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?
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?
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