In a message dated 6/9/2002 2:20:37 PM Central Daylight Time,
lachlan@london.com writes:


>
>
>
> Yes, I was asked to fill in a questionnaire
> for Genius2000, though a British modesty called for
> a period of hestitation and contemplation
> (see Greys Elegy http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/poets/grays_elegy.html)
> of common genius before commiting to the idea of heightened individuation.
>

What about the Vales of Haar? The cut worm forgives the plow. I got some
goofy cassette on, I bought it out of a suitcase on vacation in Athens by a
cafe down below the preserved/painted/restored thing that looks like the
Parthenon but is not a ruin. The tape's called "Pop '93," brit and USA
pirated pop. One song is called "Paint it True" or something, "Artist's
Sketch" maybe, has a line "It don't take a genius to know about Venus." Next
song, "Let's come together right now in sweet harmony."

Gray comes right after Pope and Dryden, before Blake and Biographia
Literaria.

"Who mourns for Adonais? O come forth
Fond wretch and know thyself and him aright.
Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous earth;
As from a center dart thy spirit's light
Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might
Satiate the void circumference; then shrink
Even to a point within our day and night
And keep thy heart light, lest it make thee sink
When hope has kindled hope and lured thee to the brink."

Do not shake thy gory locks at me!





> 'Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
> The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear,
> Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
> And waste its sweetness on the desert air.'
>
> My course, my navigation and negotiation of the interstices
> between a 'new media' and conventional institutional infrastructures
> has indeed felt the inflections of 7-11 as well as Genius2000, though
> not as great an influence as the subtle course corrections of many,
> many women.
>
> What women!
>
> The more I considered the Genius2000 questionaire, well…. Before
> long I was surfing the idea. Big Wave. Pacifica. Then clueing in to
> Dolphin chatter and Whale vibes via an MP3 site. I almost began
> reading Davis' 'TechnoGnostic' book but as 'one-one-nine' illustrates
>
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>
>
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>
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>
>
> http://www.nata2.info/?path=pictures/misc/09-11-2001/movies/first.plane.hits.gp.med.asf
>
>
> we already have ample evidence to show that the quest of the
> individual for heightened experience mediated by technology, albeit in
> this instance a collaborative, collective expression, can have unfortunate
> outcomes.
>

First Oedipus tried to escape his curse, which the gods gave him for his
line's violation of hospitality. He killed his dad on the road. He answered
the riddle and saved the city. He brought a plague. He investigated and
ripped his own eyes out. His body would bless the city that housed his
grave.


>
> Lachlan
>
>
>
> Lachlan Brown
> Thirdnet
> T(416) 826 6937
> VM (416) 822 1123



Learning to Accept Mistakes: Medical Theory, Political
Trouble, and the Tragic View in Oedipus Rex


Nickolas Herman 12-5-90


When we read Oedipus Rex now, we are reading the best example of Greek
tragedy. It can be a very heavy diet, especially for the young and hopeful.
Tragedy is not very similar to the average modern mindset. Most people, at
least in the U.S., prefer not to worry about the cruelty of fate. And
certainly we don't blame our troubles on a tragic law of nature, at least not
our average troubles, like getting bad grades, or breaking up with a
sweetheart, or really any of the things that enter our lives as challenges.
We see ourselves as being able to deal with things. How we see, and then
portray, our lives in literature affects how we live; to avoid excess
literary theory we can just say ( as the best literary theory says) that
literature influences our attention. And this given way of influencing our
attention, tragedy, is rather out of use in modern times. Unless you view
modern America as thoroughly declining, or the Greeks and their literature as
very degenerate, you must wonder why tragedy had a greater hold and grip,
really, a greater usefulness, in ancient Greece.
Short of a complete analysis of Greek culture, a good resolution can be
found by looking at just enough to see how the play "Oedipus Rex" is a very
perfect and clear example of a view which is, if not the picture of our
nature we find most relevant today, at least a picture that was at one point
civilization's bread and butter. Tragedy was, in the metaphor that this
paper will use to look at this particular play, the Greeks' medical theory,
their theory or picture of the sickness and health of humankind. And insofar
as our mental well-being is concerned, a sense of medical fact can settle
nerves that are scared by sickness, and is the type of knowledge that breeds
upon itself and is the spark of cure. If tragedy didn't understand the cure
of all our sicknesses, or the ones with which we are most commonly afflicted
with today, it was at least a budding consciousness of the idea of human
health, and an important thing for survival. Healthy ways of influencing our
attention, healthy plays, will turn our attention on our health.
The episode of sickness that we see framed in "Oedipus Rex" is Oedipus's
reign as king. In our sickness metaphor and in Sophocles's own imagery,
Oedipus is "the land's pollution" (l. 353). It is very easy to trace the
disease since the illness is concentrated right in Oedipus's person, and in
tracing it to look at the subtle observations that Sophocles makes about its
progress. Oedipus is the disease; the polis is the body with the "pollution
grown ingrained within" (l.97). In examining the tragic picture of disease
interacting with the body, we look at how Oedipus interacts with the polis.
Oedipus comes to the city as a savior by answering the riddle of the
sphinx. This is the first stage of the disease, and it is significant as
such. It illustrates the overall idea that sickness is healthy, or rather,
natural in healthy bodies. Oedipus begins his commerce with the city by
answering the riddle. Why do the people say that Oedipus's arrival was "luck
with happy omen" (l.51), which brought the reign of "Oedipus whom all men
call Great" (l.8), and which was "true good fortune" (l.1281), if it was the
arrival of a disease? Here we have to be sort of liberal and imaginative in
applying our metaphor. The play is not saying Oedipus's coming was good, any
more than sickness is good. The tragic form is what is good, the overall
picture, the understanding perspective; it is good to see and understand the
workings of sickness. Certainly Sophocles did not write with medical imagery
to talk about Oedipus's early good fortune. He didn't use the metaphor to
write the play as literally as I am using the metaphor to read the play. He
used medical imagery when it expressed his immediate meaning most forcibly.
But the fortuitous beginnings do fit our model, and are important in
explaining why the overall phenomenon of Oedipus was healthy.
The most ironclad way to protect a body from disease is to kill it.
Living bodies need to take things into their stomachs and lungs and
bloodstreams for nourishment, hoping not to ingest anything harmful, but
willing and required to take the risk. The city needed a leader, a savior,
and it took the one that came. The city sought "solution for troubles at its
feet" (ll.131-2). In the long run it wasn't totally healthy to take Oedipus
in; it was like a man dying of thirst who drinks water that may or may not
contain some dangerous microorganism. But the act itself of making Oedipus
king was a healthy one given the circumstances, and this of course is
central, since tragedy is in its essence "humanity, given the circumstances".
The initial good fortune is the healthy part of Oedipus, who contained the
sickness. "I pray that the God shall never abolish the eager ambition that
profits the state. For I shall never cease to hold the god as our protector"
(ll.880-2). This is strong testimony to the practice of following the
immediate need without imprudent regard for a distant future.
After entering the body politic Oedipus starts to cause disease. This is
in keeping with standard Olympian judicial practice of granting a short,
deluded grace period. Yet after the real sickness takes effect, it is
important to sees how it progresses. What is meaningful about the pollution
and purgation sequence in the tragic throe is that the whole process of
discovery and what we would call cure originate from Oedipus himself. He
takes all the steps toward his own expunging, grudgingly but more or less
conscientiously, from sending to the oracle, through his self-interested
accusations against Teiresias's and Creon's integrity, and finally to forcing
the herdsman's disastrous revelation. Oedipus is not willing to let himself
off the hook; he wants perfect security or hellfire.
This dedication comes from Oedipus's selfish nature. The only reason he
doesn't just execute everyone who threatens him is because this selfish
nature has a unique component: he sees the polis as an extension of himself,
so his desires are mitigated by the city's well-being. Oedipus commiserates
with the suppliants at the very start of the play, "I know you are all sick,
yet there is not one of you, sick though you are, that is as sick as
myself….My spirit groans for city and myself and you at once"(ll.59-64).
Ironically but fittingly, Oedipus identifies his own prosperity with the
prosperity of the city, constantly calling himself savior or champion. In a
way, he is–he saved the city from the sphinx. But, his role is limited, and
he must now leave the city. In a similar way, politicians today sometimes
take office just because their platform happens to fit the current trends,
and then they are thrown out when the people have had enough of their brand
of medicine. Necessity somehow tells the body what is a disease, and at what
time.
However, Oedipus wasn't thrown out directly; there wasn't a revolution.
Yet it was the city's "lips that prayed (he) pitied, not (Creon's)"
(ll.671-2). A certain type of man might have had Creon's head severed from
his shoulders and tried to pretend the plague and famine didn't exist. But,
even for a tyrant's city, it is "better to rule it full of men than empty"
(l.55). Here again we have to be rather subtle about what kind of a disease
Oedipus is. Surely not all diseases have this regard for their host victims.
Oedipus is a unique disease, who brought good fortune at the moment of
infection, and even in full pollution he behaves in a unique way. He wants
to rule the city, not destroy it. His nature, his ambition is to be the
Great Oedipus, and to be this the city must prosper. The city comes first;
when Teiresias tells him answering the riddle brought his doom, he says "I
care not, if it has saved the city" (l.443). As he strives toward his goal
of memorable monarch, in a sense he rises to his own level of incompetence,
which shatters his self-image and makes him indifferent to his own political
survival. He is a special type of disease, a human given special
circumstances. All the diseases which attack states in the form of tyrants
have one trait in common: they are not out to rule an empty or weak ship.
This rule is not ironclad, some rulers are sheerly oppressive out of
insanity, but the majority are just sane men seeking power.
The political disease that faced Sophocles's Greece was the "tyrannos".
Revolution was more or less explained by the belief that obedience was the
duty of the people, and the submissive and unjudging, though assertively
plaintive chorus here performs that duty. It is also interesting to remark
in passing that the Greeks saw the intellectual threat to the soul also as
one of what ideal to follow–they took industrious following for granted. It
is the disease of the tyrant, the bad leader, that Sophocles is trying to
bring under the umbrella of his medical theory. And he shows that this type
of man comes with a built-in cure. The people just attend to their own aches
and pains, and the tyrants will pattern their antibodies for themselves.
This is not to say that tyranny is purely good, but that healthy states need
rulers, and in the case that a bad one is sent to the polis, the hope for
recovery is not pitch black.
The third and last stage of the Oedipus-disease, after his albos-like
incubation period and his self-annihilating pollution phase, is the aftermath
or recovery period. The play ends right after Oedipus is banished, so we
don't hear about the famine and plague lifting, but the chorus says a lot of
things that already put the overall experience in a positive light. The
chorus says to the blinded Oedipus, "indeed I pity you, but I cannot look at
you, though there's much I want to ask and much to learn and much to see"
(ll.1303-5). Of the deludedly prosperous man, the chorus says "Oedipus, you
are my pattern" (l.1193). Clearly the chorus is learning something, being
changed in some way. The suffering in this play is really heaped only on
Oedipus, at least the destruction is his. The chorus suffers, but it is the
suffering of learning a powerful lesson, the pain of knowledge, not the pain
of being crushed and battered under a tyrant. Similarly, the suffering of
tragedy for the audience was the suffering of receiving intense knowledge in
a form that now we divert into smaller, more specific capillaries. In
knowledge, in mental health, the city profits from even Oedipus's
catastrophe. The coming and going of Oedipus leaves a lasting effect; "To
speak directly, I drew my breath from you at the first and so now I lull my
mouth to sleep with your name" (ll.1221-3). Not only is the disease purged,
but the chorus informs their mind with the law of human nature that this type
of disease can be purged without killing the body, and this is good medical
theory, good tragedy; in Keats's words, it "soothes the cares of man".
Stepping a bit out of our hard-working argument, we are just seeing how the
Greeks learned not to fear government itself irrationally; even when it errs
we can recover.
Even though Sophocles used much language besides medical imagery to
accomplish his effect, it is informative to try to frame the entire
phenomenon of this play in the terms of medical theory, which serves us as
sort of a counterpart to the clear vision of our nature that literature and
art, and thus tragedy, attempt to give us. Seeing what kind of disease
Oedipus, the quintessential tragic hero, is, we get a better idea of what
tragedy has to tell us. He is necessary, useful, by nature curable, and the
source of a good lesson. Certainly this is a good set of words to reassure
us when we are choosing rulers for our countries and our minds. If this
general and archetypal form was a newer discovery in fifth century Athens
than it is today, we have only Sophocles to thank.


All quotations from: Sophocles I, trans. David Grene, University of Chicago
Press, 1954.




>
>
> ::in the domains of the abstract circuit boy was an easy seduction::
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