archives

i had the BIGGEST crush on a student actor i was working with because of it. . the conviction, the way he delivered the lines SO much intentionality. where his gaze landed, the way his body moved, the subtleties in his cadence, his movements in response to the space and the objects and people around him ....

creon., his absolute dedication to state laws -- to humanity, to his humanity. i looooved when he broke down. i mean i love both him as a tyrant and him as a grieving father. yeah. even the relationship between authority and tragic consciousness... his edicts. he is both the ruler and the ruled (ruled, that is, by the very principles he seeks to enforce. ) order imposed chaos? heavens, what a man. .

he was trapped in a terrible certainty that rises like vapor from the mere proximity to power. a delusion of standing outside of the machinery of necessity. of force. of what works equally upon the executioner and the victim. every order he gives transforms not only those who must obey, but the one who commands.

and i LOVE live theater. the actor showed perfectly how the body knows what the mind refuses to acknowledge: his rigidity, the sharpness and hardening of his features, his inflexibility. work upon flesh, truth written as flesh made into stone. each degree of authority diminishes by exact measure the capacity to perceive the real. there was no justice! it was not justice he enacted. just pure operation of necessity.,,

and tragedy is the moment when the unreality collides with the real, when the moment of clarity comes precisely when power has completed its work upon him, when it has no other purpose except to show him the perfect necessity of his suffering.

nobody possesses power; power possesses. the one who believes himself its master is transformed most completely of all. destruction is its lesson to those who thought themselves its masters.

honestly i was not planning on sending an ask like this but you can also keep it in the inbox, ss it, or delete it meow meow meow meownmeow meow

! 🔅 [ i am going to use this one ok ? isn't it cute ? you will let me use it right. youth privilege. apologist right. you can ignore this ask ^_^ ]

haha no worries; i am aware my tastes lean toward the emo, yes, nothing new under the sun, as they say. besides, you should have seen me during my gothic phase as a teenager, obsessively reading mary shelley's frankenstein and sheridan le fanu's carmilla on loop (i never liked dracula quite as much, though i reread it often enough regardless. blasting out old-timey rob zombie bangers in my bedroom thinking myself so charmingly edgy, i was not, but that's history).

i was actually in two drama clubs throughout middle and high school, and i played antigone in my final year of middle school: jean anouilh's version, obviously, the last segment where she dies with haemon (let it not be said that i am not fond of the double-suicide plot device, very yandere of me, i know, but what can i say). which production did you see? have you played theater? i have a feeling you'd be a natural at acting. if yes, what plays have you been in? In what parts? If not, what would you have wanted to play? i have a terrible fondness for modernized retellings, giraudoux's electra is probably my favorite; the gardener's lament remains one of my favorite manifestos on tragedy ever written. have you read sartre's version? i dislike him immensely, and his rewriting of electra (les mouches) occupies a prominent place on the laundry list of reasons why, he is so spectacularly overrated. i just have such a deep suspicion of philosophers who turn to tragedy already knowing exactly what lesson they wish to extract from it. i much prefer merleau-ponty's approach, he leaves more room for ambiguity, for entanglement, for the fact that people can be embedded in situations they neither chose nor fully understand. sartre always feels as though he wants to rescue everyone into freedom regardless of what it costs; merleau-ponty explains why freedom is so difficult in the first place. what do you make of it?

i am not surprised you love creon; especially knowing your fondness for the poem of force, he suits you. i intuitively see him in a different light though, and he still suits you, though differently. creon, who is perpetually negotiating with consequences, wondering what can be sustained, what happens after a declaration has been made; how even when he is wrong, he is wrong in the language of continuity rather than purity: antigone loves the dead, but creon loves the city. perhaps that is why he reminds me of you, you have always seemed suspicious of conclusions reached too quickly, certainties held too tightly. even your affection is rarely declarative; it returns, observes, corrects, persists. you seem to regard reinterpretation, persistence, as one of the primary duties of love. whether this is wisdom or merely a more sophisticated form of stubbornness.... well..... who's to know. i must confess, i disliked him immensely as a teenager, mostly because i used to relate most strongly to antigone herself: perpetually angry and arrogantly self-righteous, though i suppose age has made me less charitable toward her as well. because in the end, neither of them ever truly chooses, or perhaps they do in the most mutilating way possible, without once admitting to it. they spend the entire play speaking incompatible languages of necessity; antigone insists she cannot do otherwise, and so does creon, they stand on opposite sides of the stage making identical claims, and tragedy unfolds in that space between perfectly mirrored certainties. perhaps that is what tragedy has always meant to me: not that terrible things happen, but that at some point, people become incapable of imagining any other outcome. every possible future narrows until only one remains visible, and so we march on towards the ending. as a teenager, i thought antigone was the freest person in the play because she refused compromise, now i suspect she may be every bit as bound to her dead as Creon is to his laws, and they simply worship at different altars. what i still love about her is not her rebellion but her refusal to negotiate, and she would rather die than inhabit a world that requires compromise with her sense of rightness. at fourteen, i found that exhilarating. now i find it terrifyingly noble, and strangely tender.