Oedipus
October 26th, 2009 at 00:00A king in a land without frontiers.
A postmodern solver of riddles, seduced
by a masculine conceit.
Diffèrance.
I’m allergic to roots, eradication is my profession.
If life means inscription and reduplication;
if Aristotle is suspect and meaning postponed,
who are my parents?
Deconstruction is my pleasure, my shield, my disguise. A stranger to joy, I have an answer to every question, a question to every answer.
Everything is text, everything is under control. With the unconscious in exile, Heidegger never seemed so much fun. Who cares that he was a Nazi?
Sophocles is passé. And so is Freud. With the word at my disposal, I’m your blind king, cracking nutshells. I am your prophet. I see what I want to see. The desolation of your town: small minds, big cars; short people, fat lives, real estate agents.
Why did you ask me to live among you if you won’t invite me to your home, your dinner table? Alone, eating my words, I’m feasting on contempt, disdain, repugnance, scorn — recipes from the cookbook of my secret wound. I shall finish you off. Wash you down with the rash power of my anger. Every time I arrive at a crossroads, I force you to yield.
Such unremitting rage…, so dire a feud.
Let me start over, will you?
I’m a female Oedipus locked in myself. “’Tis thus the mind would fain, find peace, self-prisoned from a world of pain.” Say it again. “There is joy in isolated thought sealed off from a world of sorrow.” In the hospital of my study no one shall uncover me against my will. What I do to myself brings me most pain. For my disease infects no other but me.
So fine to look at, so corrupt inside.
What splendour rotted by the worm within.
What keeps me from revealing the details of my birth, my childhood?
This dreadful mark of shame! No family photographs to prove a caring glance, a loving memory. Father, can’t you see I’m burning? Mother, what can I love?
Who will nurse me if not myself?
Who will punish me if not myself?
Who will cast myself out if not myself?
Quick. As quickly as I can.
“Oh, pain; pain and woe! Whither? Whither?”
I’m not going to be revered for my self-pity, my self-inflicted suffering, my vile rage.
He is a blind hero. I am an angry woman.
The sphinx is dead. Did I kill her? And why?
Posted: October 26th, 2009
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