The Chorus of
Oedipus Rex
It might be argued that all culture is the response to riddle, or the process, rather, by which we describe that which we sense that we are intimately a part of - both what that is (time, God, the play of the universe) and how relevant are descriptions are in form and process both in being (action, archetype, and memory) and logic (or language, structure, body and knowledge) - these two aspects being as intimately related as one person to another (or one time to another or one culture to another or one realm - the imagination - to another - reality) by a shared body of sacrifice, a shared history or mythology (or, at least, the belief in one), a shared rhythm. For, if nothing else, rhythm would appear to be the unifying or common element between how we view the universe or the world through a body politic (from government to reason to gender to race) and how we view the world through art, cultural sympathy, or gender and racial equality. It is this blend of the real and the ideal, the male and female archetypes of being, which informs and is informed by all literature and social order. And, again, the unifying force would appear to be rhythm, poetry, or song. The chorus, then, I will argue is an archetype of cultural unity intrinsic to the human family. I am going to analyse the rhythm section of Oedipus Rex.
For the reader of Oedipus Rex, the main element to know going into this Greek tragedy is that Oedipus Rex made legend by solving the riddle of the Sphinx and saving the citizens of Thebes (or us, really). The riddle was this: What is it that goes on four feet, three feet and two feet...and is most feeble when it walks on four? The answer, as given by Oedipus is "man", walking on four legs as a baby and on a cane at old age. As with any great riddle, the answer is as important as who solves it - or, even, the nature of one's ability to pose and solve riddles, metaphors for mysteries. That is, we are Oedipus. The play, or even the whole body of human response to mystery, is Oedipus. And the rhythm of movement of role and mask, recognition and concealment, imitates the process and rhythm of a people learning to love. Are we man or beast or god or all of the above? And who are we that we may answer such a question? That answer to this last question is where we approach notions of fate and destiny. Is there a price for our knowing and our being? Is love real? Oedipus, thus, evokes universal sympathy. It compels us to listen to ourselves and to the gods, whose identity is, as well, a mystery.
The Sphinx is a winged lion with a female face. The female face denotes the earth, the profane, or process - the intuitive. In one sense, then, the Sphinx is a symbol of all that defines, gives value to or challenges the human intellect, the rational - all that makes art or culture relevant or timeless. And here, this could be said to mean the relevance and unity of gender through archetype or shared destiny/memory with regard to the preservation of life and culture. Thus, the riddle of the Sphinx is also the riddle of Oedipus; it is the contrast between knowledge and process, language and body, collective and individual destiny.
For instance, we seek knowledge to improve and extend life. Yet, each individual is fated to
die while a natural sympathy forces each person to expect that the body of culture will continue
forever. We, therefore, find cultural redemption by a "sharing" (the smallest though not least
aspect of which is addressed through the subject of sexuality) in which some of our being and
knowledge can be preserved by the culture or family in which one lives (one reason of the many
we have children). The cultural "tragedy", then, of Oedipus Rex is that his parents left his body
for dead in the first place - this act, in itself, is acultural and challenges the intuitive body of
destiny. This act informs the rhythm of the plot, our sympathy, as well as our understanding of
the Sphinx; the Sphinx has every reason, it seems, to be angry, for its male archetype or desire to
preserve knowledge through family and cultural order has been threatened by the intuitive (by its
own female face), our sense of parental ancestry in the universe, our bodies, and our culture. In
order to impart this sacred/profane knowledge, one must also, in order to complete the process,
take this knowledge from one's archetypal "parents" who wish also, if they are anything like us,
to do the same thing - preserve their existence. This is the foundation of literature, history, myth
and culture. It is a shameful act which is really an act of nobility performed, unknowingly, by
every citizen or, in process, God or Chorus. Just as humanity must recognize what it has taken
form the earth in order to impart its wisdom into the future and not just a space capsule to the
endless reaches of physical space. Thus, this is the relevance, in part and in my opinion, of
Oedipus Rex to our culture. It makes all forms of information exchange and preservation a
sacrament, a profane union and process sanctioned, like marriage, by the gods or God, us or
Chorus, a preservation of natural rhythm - the process, form and mystery of the body of
humanity and its tale as preserved by imaginative, political, and everyday human response to
life's challenges. Oedipus Rex is the sacred art of culture wherein, ideally, every citizen is
destined for dignity, an art that by the 21st century we have come close to mastering ourselves
and not just through Sophocles. The Chorus is our sympathy for each, united as we are in the
challenge to be more and to know ourselves.
[For, as the great bard "put it down" forever, the art of culture, of soul, is "holding a mirror up to nature..." and discovering that she or spirit is just as awestruck, afraid, and curious and bold as we are, suggesting that we and gods are in the same boat, travelling on the same sea or the same direction, dynamic, context, and syntax (mythology) as the earth moving through a solar system moving on the outer reaches of the Milky Way galaxy - moving, ever moving, through altered states of space, time, consciousness and love - this "looking" mirrored in every exchange fro science to eating to sex to politics, to art - everything is information. Discovering, now, perhaps, why religion has sought to make every human ritual a prayer, an art, and why art, for 21st century, is religion is life.
We're livin on life
Our lives are a prayer
To the only one
Who is ever there, baby
]
Oedipus Rex, then, prefigures both Christianity and Rock n' Roll, both cultural elements
espousing the value of polity and individual dignity (and freedom) - the great "fuck" (or
biological, sensual, and spiritual(musical) exchange of knowledge, being, role, attention,
intention, sense of well being - health, from eating to working to tv to art to education). Oedipus
Rex, via the Chorus, proves at the outset of western civilization as we know it that love is the
greatest "fuck" of all. Says Hamlet roughly 2000 years later: "Alexander died, Alexander was
buried, Alexander returneth to dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that
loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer barrel?" They, being the working class
peasantry whose vernacular use of the word "fuck" spoke of their connection to the sensual and
the divine - the sweat of everyday life, the everyday divine design and process, that collects in
pools we call literature, culture, time, icon, archetype (and at the level of gender or culturally
defined sexuality and role - self) as well as the means we enact to describe the same - mythology:
The separation between said mythology and that which it describes demarking each cultural
"age" as outlined by William Irwin Thompson in The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, music
chorus or rock n' roll being the cultural reservoir by which each citizen may participate in and
draw from the intention or cultural mythology of King or Body of Collective Cultural Process -
participate in reality, communicate with the image of God (or oracle) through body of collective
sympathy, pools of metaphorical water in feeling (health) and form (literature, film, religion,
communication technology etc). Thus, literature and art function in process as the ideal citizen or
Oedipus. The problem Sophocles is facing, however, is what happens to that body of sympathy
or chorus at the transition of ages when the collective mythology or Body is forced into another
structural form - the secular play? Who is it that can bridge the abyss that opens up between the
body politic and the individual body - a challenge faced by the early Christian era as well,
resulting in a new cultural mythology in Christianity. Rock n' Roll in the 50's and 60's took on
this challenge and was further subsumed by media technology (which is now synonymous with
corporate and government technology), leading the 90's and early 21st c into greater interest in the
"sensual" or direct experience of life for our technological mythologies(and structures) say more
about our body than our body in terms of collective and even global culture - The voice is a
mythology a machine, an earth, and each body becomes a polity as it takes on added
responsibility (like Oedipus) in terms of knowledge, gender (relevance of knowledge to personal
and collective), and mythology (personal and collective health). I can say personal and collective
because each person is now able to obtain a direct experience (through media
technology/mythology) of the original polity or collective body - the earth, whose health and
future health is the hottest subject of communication in the early 21st century, not to mention how
such understanding will effect and define what we, humanity, are. To raise a point and then
immediately leave it, there is an ample reservoir from which to glean what Duane Elgin
(Awakening Earth) calls a "literacy of consciousness" - a new secular mythology, the next
movement in the human chorus or symphony. From the literary standpoint, one might apply the
critical theory of structuralism to all cultural forms, treating each as a word or body or metaphor:
Body of literature, or body of communication technology in which I participate when I sit at a
computer and check my e-mail and as bodies, part of a unified polity - healthy planet, healthy
race. To wit, a language by which we made describe and participate in the value of being a
human being in the 21st century, given the body of all our ancestors, which is a sacrifice.
If every age has its poet, then the American poet Robert Frost gets my vote when he writes in "Birches", "Earth's the right place for love", informing 5th century Greece as much as it informs us - a cosmic shaking of hands as Frost bends the Birch or the Tree at the base of which is Oedipus Rex, back down to earth to prevent human history form having a failed "Romance" (referring to the Romantic era) with the mysteries of both humanity and creation - keeping it relevant.
If we look at William Irwin Thompson, the universality (via Oedipus) of myth as our and "the gods" primary mode of communication, we can see that myth is the rhythm of our movement as a collective body withing a larger sympathetic body. In this context, myth is that which gives and communicates value to every social system, from polity to art to resource and consumption. In essence, then, all is myth is song, is the dark waters of the unconscious or body of collective sympathy and intuition. The value of any given communication ,then, being directly related to how a given culture values mythology - whatever that may be for them - as well as how well that culture has structured and ordered that mythology or society or Oedipal body of profane curiosity: chorus.
Here are the 4 ways of knowing through myth, as outlined in the preface to The Time Falling
Bodies Take to Light:
The Age of Gods: unitive state. Myth is performance of the reality it is describing. Hieroglyphic
level of consciousness.
The Age Of Heroes: Myth is answer to the 3 questions: What are we? Where do we come from?
Where are we going? Symbolic level of consciousness.
The Age of Men: Myth is an imaginative narrative - Romanticism.
The Age of Chaos: Myth is a false statement, an opinion popularly held.
In my opinion, we are in the Age of Myth, which is the Age of Chaos, the age where myth can be
rediscovered and given new meaning and relevance to cultural health, whatever that means...
(Quote National Post) Tues, February 22 "Italians claim to sight dark matter" supersymmetry as
mythology which describes an entity much like a god or divine spirit which pervades the entire
universe - omnipresence. -this is science , theoretical physics. See purple notebook A, lead into
"All of mythology or history being much, then, like song or poetry....)
All of mythology or history being much, then, like song or poetry (the song of a bird to my
ear or the poetry of Sophocles of Humanity to my soul) - its artistic conceit being that which it,
like God or Poet or Body most wants its beloved to hear and, thus, seeks, like Oedipus or even
the human body or the whole cosmos or all of human history, to conceal as much as reveal
knowledge, structuring its voice and compelling its voice into self-ordering systems of
communication and imaginative technologies so as not to blind us and thus, obliterate itself like
Oedipus does at the end of Oedipus Rex. All of humanity's musings or scratchings on the sacred
cave wall - a wall of flesh - being, then, Whitmanian leaves of grass, the divine voices or polity
and body, seeking a return to the cabalistic tree of life, health and knowledge, and through the
body of earth, song, literature, history, technology, and mythology, always hearing the sound of
ritual or freedom (the art of ritual being the silent art of living in the light, the sun) - always being
home, inside the body of Parent.
[quote chorus page 168- the three theban plays---Eng 230 paper---]
gold-eternal value
terror-fear
eschatology-branch of theology concerned with the end of the world
The chorus of Oedipus Rex sings of a cycle of rebirth, an evolution of cultural language. The chorus is performing the sacrifice of the body of culture and cultural language (the two being virtually the same entity or body) or logic - an androgynous rebirth - to unify language and gender, culture being founded upon and primarily enacted through family or the realtionship between man and woman. The chorus is the archetypal observance of human and universal love in God and Child, Parent and daughter/son.
We'll ride the wave..
Where it takes us
We hold the pain
Release us...
-Ed Vedder, Pearl Jam
In a sense, we are the wave, and all culture and individual perception of culture are ripples
echoing out through and around time (perhaps in "dark matter" or Spirit), disovering and creating
reality at the same time - ie performing myth, music, life, health, sun and earth, rock n' roll...