on the cutting room floor: ep 1

This is episode one of on the cutting room floor, my idea for a post-mortem / debrief / expansion / accompaniment to TXF posts. I’m a chronic over-writer, and have been all my life.¹ Thankfully I’m not aiming for concision here, or for rigor, so I’ve kept all my scraps and I’m serving them up now, hot and (maybe not all the way) ready. 

So you can read while listening to the accompanying playlist, I’m putting these songs at the top: 

I: How I Met Antigone

Why am I obsessed with writing about death, and specifically death in myth? I don’t think I will ever be able to adequately explain that! But I can at least explain where my love for Antigone comes from — with some backstory.

Like many people my age, I was first introduced to Greek and Roman myths through the Percy Jackson books. Then, in sixth grade, I read about Theseus and the Minotaur to go along with an introduction to the Greek pantheon in world history. I built on that (somewhat erroneous) classics base by reading The Iliad and giving The Odyssey the ol’ college high school try (meaning I did not finish it). I carried on nonetheless, reading The Secret History and The Song of Achilles. Then I found Anne Carson, and then I found Euripides because of her translation (Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides), and then I was done for.²

When I was applying for colleges, I wrote a supplemental essay using a quote from Grief Lessons — one which I still know by heart.³ It’s from the introduction (Carson’s introductions are consistently magnificent in their own right), and asks, “Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.” 

Given this foundation, it should be unsurprising that when I was a freshman in college I took a course specifically on the myths of Oedipus. It was a small seminar designated for freshman only, and application was through a lottery system, requiring us to rank our preferences across all the freshman seminars. I joined it in the second week. I remember feeling nervous for it, worried that everyone else would know more than I did, that they had stacks of Homer, and Ovid, Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus in their dorm rooms, read cover to cover and collected with purpose rather than gathered piecemeal from library deaccessions or yard sales.

It all worked out fine, despite my anxieties. So fine, in fact, that I don’t really remember the class itself, beside a few throwaway moments with my classmates and what can be parsed from emails to the professor and the papers I wrote for her. With this information, it might now seem obvious that the closing section of the ants go marching three by three contains ideas from the essay I wrote on Antigone for this course. That essay was about liminality and compulsive ritual action in myth, and I included ‘thirsty dust’ in both the title and my analysis. It’s only three pages. I actually think it’s well written, in part because it makes a few interesting statements but mostly because I can tell that I cared about it. 

This class was the singular time in my college career that I engaged with classics in a formal setting but I’m still riding the aftershocks of the impact it had on me; once Antigone was in my head, she wouldn’t get out. You can find moments of it in the archive posts — mentions of Oedipus or Antigone, of pollution and burial, of characters collapsing or multiplying — long after the class was over. 

Since I failed (intentionally) to explain the myth of Antigone in the main post, I’ll give a brief recap of Sophocles’ three Theban plays centered on the lives and fates of Oedipus and his family. I will do this in their narrative order as opposed to chronologically by date of creation, and with the necessary disclaimer that there are, of course, multiple versions of each story. (If you’re already familiar with the plays, you can click here or simply skip to the bolded text below.)

In the first play — Oedipus Rex — an oracle reveals to the king of Thebes, Laius, that he will one day have a son who will kill him. When his wife, Jocasta, later gives birth to a son, Laius abandons the baby in the mountains to try and escape his fate. However, a shepherd finds the baby and brings him to Corinth where he is adopted by the King, Polybus. This son is the ill-fated titular Oedipus.

As a young man, Oedipus visits Delphi and is told by an oracle that he is fated to kill his father and marry his mother. Believing that Polybus and Merope are his birth parents, he vows to never return to Corinth; like Laius, he tries to escape his fate⁴ through avoidance. On the road, Oedipus encounters Laius but does not know who he is. They argue, and Oedipus kills him. He continues on toward (the now kingless) Thebes and finds the city under the control of a sphinx which asks a riddle to all who pass it and destroys those who cannot answer. When Oedipus successfully solves the sphinx’s riddle, the sphinx kills herself and as a reward for their freedom, Thebes gives Oedipus the queen’s hand in marriage. And so Oedipus finds himself having killed his father and married his mother, completely unaware.

Oedipus and Jocasta have four children together: two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, and two daughters, Antigone and Ismene. Later, when Oedipus learns the truth, he blinds himself in a fit of despair and begs for exile. Jocasta hangs herself. Accompanied by his two daughters (and half-sisters), Oedipus leaves his kingdom.

The next part of the story, Oedipus at Colonus, tells what happens during his self-imposed exile. After traveling away from Thebes, Oedipus and Antigone end up in Colonus, a village near Athens, and accidentally trespass on a grove sacred to the Erinyes — the Furies. Villagers find Oedipus sitting in the sacred grove and persuade him to leave it. When they learn his identity, however, they wish to expel him from their village altogether, fearing his presence will bring a curse upon them all. However, Oedipus argues against his moral responsibility as he was not aware of the nature of the crimes he was unwittingly committing when he killed Laius and married Jocasta. He later meets with Theseus, king of Athens, who sympathizes with him. As a result, Oedipus pledges his burial site to Athens — an oracle has foretold that the location of his burial will be able to sway the outcome of conflicts. 

Indeed, Ismene brings news from Thebes that Eteocles has taken over control of the city from his brother, Polynices, and that war is brewing between the two. Having also heard the oracle, Creon has made plans to bury Oedipus at the border of Thebes so that the power offered by his grave will not be offered to any other land. Both Creon and Polynices arrive in Colonus and attempt to speak with Oedipus but he forsakes them both, recognizing duplicity in the former and abandonment in the latter. He curses Polynices and Eteocles to die by the other’s hand. 

The play ends with Oedipus’s death, which Theseus alone witnesses in a secret location. Although his daughters wish to visit his tomb, Theseus refuses because to share the location would to forfeit his pledge and therefore the protections afforded by the grave. 

The third part of the story tells what happens when the children return to Thebes. As foretold by their father, Polynices and Eteocles kill each other in battle for control of the city. Creon, their uncle, becomes king. By his order, Eteocles is buried as a hero and Polynices’s body left to rot as that of a traitor. Loyal Antigone defies the law of Creon in order to perform the proper burial rites for her brother, and as punishment Creon buries her alive in a tomb. The blind prophet, Teiresias, tells Creon he has erred in putting the living underground and keeping the dead above and that Thebes will suffer as a result. Although Creon comes to believe him, he arrives too late to free Antigone, who has committed suicide. Haimon, Creon’s son who was betrothed to Antigone also commits suicide, as does Eurydice, Creon’s wife, when she hears about the death of her son. 

When the earth is wrongfully denied the body of her brother and offered Antigone instead, the result is more death. If only that dust had stuck, if only the earth could have taken Polynices’s mangled body — but it could not be so. As is her role — as is her name, girl “against birth,” girl “instead of being born” — Antigone must navigate the liminal threshold of life and death through ritual action, covering her brother’s corpse with a scattering of dust to emulate proper burial and pouring the necessary three libations.⁵

Dutiful Antigone is a girl made guilty by virtue of her existence. She is, in many ways, doomed to die from the very start — she is born with a hole inside her that can never be filled, only swallowed or deepened until the hole becomes the whole of Antigone. One simple fact (he was my brother)⁶ is enough to send Antigone to the grave because, really, she’s already got both feet in.⁷ Antigone recognizes this herself in her opening line (and what I assume doubles as a stage indicator) in Carson’s Antigo Nick: “we begin in the dark / and birth is the death of us.” 

While writing the ants go marching three by three I was, of course, thinking about Antigone. And as I thought of Antigone, dust started showing up everywhere. I put a tiny box around it every time I came across it in other translations of Antigone, then, other books. I found it in crossword answers and poems and song lyrics. Then I started thinking about it so much it made me sneeze, for days on end, and I remembered that the dust found in homes is mainly made up of human skin, although I can’t remember where I first heard that. Ewwww, I remember saying as a kid, running my finger over the edge of a bookshelf and seeing it come back grey, That’s your DNA!

In Brecht’s adaptation, Antigone and Ismene stand outside of Creon’s palace at daybreak and Antigone collects dust in an iron pot as they talk.⁸ I wonder — is there any dust from inside the palace clinging to it? Is it the dust of her and Ismene, of Haimon, of Creon? Is this how, precisely, she can fulfill her wish to lay beside her brother, thigh to thigh, without ever having to be buried?⁹

These are questions I think I will probably carry with me for the rest of my life — because I must admit, I am not me without Antigone.

II: Sister Sister

Something which I initially tried to squeeze into a footnote in the main post before deciding it was too long even for me, is a brief selection of lines between Ismene and Antigone that show their relationship. I myself am brotherful but sisterless, so while I am better placed to understand Antigone’s grief for and devotion to Polynices, I find the relationship between the two foil-sisters fascinating. 

First, Antigo Nick:

and then, on the very next page:

Compare this to Brecht’s two sisters:

Then, also, let’s add Anouilh’s sisters:

III: In Poems¹⁰

Since 19 March 2021 I have had a PDF copy of T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land saved to my desktop. I couldn’t find a neat way to fit it into the main post, but I would be remiss not to mention it at all. The Waste Land is haunted by many of the same things I was working through in the ants go marching three by three. The second stanza even has a great line about dust:

Isn’t this precisely what Antigone does — what makes the guard so terrified to witness her brother’s burial — show him fear in a handful of dust? Even the setting is reminiscent: Thebes is a city bathed in the red dusk of war, and while some things, like Eteocles, are given rest, others — and other remains — remain unsettled from the siege.

More explicitly, Antigone and The Waste Land are linked by a character held in common: the blind, trans- or cross-gendered, Theban prophet of Apollo, Teiresias. In Antigone, it is Teiresias who finally spurs Creon into action, sparking the closing arc for each of the characters as they hurtle toward death (Antigone, Haimon, Eurydice), or a long and final grief (Creon). In The Waste Land, Teiresias serves as the narrator of a section of the poem about an unsatisfying sexual interaction between a typist and a ‘young man carbuncular.’ Eliot locates Teiresias at the intersection of several dualities: “I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, / Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see / At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives / Homeward…” And at the end of the stanza, as a parenthetical: “And I Tiresias have foresuffered all / Enacted on this same divan or bed; / I who have sat by Thebes below the wall / And walked among the lowest of the dead.”

Moving away from Antigone briefly, The Waste Land is an interesting companion to thinking of the city and the forms it takes — in Eliot’s poem, it is the “unreal city,” one fragmented by war and death, yet in which life still persists.¹¹ I hope to write more (at length) about cities in literature in the future.

Speaking of dust in poems, Frank Bidart’s “Guilty of Dust” is one of my favorites. I can also find Antigone in its lines, clear as if she was always there. 

The poem opens “up or down from the infinite C E N T E R / B R I M M I N G at the winking rim of time,” which I find a great descriptor for the liminal space Antigone occupies in her service to Polynices, as a girl both alive and dead, both surviving her brother and dying with him. 

“the voice in my head said,” Bidart continues, “LOVE IS THE DISTANCE BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE / WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE.” Antigone is dragged into liminality by her love for her brother — the distance between them is the distance of reality. Antigone loves her family, and understands her duty to them. The only way to live in accord with this love and duty is to die; only in death can her family be reunited in a way free from impurity.¹²

In the next stanza, Bidart writes, “then my PARENTS my FRIENDS the drained / SPECTRES once filled with my baffled infatuations / love and guilt and fury and / sweetness for whom / nail spirit yearning to the earth.” I take a literal reading of this line and borrow it to describe Antigone’s fate — although her bridal chamber is a tomb at the order of Creon, the deeper/richer/truer reason she is trapped to the earth and buried while still alive is because of her love of her brother and of her family. 

“then the voice in my head said,” Bidart closes the poem, “WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE / OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS REVOLT AGAINST IT / WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE.” I think this one is pretty clear. What Antigone loves is her fate. She becomes nothing, hollowed out of all her individuality, to become a vessel for Polynices’s death. Antigone dies without fear of disgrace in order to give her family just a little. 

IV: In Songs

Typhoon recently rereleased their sophomore album, White Lighter, for its tenth anniversary. There’s a new song at the close of the anniversary edition and it so perfectly fits the broad theme of the ants go marching three by three that I would (jokingly) suggest the reason it’s taken me a year to finish it is because I was waiting to be able to share this song as part of the piece. White Lighter is an album that tangles with questions of mortality, and this is true in the new song, “Reed Rd,” as well. Typhoon makes this clear in the opening lines: “You were born in a hospital bed / You will return to the hospital bed, my friend / Life's a beast that shits and eats from the same end.”¹³

I don’t think I should paste in the entirety of the lyrics, so I’ll suggest listening to the song — better yet, go listen to the whole album. It describes birth, homecoming, and death better than I ever will.

IV: Reading List Roundup / Even More Materials…

1. The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. (link) + a companion Poetry Foundation poem guide. (link)

2. “Guilty of Dust” by Frank Bidart. (link)

3. Jean Anouilh’s adaptation of Antigone; I specifically have read the English translation by Lewis Galntière.

4. La Machine Infernale (The Infernal Machine), a play by Jean Cocteau; I specifically have read the English translation by Albert Bermel.

5. The Darker Face of the Earth, a verse play by Rita Dove. 

6. The Island, a play written by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona.

7. On Substack: “on tragedy: After Sophocles & Anne Carson” by Dante Émile. (link)

8. “Postmemory,” a poem by Jenny Xie. (link)

9. “Tablet IV,” a poem by Dunya Mikhail. (link)

10. “The Boy,” a poem by Marie Howe. (link)

11. This 2022 conversation between Björk and Ocean Vuong on death, music, and motherhood. (link)

12. This essay on the Atreus line, relevant as it diverges from the Oedipus line. (link) 

13. “Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact [that] it rains.” This quote is sometimes attributed to radio broadcaster Paul Harvey during a Future Farmers of America convention in 1978, although I think it is better known from a well-circulated image of the quote printed on a Farm Equipment Association of Minnesota and South Dakota sign. 

14. And finally, those three gulls I mentioned: 

1 Starting in elementary school through to high school, my papers averaged an additional five pages over the requested length. I wish this were exaggeration, but I remember being in fifth grade and writing twelve page book reports. Why none of my teachers ever put a stop to it, I can’t say. And while I at least learned to respect page limits in college, I remember writing multiple papers where my notes document was three times as long as the actual paper; clearly concision is not my strong point.

2 As a general comment, I believe Anne Carson is some kind of literary genius, and while fifty percent of her prose is (still) over my head, it only makes me love her work more. 

3 I listed my favorite books on my college application as: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides, The Catcher in the Rye, The Iliad, The Secret History, The Silmarillion. NERD! TRY HARD! 

4 In typing this, I accidentally wrote ‘father’ instead of ‘fate.’ The implications of that Freudian slip… just for that, I’ll toss in this poem by Dick Laurie, titled “Forgiving Our Fathers.” (link)

5 For an in depth (and well researched) explanation of how Antigone’s act of defiance is in opposition to not just Creon’s edict but standard ancient Greek burial practices, see Kerri J. Hame’s 2008 article, “Female Control of Funeral Rites in Greek Tragedy: Klytaimestra, Medea, and Antigone” (link).

6 From Jean Anouilh’s adaptation of Antigone:

7 It’s no wonder that she doesn’t live long enough to be married to Haimon — she’s already spoken for! As in Jean Anouilh’s adaptation of Antigone, “[Haimon] didn’t know, when he asked her, that the earth wasn’t meant to hold a husband of Antigone, and that this princely distinction was to earn him no more than the right to die sooner than he might otherwise have done.” 

8 A line that I like from this section of Brecht’s play is when Ismene says of her sister, “You with the dust in your collecting hand, you seem / To dye your words with red.” 

9 Carson’s Antigo Nick:

10 Disclaimer: I’m NOT suggesting that Antigone is really in these two poems. Rather, I’m saying that when you look at the world through dust colored glasses, you will start to find her everywhere.

11 You can take a virtual walking tour of key sites from The Waste Land! (link) 

12 I’m not sold on using ‘impurity’ here, but I don’t want to say sin because sin has too strong of Christian associations for me. What I mean is that although the Greek gods are an incestuous bunch, the Oedipal trilogy is dedicated to the wrongness of incest among mortals, that a house built on a rotten foundation is doomed to fall. And that, like Oedipus finds a way to rid himself of his contamination in Oedipus at Colonus by accepting death, the Oedipus line as a whole is not made ‘clean’ (decontaminated) until they are reunited in the underworld. (I’ve spent an excessive amount of time trying to find one specific quote about a rotted foundation used as metaphor for — I think — the Oedipus myths, but to no avail. If anyone knows the quote I’m talking about, I’d be so grateful — especially since it means Google will stop recommending me articles about the trials and tribulations of home inspection, and when to walk away from a house.) 

addition 27 January 2024: I FOUND IT! I was wrong. It was not about Oedipus at all, but a line from Hercules himself in Tom Sleigh’s translation of Euripides’ Herakles: “Hear me out. What I have to say will show up / Your advice. My life has been a botch, / First to last: / I take after my father— / Who killed my mother’s father — and disregarding / Such a blood-curse, married Alkmene who gave birth … / To me. / When the foundation’s laid so badly / That the whole house tilts, the sons / Inherit … grief.”

13 This is a personal footnote, one that I’m making to pressure myself into a future post about the ouroboros because now that it’s been mentioned once I’ll have to close the loop (eventually).