So, looking at these three books, I decided to start with Bacon as it was, superficially at least, the slightest of the three. And I have to say, it went very much over my head. I got the idea: it's an allegory, as any utopic vision must be, for a new order. But the weight of it, as I've been told exists, was lost on me. Originally, when I finished, I wrote a glib little summary of the book.
"The Great and Perfect Christian State, where white men worship God with perfect humility and, in following the teachings of Christ, behave with charity and love toward each other and strangers (as long as they are Christians), cherish chastity, marriage, and family that centers on reverence for the father, are whole with nature, pursue science in the name of God, and view knowledge as the ultimate good (tempered with the belief that God created all things). In this, men can live happily and well together. And women are there too. And Jews are allowed, as long as they love Christ, or even just like Christ. But they've got us beat in the after world, regardless."
I do accept that my thin take in it is no doubt due to my modern perspective. But like each of these books, I've got turn the corner and see that my modern perspective wasn't invented by me and me alone. And it was in this and the other two books that it indeed was created. I still don't think that Bacon was the heavyweight of the three, if only because it didn't argue it's point with much subtlety, or if it did, I missed it.
But I do get the discussion notes that he was theorizing a world of grace, and postulating that science is the way to negate the fall. It also seems, and this was borne out in the discussions, that he was proposing a form of democracy, which was inherent in the Utopian ideals that were floating around at the time of his writing.
These ideas, that there should be a merger of industry, science, and church/state, and that man should dominate and control nature to create it's ends, are the very foundation of the world we've been living in since that time. And that Bacon was part of the intellectual revolution that lay the ground for it.
I've come to understand, if only on a simple level, that this movement of philosophy was divided into three eras: the ancient philosophers, the christian philosophers, and the romantic philosophers. (Nussbaum)
We are leaving the ancient philosophers and now dealing with the Christians. Which introduces us to a new concept: the concept of Grace or Faith, that falls outside of Reason and Passion. And here is where I find Pascal so interesting. Rather than deny the difficulty of achieving a state of Grace (as compared to Bacon who, through his Utopia, is able to assume man's ability to rise above the Fall) Pascal seems to be very aware of how difficult it is.
He presents a view of reason and "imagination" as being both a gift and a curse to mankind. He states clearly that Man has been quite right to make these two powers (reason and imagination) into allies, because they bring us to beauty, justice, and happiness, which are the world's 'supreme good". But at the same time, he warns that the war between sense and reason are also "the most absurd cause of his errors". (II 44)
I think this is important, because it is in the contradictions inherent in man that we find a "proof" of God. Man's greatness is that he knows that he is wretched, and thus there must be hope that he can rise to Grace through faith in Christ.
And this is where I liked Pascal so much. The idea is that we must choose to believe in God because choosing to believe gives us the better chance of a good result. He is laying out, in a very elegant form of argument, that Reason, or proof, can only lead us to the door of Faith, and our knowledge of Good, Justice, and the happiness that come, but it is faith and faith alone that move us toward the "divinity" that Grace promises.
I found this to be a very humanist argument. Unlike the previous works, from Plato through Augustine, which reserve this "god-likeness" for a reserved few, Pascal's view seems, in it's attempt, at least, accessible to all. There are certainly those who are possessed of a "God given" Grace, the Jensenists to whom he belonged, no doubt, but it wasn't their exclusive territory. But we can ourselves strive toward Grace.
Re-reading the class notes, and after re-reading Pascal for our papers, I'm impressed with how difficult it is to get a grasp on everything that he was saying. The sheer difficulty of the text, with so many arguments not laid out but in note form, and the curse of our course which is a thin historical context for the works that we're reading, I'm not sure that I'm really scratching the surface of what Pascal was after.
Who were the Jensenists and what was his relationship to them? Did he really believe that he was 'chosen" for grace? He died so young, and accomplished so much, but can the life of seclusion and study he lived really lead him to any insight into human nature other than an Academic/christian point-of-view?
It's the historical context of his time that I find illuminating. Knowing that he, Descartes, Bacon and Gallileo were more or less contemporaries, knowing that the bridge between science and faith was being formed, at great peril, in some cases, shows me, in my brief glimpse, that Pascal was a man of great faith and humility, in spite of his sense of his own importance as a thinker and scientist. That he was so clearly aware of the nature of his intellectual abilities compared to his peers, makes his insistence on the limits of reason, even his ability to reason, in accepting God,so very unlike Descartes. Perhaps it was his early death and the health problems he faced that allowed him to see himself as human and limited.
Ultimately what he gives me is a great sense of hope that a life spent at least in the pursuit of grace, is a good life. Perfection is not an option.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
Lucretius and Sappho: The Poetic Discourse
Nice Title. I will write more about Lucretius here, mainly because I take the point that Sappho was simply to be read for it's beauty without an analysis of it's time and structure and it's place in our debate between Reason and Passion. To me, fragment 31 stands out as the signpost for why we read her today: a dismissal of politics and mythology as things that stand for love in her world. She then celebrates, oddly, not a love she shares with someone, but her sadness at not being able to see her friend who is gone. The heartbreak in the poem is so poignant, small and so human.
Some say an army on horseback,
some say on foot, and some say ships
are the most beautiful things
on this black earth,
but i say
it is whatever you love.
It's easy to show this. Just look
at Helen, beautiful herself
beyond everything human,
and she left
her perfect husband and went
sailing off to Troy
without a thought for her child
or her dear parents, led astray
lightly
reminding me of Anactoria,
who is gone
and whose lovely walk
and bright
shimmering face
I would rather see
than all the chariots
and armed men in Lydia
but it cannot be
humans
pray to share
unexpectedly
Simple images like "this black earth" and "bright..... shimmering face" compose a picture of ourselves so powerful and undeniable that it's hard to imagine arguing with it. Hard to imagine denying it as an expression of it's, and our time.
I suppose that that is what I liked most about the poetry, and the answer to the big question, for me: "Why do We Read This Book?". I think we read it for the same reason we read any poetry: to understand our selves as human beings. It gave me an insight into just how human they were in those times. No different, no less complex than we are today. We like to imagine that technology is the great divide between our times and all others, but it hasn't changed our essential human needs, desires, and means of relating to the world and each other.
It still comes down to guns and butter.
And so now comes Lucretius. A poem about the foundation of our universe and our race. Swinging for the fences, he is. However, his main goal can be simplified, if possible, to the notion that he wishes to remove man from his fear of death which he feels drives us to evil (ambition, envy), and that we can rid ourselves of it by "observing Nature's laws and looking at her face" 1-91.
I suppose for the purposes of a "book report", I should go through my notes first. It's interesting in one sense, coming back to the work a week or two after we've moved on. My impressions have shifted now that we're reading Christian philosophy. So I won't stick to my notes too long.
But I did start with the Big Question: Why Are We Reading This?. And I wrote that little is known about Lucretius except that he was Roman and wrote this one poem. He most likely wrote other things, but they are lost, and that is most likely because he seemed to make very little impression on his immediate culture and time. He didn't organize his philosophy, it is from the Epicurans; nor did he imagine his science, much of it coming from the ancient Atomists, although he did add the notion of the" swerve". He didn't invent the didactic poem, although he seems to have perfected it's use in Roman literature along with Homer. So why do we read it?
Like Sappho, I think the answer lies in the undeniable humanity expressed in the form he chooses. By humanity, I mean the indivisible combination of Passion and Reason that describes us best. (Isn't this the point of this whole thing?)
Even though he rails against religious superstition and calls fervently for man to adopt a philosophical life, he does so with intense passion, vibrant imagery, logic, humour, and moreover, he does it all in rhyme. He tries to dismiss his use of the poetic form (1-932) as a necessary panacea to get people to swallow a bitter medicine, but I don't believe that a cold, passionless mind could sustain the exercise with nearly the success that Lucretius does.
It feels as though Lucretius, bound by the demands of his age - a culture of superstition and fear, an insecure warlike State, early, often violent death, a rigid hierarchical society - was trying to create an expression of his inner humanity. His belief system writ large. It feels like a way of extending himself to a larger world in hopes of finding an audience, and of moving them the way he was moved in his life. He wanted to be free, and free his fellow man as well:
"The mind seeks explanation. Since the universe extends forever out beyond those ramparts at which our world ends, the mind forever yearns to peer into infinity, to project beyond and outside itself, and there to soar free." (II, 1045)
I think I'd like to leave it at that. I will post notes from the class discussion which cover the questions asked and answered. More and more we're seeing the discussion on Reason and Passion lead us to their intrinsic need for each other in order that we may understand ourselves and our world. The Christians are bringing in a new idea, the idea of Faith, or Grace. But, and I'm reading Nussbaum now too, although I doubt I'll even get close to finishing it, but the need for both emotion and reason to help us make sense of ourselves is the point.
Perhaps passion, in the age of Plato, was a dangerous thing. Maybe it led to murder, mayhem and superstitious ritual. We have television and football now, which are regulated forms of stupidity, but without regulation, would football be a blood sport? The Greek plays we've read point to deeply violent, tragic results of passion. Perhaps it was in this climate that Plato's call for reason comes. After all, as Lucretius says, "Nothing comes from Nothing". Context is King.
Two ideas that I loved from "Nature of Things":
The idea that "Motion has impetus in thought". II-250-270
And the discussion of animals having feelings too.
The latter is an idea that comes well before it's time. Indeed, it seems that philosophers went well out of their way to deny animals any feelings, only recently to have the idea come back in the past couple of hundred (more or less?) years. Does admitting this notion change or challenge our ideas, as propagated by the biblical texts, of man's dominion over animal. There's a lovely equality of the species, at least on a level of our common experience of being living creatures on the same planet, subject to pain, suffering, birth, death, and possibly even love and grief, even of only at a primitive level.
The former idea shocked me, in a way, with the notion of having "Freewill", as he calls it, being an entirely physical construct, rather than something granted by God, or by intellectual choice. Choice is about the origin of motion: thought precedes action, action creates reaction which is emotion. I suppose as an actor and acting teacher I'm somewhat more interested in these ideas, which is why I'm trying to read Nussbaum. But I'm fascinated with the notion of the role of emotion in our decision making, and thought processes. Do we ever ask ourselves what emotion is? Why does the Cow seem to mourn her calf? When do emotions rise? Nussbaum believes they arise in/from the narrative form. As an actor, I understand that to be true. You can't create emotion from nothing, it comes in reaction to a story. Context which translates into action. Response which informs decision. Passion and Reason as a necessary combination of events that lead us through our lives.
I think this is why I'm so attracted to Lucretius, Mencius, and even Seneca, who I've yet to address, but will later. There's a sensuality, if that's the word, to their writing, perhaps because of the forms they choose - poetry, letter, story - a narrative that leads me through ideas in a way that I relate to emotionally as well as intellectually. Perhaps not each in perfect balance, but that's the advantage of time: I can thread them together for new meanings.
Also, these three books seem so relevant to our time today. This idea came up in the discussions of Lucretius as well as Seneca. Are we in a modern Epicurean/Stoic age? I still can't articulate why yet, but I think the answer is "yes". We are very much concerned with our relationship to nature. We are very suspicious of superstition/Religion. We have left our focus on the public sphere. In fact, politicians now tailor their messages to appeal to us in our private spheres: home, family, taxes/income, private good over public service as exemplified by the re-hashing of Adam Smith and the so-called 'free market" or trickle down effect of the economy. If we leave you alone to do as you think best in private, it will be better for the public good than if we try to orchestrate the public good itself. Most of all, live for today. Borrow and spend, don't save. Learn to cook and eat well, get therapy, be happy, and it will benefit society indirectly. Advertising directs us to feel good about living for ourselves.
Nothing comes from Nothing.
But like the recent collapse of the financial markets, are we setting ourselves up for another kind of fall? Are we in danger of living in complacent, only semi-functioning social structures that do not grow and support change? Are we in danger of a new kind of tyranny because of our ambivalence? 8 years of Bush would seem to say so. But maybe the strange Nobel prize for Obama says we don't want to.
Some say an army on horseback,
some say on foot, and some say ships
are the most beautiful things
on this black earth,
but i say
it is whatever you love.
It's easy to show this. Just look
at Helen, beautiful herself
beyond everything human,
and she left
her perfect husband and went
sailing off to Troy
without a thought for her child
or her dear parents, led astray
lightly
reminding me of Anactoria,
who is gone
and whose lovely walk
and bright
shimmering face
I would rather see
than all the chariots
and armed men in Lydia
but it cannot be
humans
pray to share
unexpectedly
Simple images like "this black earth" and "bright..... shimmering face" compose a picture of ourselves so powerful and undeniable that it's hard to imagine arguing with it. Hard to imagine denying it as an expression of it's, and our time.
I suppose that that is what I liked most about the poetry, and the answer to the big question, for me: "Why do We Read This Book?". I think we read it for the same reason we read any poetry: to understand our selves as human beings. It gave me an insight into just how human they were in those times. No different, no less complex than we are today. We like to imagine that technology is the great divide between our times and all others, but it hasn't changed our essential human needs, desires, and means of relating to the world and each other.
It still comes down to guns and butter.
And so now comes Lucretius. A poem about the foundation of our universe and our race. Swinging for the fences, he is. However, his main goal can be simplified, if possible, to the notion that he wishes to remove man from his fear of death which he feels drives us to evil (ambition, envy), and that we can rid ourselves of it by "observing Nature's laws and looking at her face" 1-91.
I suppose for the purposes of a "book report", I should go through my notes first. It's interesting in one sense, coming back to the work a week or two after we've moved on. My impressions have shifted now that we're reading Christian philosophy. So I won't stick to my notes too long.
But I did start with the Big Question: Why Are We Reading This?. And I wrote that little is known about Lucretius except that he was Roman and wrote this one poem. He most likely wrote other things, but they are lost, and that is most likely because he seemed to make very little impression on his immediate culture and time. He didn't organize his philosophy, it is from the Epicurans; nor did he imagine his science, much of it coming from the ancient Atomists, although he did add the notion of the" swerve". He didn't invent the didactic poem, although he seems to have perfected it's use in Roman literature along with Homer. So why do we read it?
Like Sappho, I think the answer lies in the undeniable humanity expressed in the form he chooses. By humanity, I mean the indivisible combination of Passion and Reason that describes us best. (Isn't this the point of this whole thing?)
Even though he rails against religious superstition and calls fervently for man to adopt a philosophical life, he does so with intense passion, vibrant imagery, logic, humour, and moreover, he does it all in rhyme. He tries to dismiss his use of the poetic form (1-932) as a necessary panacea to get people to swallow a bitter medicine, but I don't believe that a cold, passionless mind could sustain the exercise with nearly the success that Lucretius does.
It feels as though Lucretius, bound by the demands of his age - a culture of superstition and fear, an insecure warlike State, early, often violent death, a rigid hierarchical society - was trying to create an expression of his inner humanity. His belief system writ large. It feels like a way of extending himself to a larger world in hopes of finding an audience, and of moving them the way he was moved in his life. He wanted to be free, and free his fellow man as well:
"The mind seeks explanation. Since the universe extends forever out beyond those ramparts at which our world ends, the mind forever yearns to peer into infinity, to project beyond and outside itself, and there to soar free." (II, 1045)
I think I'd like to leave it at that. I will post notes from the class discussion which cover the questions asked and answered. More and more we're seeing the discussion on Reason and Passion lead us to their intrinsic need for each other in order that we may understand ourselves and our world. The Christians are bringing in a new idea, the idea of Faith, or Grace. But, and I'm reading Nussbaum now too, although I doubt I'll even get close to finishing it, but the need for both emotion and reason to help us make sense of ourselves is the point.
Perhaps passion, in the age of Plato, was a dangerous thing. Maybe it led to murder, mayhem and superstitious ritual. We have television and football now, which are regulated forms of stupidity, but without regulation, would football be a blood sport? The Greek plays we've read point to deeply violent, tragic results of passion. Perhaps it was in this climate that Plato's call for reason comes. After all, as Lucretius says, "Nothing comes from Nothing". Context is King.
Two ideas that I loved from "Nature of Things":
The idea that "Motion has impetus in thought". II-250-270
And the discussion of animals having feelings too.
The latter is an idea that comes well before it's time. Indeed, it seems that philosophers went well out of their way to deny animals any feelings, only recently to have the idea come back in the past couple of hundred (more or less?) years. Does admitting this notion change or challenge our ideas, as propagated by the biblical texts, of man's dominion over animal. There's a lovely equality of the species, at least on a level of our common experience of being living creatures on the same planet, subject to pain, suffering, birth, death, and possibly even love and grief, even of only at a primitive level.
The former idea shocked me, in a way, with the notion of having "Freewill", as he calls it, being an entirely physical construct, rather than something granted by God, or by intellectual choice. Choice is about the origin of motion: thought precedes action, action creates reaction which is emotion. I suppose as an actor and acting teacher I'm somewhat more interested in these ideas, which is why I'm trying to read Nussbaum. But I'm fascinated with the notion of the role of emotion in our decision making, and thought processes. Do we ever ask ourselves what emotion is? Why does the Cow seem to mourn her calf? When do emotions rise? Nussbaum believes they arise in/from the narrative form. As an actor, I understand that to be true. You can't create emotion from nothing, it comes in reaction to a story. Context which translates into action. Response which informs decision. Passion and Reason as a necessary combination of events that lead us through our lives.
I think this is why I'm so attracted to Lucretius, Mencius, and even Seneca, who I've yet to address, but will later. There's a sensuality, if that's the word, to their writing, perhaps because of the forms they choose - poetry, letter, story - a narrative that leads me through ideas in a way that I relate to emotionally as well as intellectually. Perhaps not each in perfect balance, but that's the advantage of time: I can thread them together for new meanings.
Also, these three books seem so relevant to our time today. This idea came up in the discussions of Lucretius as well as Seneca. Are we in a modern Epicurean/Stoic age? I still can't articulate why yet, but I think the answer is "yes". We are very much concerned with our relationship to nature. We are very suspicious of superstition/Religion. We have left our focus on the public sphere. In fact, politicians now tailor their messages to appeal to us in our private spheres: home, family, taxes/income, private good over public service as exemplified by the re-hashing of Adam Smith and the so-called 'free market" or trickle down effect of the economy. If we leave you alone to do as you think best in private, it will be better for the public good than if we try to orchestrate the public good itself. Most of all, live for today. Borrow and spend, don't save. Learn to cook and eat well, get therapy, be happy, and it will benefit society indirectly. Advertising directs us to feel good about living for ourselves.
Nothing comes from Nothing.
But like the recent collapse of the financial markets, are we setting ourselves up for another kind of fall? Are we in danger of living in complacent, only semi-functioning social structures that do not grow and support change? Are we in danger of a new kind of tyranny because of our ambivalence? 8 years of Bush would seem to say so. But maybe the strange Nobel prize for Obama says we don't want to.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Journal Update: Antigone and Medea
Well, we were warned not to leave the journal too long as it was hard to go back and write about all the books we've read and of course, I didn't listen. It's only been two weeks but it feels like a long time since I read Antigone/Medea and Sappho/Aristotle. Reading that and it strikes me how very large each of these works is. It occurred to me today in the Lucretius seminar: each of these books has spawned entire industries of academic work, and here we are attempting to wrap our heads around them in quick succession, two at a time, week after week.
But that, in a way, helped me with Lucretius. I realized that the point is to read the books for a progression of the larger idea, passion vs. reason, and the balancing act that man has been struggling with since the beginning of written thought. We are by nature passionate beings and also thinking beings, and the two live in an uneasy balance within us. So how do/have we define(d) ourselves as a species? How have we negotiated our relationship with the world around us which is so incapable of organizing itself as well as we can? How do we create and regulate social order when our emotions and fears can get the better of us and threaten to topple it? How do we create room for ourselves to still be sentient beings within the demands of order and a moral society?
So taking this idea, rather than replicating my notes from the readings and discussions, I will try to fill in the blanks from the past two weeks.
Antigone/Medea
I had read and seen Medea before and was familiar with it. We were getting a visit from Zoe Caldwell when I was in theater school and she had recently starred, to enormous acclaim and a Tony award, in a production of Medea that her husband, Robert Whitehead, had directed. We watched a video of the performance and studied her carefully. It was odd for me, having never seen classical theater before except for a high school production of Iphegenia in Aulis that my father directed and in which I performed as a six-year old. I don't remember much except that I had to be carried on stage asleep but held up my entrance because I had to pee. We all wore tunics and I saw the full breast of the girl playing Iphegenia.
Ms. Caldwell's Medea indeed sported the same tunics, but I was struck by one extraordinary thing: her voice. It was so full and deep and pained, like a wail from an animal being sent to slaughter (I grew up in the country and unfortunately have heard such a thing). It seemed to emanate from somewhere deep in her groin, which indeed it must have, because she spent most of her performance clutching and rubbing what I could only imagine was her womb. I've never heard anything like it since on stage, or anywhere for that matter.
When she spoke, she talked about the difficulty she had each night as she sat for dinner with her sons before the show. She said she couldn't look at them without crying, a feeling that persisted until the end of the run. She admitted that she was using them to prepare for her performance each night, imagining slaughtering them with her own hands as they ate quietly. I thought my mother was the only one who did that kind of thing.
The play was a deeply moving meditation on a woman who had been grievously betrayed. There was no sense of Jason being right. He had obviously scorned his wife, and her grief had turned inward to rage, and then outward to murder. It was the story of the first wife scorned by a callow husband for a younger woman. The sense of great injustice was palpable and righteous. And she wasn't taking it lying down. No wonder New Yorkers loved it. (I'm joking, but the point is that the production was very much of it's time).
It was interesting to read the play again with this experience in hand. This time I saw (forgive me) Jason's side of things. Perhaps it's because I've been through a divorce myself, but I saw a world in which Jason was also trapped by circumstance. He didn't handle it very well, and to me that was the mistake. If he had a master plan, he should have made her a partner in it. But perhaps, in that age, a man needn't but assume that his wishes stood for the best interests of his family. But still, the drama of "natural" law, versus social norm, the law of man, plays out like a time-bomb.
But that is nature of great drama, especially tragedy. There is no "bad guy", certainly a hero and a villain, but we must have empathy for both or the drama sinks! (or it's a tv series) Circumstances and time are the true enemies. Perhaps this is the nature of the struggle? We contain within us the struggle between passion and reason, but are victims, if we fail, of time and circumstance.
Antigone astonished me. I had never read it before, nor seen a production, and I left it thinking it was one of the great tragedies I had read. I thought that Arthur Miller would have written it, had he been around back then. It was as didactic as anything that he had ever written, but like the best of his work, it's essential humanity soared over the moral lesson it tried to teach.
Like Joe Keller or Willie Loman, Creon has a tenuous hold on power over his family, and the fear of failure and threat from within drives him to inflexibility and rage. Caught in his own egotistical trap, he is forced to condemn his son's fiance for doing what all acknowledge to be "the right thing", burying her brother to save his soul.
Antigone as well is caught by the same inflexibility, and that is the stuff of both comedy and tragedy. Two rigid characters caught in a circumstance that demands they negotiate change. And like all great tragedies, from Hamlet to The Crucible, it ends in the physical death of the hero, and the moral (emotional?) death of the villain.
And again, the lesson is the same, a man of reason is reduced to an emotional wreck, and an emotional heroine makes a treaty of reason with her soul, removing herself from fear of death. They change places, as it were. In both these plays, the marriage of Passion and Reason fails. And I think that's the point: in marriage, each partner must be able to accommodate the other. They must strive for balance. The stuff of marriage, I suppose, but a little dull for a Greek Tragedy.
But that, in a way, helped me with Lucretius. I realized that the point is to read the books for a progression of the larger idea, passion vs. reason, and the balancing act that man has been struggling with since the beginning of written thought. We are by nature passionate beings and also thinking beings, and the two live in an uneasy balance within us. So how do/have we define(d) ourselves as a species? How have we negotiated our relationship with the world around us which is so incapable of organizing itself as well as we can? How do we create and regulate social order when our emotions and fears can get the better of us and threaten to topple it? How do we create room for ourselves to still be sentient beings within the demands of order and a moral society?
So taking this idea, rather than replicating my notes from the readings and discussions, I will try to fill in the blanks from the past two weeks.
Antigone/Medea
I had read and seen Medea before and was familiar with it. We were getting a visit from Zoe Caldwell when I was in theater school and she had recently starred, to enormous acclaim and a Tony award, in a production of Medea that her husband, Robert Whitehead, had directed. We watched a video of the performance and studied her carefully. It was odd for me, having never seen classical theater before except for a high school production of Iphegenia in Aulis that my father directed and in which I performed as a six-year old. I don't remember much except that I had to be carried on stage asleep but held up my entrance because I had to pee. We all wore tunics and I saw the full breast of the girl playing Iphegenia.
Ms. Caldwell's Medea indeed sported the same tunics, but I was struck by one extraordinary thing: her voice. It was so full and deep and pained, like a wail from an animal being sent to slaughter (I grew up in the country and unfortunately have heard such a thing). It seemed to emanate from somewhere deep in her groin, which indeed it must have, because she spent most of her performance clutching and rubbing what I could only imagine was her womb. I've never heard anything like it since on stage, or anywhere for that matter.
When she spoke, she talked about the difficulty she had each night as she sat for dinner with her sons before the show. She said she couldn't look at them without crying, a feeling that persisted until the end of the run. She admitted that she was using them to prepare for her performance each night, imagining slaughtering them with her own hands as they ate quietly. I thought my mother was the only one who did that kind of thing.
The play was a deeply moving meditation on a woman who had been grievously betrayed. There was no sense of Jason being right. He had obviously scorned his wife, and her grief had turned inward to rage, and then outward to murder. It was the story of the first wife scorned by a callow husband for a younger woman. The sense of great injustice was palpable and righteous. And she wasn't taking it lying down. No wonder New Yorkers loved it. (I'm joking, but the point is that the production was very much of it's time).
It was interesting to read the play again with this experience in hand. This time I saw (forgive me) Jason's side of things. Perhaps it's because I've been through a divorce myself, but I saw a world in which Jason was also trapped by circumstance. He didn't handle it very well, and to me that was the mistake. If he had a master plan, he should have made her a partner in it. But perhaps, in that age, a man needn't but assume that his wishes stood for the best interests of his family. But still, the drama of "natural" law, versus social norm, the law of man, plays out like a time-bomb.
But that is nature of great drama, especially tragedy. There is no "bad guy", certainly a hero and a villain, but we must have empathy for both or the drama sinks! (or it's a tv series) Circumstances and time are the true enemies. Perhaps this is the nature of the struggle? We contain within us the struggle between passion and reason, but are victims, if we fail, of time and circumstance.
Antigone astonished me. I had never read it before, nor seen a production, and I left it thinking it was one of the great tragedies I had read. I thought that Arthur Miller would have written it, had he been around back then. It was as didactic as anything that he had ever written, but like the best of his work, it's essential humanity soared over the moral lesson it tried to teach.
Like Joe Keller or Willie Loman, Creon has a tenuous hold on power over his family, and the fear of failure and threat from within drives him to inflexibility and rage. Caught in his own egotistical trap, he is forced to condemn his son's fiance for doing what all acknowledge to be "the right thing", burying her brother to save his soul.
Antigone as well is caught by the same inflexibility, and that is the stuff of both comedy and tragedy. Two rigid characters caught in a circumstance that demands they negotiate change. And like all great tragedies, from Hamlet to The Crucible, it ends in the physical death of the hero, and the moral (emotional?) death of the villain.
And again, the lesson is the same, a man of reason is reduced to an emotional wreck, and an emotional heroine makes a treaty of reason with her soul, removing herself from fear of death. They change places, as it were. In both these plays, the marriage of Passion and Reason fails. And I think that's the point: in marriage, each partner must be able to accommodate the other. They must strive for balance. The stuff of marriage, I suppose, but a little dull for a Greek Tragedy.
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