Fool's Republic by Gordon W. Dale

Author:Gordon W. Dale [Dale, Gordon W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-284-0
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2011-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

In time, I progressed from Empedocles to Sophocles. Twenty-five hundred years after they were written, his words retain their power, are able to move me. They even moved Freud. But imagine how much more powerfully they must have affected the Greeks of Sophocles’ day. Imagine audience members watching Oedipus the King, caught up, not just in the tension generated by the play itself, but by their own intimate knowledge of the myth on which it rested. They knew from the start that Oedipus had unwittingly killed his father and married his mother and was thereby doomed. When he ignored the warnings of those around him and relentlessly pursued the truth, the audience could only watch with helpless fascination, knowing the tale and its inevitable and terrible outcome. That is the play’s horror.

It is also, I would argue, the horror of memory.

I’m fully aware of Sara’s ultimate fiery fate in the desert. And so I do my best to keep her from the stage of reminiscence, knowing that I summon her up at my peril. Even memories of her childhood are tainted by the foreknowledge of her death. A day at the ocean, when she’s five, ends in burned and twisted wreckage. A school play leads to the look on Joanna’s face when two air force officers arrived unannounced at our front door, leads to the sight of her turning from them, stricken. I think of Sara and see Joanna distancing herself from those men. I see her buckle, watch myself move, too late, forever too late, to cushion her fall, aware even as I make the attempt that my own life is over, that all light has been snuffed from the world. That’s the price I pay whenever I think of my daughter.

What heinous thing have I done that compares to stealing a father’s memories? How can it be that I am the criminal here?

Had I the courage, like Oedipus I would pluck out my eyes. I would tear out the light and live perpetually in the dark. I would flee the places of man and roam the wilderness like a wounded beast.

I would blind myself today.

If only I had the strength.

And if only it were that easy to erase the hateful, sadistic panorama of the mind’s eye.

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