Catharsis

I went to see Robert Icke's Oedipus. This review gives it five stars and it deserves it.

When I was doing my A Levels - and one was Latin, though I didn't do Greek - I went on a school trip to Greece. I instigated a reading of Oedipus Rex in the back of the bus. Watching the play made me want to read that and.. I think it's a trilogy... one with Antigone leading her blind father around. Turns out that I don't have a copy, but I guess it'll be free to read online. My assumption is that it's out of copyright by now.

There's a gun in an early scene, and so, of course, it goes off at the end. Fantastically done suicide of Jocasta. Then Oedipus is blinding himself with her black high heeled shoes. I had my hands over my eyes and was moaning "No! No! No!" and rocking.... weeping... and it was like I lost myself... like my psyche was fractured by the pain of it.

I have written before about witnessing - how to look makes you culpable. Or, rather, to see. And here... well, I thought of how to see, to know, to understand something so dreadful, that you have done something so dreadful, makes impossible any future seeing, knowing, understanding.

It's like the Anthropocene. We see, we know, we understand and there is not a literal but a wilful blindness, ignorance, incomprehension.

This week, I've been attending an on-line conference. That has raised some thoughts, but far more inspiring has been reading Deborah Bird Rose. There's one paper she wrote about Val Plumwood which is... oh, as good as Oedipus. And it excited me because what she, through ethnology, Val, through philosophy, and Rose's Aboriginal teachers, though culture and life, knew was what the trees have been telling me. That it's minds all the way down; that if you approach the more-than-human as communicable, it/they communicate/s. That we are not the centre of any other being's world. That the purpose of life is to open enough to know and live well with one's fellow earth beings. For that, we need the open eyes and hearts and minds - and that means that we also have to see the unseeable, know the unknowable, understand the incomprehensible and, somehow, get beyond the guilt and into relationship.