Yesterday and today, words have been popping into my somewhat muddled mind. Today, it is Antigone. Antigone. If you know what or who Antigone is, then perhaps you will understand what I am about to tell you. If you are not familiar with Antigone, you will be by the end of this quick read.

In the early 1970's I was in high school and very active in speech and theater. I enjoyed being on the debate team and also helping out with set building for the plays. I will never forget the look on Mr. Harmon's face when I operated the table saw all by myself. I was a girl who had spent hours in my father's workshop and knew a thing or two. I enjoyed speech and also did some prose reading. I tried to act in plays and succeeded in getting one major role, but that is another story. This story is about the very beginning of all that.

For some reason, someone thought that I should read the soliloquy from this ancient play, Antigone's speech to the people of Thebes. My first problem was, even though I read the play, I barely understood it at the time. I was unfamiliar with Greek tragedies and knew the basic mythologies, as everyone had to study that, knew some of Homer and Socrates, but this play was confounding. I could not read the lines correctly without sounding stilted and affected. Over and over I would try to make some damn sense out of it, but I could not become the character enough to say her words. Worse than that, I had a horrible time with memorizing stuff. In this case it was impossible as I was freaking out just trying to read it. 

I was tall, thin, naive, conservative, and apparently the object of many a young lad's yearning. The pedestal was very precarious, and I yearned to have the adventures that would put me somewhere between the top of the pedestal and the ground. 

Antigone had been selected for me. She and I did not communicate. It was one of the things I did give up on. I see now that I was wrong to do so. It could have been hormonal impatience, or my own lack of depth at the time, which was actually, interestingly perceived that I had. It turns out Antigone is in many ways a person like me. She is stubborn and strong enough to carry out her beliefs.

The play is in essence a series of absolutes. This rule is here, it is ordained, and you must not defy it. Really? Sounds to me like it needs defying.  

 Sophocles wrote of four siblings. Two sisters, one being Antigone and two brothers. It seems that between the two sisters, Antigone is the one who is least likely to be loved, not being blonde, beautiful and voluptuous as her sister, but a stronger personality, a woman that defies the mold and path of her sister, of most women of the time. The brothers find themselves on the opposite side of a political battle where both are killed. The king of the Thebes determines that one was disloyal and therefore should not be buried as an act of disrespect. It turns out however, that not burying anyone is lack of respect to the gods that command burial and doom for the person not buried with respect to their afterlife.

It turns out this is a tough situation for a loyal sister. She is determined to bury him. She sneaks out to do so and it is discovered. This puts her in direct defiance to the king. He tries to convince her that it is her duty to obey him over what is basically her sense of obligation to her brother and to the gods themselves. He cheapens his determination, softening it, almost pleading with her,  in the hopes that she will resist her courage and comply. She resists and resists, to her own demise. She speaks in part these words to the citizens of Thebes, his subjects:

 “What greater glory could I win than give my own brother decent burial? These citizens here would all agree, they would praise me too if their lips weren’t locked in fear. Lucky tyrants- the perquisites of power! Ruthless power to do and say whatever pleases them.”

 Even the son of the king does not agree with him and nor do the chorus and leader in the play. When she is deceased, the son kills himself and in the end the king realizes that he has lost everyone who loves him in the grasp to demonstrate his power and demand loyalty, he has become hollow.

The lesson of Antigone and my life is that you must speak truth to power. You cannot become undone and fear, you must be resolute. There are not always happy endings, but there are achievements and knowledge birthed.  Speaking truth to power is what is happening in Egypt, Madison and every other place where it is suppression, or lies, where those with power become tyrants and work desperately to wield and maintain it.

Antigone breathes in and breathes out, she stands with fear within and but not out, she is without fear to the king, who is wrong, who seeks to usurp the very power of his own gods.

Religion aside, gods aside, his failure is in his unwillingness to see what is decent and decent in this play is everyone who agrees with Antigone. Why? Because Antigone speaks to the moral nature of what she believes and fights singularly to right the cavalier wrong. She expends her self, her proposed marriage, her future, and her value to the king, (which even gains for Thebes through the proposed marriage) to right the wrong. To right the wrong.

First you must see the wrong, your eyes must be open, your ears must hear. You must crawl above the din of the screaming and threats, the anger and the hate, all rhetoric; you must understand what it is you fight. You are fighting power and preservation of it, you are not in one simple act undoing one wrong, you are taking chinks from the armor and tearing at its molecular core, presenting the ultimate challenge to its wrongful existence. Power and greed is perhaps the deadliest combination.

http://faculty.mercer.edu/zimmerman_jj/fys10204S/Responses/011204.htm

Copyright 2011 by SheilaTGTG55