[CN: mental illness, self-injury]

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CASSANDRA:
Say, is my speech or wild and erring now,
Or doth its arrow cleave the mark indeed?
They called me once, The prophetess of lies,
The wandering hag, the pest of every door—
Attest ye now, She knows in very sooth
The house’s curse, the storied infamy.
— Aeschylus, Agamemnon

“Between killing and dying, there’s a third way: Live.”
— Christa Wolf , Kassandra

Long before I designed my own undergraduate major around the literature of Greek mythology or wrote my senior thesis on modern adaptations of ancient Greek plays, I was obsessed with the characters. Even before the obligatory grade school units on mythology, complete with afternoon trips to the library where we all colored in our own mimeographed faces of the Olympic gods, I knew all their names and backstories.

I had grown up with them, you see. To me, Greek heroes and gods were the stuff of bedtime stories.

My mother, who had herself majored in classics and kept a copy of Winnie Ille Pu (the Latin translation of A.A. Milne’s classic) on her bedside table, pulled myths from her memories every time I pleaded “tell me a story, mom, please make me a story, make it a good one.” These tales felt like place-markers for invention, filled with lacunae where our own stories could take root. In time I came to know for myself the source materials she drew from — and realized how even the ancients manipulated myth-telling for their own creative purposes.

I haven’t read Aeschylus or Euripedes in decades now. Nor Homer, Plato, or Sophocles. My memories are become gentler, names and details mere flotsam in the wine-dark sea of my mind.

I like it this way. All the easier to tell you stories of my own.

• α • ω •

Remembering details…

In ancient Greek theater, the chorus member played not a man but an everyman. He played every Everyman. He hid his own face behind a stylized mask that bore the same expression as every other chorus member, so that collectively they formed a herd. A populace. Defined by this mask, this shell of anonymity, the chorus provided a foil against which the brilliance and hubris of the tragic hero shone.

The hero himself was forged from the divine. Fathered by a god, guarded by nymphs, taunted by the cruel Fates spinning at their wheel. Even his inevitable fall through pride could not diminish such grace. After death, a hero’s body was often flung into the stars, where his face gleams still today in the winking pinpricks of our constellations.

We all know how such tragic myths go. The hero gets the girl, the glory, and finally the agony. The chorus gets not even its own face.

Just a paycheck. It’s steady work, after all, being Chorus Member #4. All you have to do is memorize the same lines as everyone else.

And never let your mask slip.  Continue reading “This marble column, gleaming” →