Autonomy and Incest in Sophocles’s “Oedipus Rex”

His first claim to fame was the solution to  a riddle that earned him a kingdom by sheer force of intellect. His second was a doomed attempt to escape the particularly gruesome fates of patricide and incest. With his first act, Oedipus saved the city of Thebes from the sphinx; with his second, he afflicted it with a plague. In his retelling of this myth, Sophocles reflects on the competing claims of three paths to knowledge: reason, revelation, and experience. Why can’t Oedipus’s brilliant mind save him from the enactment of a prophecy? Why might we be most vulnerable to the fate we’re most determined to avoid? Can we truly be free, or are our attempts to transcend the limitations of character central to its pathologies? Wes & Erin discuss Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode. Transcript 0:12 Wes: His first claim to fame was the solution to a riddle that earned him a kingdom by sheer force of intellect. His second was a doomed attempt to escape the particularly gruesome fates of patricide and incest. With his first act, Oedipus saved the city of Thebes from the sphinx. With his second, he afflicted it with plague. In his retelling of this myth, Sophocles reflects on the competing claims of three paths to reason, revelation, and experience. Why can't Oedipus brilliant mind save him from the enactment of a prophecy? Why might we be most vulnerable to the fate we're most determined to avoid? Can we truly be free? Or are our attempts to escape the limitations of character are central to its pathologies? Today we're talking about Oedipus Rex. This is Wes Alwan. 1:02 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, since there's an investigation afoot about, you know, the origins of COVID 19, and there are all these theories floating around about what the origins of the virus are. Did it come from a bat or a pangolin? This whole lab leak theory. I just want to float another possibility. I mean, how likely do you think it is that. I don't know, maybe the mayor of Wuhan doesn't know who his real parents are and he's made a huge mistake? I'm just saying, you know. 1:36 Wes: Yeah. Is it the mayor of Wuhan or is there a president of the world? I guess not, since the whole world has been plagued. 1:44 Erin: Thebes is most of the known world at that point. Right. But anyway, yeah, I'm just saying somebody should look into that. 1:50 Wes: I think the idea that we're being punished is a promising idea. Punished by the gods. What are we being punished for? 1:58 Erin: The Internet, podcasts? 2:01 Wes: Well, I think there's something to that. 2:03 Erin: YouTube, trolls. I don't know. 2:05 Wes: I think technology is part of the story. 2:07 Erin: You're already getting into an interesting area there, because I was thinking that just Oedipus was being punished, but you're suggesting the whole world is, or all of Thebes anyway, is being punished for. I guess it's being punished for housing incestual Patricider. 2:23 Wes: Are they just collateral damage or are they actually being punished to the extent that I think the punishment is generalized is just the extent to which I read it as a kind of Prometheus myth. Because here is Oedipus, this very clever guy who has come along and solved this riddle and he's done it. A lot is made of the fact that he's done it without learning. There's some question of whether he's done it with help from the gods or without help from the gods. That's sort of conflict in the text. There's a lot in the text that gives you the idea that he. It's his intelligence and his riddle solving ability that are the problem and the things that threaten to arrogate the position of the gods in a way. I read the crisis, the crisis in Thebes is created by Oedipus solving of the riddle. The minute he solves the riddle, something has actually gone awry. Of course, you know, literally we have to attribute all of this to ultimately to incest and these things are actually related. But psychologically, the most immediate precursor of the plague and all these problems is Oedipus's cleverness. His ability to simply, almost like a mathematician or a logician, to solve this problem in a world in which this problem should be solved or is more typically solved by appeals to revelation, to prophecy, to some sort of supplication to the gods, or appeals to the authority of tradition, to experience. But the solving of the riddle in a way is like an a priori exercise or an exercise in semantics or something very similar to math. Yeah, that's my kind of Promethean reading of all of this. 4:10 Erin: So I think that that is a really good observation. However, it makes me think of the fact that this prophecy about Oedipus sort of predates Oedipus himself. Right? Like Laios is told that if he has a son, that the son will. Like he tries not to have a son with Jocasta. Is that right? I don't remember fully the whole pre play longer myth. 4:31 Wes: So we just got confused about. Or I just got confused about whether it's Jocasta or Yocasta or Yocasta. Because, Erin, you've always heard it. Yocasta. I've always heard it. Jocasta. 4:42 Erin: Right. 4:43 Wes: And your pronunciation is what it is in the actual ancient Greek. And I guess the way I've heard it is the Anglicization. Is that how you say it? 4:53 Erin: Yeah, the Anglicized version. 4:56 Wes: Yeah, the Anglicized version. So I guess we decided just to go with that. 5:01 Erin: Okay, so forgive me if I don't consistently say Jocasta. I'll try to. 5:04 Wes: Well, just say okay, then we'll go both ways. 5:07 Erin: Okay. Yeah. So you're highlighting, I think, what's a really interesting tension in the text because it does seem as though his riddle busting is the source of a lot of the problems. And yet at the same time, laios has this prophecy before oedipus is even conceived that if he does conceive a son, his child will kill him and marry his mother. I think that's the way the myth goes. Obviously Oedipus, from what I understand, was, you know, Sophocles version was based on this myth that everybody would have been common knowledge for everyone in Greece that had a very long history. 5:42 Wes: And I don't think there's too much variation in the way the myth was told as well. 5:47 Erin: I know that there's a slight difference as far as the actual origin of the curse that laios might have been involved in, or he might have sinned against the Greek values of hospitality, or he might have just conceived oedipus when he shouldn't have or when he was told not to. There's some variation about the precise origin of why this curse falls upon them. But what you're also making me think of is another really big tension in the text that bothers me, which is, is fate different from the gods? And what role do the gods have in fate? It's my understanding that they're actually two different forces in a way. Right. Because the gods can be moved by sacrifice, supplication, but fate can't be changed. Destiny can't be changed. 6:36 Wes: You know, it's that whole euthyphro dilemma named after the platonic dialogue, in which is something pious because it's loved by the gods, or is it loved by the gods because it's pious? Or in early modern philosophical tradition, is the moral law just something that is the whimsical dictate of God, or is the moral law. The moral law, and everyone is subject to it, including God. So, yeah, I think it speaks to that sort of problem, this relationship between fatedness and the gods who can be moved. Are the gods in some sense subject to fate? And this is a. I think a play in which the rumination. There's a lot of rumination by the chorus. It's a play about religious doubt. I think the chorus gets very worried about whether or not. So maybe we can look at one of those passages. 7:29 Erin: Sure. 7:30 Wes: And by the way, I think. I think the best parts of this play are in the chorus, actually. Even though when I was younger and I read it, it's just like, get me to the plot. I just can't this chorus fluff get me beyond the chorus fluff Now. I even felt some of that on this rereading. But when I actually started to analyze what's going on with the chorus, I'm like, wow, this is quite amazing. So let's go to 463 to 512. And by the way, so I'm using the David Grene translation and you're using the Fitzgerald. 8:02 Erin: Yes. 8:03 Wes: Fitzgerald is very known for his poetic style. And actually I favored him when I was younger. Like, I memorized parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and I would always use the Fitzgerald because the alternative was the Lattimore, which is very dry but more literal. I spent way too many hours looking at all kinds of different translations and trying to decide do I want the poetic and tolerate the anxiety of knowing that Fitzgerald has thrown in a word that just isn't there in the ancient Greek, or am I just going to go for the dry literal? And I went for the dry literal. But you have the other side of things, so we can compare those, which I think is a good thing. And actually, Grene is not that bad. He's not all that dry. 8:47 Erin: No, I find the idiom to be really dated. 8:51 Wes: Yeah, yeah, it's a trade off. If you look at the ancient Greek, there are so many difficult decisions to make. You know, if you try to be faithful, you are just driven in the direction of syntactical clumsiness and dryness and things sounding very dated. It's really hard to avoid. Like, if I were translating this, you know, just. Just even the beginning children, young sons and daughters of old Cadmus, I'd be awfully tempted to do a very loose translation and get rid of any reference to Cadmus, which some translators actually do, to make sure that any of the outdated references that would have been meaningful for ancient Greeks but are not meaningful for us, I'd be tempted to replace them with something that had some actual import for us, because that drives the emotional power of the play. And for us, it just. It works against it. It's rooted in ancient Greek mythology, which is something that does not have the same deep emotional significance for us as it would for them. 9:51 Erin: Yeah, I think that any great text needs to be retranslated for each generation. And I think that the self consciously high syntax that he's using, I believe that the Fitzgerald is actually older than the Grene, or they're roughly the same age. But I just think that the Fitzgerald, much less self consciously produces a very beautiful text. And I allow a lot of liberty in translation. Things don't bother me ultimately, because you're not just reproducing perfectly exactly what's in the Greek, you have to create something that's beautiful in its own right. So I tend not to be bothered by those types of smaller changes, which is a liberty that I have for not knowing Ancient Greek at all. So I'm not bothered by it, as 10:33 Wes: you'll find out, for certain things, I like to know what's there in the Ancient Greek just because it drives the interpretation. It tells you what the playwright is doing. So, for instance, in the Grene translation, this fourth and fifth lines, the town is heavy with a mingled burden of sounds and smells, of groans and hymns and incense. Okay, so this is a difficult translation problem, because what Sophocles is doing in this is he's saying that different sensory modalities are actually woven together. So in the Ancient Greek, it's clear that he's doing something very interesting. He's telling us that sounds and smells somehow have interpolated each other, which is very important in a play that. Where incest features. Right. Because incest is about a breakdown in boundaries between things that should be bounded and separated. So that's the way Grene gets at it. Other translators, sometimes they just abandon the attempt to try to get at that interweaving of different sensory modalities. So Fitzgerald, for instance, the breath of incense, rises from the city with a sound of prayer and lamentation. He hasn't abandoned that task, but he's been a little more subtle about it. So the with is meant to give you a sense of this connection between the smell and the sound, almost as if the sound is coming from the smell. So that's just one example of the type of things I think about when looking at translations, but I've never been able to come down on one side or another. So when I was in school doing the Aeneid, in Latin class, I'd have one poetic translation and one literal translation, and then the Latin, and of course the Latin. I was practically hopeless, right? And I'm still hopeless now. Like reading Oedipus and referring somewhat back to the Ancient Greek, I'm like, I'm going to translate this for myself. I can do it. I just need a dictionary and five minutes. And I'm like, yeah, it's not possible. But, yeah, I was hopeless in Latin class. So we did our translations while referring back to these other translations. And I had always had to have one poetic and one literal next to me at all times. 12:52 Erin: Six years of Latin, baby. 12:54 Wes: You did six years? Yep, I did four years, yeah. 12:58 Erin: Oh, so you probably know as much as I do. 13:01 Wes: Yeah. I taught Latin at a community college at one point, but. 13:04 Erin: Oh, then what are you talking about? 13:06 Wes: No, I'm not. I'm not proficient. Last night I was looking up, is there a way for me to become fluent in ancient Greek? Can I go to a place where people are actually speaking it? 13:16 Erin: Oh, my gosh. 13:17 Wes: Do they have any programs where you can just immerse yourself in it and, like, so I can just ramp up quickly, you know, I did two years in undergrad, and then I did a year or two in grad school at the University of Texas would have. Which had, like, I think, the number one classics program in the country. And I got a B in Herodotus because I hated sitting there with a dictionary. And Plato I could do, but Herodotus might as well have been a different language. And then I'm like, this isn't even one language. This is multiple languages. Because the civilization spans, you know, thousands of years, essentially. So, I mean, biblical Greek is not Platonic Greek is not Herodotus's Greek. 13:57 Erin: So my mom made me learn ecclesiastical Latin. Yeah, not that big of a difference, but. Oh, boy. 14:03 Wes: Yeah. Well, it's got to be somewhat easier, right? 14:06 Erin: I don't know. Sure. 14:08 Wes: Yeah, I don't know either. Anyway, so. All right, we got that interlude out of the way. We were talking about religious doubt, which I think is one of the big themes of the play. So if we go to 463 to 512 roughly, for the chorus. So I call this section Prophecy versus Proof. Teiresias and Oedipus have just had a big fight. And Teiresias has told Oedipus that, you know, he's the one who's the murderer. And the chorus now starts to fantasize about the culprit in a sympathetic way. Strophe says he should run. The gods are after him. The antistrophe says, fantasizes sympathetically and says he must be lonely. He's out in the woods, he's running from justice and chased by prophecy. And then that word prophecy serves as a point of rumination for Strophe again, which says basically doesn't know what to make of Tiresias prophecy because Oedipus would have no reason to kill Laius. And you get this highlighting of the conflict between reason and revelation here. And then the antistrophe says, gods know all, but the prophet's opinion shouldn't. Really Isn't any more privileged than my own. You can't convict Oedipus without proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Even though it's not exactly that phrase. Because we already have a kind of tangible proof in Oedipus's defeat of the Sphinx. So you get these three different elements that enter into this. You get this, you know, there's empirical evidence, there's reasoning, and then there's revelation. And a lot, you know, a lot of the play centers on the question of whether prophecy can actually be proof. Jocasta is going to. Later on, she's going to say, you know. Yeah, you can't believe prophecies. They prophesied that we were gonna have a son who's gonna kill laius and marry me. And that didn't come true. So why would you believe this? I love that. There's a lot of delicious ironies in this play, and that's one of them. 16:21 Erin: Yeah, I was just gonna say that Yocasta reproduces this argument for herself later on. She has some great lines later. 16:28 Wes: So this is around 699 to 732. 16:33 Erin: I think it's better in the Fitzgerald. In the Fitzgerald, she says, set your mind at rest. If it is a question of soothsayers, I tell you that you will. Whose craft gives knowledge of the unknowable. Here is my proof. And then she tells the whole story of. 16:48 Wes: I'll read the Grene. Our listeners can cringe along with you. Do not concern yourself about this matter. Listen to me and learn that human beings have no part in the craft of prophecy. Of that I'll show you a short proof. 17:01 Erin: Yes, yes. 17:03 Wes: Unless you're using this as a key to the ancient Greek. Yeah. It's very unsatisfying. 17:07 Erin: Yeah. And at the end of her sort of long explanation of how they killed their own kids. So none of this is, you know, needs to worry Oedipus. She says, this is what prophets and prophecies are worth. Have no dread of them. It is God himself who can show us what he wills in his own way. So again, there's this tension between. Like with Yocasta, it's this idea that these. These diviners, these prophets are flim flam men. You know, it's like going to a carnival and getting your fortune told by somebody. And so she believes in the ability to subvert prophecy. And that somehow this is separate. So that both soothsaying and somehow prophesying are separate from God's own will, which is a bizarre qualification. So she thinks that Tiresias is basically the equivalent of like someone with a crystal ball. But also that the prophecies that she and Laios were confronted with as the result of the speakings of those types of men are worth just as much. So there's not any kind of divine revelation. How does God reveal himself then? Because she said, it's God himself who could show us what he wills in his own way. How that way is meant to come about, she doesn't specify. But it's not through prophesying. 18:18 Wes: Right. 18:18 Erin: Which is bizarre. She thinks those things could be subverted. She subverted them. It's all fine. I love the fact that then she's like, we took care of this problem. And then later she's just like, don't worry about it. 18:29 Wes: Just. 18:29 Erin: I don't want to. Don't ask, don't tell. It's very. She's kind of the funniest character, in 18:36 Wes: a way, what you're saying about Jocasta. Oedipus ends up having the same sort of attitude in his great conflict with Tiresias, the sort of meat of the play. It's a great showdown and I think it's one of the things that actually can translate as a modern audience. If you're going to look at this on the stage. I think the only one that really worked for me was the. I don't know if you've seen it, the Christopher Plummer and Orson Welles version. Christopher Plummer as Oedipus and Orson Welles as Tiresias. 19:02 Erin: I saw that when I was a kid, but I haven't seen it in many, many years, so I have no memory. 19:07 Wes: Orson Welles does a really good job. And the other versions I've looked at, there's some BBC versions, I think one of them with William Shatner, but it's. Everyone's in a mask, which is just, I find completely unwatchable when everyone is in a mask. But, yeah, I think it's very, very hard to translate to the stage. But if you're gonna choose one scene, it would just be. It would be this showdown between Oedipus and Tiresias. Starts with Oedipus praising Tiresias by saying that he's versed in things that are both teachable and not to be spoken. Again, I think this sets up this contrast between teachable knowledge, which I associate also with knowledge from experience, and then prophetic knowledge. And then it leaves out the thing that Oedipus is known for, which we'll find out is cleverness. And the part of this I'm thinking about is when things turn in the conversation. And at first Tiresias won't talk to him and then ultimately he accuses Oedipus of being the murderer. Oedipus turns things around and becomes very contemptuous and taunts him for not being able to solve the riddle that delivered the citizens of Thebes from the sphinx. That's around 392, he will say, maybe let's go to that. So you can also read your translation. He will say, starting with 390. For tell me, where have you seen clear Teiresias with your prophetic mind? When the dark singer the Sphinx was in your country, did you speak word of deliverance to these citizens? Yet solving the riddle then was not the province of a chance comer. It was a prophet's task. And plainly you had no such gift of prophecy from birds, nor otherwise from any God to glean a word of knowledge. But I came, Oedipus, who knew nothing, and I stopped her. I solved the riddle by my wit alone. Mine was no knowledge got from birds. This no knowledge got from birds is actually. And this is the last time I'm really going to go to the ancient Greek. But in the ancient Greek, it's just like Mathon, where we get our word for math from. So he's just. He calls it literally, it's bird knowledge. That's what he's saying. Tiresias Grift is, you know, bird knowledge and making fun of that. And he's contrasting that to gnome judgment or cleverness, or what's translated here as wit. What is it for Fitzgerald? 21:33 Erin: So he says, your birds, what good were they? Or the gods, for the matter of that. But I came by Oedipus, the simple man who knows nothing. I thought it out for myself. No birds helped me. And this is the man you think you can destroy, that you may be close to Creon when he's king. So he just says, no, birds helped me earlier. 21:51 Wes: So I just want to say. Before you go earlier, when he says, I thought it out for myself, he starts by saying, I stopped her. nin epausa. When he says I solved the riddle by my wit alone, he doesn't even actually mention the riddle in the ancient Greek. He just says, I hit upon it by wit alone. Or even that I hit upon her. So this, the word is. And I think kerr is. It's the root where we get curiosity or curator or. But ultimately these Kerr words go back to javelin. So it's as if he. I hit upon the answer. But there's a double entendre there. It's almost like he hit her with his mind, with his cleverness, with his knowledge. It sets up A very strong contrast between cleverness and ingenuity and its ability. This isn't Hercules going and wrestling the Sphinx to the ground. This is someone who can use their mind to do things like this. And this is a rival. Oedipus is the rational guy. He's the smart guy who's come along and is a threat to the idea that bird knowledge or prophecy is effective is the way to go. I think this is the essence of the crisis created by his solving the riddle. He is an obvious rival to prophecy and he kicked prophecies ass. Tiresias couldn't do anything about the Sphinx. 23:06 Erin: So in the Fitzgerald, there are some actually some pretty funny things in Oedipus speech here which are more greeny type things maybe. So Oedipus says he has brought this decrepit fortune teller, this collector of dirty pennies, this prophet fraud. Why, he is no more clairvoyant than I am. Tell us, has your mystic mummery ever approached the truth? When that hellcat the Sphinx was performing here, what help were you to these people? Her magic was not for the first men who came along. It demanded a real exorcist. Your birds, what good were they? So this interesting idea that he's yoking exorcism to this idea that the Sphinx is a hellcat and that Oedipus somehow had the magic formula to expel this sort of demonic force from Thebes. Yeah, it's a different gloss on the Grene. And your interpretation? It seems to me to be more. To have more of a religious bent to it. Of course, by bringing the word exorcism in. But I guess Fitzgerald's interpretation of this doesn't matter. 24:01 Wes: So say that exorcist part again. It doesn't mention wit or judgment or cleverness. 24:06 Erin: So of course he implies that Tiresias is just a fortune teller. In the same way that Jocasta will later say that prophecies are as good as the air they're written on or whatever. So the decrepit fortune teller, the collector of dirty pennies, which is like my favorite thing in the whole book, prophet fraud. He's no more clairvoyant than I am. And he uses this term, mystic mummery. So there's this idea of mysticism. And then he says I was the real exorcist. Your birds, what good were they? Or the gods for the matter of that. But I came by Oedipus, the simple man who knows nothing. I thought it out for myself. No birds helped me. 24:39 Wes: Thought it out for myself is what he's translating, you know, that's kures us. 24:43 Erin: So the idea of this yoking, of this kind of religious implication of exorcism with the idea that he's going to exorcise the Sphinx's evil with his mind. 24:53 Wes: Exactly. 24:53 Erin: Rather than with any kind of fortune telling. It's just an interesting equivalence. 24:57 Wes: It's a well thought out approach in the sense that it emphasizes the competition between those two things, which is right there in the text. Of course, I wish it were translated in any text as bird knowledge. I think that's just something a translator should leave alone because it's so contemptuous. You know, I did it with my mind, not by bird knowledge. So, yeah, you know, Oedipus, at the start of the scene, he pays lip service to Tiresias being able to divine with the birds, talk about both things that are teachable and things that are not to be spoken. But that very little. Well, it's not very little, but, you know, under pressure, of course, we get. We get Oedipus true attitude, which is really arrogant and contemptuous. So it's clear that Oedipus intelligence is related to a kind of impiety or not taking the gods seriously if we are to associate the gods with prophecy. Which is a question, you know, and it becomes a big question for the chorus as well. 26:00 Erin: Of course, in reading this for the first time in quite a while, I had a different takeaway from this scene than I had ever before, which was that the conflict between Oedipus and Tiresia seems to me like one of biography or autobiography. It seems like the tension here is Oedipus is right to know. I find him to be as arrogant and obnoxious as ever. I love in the very first scene when he's telling the chorus that like, you know, no one is more upset about everything going on in Thebes than me, because this is all about me. 26:30 Wes: I know there's a lot of that, 26:32 Erin: yeah, it's really obnoxious. But at the same time, I think that what we're getting at here, what you're getting at is this idea of knowledge is the sin in a way. Right. The idea of the fact finding mission that Oedipus is on is somehow his fatal flaw more than his pride, is. I think what you're suggesting I'm using fatal flaw, throwing it in. 26:56 Wes: Yeah. So I think there's actually a triad here. It's not just prophecy versus knowledge. It's knowledge from teaching versus knowledge from revelation, from prophecy versus knowledge from wit or wits. Judgment, cleverness, thinking it out, as Fitzgerald describes it. And the knowledge from teaching is more akin to what is knowledge from experience, from what is empirical, from what is posteriori. And the wit stuff is more like what's a priori or semantic or conceptual analysis or math. Things that you can kind of demonstrate without any appeal to experience. Right. If you start out with a few axioms and you have the rules of derivation, whether logical or geometrical, the conclusion in a way is already there in the premises. It just has to be teased out. And again, this is another example in the way, the kind of incest theme, in the way in which this type of reasoning undoes boundaries. If you think of the axioms as the progenitor and the theorems, the thing that produces, as sort of the children, the creature in mathematical reasoning, that relationship, in a way is too close because it's analytical in some sense, or perhaps analytical. Kant ultimately thought it was synthetic. But anyway, so I think the threat is Oedipus particular kind of use of a priori reasoning, which is very suitable for the riddle. The riddle is not something you do. He doesn't have to become a private investigator for that. He doesn't have to go out and solve a murder. He doesn't have to appeal to the gods for that. That's just purely, hey, I'm smart, right? 28:35 Erin: Right. 28:36 Wes: I can figure that out. And obviously, when he becomes the private investigator into the murder, or the public investigator, however you want to put it into the murder for which he actually is guilty, there's a question of whether he is going to do this by experience, by prophecy, or by doing it the way he solved the riddle, which he tries to do. So for instance, when he concludes that Tiresias and Creon are in a plot against him, he does that a priori style. It's not because he has any evidence of that. It's just. It's almost like he's a conspiracy theorist. Well, why didn't Tiresias say this before if he's only just saying it now? It must be because Creon put him up to it, blah, blah, blah. He's a bad private investigator because he's not interested in the beginning. He becomes more interested later on, but not interested enough in experience and data in the empirical. So anyway, sorry for that long speech. I see here a kind of conflicting triad of approaches. The rational, the empirical, and then the revelatory. 29:38 Erin: Well, I see what you're talking about with the experience or the teaching. Those two things are together in your mind, right? Teaching and experience. 29:46 Wes: Yeah. 29:46 Erin: So I see those two things are linked together in Oedipus throughout the scene, in a way, because what he's arguing with Tiresias about, I think, is this question of what is his true biography, what is his true history. And in a way, this bird knowledge idea is really interesting to me because Tiresias has knowledge from a certain height, from a certain vantage point that gives him a lack of involvement in these kind of worldly concerns in which Oedipus is embroiled and so embroiled that he can't see what the truth is. But the idea of Oedipus experience as being, you know, maybe the reason why this is all being brought to my mind is because of this much maligned term that I hear bandied about all the time, which is the idea of someone's lived experience. Right. So Oedipus, according to his lived experience, is the rightful king of Thebes and did nothing wrong. This is why I see this as a tension about biography or something. So he's yoking together his experience of I came here, I did the right thing, I'm a great guy, and this is great. And then he's also yoking that to this detective thing that you're talking about solving the riddle, trying to figure out who the killer is, doing both of those at the same time. And it begs the question, who has this sort of ownership over one's own life? It seems to me that Oedipus has no ownership over his own life and that the very idea of ownership is refuted by this idea of the prophecy over which you have no control and of which you're then not even supposed to be aware because the very awareness of it will kill you. So it seems to me like Oedipus is trying to tell a narrative of his own life which is not the truth, but which is true to his own experience of his life. And Tiresias is saying, no, you don't even have a right to this story. Yeah, I'm trying to find a way to be more sympathetic to Oedipus and also to kind of get at this idea of what is objective history and objective biography and objective truth and what is self aggrandizing memoir. You know, I think that is what's most interesting to me in this read around. So let's stop here for a minute to talk about the sponsor of today's episode, Better Help. That's H E L P. Is there something in your life that's holding you back? Something interfering with your happiness? Maybe you're like me and the Pandemic Blues is still getting you down. If you want to talk out a problem and you need a sympathetic ear, or if you have a goal that you just can't seem to reach. BetterHelp is a convenient and secure online resource. You don't have to make the trip into a therapist's office. And if you're in an area with relatively few options or resources for in person therapy, you're not just limited to what's around you. You can access BetterHelp from anywhere in the world and be connected with your own licensed professional therapist. Even better, you can start communicating with your therapist in 48 hours or less when you go to their website. BetterHelp will help you figure out what your needs are. They have counselors who specialize in anxiety, stress, depression, sleep, relationships, grief, self esteem, anything that you can think of. And then they match you to the therapist that's right for you and your needs. You can message your therapist anytime and you can schedule weekly phone or video sessions in a very secure online environment. Best of all, BetterHelp is more affordable than most offline counseling. And as a subtext Listener, you'll get 10% off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com subtext Again, that's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P.com subtext. And now back to the show. 33:22 Wes: That's really interesting. Yeah. You know, you're making me think of the fact that for all Oedipus contemptuousness, prophecy will be vindicated by this play, right? Fully, fully vindicated. But he is right that Tiresias couldn't solve the riddle of the Sphinx and that he could. And we don't really find out why that is. But, you know, then he moves on to the very paranoid way he approaches things. And this starts early on when he's. So, for instance, when he first puts on the private investigator hat and is interrogating Creon, you know, he's asking the where question, Was Laius killed at home or abroad? And Creon, by the way, is very interestingly evasive in the answers he gives. And just instead of saying he doesn't know, he talks about how Laius went on his embassy. So basically he doesn't really know how far Laios got before he was killed. So the question of whether it happened at home or abroad is unclear. Where there are witnesses. Oedipus. Next question is, well, was it an inside job? He couldn't have done this without money from someone in Thebes. And then it's why was it uninvestigated Right. This is one thing Sophocles does very skillfully early on is he lets Oedipus put on the private investigator hat. His first questions are very reasonable. And then you see this escalation of paranoia. It's really heightened in this scene with Tiresias, where he concludes that Creon and him must be in a conspiracy to kill together. How great a store of jealousy you are hoarding. If for the sake of the office which I hold given me by the city, not sought by me, my friend Creon, friend from the first and loyal, thus secretly attacks me, secretly desires to drive me out, and secretly suborns this juggling, trick, devising quack, this wily beggar. So I think you've read some of this in the Fitzgerald translation, but. So that's the first part of the speech that ends with the whole thing about bird knowledge. And then ultimately Tiresias will tell him, as you're getting at the self aggrandizing biography that he has, which is based in some truth, is missing out on some very essential details, right? Like the whole killing the father, sleeping with the mother part. There's of course a lot of iconic stuff that happens in Tiresias next speech. You have your eyes, but see not where you are in evil, nor where you live, nor whom you live with. Do not know who your parents are. And then at the very end of the speech, and of the multitude of other evils, establishing a grim equality between you and your children. You know nothing so muddy with contempt. My words and Creon's misery shall grind no man as it will you. I love this phrase, grim equality between you and your children. It connects this mathematical idea, this riddle solving idea with the idea of self generation. Right. So to be able to reason the way Oedipus does is to be a self made man in a sense, right? To be independent of influences, to be free because you can reason your way to your decisions. And that is evocative of incest, that ability to be self generating, to be free of cultural influence and free of the gods and free of prophecy and free of fate, all that stuff, but it backfires. So the seeming, the capacity for this demonstrative reasoning to extricate oneself from fate, including one's character, right? Including the driving forces involved in just having one's character actually represents a breakdown in an important boundary. It becomes incest, it becomes grim equality between you and your children. Tiresias gets the best of this, you know, the best of Oedipus here. 37:12 Erin: Yeah. So I love this idea that you're Talking about of the self made man, this is clarifying certain things for me. The hubris of that, that Oedipus, by being above prophecy and above the gods has in a way already de parented himself is, I think what you're saying. He's already orphaned himself by separating from this larger tradition, this religious tradition and employing logic. This speaks to the question I have of his right to know his own biography. I think what you're suggesting is that he's already sort of divorced himself from his own biography by de parenting himself from this larger tradition. 37:49 Wes: Ah, very good. Yeah. 37:51 Erin: This idea of self generation and of the problem of knowledge, obviously it makes me think of, you know, the Judeo Christian tradition of Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And both sets of knowledge, I think ultimately produce shame and alienation. Right. But of course with Adam and Eve that does away with the whole problem of parentage. Right. Because they're just created by God, so their lineage doesn't need ferreting out. 38:18 Wes: Right. 38:19 Erin: They're created by God immediately. And the knowledge that they cannot have is this knowledge of good and evil, which once they learn this, once they eat the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then the two of them are made aware of their nakedness and they experience all this shame and they have a similarly shameful reaction as what Oedipus experiences. Obviously Oedipus has this compounded horror and everything else that goes on. So the tension in Oedipus then, which I think this is where I'm getting at with this slightly unfair, I mean a lot about Oedipus situation is majorly unfair. But this idea that he doesn't have the right to know his own origins, I think is a very different gloss on this idea of the danger of knowledge that both sets of traditions seem to be engaging with. So on Oedipus part, the fact that he's not allowed to know his own parentage or that somehow the knowledge of that is more dangerous than the fact that this has already happened. Right. The self knowledge and the self understanding obviously speaks to, you know, a discomfort that the Greeks have with this idea of knowing too much. So there's the same discomfort with knowledge in general and that it's crueler in the Greek because Oedipus doesn't even know where he comes from, though he thinks he does. Whereas there's more of a sense of fairness, I guess, and safety and therefore more betrayal on the part of Adam and Eve than on the part of Oedipus. 39:53 Wes: More betrayal on the part of Adam and Eve in the sense of. 39:56 Erin: So that Adam and Eve have betrayed their rightful parent. By knowing their origins, they're at less of a disadvantage. 40:05 Wes: Just listening to you talk about this, I was reminded of the psychoanalytic claim that there's a connection between our curiosity, our desire to know in a scientific way, and early childhood sexual curiosity about where babies come from, where I come from, what sex is, what the opposite. The genitalia of the opposite sex look like. And we talked about that in our alien episode. Right. Where one can be diverted off. You know, mother diverts them off course. It's a very. There's some crossover here, Right, Sure. She diverts them off course towards something in service of scientific investigation which is going to bring them face to face with is what is arguably the horror of incest in some sense. And self generation. Right. The larval form that impregnates the adult male and all that stuff. So there's a connection between knowledge of sexuality, which I think, you know, the knowledge of good and evil from the fruit of the tree, of course, is related to that. And why else would they become suddenly ashamed of being naked? There's connection to that and worries about incest. Right. Worries that knowledge. Right. Because just thinking about one's parents having sex is really gross. 41:31 Erin: Yeah. 41:32 Wes: Long before you would ever get to doing it or fantasizing about doing it with a parent. The idea of them doing it is horrific. So the taboo, the incest taboo runs that deeply and it makes sexuality very fraught for us, in part, also, because there's this crossover between the nurturing of infants and sexuality. Right. So we, you know, infants suck at the breast and there's pleasure in that. And later on, people tend to, to some extent, their choice of a partner is influenced by early caretakers, by, you know, they're modeled, to some extent, a mother and father. So people end up not escaping their origins in the way they might think. And this is. You could tell a story about someone who goes off to college, tries to get a job, and then things don't work out and they end up back home with the parents. This is a version of that story. Another version of that story is that you don't end up at home because you couldn't find a job. You marry someone that's too much like one of your parents. And that Freud thought impotence and frigidity and other relationship problems had a lot to do with the incest taboo being triggered by the fact that people will pick someone that's too much like a parent. And yet our affectionate feelings for people are based on that. So our affectionate and sexual feelings come into conflict with each other. This is all about the resolution of the Oedipus complex. This is what the Oedipus complex is all about, as the way in which neurosis arises because these taboos get evoked. Our relationships with people and our relationships to our work, so we become inhibited. So that's another way that you end up back at home. And then there's this literal Oedipus version. And then there's another version in which you think that your sublimation in work takes you away from the parental right. Because we grow up, we detach ourselves from our parents and we find lovers, partners, alternative objects, as psychoanalysts would say. But we also sublimate things into work. And we identify with cultural values, we identify with parental values. The overcoming of the Oedipus complex means getting those identifications in place and shifting our libido away from parents, to values, to aspirations, to conscience. It's about the development of conscience. It's about the development of what Freud called an ego ideal. But that can go wrong. That can go wrong because it can be infused with a Garden of Eden ethos. It can be fused with the idea of. With something hubristic, with the idea of becoming perfectly merged back with the mother, with the object, with grandiosity, with being completely triumphant over the gods. This is the predicament. Why does fate punish us for running away from it? Because sometimes running away from it is running towards it. Especially when we get involved in work and people become maniacal and narcissistic. Our ambitions can really screw us over. They can really be evocative of incest. They can really represent not growing up, not moving away from our original conditions, but finding them again in the effort to transcend them. So sorry for that long speech. That's one of my pet theories that I just grind over and over again. 45:01 Erin: But anyway, no, but I'm glad that we got to the Freudian element of this. I mean, it's ironic because I think that Tiresias's relationship with Oedipus is. We could say it's almost anti therapeutic. Right. Like the idea on Tiresias part isn't to discover and therefore confront our problems as a way to heal them, to deal with whatever is broken within us, but to just stay submerged in ignorance like that. Ignorance is better for us. 45:30 Wes: Yeah. I mean, Oedipus could say to Tiresias, he says, why didn't you solve the riddle of the Sphinx? But he might also say to him, why didn't you help me out earlier? And in a gentler way, why didn't you become my therapist? Why didn't you help me discover what was just in my unconscious? 45:46 Erin: You know, this time around, I kept being reminded of the Truman Show. I don't know if this is a bizarre, interesting. 45:52 Wes: Yeah, let me know. Tell me about that. 45:54 Erin: You know, obviously, a lot of this play is about irony. And, you know, on a basic level, I suppose, having two competing ideas warring with each other at the same time, which we could say about a lot of turns of phrase and stuff like that. But I think that holds true for irony. And I think of Corinth and Thebes as setting up parallel universes, almost like they're kind of analogous to each other. Corinth has its king and queen, Thebes has its king and queen. And it's almost like one is the real world and one is the dream world or maybe the nightmare world. And so it's as though Oedipus is Truman slowly realizing that he's in the nightmare world, yet at the same time it's the real one. Right. Because that's actually where he really belongs, in Thebes, because he's supposed to be a son of Thebes. But he's sort of waking up to this realization that his hometown, his relationships, his whole backstory is not what it seems. It's, all, in a way, an invention. And I vaguely remember, I think it was the director of the Truman show maybe reading something about how the feeling that the film meant to evoke is similar to basically anyone's childhood experience, where you might wonder if everything is fake. But he used the example of if you're a kid wondering if you're adopted, like if this is really where you belong. And that kind of falseness is what that sort of Truman show idea is evoking. 47:21 Wes: And in particular, he finds himself in the wrong career, maybe as a king. I don't know. I was just thinking about facing career terms again and feeling imposter syndrome and feeling like a fake or that you somehow. Poorly situated. 47:33 Erin: Right. I think that the Truman shows, you know, the dramatic dilemma in that film. This is obviously not a perfect parallel, but I just think it's interesting that the dramatic dilemma in that film is this idea of letting someone live a real life, like someone's right to know what the truth of their own life is. Which is, again, I think, where I'm getting this whole idea of biography. One's ownership over one's own story, who owns it, who has the right to know it or to tell it, and who could be said to know the whole thing, the whole story. Can we say, you know, that Oedipus, in a way, does know the whole story, and he knows it better than Tiresias ever could because he's lived it anyway. The tension in the Truman show is about making sure that he knows what the truth is and getting him back to the real world. And everyone who's a good guy in that film seems to intuitively want that for him. There's a tension in that film, too, between the television audience that's been watching him 247 his entire life and knows everything, everything about him, supposedly, or Truman's experience and which is the more real one. Anyway. All of that to say that the whole dramatic functioning of the Truman Show's plot is based on the idea that Truman, of course, has the right to know that he's in a fake world, that his relationships are fake, that things are not what they seem, and that he has to sort of wake up and get to the real world. In a way, Oedipus is. The plot is doing the opposite of that. It's like, no, no, just stay in the dream world. Everything's great. Don't confront this. Don't think about it. Don't worry about it. Which completely is topsy turvy with this idea of prophecy, too, because the idea of prophecy is revelation. So I'm just really grappling with what I think are obviously purposeful inconsistencies and mind benders and riddles and all of that, which I guess, you know, I'm not supposed to think about. 49:22 Wes: Yeah, right. Yeah, it's taboo. But you're raising an interesting hypothetical, which is just, what if Oedipus had just followed Jocasta's advice and left well enough alone and didn't continue his investigation? Right. Just Oedipus. Prophecy is BS. Stop looking into this any further. 49:43 Erin: It's Tiresias advice, too. 49:45 Wes: Yeah, Tiresias is a prima donna as well. Like, you know what? As soon as he arrives, it's like, this is just a waste of my time. Why am I even here? 49:53 Erin: Right? 49:54 Wes: This is pointless. You're incurable. And I'm not going to even tell you anything because it's pointless. Which, of course, you know, he's a prophet. He didn't need to be a prophet to know that. That, of course, what was going to happen if he told Oedipus everything is Oedipus was going to erupt in rage and that Tiresias life would be in danger and all that stuff. But Tiresias, you're talking about the right to know. Tiresias is saying you don't know or you do in a way. It's unconscious. Some translations even use the word conscious. Unconscious. I don't know what it translates. But at some level you know this, but you know it without knowing it consciously. And you're going to inevitably find out and you're going to be miserable because of that. But in the meantime, you have eyes and you can't see and I can't see and I'm. And I don't have eyes, but I do see. So you get this contrast between two different types of knowing. The more rational conscious type of knowing on Oedipus part, and then the Tiresian knowledge, which on one level is prophetic but translated into our language at least is a competitor for therapeutic self knowledge, right? Or knowledge of one's own desires and hang ups and unconscious conflicts, unconscious beliefs, all that, you know, all that psychoanalytic analytic stuff that supposedly if we can raise it to consciousness or come to grips with it in some other way, would make our lives better. So you can read the prophecy stuff as kind of proto therapeutic because the understanding is that there's something more important than rational understanding of things. And it has something to do with our unconscious, but also something to do with our emotional life, something to do with the irrational. And so just getting back to this whole hypothetical, why not leave that alone? You know, some people don't want to go into therapy and stir up all that stuff. Why, why can't Oedipus just take Jocasta's advice and not stir it up and they can live happily ever after not knowing. Possible answer to that is just that those things drive us, that comes out in action. So what you don't know will inevitably hurt you. And that's, it's, you know, fadedness is related to that, right? Fadedness is related to things that are merely in the unconscious. They have to come out somehow, they have to be discharged somehow. And they'll be discharged in action if they can't be discharged in mentation, let's say, if they can't be discharged in the knowing of them. So that's one way in which fate again is related to these. The attempt to avoid fate, or at least to avoid the knowledge of fate. 52:32 Erin: This hubris with which Oedipus is plagued, I think is collapsed at several times in the text with the desire to know those Two things are the same thing. I don't know what it is in the Grene. I won't be able to find it quickly. But in the Fitzgerald, the chorus says the greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves. And I know early on during Creon's fight with Oedipus in the Fitzgerald, he says, natures like yours chiefly torment themselves. So there seems to be this suggestion that through his pride and his insisting to know both of those things together, he came to grief that the problem was not the prophecy itself, but his own personality. And his need to know the truth is what caused him grief. His own nature, which you could also attribute to a kind of fate. You know, you have a certain personality that is what's bequeathed you at birth. And the ways in which that personality plays out are going to cause you a lot of problems. 53:29 Wes: Not just at birth though, but by early child, right? By nurture you get from bad parenting or even good parenting, but just the accidents of parenting that form your character. 53:39 Erin: Right. Though I think that a lot more. I don't know, I guess this is a larger. This is a larger problem. But I think that I've seen a lot of obstinate children in my day. I've been an obstinate child. And a lot of our personalities are in spite of our parents best efforts. And we're born sometimes with certain characteristics that seem to be handed down from on high, for lack of a better phrase. Right. 54:01 Wes: They're hard to change. They're really ingrained and very difficult to change. 54:04 Erin: Exactly. And even independent of any kind of human parental intervention. So they may seem to be, you know, fated or prophesied or whatever. And so in a way it seems to me that Oedipus worst curse, or his true curse is his personality. I mean, that seems to be what Creon is suggesting. 54:24 Wes: Character is fate, right. 54:26 Erin: You know, even the act of blinding at the end of the play is goaded by the gods. There's a kind of doubling suggestion that Oedipus act of blinding himself was on the one hand goaded by the gods. But then on the other hand he says, well, the blinding hand was my own. So he does take responsibility for blinding himself in an act of really insanity. Right. Which we can't even really say was his. 54:48 Wes: But it's also an advance though. He's becoming more like Tiresias, right? He needs to concentrate. I mean, he says it's so I can't see the crimes, I can't see my offspring, the products of incest, etc. Etc. But also he needs to be less focused on the conscious and on the rational and on the visible, the tangible, and get more in touch with himself, man. And what better way to get in touch with yourself than to cut out the distractions, get rid of your eyes and look inward, so to speak. 55:21 Erin: Though the chorus suggests that he would have been better dead than blind and alive. 55:26 Wes: They're hysterical. They're just all over the place. 55:29 Erin: Don't listen to them. 55:32 Wes: They're very worried. I love the chorus in this, you know, I think often they are hysterical. They're just. They're constantly worried and ruminating and doing a lot of work for the audience, of course, like so, for instance, in 864 to 910. In my version, the second ode, it starts out the strophe Mayow. Basically, the upshot is a desire to live by God's laws, which are not something that are derivable from mortal nature, right? We have to look, to use the word, they have to come from on high. And then there's the idea that there are nevertheless those who can violate the laws. So insolence breeds the tyrant. There are two worries. One is that there are people who can violate the laws. And if they can do that, then it's a problem of evil. And the gods don't punish that. Then are the gods effective? Should I even honor the gods? Should I obey the oracles? All that stuff? Maybe the oracles are unfit, but then really, it's a double bind. The other worry they have is, but we need ambition because that's what profits the state in the community. We need leaders. And leaders can't just be passive. They can't just be subject to the law. Everyone is subject to the law ultimately, right? But they can't be so passive in the face of the law that they don't have any agency. So this is the dilemma. So I was pointing this passage as an example of the sophistication of the choruses, even though I was just dissing them, the sophistication of their rumination. But this is the dilemma of the resolution of the Oedipus complex, which. It's one of the dilemmas, which is that we can't just say, oh, no, we can't just. It's like just say no to hubris, right? Can't do a. Like just say no to drugs. We can't just do a campaign because we can't do without ambition. This is something I've actually seen in patients who, right? They struggle with this because they are. They're tortured by ambition. And I always wish that I could tell them, yeah, just stop being ambitious. Just enjoy your life. But that's not a realistic solution. It's not a realistic solution for the polis, for the community, and it's not a realistic solution for individuals. So Oedipus, ambition, right, he was going to go out in the world and he was going to evade the prophecy, but because it was tinged with hubris, it meant running back towards what he was fated to do. 57:58 Erin: Right. After the ode that you're speaking of, the most bizarre part of the play occurs, I think, which is when Jocasta decides that she's going to go sacrifice to the gods, pray to the gods for an escape from the curse, and then I'm not sure what happens here. So either she's stopped from being able to go and pray by the messenger coming in, or her prayers seem to be answered by the messenger coming in. I'm not sure what the function of Jocasta saying that she's going to go and pray is at this moment, because immediately the messenger comes in and seems to be an answer to her prayers. Because this is when the messenger says, Polybus is dead. You know, the king of Corinth, who Oedipus believes to be his real father, is dead. And obviously Oedipus hasn't killed him. He died of old age. So they think, great, this is proof again, proof that Oedipus has escaped the curse. Of course, it turns out to be the opposite, I guess, even crueler, right? It turns out to be that that's not the case. I think it's also really funny that the messenger is like, I have great news. Your dad is dead. And Oedipus is like, great. 59:08 Wes: Yeah, that part as well. 59:10 Erin: Yeah, right. 59:11 Wes: He says something like, this will bring you pleasure. It might bring you some pain as well, but probably more pleasure, but mostly pleasure. Right? 59:18 Erin: But I guess the question then is Jocasta's attempt to pray to the gods for freedom from the curse, is that subverted? Or is this, you know, like, is she intercepted by the messenger before she can do this? Or is the play just that cruel that she goes and prays and then immediately seems to get her prayer answered, but it turns out that the gods are laughing at her, essentially. And this idea of the gods scorn or their hatred for Oedipus, their hatred for. For Jocasta, for all of Thebes, is something obviously that plays upon. Yeah, plays upon. And this idea too is really troubling, I think. And something that you know, we should probably deal with the idea that if you're. If you're dealt a bad hand, then that means that the gods hate you. You know more about the ancient Greek, obviously, far more than I do. Are these threads meant to contradict each other or is there supposed to be some sort of higher understanding that I. I don't have of how. I mean, I know that there's obviously something fundamentally flawed at the heart of Greek religion here. 1:00:24 Wes: Yes, yes. 1:00:25 Erin: So, you know, this tension can't be resolved. 1:00:28 Wes: Yeah, exactly. 1:00:30 Erin: So Sophocles awareness of that is introducing all of these contradictions, rather than the contradictions are there, and he's not necessarily aware of how contradictory they are or some combination thereof. 1:00:45 Wes: I think this is what ancient Greek tragedy is all about. It's an ongoing religious crisis of a civilization that is becoming more and more culturally advanced. Family values are going to shit, cats and dogs, living together, all that stuff. So it's, of course, a crisis that continues and it's associated, we associate it with modernity, of course, but I think it's a very old crisis. And that's what we see here. The play vindicates prophecy because it has to vindicate prophecy and treats that as a. In some sense as a vindication of the God. So there's a question, you know, as you point out here with Jocasta's prayer, it's not clear that prophecy is, you know, and her and others in play, you know, it's. It's not clear to them or to us that prophecies are real, that they really represent deliverances from the gods. It could just be a sham, right? These just could be con artists. They could be scamming us, people like Tiresias. So there's that problem. But then there's also the problem of evil, which we just talked about. And there's the problem of freedom, which is a big problem. Right. How can there even be an ethics if we're not free? But how can we be free if we're fated or if the gods simply determine everything? These are all the sorts of questions that are arising. And you point to one of the most intractable questions, which is how can you populate your divine realm with a bunch of assholes, cantankerous assholes, who have grudges against humanity and make that work? 1:02:15 Erin: Right? It's a bizarre thing. So I guess the extent to which the gods become more human is where we get into trouble, where they might have a personal dislike for you. And the extent to which they're human degrades Them. The extent to which we have to appease them. Appease them? Yeah. The extent to which we have to appease them and deal with their personality issues is the extent to which the gods in Greek mythology become more and more human. And then as humans are getting smarter and more and more advanced in logic, it seems to me like the convergence of these two things goes to the vanishing point, right? We think of it as like a landscape almost, so there is no difference between humans and gods, and the whole thing collapses. And I guess we're probably right on the verge of this collapse. 1:03:01 Wes: You know, I think there's a. Which we've already talked about a bit, but the psychology of this is important, which is just that, the status of the gods as humanoid, so to speak. It means that you can tell stories about hubris, right? It means that you can tell stories about the ways in which becoming like a God is bad because it's a threat to the gods. Right? The gods are envious and they're jealous and. And they don't like their territory to be encroached upon. So one can explain how hubris and narcissism and all that stuff goes wrong. This is partly an attempt at a psychology, an attempt at an explanation of a very real phenomenon for human beings. You get too inflated, you get too big, and then you get struck down by Apollo or Zeus. Apparently, even if they're not around, you still get struck down. It's an attempt to say why. And the answer to the why ultimately does involve incest in some metaphorical sense. It involves the ways in which, as I've said, the attempt to be godlike is an attempt at a return to a Garden of Eden or to a perfect restoration to a symbiotic state, with the Mother, for instance. And that grandiosity gets infused into the very thing that's supposed to achieve separation, which is our identifications and our aspirations. It's a horrible bind that we find ourselves in that the very machinery that's supposed to achieve that, to give us psychological maturity, that that in and of itself can do the very opposite if it's too infused with the archaic, with the grandiose. Let's say the problem is complicated and the mythology actually successfully gets at some of those complications at the level of parable. But then it leaves you wanting more. So it inevitably leads to the sorts of questions that are addressed in Greek tragedies and the crises of conscience and to religious doubt. We need a better religion or we need a better psychology or some combination thereof. Okay, so let's stop there. And we will continue to discuss the play in Postscript. Specifically, we'll talk a little bit more about Creon, who we've neglected. So thank you. 1:05:28 Erin: Sounds good. Thank you. 1:05:31 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.