Last week, I spent my twilight hours cycling. When “the moment” impressed me to stop, pell-mell, as my destination and direction were uncertain and moved merely via the road before (beyond?) and the force within, I came upon a man-made escarpment, whose concrete stations abutted the local water reservoir. Dismounting, I dangled my legs over the edge of the water line and observed the scene before me: waterfowl were about business, their grace and form suggesting a certain playful-ness of spirit that further exaggerated their distance beyond “solid ground.” Peering further, I spotted a rather large bird break out from a copse of trees across the waterway. He made several large and high flown circles above the zone and unexpectedly dive-bombed the surface. Emerging soon after from the fresh foam froth he had created, a fish squirmed in his powerful talons; up-away did the wide wings beat to its nest, apparently crested upon the crown of that very same copse of trees. A wayfarer, who snatched upon my place without me knowing, soon said: “Ofspry; beautiful bird. Their vision is very good and they can see everything.” I nodded and watched the Ofspry crowd its nest and feed: what, I couldn't judge, but I left the bank and resumed my journey assuming that something of his had been satisfied.
In the scene of Treplev's play, Act I of Chekov's “The Sea Gull:”
Treplev:...oh venerable shadows of olden days, ye shades that float over this lake at night, lull us to sleep and bring us dreams of what will be in two hundred thousand years....”
Nina: “Men, lions, eagles, and partridges, horned deer, geese, spiders, and the silent fish of the deep, starfish and creatures which cannot be seen by the eye—all living things, all living things, all living things, having completed their cycle of sorrow, are now extinct.....all living creatures have turned to dust and the eternal matter has transformed them....while the souls of all beings have been merged into one soul....In me the consciousness of men is fused with the instincts of the animals.
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Nina: I am alone. Once in a hundred years I open my lips to speak....I know not what I am nor lies before me. All I know is that I am destined to struggle.
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Nina, to Trigorin: It's a strange play, isnt it?
Trigorin: I didn't understand a word of it, but I enjoyed watching it...There must be a lot of fish in that lake.
As I read this play I wondered, to Thomas Hardy's once poeticized “All Enacting Might,” if “he”—this “Might” was “speaking in symbols,” in the symbol of the Ofspry, as Treplev was to Nina in the images of both the dead bird and the rattle-trap “philosophy” of his (apparently) unappreciated master work. What was it that I saw in those waning stretches of daylight? The bird, a beast of prey, flew (not on waxed wings) and achieved the satisfaction of his immediate desire; which, from my (and the other's) perspective as an observer, was a beautiful event—or at least one worthy of exclamation. Point being, it seems that it is not only I, nor you, nor “him” which works in symbols, but rather all Nature and her players, which as far as expression is concerned, speaks, neither revealing nor concealing. What then, is next? The deed? The force?
I'd say: the Terror (The will to be, the desire to be)?---- how would Blanche Dubois respond?
The Greek mythos Io, from Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, stated:
“My Father of these fears that walked in darkness,
And many times to Pytho and Dodona
He sent his sacred missioners, to inquire
How, or by deed or word, he might conform
To the high will and pleasure of the Gods.
And they returned with slippery oracles.”
Prometheus was the “man-loving” Titan who not only stole the blessings of fire from the Olympians for the benefit of mankind, but also, through bestowing “all manner of arts to men,” took, in his own words, “from man expectancy of death,” consummated through “blind hope planted in the heart of him (man).” Io, from this Pantheon, was a priestess of Hera who was raped by Zeus, who subsequently changed her into a heifer in order to escape the wrath of his consort, Hera. She was later loosed by the Gods to roam the world, forever stung by a maddening gadfly. A woman of neither word nor deed, her fate, ominously hinted at by the “slippery” Pythian and Dodonic Oracles, could not be avoided. Seeking comfort and finding it not, she fled the Bound Prometheus exclaiming:
“It beats upon my brain—the burning wind
That Madness blows!
It pricks—the barb, the hook not forged with heat,
The Gadfly dart!
Against my ribs with thud of trampling feet
Hammers my heart!
And like a bowling wheel mine eyeballs spin,
And I am flung
By fierce winds from my course, nor can rein in My frantic tongue
That raves I know not what!--a random tide
Of words—a froth
Of muddied waters buffeting the wide,
High crested, hateful wave of run and God's
wrath!
I've examined my past purpose: from theology, to philosophy, later to philosophy and literature, and finally to farming (and literature and philosophy; probably theology). I see myself as “searching for her or his home” and I am not taking the later-Wittgenstein approach of thwarting the impulse towards finding unity. I consider my present biography as the “changing expression of the goal,” this meaning that the goal is not that which changes, but rather the journey towards it. Is this “harmony” perhaps inauthentic? Maybe, but I do not believe that a cord of Gordian knots should only be used as a tool for breaking necks. Bounded-ness, as it were, can serve its purpose well as a bedrock for steadfast-ness, a trait taken to task within the long-drawn days of our lives. I agree with the thought that “even knowing what it [the goal of one's life] is may take years of a person's adult life,” but I am sometimes not all that sure where one should go from there. Our friend Ahab took this trait to its adamantine extreme, and although I can't condone the purpose in his pursuing, I do respect the measure of his monomania. Ultimately, his sinking into the abyss may suggest a lack of community (communion?), but not personality (character). The Devil, therefore, does he linger? A criticism of Goethe's “too many manifestations of Mephistopheles in various guises” is reasonable, but I (my inner Faust) typically sees him singularly, as what I don't want (the office) or what I couldn't have (school?). Here I may have mixed up laboring and seeking, in which event I only have myself to blame. But youth, being what it is, has not yet been wasted (would Joseph Conrad agree?). So again I am and remain “perplexed;” So in the beginning was........
I must here mention that I had purchased my copy of The Sea Gull from an estate sale in Pittsburgh. The former owner, a Miss. Margie Mermelstein of Northwestern, class of 1963, wrote on the opening page of the play the following: “Comedy— Absurd--- Meant to be funny.” Where she got that from Lord only knows.
