The infernal

THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST.
JUSTICE URGED ON MY HIGH ARTIFICER;
MY MAKER WAS DIVINE AUTHORITY,
THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND PRIMAL LOVE.
BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS
WERE MADE, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY.
ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE.

(Inferno, Canto III)

There are a couple of things that jump out immediately from this inscription on the Gates to Hell in the Inferno: the first is that the gate demands to be read, it does not speak to those standing before it, neither is the visitor prescient. The second thing that strikes me is this idea of a self-narration, the story of oneself as told by the self-- what is this story? why is it that the story of the self often the most untrue? and why, most importantly, does the self tell a story? The gate, then, is an active agent of telling and narration whose unchanging act suggests that it somehow remains consistently engaged with the rest of the telling in the Inferno. In other words, the gate and its story of hell is one that is echoed and altered with each sub-narrated story-- eternal pain, the way of the lost, the abandonment of hope? Are these all really themes of the Inferno, or can we perhaps argue that these are themes it wishes it has, yet ones that it is fearful of embracing?


Curiously enough, the inscription of the gate is a memory of the future-- it is meant to remind us of what is to come. We haven't met the characters populating the Inferno, but the gate is not a prophecy of them, it is an altered memory of their state of being, and thus an element of the narrative that creates an important distinction between the narrative of a memory by a self and the narrative of a present. Either way, the characters are narrated by another figure. The narration of the gate, however, is unique in the way that it anticipates the narrative, telling it already but without us as the readers yet knowing it.

These are just a few ideas I've thrown out there about how to possibly approach the gate as a kind of ante-narrative or ante-Inferno, a parallel but brief vision of hell that stands at the point at which we enter. There is something else that calls out to the reader, and that is the last line of the inscription: Abandon every hope, who enter here. It might just be the translation but this one line reminds me of modern poetry, and Eliot's poems in particular. Somehow the gate seems to want to read hell as the landscape that the modernists would obsess about later on. It is a kind of wasteland where the living and breathing rot over and over again. The wasteland, of course, would be on earth for the modernists. Eliot's rotting souls utter the same words again and again: hurryup hurryup as if to somehow accelerate their torture. Yet, I would think that they are numb, feelingless compared to the characters of the Inferno who seem almost to savor this torture, to live in the future and memory of the full lives they lived. Hell is the consequence of the lives of Odysseus, Paolo, and Ugolino. Hell on earth, Eliot's Wasteland, is the consequence of a life that possibly never was, that cannot care for torture because it still cannot feel the pain.

Ugolino, II

"But after we had reached the fourth day, Gaddo,

throwing himself outstretched, down at my feet,

implored me: "Father, why do you not help me?"

And there he died; and just as you see me,

I saw the other three fall one by one

between the fifth day and the sixth; at which,

now blind, I started groping over each..."

(Inferno, Canto XXXIII)

We're back with Ugolino and the penultimate events that led up to his punishment in the Inferno. But here is a man who is already punished, and I want to try an understand whether this earthly punishment of seeing each child starve and die before his eyes is somehow worse than the eternal ordeal of gnawing helplessly on the bones of the man whose betrayal led him to the death and dying acts that he had. The most arresting part of this brief excerpt is Ugolino's blindness coming directly after the deaths of his children. In other words, his punishment is to see, and to a lesser extent, to hear, the excruciating deaths of his children. There have been other blind fathers before Ugolino and there will be some after him-- Oedipus comes to mind in the former category and Lear in the latter. Their blindness, however, is a kind of gift. Lear carries Cordelia's dead body without seeing his daughter actually die. The blind Oedipus is led by Antigone whose death comes after his. Ugolino, however, must see each child die before blindness sets in. The role of the auditory is equally interesting here: what is heard cannot be responded to. Gaddo's plea for help, for some kind of rescue or relief from not death, but the pain of dying, paralyses his father, who only after the death of his son, possibly does what he was asking him to do in the first place.

It is to touch and taste that Ugolino must turn in the last few moments of his own life-- senses that incidentally are closely associated with sin-- lust and gluttony. In Hell, Ugolino is the glutton who is never satiated, gnawing and chewing but never, ever will his hunger end. But let's come back to my original issue with this passage: is the earthly punishment somehow worse than the eternal? I think, yes, for the eternal is a kind of reprieve from what Ugolino hesitated to do on earth. In hell, Ugolino is a saintly figure, who saves even the dead from their fate. On earth, he was suffering towards this sainthood, tested for the spiritual by the deeply physical.

Ugolino, I

"As soon as a thin ray had made its way

into that sorry prison, and I saw,

reflected in four faces, my own gaze,

out of my grief, I bit at both my hands;

and they, who thought I'd done that out of hunger,

immediately rose and told me: "Father,

it would be far less painful for us if

you ate of us...""

(Inferno, Canto XXXIII, Dante, translated by Allen Mandelbaum)

I've decided the Inferno and its slightly less infernal siblings should get more posts than some of the other books I've talked about. Two reasons: 1. c'est Dante, and 2. I'm teaching a course on Dante next quarter, never hurts to have some thoughts about the guy. We're coming towards the end of the Inferno here, and maybe in other posts, I'll go back to do the famous P and F scene as well as the scene of Dante's induction as an officially great poet of Western civilization.

This is, of course, one of the most heart-rending scenes of the Inferno, Count Ugolino is seen uncontrollably gnawing on a skull-- supposedly that of one of his sons who sacrificed themselves to their father's hunger and to their own misery by allowing their imprisoned flesh to become sustenance for the Count. Allen Mandelbaum asserts that it is not quite clear in either the Italian or in his translation whether Ugolino actually consumed his children or not, and I'm not going to be the one to decide. What I do want to talk about here is the effeminized figure of the father, and idea of the sacrificial flesh of sons. I don't want to make this into a discussion based off of Christian theology though I will talk about it briefly. Right now I want to think about the figure of Medea in comparison to Ugolino-- the mother who destroys her children in order to save them from a father's second marriage and to avenge herself upon an unfaithful husband, and then, the figure of a father who dying of starvation with his children thinks to appease his sons' misery by consuming their flesh. In Euripides' immortalizing play, Medea knifes her children to death and then flees to Athens where King Aegeus has promised her refuge. Here, Ugolino cannot escape the remnants of the bodies which begged his aid in their destruction. What stands out, when we place these two figures side by side, is the way each takes on characteristics of the opposite sex. In other words, these unnatural parents are unnatural also in that they evade the binds of their own gender. Medea physically kills her children, but more importantly, promises fertility to Aegeus, i.e. she takes on the male association of abundant seed. Ugolino, on the other hand, regressed to femininity attempts destruction of his own body before taking that of his children. His punishment, however, seals this gender transformation through the body: Ugolino's body will forever hold those of his children, a perverse spin on the image of pregnancy.

While I do want to briefly mention the reflection of the Christian idea of the son's sacrifice of his flesh in order to preserve, in a sense, the father or the image of the father, that idea isn't given much credence here. For this is not a divine father, but a very human one who instead of immortalizing the flesh takes it for his own private survival. The other transformation that goes on here, of course, is of the young dying before the old. It is the children who offer, (and succeed horribly) in giving their father posterity. It is on their name that he lives instead of perpetuating the generations by offering his body to his name-bearing sons.

I'm going to stop here with this passage now. On thinking more as I wrote, I've decided to do a second post about the Ugolino's continued narrative.

Orpheus and the Afterlife

"Reweave, I implore, the fate unwound too fast
Of my Eurydice. To you are owed ourselves and all creation; A brief while
We linger; and then we hasten late or soon, to one abode...
... The favor that I ask is but to enjoy her love and if the Fates
Will not reprieve her, my resolve is clear
Not to return: may two deaths give you cheer."
(Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book X, translated by A. D. Melville)

Yesterday I dissed Aeneas for not being among the great lovers of literature. I mentioned Romeo and Juliet, and Cleopatra and Marc Antony, but my all-time favorite has always been Orpheus, the lute-player who will go to the Underworld to find his dead bride, and if that fails, will please the gods with his own death. It's a seemingly win-win situation. What charms me about Orpheus is that he unlike all the others I've spoken about so far, allows for love to transform him and affect him-- his figure makes the suggestion that other love forms are not really love but a kind of ownership, pleasure boat ride, social contract etc. Odysseus was faithful to Penelope, but she was not the compass that led him to Ithaca. Aeneas chilled with Dido while it served the interests of him and his people. Romeo was too chicken to go on living without Juliet-- and didn't even wait to see what his options were. Orpheus, on the other hand, has it all figured out. I don't want to make this blog post about how I wish there were more of this guy around, what I do want to talk about though is his concept of destiny, particularly hell, and then maybe add a few reflections of my own, given recent events in my life.
The first thing to understand about pre-Christian Greek and Roman narratives is that there was only a kind of hell that they could aspire to after death-- they didn't have the chances monotheistic faiths give us. It was death, and then the realm of Pluto, the god of the Underworld, cold and uncaring, who plundered the living earth at will, taking figures like Proserpina and Eurydice with him. For Orpheus to contemplate death for Eurydice then, was to contemplate what in Christianity is a kind of eternal damnation. Later on in the Inferno, there will be more such figures-- people who for the sake of another we willing to face this eternal damnation, Paulo and Francesca being my particular favorites.
But there is also an opposite case where romantic love and the after-life instead of being one and the same, are battle-axes pointed at each other, one waiting to destroy and interrupt the existence of the other. In our times, then, it seems that we often end up choosing between faith and love, rather than trying to mediate both. Is it the fear of Hell that keeps us from allowing both or is it the desire for Heaven? Orpheus didn't have a choice about where to go to search for Eurydice, so he floated into hell. Paulo and Francesca were joined by the hip, but are seemingly unregretful about their stolen kiss. What I want to say here is that many of the greatest lovers in Western literature do not see hell as abominable-- possibly because it is a hell of virtue, nobility, and love, rather than a hell of low actions, murder, and avarice.
While the Greeks and Romans didn't really have a concept of the Underworld as Hell, Dante certainly did. I'm going to write about Dante later, but I do quickly want to mention that it is the most noble figures of the Western imagination that end up in the Inferno-- these are people of great virtue and perseverance, and thus whose presence makes hell a better place. This is a great line to end with, this idea of making hell a better place, but I want to go a little further and think about the forces Orpheus has to wrestle with: Death, and destiny (or, the Fates). It is to the Fates that he turns first, believing that the fabric can somehow be unwoven and the nightmare of separation ended. Unable to have Eurydice in life, Orpheus chooses to have her in death. And this doesn't work out either, as the story goes. So my last question then is this: is life one big speed-dating event? Do figures like Orpheus waste their time trying to be the living among the dead, trying to unwind the fabric that has suffocated their love? Or is the struggle to make a love clear among the darknesses of Hell and Heaven perhaps a duty that such figures undertake, to make the world a better place through the eternity of their pain?

Poetry: not as we know it.

"To One Who Loved Not Poetry"
Thou liest dead, and there will be no memory left behind
Of thee or thine in all the earth, for never didst thou bind
The roses of Pierian streams upon thy brow; thy doom
Is now to flit with unknown ghosts in cold and nameless gloom.

(Sappho, translated by Edwin Arnold, 1893)

I love poetry, but I've never been particularly good at writing or explicating about it. What draws me to it is the sharpness of its brevity and the peculiar disconnect it creates between the living world and itself. I've jumped back a few hundred centuries to the Greeks again-- the reason for this is simple, I don't want to write about Dante until I can do him full justice. The Inferno will come. But here is Sappho-- who is a literary vixen in her own right--and its a tough task to do her justice too.

This is a particularly relevant poem though, for it attempts to encapsulate the meaning of poetry to not just the human soul but also to human existence. But I don't think "poetry" here and in Sappho's mind is suggestive of simple verse. And this may be a very simple interpretation and a completely pointless post, but I want to talk about this idea of living poetry, and of binding roses from Pierian streams upon our brows. In other words, why do we read literary works that suggest something beyond the ordinary to us-- in the case of this blog, why does each one of these books call out to me, and so many of my friends, begging for a rereading but also asking from us to immortalize them in the lives that we lead?

Here's slightly different aspect of death: this is the fear that death will scratch the memory of a being from this earth, damning him to an eternal existence with the unknowns, or what I read to be as more like-mindeds. In a sense, the death of a figure who shuns a moderate version of Quixote's life is a figure who shuns the possibilities told to him by his ancestors. It's interesting that I have this thought because earlier I was playing around with the prologue of the Arabian Nights, where the crucial suggestion is that the past is indeed a place from which to gain knowledge and seek admonition. Here, the literary past in particular is a place through which to somehow evade death's darkest punishment: erasure.

If what we fear most about death or distance or disappearance from the lives of others is the erasure of our being's presence and the memories we sought to create in our lifetime, I wonder then, whether Sappho's solution is the antidote? When we intoxicate, decorate, and even consecrate ourselves, are we seeking to make an eternal memory? I guess what I'm struggling with here is how do we make a memory so powerful that even in our death, it continues to live on? Sappho had the Pierian stream, its intoxicating water and its lush roses to sate her desire with-- in this world, are our facebook pages, our blogs, our emails, our diaries, our academic essays a way of immortal preservation? Or is it our deeds, our immense love for others, our friendships, our relationships, our families that preserve us? Is it in the latter that we must seek Pierian roses or the former?

I wonder too, if what Sappho suggests is yet another concept of hell. Fire and brimstone over and over again, can it just be that hell is a place where all we encounter is sameness, where each person has committed the sin of being unexceptional, or of living a life in which a lack of imagination and an absence of empathy informed his ill-deeds? Heaven, by this standard, would be a place where those who learnt and taught the virtues of possbility and perseverance landed up. And in a sense, it's true I think-- Heaven is a place of eternal possibility, or at least that's what they told me when I was a kid. I remember planning to eat a couple of hundred burgers and lots and lots of apple-pie when I finally got there.

Roland's unmindfulness.

"Count Roland lay down beneath a pine tree

He has turned his face towards Spain.

Many things began to pass through his mind:

All the lands which he conquered as a warrior,

The fair land of France, the men of his lineage,

Charlemagne, his lord, who raised him.

He cannot help weeping and heaving great sighs

But he does not wish to be unmindful of himself."

(The Song of Roland, translated by Glyn Sheridan Burgess, Penguin Classics)

It's a long jump from Augustine to a world where there is suddenly a concept of France and Spain-- the first signs of Europe as we know it start showing in the Song of Roland. Technically speaking, I shouldn't be a big fan of this 12th century French poem-- it's all about Muslims and Christians bashing each other, God knows I'm not a fan of that. But I still love it-- I love it because even though it's madly macho and full of hate, it has these amazing moments where the human in these warriors shines through, and the power of this transformation is what reminds me that underneath our tough skins, we're all the same. 

Here, Roland, Charlemagne's nephew and a brave fighter, lies dying on the battlefield. This is without doubt one of the greatest deaths in literature (for a full appreciation of it, I'd suggest reading the whole scene). But I want to read this death as just Roland's death, the death of an individual who even as he feels life leaving him, "does not wish to be unmindful of himself." I want to try and understand what it means not to be unmindful and what is the self that guides us towards rejecting this state of abandon-- even when the sustaining force of narrative is about to depart. In other words, is their any virtue to the narrative of death and dying? 

In the moments before he is arrested by this thought of unmindfulness, we entertain the idea that Roland is allowing himself to be human, to engage in the luxuries that memory allows, and most importantly, to allow these thoughts to capture his being in such a way that it is no longer existing in the present, but rather attempting to see the future through the eye of the past. In other words, when we die, it is the past that informs our emotion not the present moment. 

So what is the role of the present moment, then? That's where unmindfulness seems to play a role-- Roland's arrest of his unmindfulness moment is to attend to the present of death. Unmindfulness, essentially, lures the dying man away from the urgency of the present, towards the possibilities silhouetted by the past. It reduces, rather than gives agency.  Roland's snatch for the present is a kind of "Death be not proud" moment, insisting on his sense of living each moment as it comes rather than taking death's kind anesthesia of memory.

On the other hand, it is the "weeping and heaving of great sighs," that make him human-- and thus immortal in a sense of the word, for it is the ability to feel that continues on in the species, undisturbed. Does he weep, then, in the present or for a past that tells him of the future that's been closed to him? Is his weeping possibly for the utter lack of a present he experiences-- the extreme distance of all things close and beloved? Or is Roland more alive than we can imagine in the way that his wishes still inform his actions? I would think in death, Roland is perhaps the strongest he can be because of the way all three spaces of time are suddenly captured in his form-- and experienced so powerfully in his mind. If we can be three places at once, no matter, the pain, are we not superhuman for just that small moment in time? But we don't live to tell it, and I think maybe that adds an extra element of the super. 

Augustinian angst.

"For what can be more wretched than a wretch who has no pity upon himself, who sheds tears over Dido, dead for love of Aeneas, but who sheds no tears for his own death in not loving thee, O God, light of my heart, and bread of the inner mouth of my soul, O power that links together my mind with my inmost thoughts? I did not love thee and thus committed fornication against thee..."
(Confessions, Book 1, St. Augustine, translated by Albert Outer)

If Montaigne is the person whose lonely thoughts constantly make me want to comfort him, than St. Augustine is the person whose constant struggle with ideas of love simultaneously attracts and repulses me-- only to keep me circling in his struggling orbit. Here Augustine is bemoaning the shallow emotion of empathy for it seems to have dulled and interrupted the greater emotion that later enters his soul-- love of God. If he cried for Dido upon learning of her bereavement than surely this was a kind of infidelity to his later and eternal master. But this is Augustine's reading of himself-- in this post I want to make yet another an attempt to reconcile his conflict: are his free-flowing tears for Dido one step towards loving God, or are they in fact, the expression of a fully-blossomed love of God already? In other words, can Augustine's immense pity for a weeping queen be read as a kind of human godliness?
If I went into theological definitions of Augustine's concept of God and other such scientific things, maybe this blog post would be more concise and perfect. But I want to explore the idea of God on a more basic level, as I always do, and try to make clear on this other level, the connection that DHR once made-- Augustine is very much like Aeneas, a wanderer with a cause. A simple description of Augustine's pre-conversion state of mind would be this: he loved God without knowing. I say this because I read Augustine's movable state, his ability to weep for an unloved one, as one that encapsulates all of the characteristics of God that we turn to-- modified for the human form, of course. If the form of God is able to show mercy that is powerful enough to change circumstance, than the most divine of human forms is able to weep in the face of another's misfortune.
A wretch who has no pity on himself may be wretched indeed, but isn't that perhaps the most godly of all human beings--God, as I see him, is a figure whose entire self is devoted to the care and love of a creation that is so much less than him. The human being can't really make that assumption but don't we all nevertheless, aspire to the image of God? In Islamic thought, there can be no real love of God, unless there is a love for his creation. The whole let's-leave-the-material-world-behind train of thought sometimes strikes me as people getting ahead of themselves--it's not original sin that brought us here but rather our own connection with each other and the things around us, God's creation. I'm not sure whether we've been sent to this world to make up for that one mistake in the Garden of Eden, but rather, I think we've been sent to learn how to love each other for aren't we all, in our various guises of religions, just God's creation?

You've lost that lovin' feelin'

AGAVE: Father, I shall be parted from thee and exiled. 

CADMUS: Alas! my child, why fling thy arms around me, as a snowy cygnet
folds its wings about the frail old swan? 

AGAVE: Whither can I turn, an exile from my country? 

CADMUS: I know not, my daughter; small help is thy father now. 

(Euripides, The Bacchae)

The Bacchae is one of my favorite plays-- I wrote a paper called "Technicolor Tiresias" on the figure of the soothsayer for the HUM Sequence. That was then. In the past couple of years, of course, The Bacchae has changed from being just a Greek tragedy to a delineation of the system that helped define the concept of the ubermensch-- oh Nietzsche. I don't want to go into the overdone ideas of Dionysian and Apollonian in this post. Let's concentrate on this scene instead: Agave has just discovered that the hunter's prize she carries so proudly in her arms is the head of her son Pentheus, and Cadmus has been sentenced to the form of a serpent by a merciless Dionysus. In the breakdown of a family and kingdom, what speaks to me most is the shattered but nevertheless still completely precious relationship of parent to child. Agave is to be exiled, and Cadmus will no longer retain his human form, let alone the kingdom. Yet Agave, a parent who has just destroyed her own child, clings to her father somehow believing that a solution can be found in his figure.
A couple of days ago, a friend and I were discussing how great the Greeks are to write about because they just feel so much. Part of the reason why they feel is because they are placed in situations of intense suffering-- situations that I think are of the worst possible kind because they stem from innocent ignorance and inherent lack of control for the destiny of the self. In such situations, feelings of regret and the desire to somehow turn back the pages humbles characters like Agave and Cadmus so entirely that it is hard to try and logically unravel why what happens happens in the play. (It's funny that I have this thought-- I just recalled that one of the discussion questions given to us in our precept sheet required that we trace "stages" of Pentheus's transformation.)
The image of a young cygnet folding its wings around a frail, old swan is perhaps what captured the scene for me-- even more so than the Lear-like reduction of a father to nothing in the line that follows. It doesn't strike ironic or weird despite the fact that Cadmus and his wife are soon to assume the shape of beasts. It just says something incredibly simple, and then rejects its own simplicity (but that's just the Greeks doing their thing). I am convinced that what Agave seeks is comfort, not solutions. There is no solution or reversal to be had-- and of this Agave is well-aware for she has already begun to refer to herself as an exile. It is not destiny or irony that happens in a tragedy like this, but rather a kind of paralysis of the passions that guide life. More than death that is the tragedy-- the shrunken father who is of "small help" to his distraught.
Somehow, these days, so much leads me back to the simplistic question: Is all this worth it? In his last moments as a human, is it not Cadmus' burden to be a human, and so to extend his humanity forth to Agave's broken figure? Is the Greek tragedy, then, somehow mocking at the figure of the human even as it reduces it to a puppet of circumstance? In other words, we must ask whether humanity is a failed function all along whose only vestige available in the tragedy is the intense feeling that emanates when the human form and function are about to snatched from the accursed?

Parabolic.

Matthew 13
10: And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables?
11: He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.
12: For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.
13: Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.
(The New Testament, King James Version)

Earlier today I read that out of all the great works of Western civilization, the Bible is the hardest to interpret. In this particular excerpt from the Gospel of Matthew, we have the problem or the key to this difficulty raised by the disciples themselves-- why is the parable the choice form of discourse, particularly in the New Testament? The speaking figure of Jesus suggests that the parable separates the men from the boys-- the disciples from the masses that have come to receive his message. I want to try and argue a kind of an opposite case, that the parable is not really created because the listeners are those who don't see while seeing, and don't understand while listening, but that the parable is in itself a kind of mystery whose seemingly opaque form ensures its longevity. In other words, the parable is a classic means of extending Jesus' message over centuries of time, rather than allowing it to possibly wilt at the mercy of a few disciples.
If Jesus initially disseminated through the parable, then this same parable flowered over twenty or so centuries, using its interpretable form to speak with changing and inconstant generations.
The figure of the disciple has due importance, but in the long term, it is the multitude whose simple memories of the parables will populate the New Testament and thus even though they're intelligence in the moment is limited, it is their continuity that colors the future of the Christian faith.
While the disciple has been "given" the mysteries of the heavens, the multitude must struggle to crack the nut. It is the continuous cracking of the nut, then, that keeps the faith going, not the one time transfer of Jesus' idea to his immediate right-hand men. This, of course, touches briefly upon the idea of religion as a living, growing entity that must constantly be reinterpreted in order to sustain its marriage with this world. Does the parable of the sower operate differently in a world where people have never sown a seed, than in the world where it's all they did? Do our generations struggle to establish that basic relationship between what is sown and what flies away? But what remains important here is that the parable has carried through for various reasons: its simplicity, its deep connection to the figure of the human, and most interestingly-- the connection of this human to the earth. The parable, then, is a very earthly thing, and about earthly people. I wonder, in ending, why the earthly is such a bad thing.

Oedipus the Meek

"Am I not evil? Am I not utterly unclean
Now I must be banished, and when I go
I may not see my family, nor set my foot
Into my country...
...Do not, do not You sovereign holy Gods
Let me see this day; But let me vanish from the mortal world
Before a stain like this pollutes my life!"

(Oedipus the King, Sophocles, Wordsworth Editions)

This is Oedipus the King speaking or rather letting the words drop from his lips at what can best be called a moment of threshold. This is before Jocasta's messenger confirms his heritage and thus, his guilt, and after Tiresias has uttered his dark prophecy. I don't want to talk about Oedipus as the big figure that he is in both literature and critical theory, but rather as Oedipus, the man, very much in the space between what is fate and what is past. It is Oedipus's prayer that interests me the most--his desire to disappear from the world before his history, his footprint, is stained with the sins of incest and patricide.
We're in a moment then, that seems to not want to recognize the possibility of redemption and forgiveness, but also is unable to conceive of the existence of a sinner. In other words, there is no option for Oedipus, in the case of his sin being confirmed, but to disappear and somehow also erase the memory of his actions on earth. Once again, this is a moment of pre-Heaven and Hell, and pre-redemption days--- but is this also a moment of pre-forgiveness? Oedipus does not pray to the gods for this very wonderful thing, but rather prays for a turn in his fate that would save him from the fate that seems so inevitable at this moment. So in a sense, Oedipus is at a point where death and its permanence are the only escape. As we know, this death does not come for a while and instead, Oedipus wanders around the countryside for sometime, blinded and helpless.
He gets neither the change in the fate he prays for, nor the forgiveness from among those his unconscious sin affected-- I would say that makes him the most damned of all characters I've encountered. I'm still curious though, why Oedipus doesn't pray for forgiveness-- it is undoubtedly a pre-Christian attribute, and is often (and rightly) addressed to the offended in pre-Christian narrative. Is there something inadequate about it? Is there something that forgiveness can't do?
I think there is-- and I think that's reversal. Orpheus asked for a reweaving, and Oedipus asks the same thing. Neither asks for the nightmare to be ended, for things to resume as if darkness had never descended upon them. Why is reversal not a possibility in the desperate minds of these two figures? Why cannot the move forward be one that takes in its arms what is past and reconciles it with what is to come? Is there something inherently wrong with us as human beings that makes the element of forgiveness into one that necessarily must be futuristic and thus incomplete and inadequate. Forgiveness, the way we do it, does not carry the past forward cleaned of its wounds. It inherently assumes that repentance on the part of the sinner is an acceptance and a healing on the part of the person sinned against. Yes, the person. We sin against a divine law, but more intimately, we sin against each other. And that is where forgiveness falls short.