In My End Is My Beginning: Speaking Myth to the Shades Below Herbert Golder (bio) He chose not to answer but turned away in silence and joined the other shades of the vanished dead disappearing into darkness who knows, for all his anger he might still have spoken or I to him. (Homer, Odyssey 11.563–5) Forethoughts It started with something personal, deeply personal. Argiris’ father had had a stroke. In the hospital he developed an infection. Argiris was informed that his father was near the end. Then, a half-hour before he passed, he was tested, as a matter of routine, for Covid. He tested positive. Because he died, not from but with Covid, his body couldn’t be touched, let alone properly buried. Contaminated, he was wrapped in layers of opaque heavy plastic. Then, when officials decided the time was right, they dressed in their white hazmat suits and dumped him. Distance was maintained. Dignity was murdered. Death always stops us dead in our tracks, so to speak, and forces us to think about time, about its merciless passage. No Greek play is more thematically preoccupied, from beginning to end, with time and its passage than Sophocles’ Ajax, and how one can, by choosing certain values by which to live and—necessity being a harsh master— to die, hold out against its corrupting rush. Such reflections might occur to any of us. When they begin to stir inside a director touched by loss and in search of a vehicle, a mask [End Page 103] which as Nietzsche said every profound mind needs, they just might, if all the alchemical elements can be made to fall into place, lead to a production. A deep unrest must find articulation as a powerful vision for this to happen. In this case, the premier theater company of Greece was moved enough by this vision to mount its production in the premier theater of Greece, at Epidauros. The best actors in Greece, similarly, could feel in their bones how to make this live as theater. Having exchanged some letters with the director about this play and having been impressed by how deeply he was thinking about it, I decided to make a pilgrimage to this ancient place, to see this play to which I also had a deep connection myself, having translated it, and to revisit this sacred space in a year, moreover, that marked a significant anniversary since my last visit, one that was part of a series of events in that long-ago time that changed my life. Walking the sacred way, climbing the antique marble steps, taking one’s seat in the perfect bowl of the god’s theater, surrounded by the even more ancient forest, watching the sky slowly darken as the buzz of cicadas make the air you breath vibrate, and then, from one second to the next, evening has fallen, actors appear, and a voice clear as day breaks the silence of the night. Afterthoughts Impressions, thoughts, afterthoughts keep occurring to me, like those tremors and aftershocks one experiences after a seismic event, or the rumbling of thunder after the lightning has passed. But the main lines of my thinking, in reflection, are clear. I realize it perhaps amounts to an apostasy to characterize a Sophoclean production as Euripidean, but that is what this production was. In my view, the director’s instincts were right on target. A modern audience, even a Modern Greek audience, does not know who Ajax is. It is necessary to build the myth of Ajax for the audience, to set the stage, as it were, for its passing from the world. Sophocles lays claim to an heroic tradition; he stakes our souls on it; he possesses it so firmly he can degrade his heroes, as he ever does, so we experience what is godlike about them as they evince it in their upward [End Page 104] fight against the beasts and demons that drag them earthward. His great play ends with a reconciliation, the new man, Odysseus, paying tribute to Ajax and the ancient heroic world he embodies. Very likely produced at a time when Athens was questioning the...
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Feb 1, 2024
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