Antigonick

Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evil but if some god shakes your house ruin arrives ruin does not leave it comes tolling over the generations it comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floor and all your thrashed coasts groan

I prayed and fasted. I read the mystics. I studied the martyrs. I began to think I was someone thirsting for God.

Antigone: We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us. Ismene: Who said that? Antigone: Hegel. Ismene: Sounds more like Beckett. Antigone: He was paraphrasing Hegel. Ismene: I don't think so.

There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cuncta: everything that is me is with me.

I’m a strange new kind of inbetween thing aren’t I not at home with the dead nor with the living

perhaps you know that Ingeborg Bachmann poem from the last years of her life that begins "I lose my screams" dear Antigone, I take it as the task of the translator to forbid that you should ever lose your screams

how is a Greek chorus like a lawyer they’re both in the business of searching for a precedent finding an analogy locating a prior example so as to be able to say this terrible thing we’re witnessing now is not unique you know it happened before or something much like it we’re not at a loss how to think about this we’re not without guidance there is a pattern we can find an historically parallel case and file it away under ANTIGONE BURIED ALIVE FRIDAY AFTERNOON COMPARE CASE HISTORIES 7, 17 AND 49 now I could dig up those case histories tell you about Danaos and Lykourgos and the sons of Phineus people locked up in a room or a cave or their own dark mind it wouldn’t help you it doesn’t help me it’s Friday afternoon there goes Antigone to be buried alive

You are a person in love with the impossible

to carry one's own door will make a person clumsy, tired and strange on the other hand, it may come in useful if you go places that don't have an obvious way in, like normality or an obvious way out, like the classic double bind

all the tall mad mountains of her mind

Kreon: here are Kreon's verbs for today Adjudicate Legislate Scandalize Capitalize here are Kreon's nouns Men Reason Treason Death Ship of State Mine Chorus: "mine" isn't a noun Kreon: it is if you capitalize it

when joy betrays you I do not count your life alive a corpse is more alive be as rich as you like be absolute if your joy goes I wouldn't buy you for a shadow of smoke