elucipher-deactivated20151112:

(rec’d greek tragedy here.)

Antigone herself is the royal house of Thebes, reliquary of unsleeping ghosts: grandfather, father, mother, brothers both. She is her father’s daughter, child of Oedipus’ unhallowed love, inscribed with his flesh-curse, heir to the great and iron will that drove him down to ruin. Her bones and blood and breath are stained with sickness and death, all her life in their stealing reeky shadow. In Carson’s Antigonick she quotes Beckett: begin in the dark and birth is the death of us. 

And like her fate-throttled father she goes unhoused and wandering, fugitive from hearth and city and polis. The law will see her brother’s body unburied, a treasury of meat for carrion birds. Her wild grieving love decrees that her own hands cover him with earth; and on this scant death-bed I shall lie beside him, dear one with dear one. Care of the dead is women’s work, but for Antigone it is more: a joining in the dark of womb and grave. she will have no living husband; bride of Hades, she names herself.  

This is a drama of upheaval: old ways of blood and allegiance and retribution (physis) giving way to state and justice and law (nomos). Creon is a self-crowned tyrant. Antigone is only a girl, alone and seized with love for her brother; but she is also a revenant of the ancient order that will not go quietly, slipping through this new world to detonate herself with a little act of piety. A woman who does not submit to the law is poison: viper, Creon spits. Antigone does not bend for love or edict or threat, even when she stands on the mouth of a tomb, condemned to be buried alive. She is impossible, annihilating, a hot heart for cold things. The city, in whispers, praises her. The play is awed by the fatal glory of her. 

She claws off all sanctioned female identity. She steps out of her soft skin. She makes herself prayer-sharp and steel. When Ismene cannot help her, she casts her sister aside; she can only love the dead. Martyr, she is absolute. Her conviction is ferocious. There is no choice, but Antigone chooses: she walks into the arms of death, and death reaches up to swallow her, sundering all she touches. Even her silence roars like thunder. You can imagine her eyes: unbearable.