You don’t make it easy on yourself, do you? Trying Open-heart Surgery to get to the truth, trying to expose the sinews of veracity and the chambers of truthfulness, as if some kind of operation could provide you with the answers to all the questions you have been asking over the years, the big questions, like – If there is a God, what has been up to these last years and decades (just to keep to the last 100 years), and why do good thing happen to bad people, and the other way round.
Later post-operatively, "I love my life" you scrawl, the last thought brought to a shuddering, heat-stopping halt, flat line, sending the emergency team running for the defibrillator pads, and looking for the big needle to put straight into the heart, adrenalin, The truth drug to kick you back into life.
"Where's my heart?" you ask and there is the sense of people searching round in a dark cellar or locker room down below, rummaging about, looking for something old and long discarded like a childhood dream, an old favourite.
"The normative character of Greek Art, as sprung from the childhood of humanity". So wrote Walter Benjamin. Berliner Chronicle (1932-38 with ‘ongoing revisions… ongoing because in those terrible times he was unable to find a publisher. WB also considered suicide in 1932, but then decided against it). And then there was Benjamin’s interest in the historical description by Marx of the technological shifts that made Greek mythology redundant: crashing down the ‘Royal Houses’ (like the House of Atreus) and collapsing ‘City Plutocrats’ (like the citizens of Thebes) leaving a blank, where nothing is tragic, nothing is changed by events and people just ‘carry on’, like the MOD advice tells them, carry on just the same with luxury brands, ever faster speeds on the internet, and constructed components of personality – Flash – because write Benjamin, " ‘becoming’ no longer has any meaning for us, rhythmically. We subvert it dialectically in sensation and tradition".
So what's left of the story now? Foolish delights in novelty, and nostalgic sentimental attractions, glittering with illuminations and sensations. Only the chorus, the ones noisily rummaging round in the cellars looking for something right now, somehow the crowd kept its voice.
And now, when something truly tragic presents itself, like ‘ten billion’ – overpopulation - the same was going on for me this last week after I had written on the overpopulation Catastrophe Games - how many medals, the major developing nation and developed nations, all fiercely competing for medals, gold, silver, bronze, it occurred to me that the story we were had got used to the last 100 years – Oedipus, big Oedipus, oedipal everything, was dead - "Where’s my heart indeed."
"It is the near future. Civilization, if you call it that, is confined to strongly defended compounds threatened by lawless ‘ferals’ outside the gates. Oil is scarce, food is becoming scarcer, and the isolated city-states wage war and form unholy alliances to secure the sustenance they need, Survival is the primary virtue, and when hunger threatens bonds of kinship and common humanity are strained to breaking point"
The story could be – yes – OUTLAWS and the near future. And did you also read the link l gave you 2 weeks ago: "A Brief History of Climate, Change and Conflict", No? Well here is the link again... The story could be now, or nearly now. Or it could be another time, for example:
- from Sophocles, ‘The Theban Plays: the famous trilogy of tragedies of Oedipus and Antigone
OR
- or from Aeschylus, ‘The Oresteia: his surviving trilogy of tragedies.
There is a sound of stamping feet as the crowd comes rushing up from the cellars, and two wild-eyed women emerge from it, coming forward to address you in the audience directly. One is Judith Butler, author of Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death . The other is Gwyneth Lewis, whose translation of Clytemnestra (one of that trilogy of plays by Aeschylus) has been being performed this summer at the Sherman Cymru, Cardiff, and the above quotation is taken from a review.
Now it is your turn to tell the story about the seven billion OUTLAWS at the gates, including so it seems the likes of Missy Frederica with her sniper’s rifle, and heading for ten billion and what kind of human behaviour to expect – in other words, the very worst.
The question is can anything stop you from going mad (and unleashing violence in a kind of Greek tragic madness)? Can anything stop you from this gun-wreaking havoc? Two weeks ago I suggested heading for the gun cabinet-because it is too late, and the tragedy is already unfolding before your eyes, and there is just you, the Chorus crowd, who are left, the bit players without the main characters (only leaving the House of Murdoch, the City of London buffoons behind). So you stare across the footlights… waiting for - Hermes, the "child-author" - something to appear.
But thank you and good night for now- it is INTERMISSION time – I know, I am sorry it has come at such a cliff-hanger moment. But equally I know most of you can’t wait to head for the crush to get the booze down, and only a few are left in their seats staring blankly back now at the ‘Safety Curtain’.
The lights have come up and it is time for us to have our happy pills again.
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