Chekhov’s Mistess

Reading in Captivity

My son likes to wash his hands a lot. When you’re not yet two years old, ‘washing hands’ means something like grabbing the stream of water from the faucet to see what happens or moving dishes from the counter to the sink and the sink to the counter and to the sink, or pretending to use a sponge to clean like the giants around you do.

I’ve worked out a way to accommodate this fun by putting one foot on a stool, the Sun King on my knee and carefully balancing to give him room to move without actually falling into the sink. This keeps him quiet when he might otherwise be storming through the house, so it has become a routine.

Cute at first, it became tedious after a while (and my wife’s not tall enough to manage this), so I began to look for ways to keep myself occupied while getting innocently drenched.

It’s not really a time for serious novel reading of course, essays aren’t bad, depending, but I picked up a book a couple of weeks ago that struck me just right. Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, the ancient story of the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans and paid for his transgression against Zeus by being chained to a rock with an eagle gnawing away at his liver.

Seems like an odd choice, but it’s not really. It’s no secret that I like to read out loud and the copy I happened to have – Scully and Herington’s 1975 translation – is very readable. Physically, the book is small, so I could hold it with one hand and it’s short enough that even with many interruptions, it wouldn’t take long to read.

Since plays are dialogue anyway, reading them aloud is the best way to experience them and maybe even better, from at least one perspective, than seeing them performed. Still, I might not have thought to do so if it weren’t for my captivity.

If you haven’t turned your head away in embarrassment yet, I’ll tell you that even serious literature can be fun when unchained from merciless footnotes and just read. Imagine the above scenario, me and my best stentorian voice giving life to the ancients as best I can under the circumstances:

What’s this! have you too come

to witness my pain?

How did you dare abandon

the great stream that bears your name

and the rock arches of the sea caves

the sea itself has made –
to come to this, this motherland of iron!

And why? To wee what’s happened to me?

To howl feeling with me?

Well here’s a show for you: look at this

friend of Zeus!

I helped Him

set up His tyranny,

now I’m wrencht with torture

ordered by Him.

This is Prometheus talking to Ocean who has dropped by to convince him to stop struggling and keep a low profile so as not to further upset Zeus, but Prometheus will not give in. Later Hermes comes by with more threats:

My words won’t persuade you? Then think

what a storm, what a towering wave of ruin

rushes down on you!

You can’t escape it.

First the Father will flash

lightning and thunder down, and pound

this jagged ravine into an avalanche

to bury your body in it.

Arms of stone will hug and hold you.

And so, you’ll travel through the vast tracks

of time. And at last come back up into the sunlight.

Then

Zeus’s feathered hound, the blood red golden EAGLE

will tear your flesh

into flapping rags.

It won’t be invited, but it will come:

all day

feasting, it’s beak

stabbing your liver black.

Blood black.

This is very straightforward and dramatic stuff, so large and imposing these gods, yet whenever I’ve tried to read any scholarly explanation for them, it’s in the most complicated language. As though they want to keep obscured the fact that there’s no secret. I don’t mean to advocate ignorance, just that there are many layers of enjoyment right here to be had up front without the torture of the academic gods to act as a barrier.

Prometheus has been the basis for many subsequent great works of literature and reading Prometheus Bound you can hear the echos of Marx “…the arrogance of birth, no worker should want to marry the likes of those” and Shelley’s Frankenstein. But the allegories of the tale, just like with its followers, wash over you in the telling – that’s why it’s great.

Next on dock for my reading in captivity series, Seamus Heaney’s new The Burial at Thebes, an adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone.

comments

Now I’ve got a great big grin on my face.  Love the juxtaposition!

    – amcorrea (10/17  at  10:40 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: October 17, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Song of Myself: Diary

• Comments:1
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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