cosmology. Here too there are Greek parralels. Prior to the Olympian age, there were tremendously destructive wars between the gods, gods eating their children, gods coming out of other gods (Athena from Zeus' forehead, for instance), and so on. Could they have been intuiting the fact that the present solar order had tumultuous roots?
   
   
6. The whole idea of the Sun being powered by a tiny black hole is still making chills go up and down my spine. I feel that spiritually speaking my own life is powered by a small black hole, namely depression. At times it obviously is draining and depleting, but over time I have come to see it as a source of spiritual conflict that really fuels me. It gives me an edge I wouldn't otherwise have, in other words.
   
   Less personally, this idea totally explodes all of the symbolism associated with the sun from Homer to Newton. The sun in these systems is always a source of order, a pure radiance, etc.. Now there is something dark and cold at its very heart. This new sun is very compelling, and very modern. Is the world ready for it?
   
   
7. I'd like to talk to you more in depth about the relationship between cosmology, mythology, and psychology. In particular I'd like to introduce you to the ideas of Moses Maimonides.
   
   
8. Methodologically speaking, I noticed that many of the predictions your theories would produce can only be tested by experiments that are very difficult to implement. Do you run the risk of creating a virtually untestable theory? For your colleagues, this might seem a flaw. But I'm convinced that the only true theory will be the one that is absolutely untestable, because it will have precisely grasped the singularities, which never appear. So, paradoxically, I see this as a virtue of your theory.
   
   I do not mean to neglect or downplay the fact that your theory more plausibly explains many of the known phenomena than heretofore, and often with a very satisfying elegance. These are also great virtues.
   
   
9. Your argument that your universe is more benevolent than a big bang universe, because it makes it more likely that life on other planets has occurred, is completely weak and bogus. I can say this directly now that you know how much I admire your thought in general. We are just as much alone now as we ever were if these alien civilisations have come and gone before us. And, anyhow, the probability of current life on other planets must be damned close to 100%, with or without a Big Bang. But we don't know these aliens, and so we're still alone.
   
   Looking past our brothers and sisters on this planet as sources of consolation and connection, we keep dreaming of a fellowship with alien races. All too human.
   
   
10. I still think you have to face the "creepy" repetitions that an eternal and yet historical universe makes possible. This is comforting to you because it gives you a false sense of eternity. You have existed before and you will exist again. But every possible counterfeit for you has also existed and will exist again. Face it, it's creepy. If you want to see what a nightmare this really is, read Borges' story "The Library of Babel". Actually, I'll try to mail it to you if I can.


Anyway, thanks for sharing this with me. This project deserves all of the attention you can lavish on it.

Just in case you're curious, here's some of my writing:
The Embassy, a strange tale: http://www.geocities.com/kjohnson3253
Dreams of a work, miniatures in literary criticisim:
http://dreamsofawork.blogspot.com
Enjoy!

-Kevin R. Johnson, M.A.
Gifted Unlimited
http://pages.prodigy.net/kjohnson

On Taoism and Protestantism

Several years ago, serendipity brought me to a day at a conference entitled "Taoism and the Ecology." Mostly the presenters were stuffy academics, but a few presenters were actually Taoist practitioners.

One of the most controversial presentations was by a man who goes by the name of "Liu Ming", which means "older brother." He is an american born practitioner of what he calls "orthodox Taoism". He has a topknot and wears a robe. His stance was that there is no environmental crisis, and that even if humanity's survival were at stake, there would be no environmental crisis. The environmental crisis, he said, was a scientific version of the apocalypse, and using blue recycling boxes was the modern way of avoiding damnation. Protestantism, he said, had simply found another vocabulary to express the same distorted message: there's something wrong, and we must make tremendous efforts to fix it. Typically, Westerners turn to exotic "other cultures" for the solutions to problems that they have invented, and patronize and misunderstand these cultures in the process. This guy was cool.

Somebody asked him why he had come to the conference in the first place, if he didn't see a relationship between Taoism and the ecology. Free planefare, he said. He had needed to come to these parts to perform a ceremony over the grave of his parents.

This is where things get disturbing. He had come to Massachusetts so that he could go to the grave of his birth parents and perform a ceremony completely renouncing them as his parents. His teachers were his adoptive parents now. That is how much he wanted to distance himself from Protestantism and firmly ensconce his identity as a Taoist.

Taoism, to my mind, indicates an effortless comfort with one's self and one's world. It seemed odd to me that in the name of Taoism he would be inclined to come such a distance simply in order to reject a valid part of his history and cultural heritage.

This has been a sore spot between me and Liu Ming since that time. Although we haven't spoken since, I read with pleasure Frost Bell, the newsletter of his organization Orthodox Taoism in America., and I've written him two letters that were designed to address this sore spot somehow. Here is the text of the second letter, dated 07.25.01.

Dear Liu-Ming,
You always seem to oppose your own views with "Protestantism". What do you mean by Protestantism? What do you see as its cosmology? Can you elaborate on your view that the New Age movement is "warmed over Protestantism with occult garnishes?"

I am being influenced by a variety of different spiritual traditions, including Taoism. I come from a Protestant background. Whatever spiritual dish I am eating, I try to make sure that it is truly to my taste, that it recalibrates my chi, and that I fully digest it. I know that many times I distort the true teachings of these traditions and fit them in with my early religious training, where indeed I was looking for a spiritual regiment to fix my "wrongness" so that I could experience a strong and grandiose "salvation." I assume that this is the paradigm that you object to. But I have managed to obtain occasional glimmers of self-acceptance, and to connect with the authentic voice of these Eastern influences.

Respect for the "other" demands a deep listening. One cannot allow an overwhelming lust for wisdom to cause an invasive and possessing rape of another tradition. Spiritual influence requires a careful alchemy to ensure proper interactions between two elements that allow each of their natures to be enhanced and calibrated. Frost Bell and Orthodox Taoism in America seem to be devoted to this discipline. I'm glad I know of you.

Sincerely,
Kevin

I doubt if he'll write back. Taoism suggests non-action in most circumstances.

On Leopards

"...And lo!
almost at the beginning of the rise
I faced a spotted Leopard, all tremor and flow

and gaudy pelt. And it would not pass, but stood
so blocking my every turn that time and again
I was on the verge of turning back to the wood"
-Dante, Inferno, I.31-36

The Divine Comedy is the path Dante took to escape the tyrrany of the beast, led "forth through an eternal place" by Virgil. Traditionally, commentators have seen the following biblical passage as the literary source of Dante's leopard. It shares the same tone of the menacing tyranny of brutes over men, and connects it with man's fallen nature:

"... a leopard shall watch over their cities: everyone that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces: because their transgressions are many, and their backslidings are increased."
Jeremiah 5:6

Borges gives a much different account. According to him, Dante was inspired by a live animal, a caged leopard in Florence:

"The leopard did not know, could not know, that it yearned for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing flesh and a breeze with the scent of deer, but something inside it was suffocating and howling in rebellion, and God spoke to it in a dream: You shall live and die in this prison, so that a man ... may ... put your figure and your symbol into a poem."
-Jorge Luis Borges, The Maker

Borges suggests that what is brutal in us must suffer a terrible oppression at God's own hands for the sake of poetry. Art requires and allows us mastery over our animal natures, which otherwise would lord it over us, as it does in Jeremiah and Inferno I.

And yet there is nothing but sympathy for the beast -- we feel an agony at its fate. The situation is even more poignant in Rilke's poem "The Panther":

"As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed"
-Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours

Here again we have the tragedy of caged vitality. "It seems to him there are / a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world." The loss is great and must be mourned. But is not something also gained? Poetry is the panther's ritual dance, metre is in its soft strides, and a tyrannizing and unifying idea is its center. Can this be enough to compensate for the loss of a world?

It's up to you, gentle reader, to decide. Open the cage if you dare. Let the leopard rip across the savannahs of your mind. Give it the hot pleasure of tearing your flesh. The poet has taken pains to dominate it. Now, let it dominate you.

I'll be surprised if you come back here alive.