Sophocles filtered through Anthony Burgess’s manufactured tongue, performed in a converted military chapel on the San Francisco waterfront. May 2017. A staged reading, actors clutching scripts like life rafts while pretending they’re drowning in ancient Greek despair.
And you know what? There’s something almost obscene about the whole setup. Not obscene like shocking, obscene like accidentally true.
Oedipus wakes up thinking he’s the hero. The hero. Beat the monster. Saved the city. Got the girl. Crowd goes wild. Roll credits. Except no. Except slowly, with the methodical precision of a cancer spreading through tissue that doesn’t yet know it’s dying, he discovers he’s been fucking his mother and the prophecy he ran from caught him anyway because it was him. The whole time. He was the thing he was running from all along. The monster in the story was him. The monster in the story was always going to be him.
And Anthony Burgess. Anthony Burgess. That clockwork orange brained madman. Invents a language for it. A whole language. Translation wasn’t going to do it, see, translation wasn’t even close, translation is what you do when the thing can still be said in another tongue, and this thing couldn’t. He needed something worse. He needed syllables that predate meaning, syllables that catch in your throat on the way up, syllables you choke on. He understood, the way Burgess always understood, that sometimes the horror can’t be captured in English or Greek or any language that’s already been used to lie. It needs its own sonic architecture of doom.
Fort Mason Chapel, though. Oh, Fort Mason Chapel. That’s the real perverse poetry. A military chapel. A military chapel, where soldiers once prayed to come home whole, where God was supposed to be on our side because we had the bigger guns and the better cause and the louder hymns. And into that space, that consecrated space, that space where the whole infrastructure of righteousness lives, you drag Oedipus. Walking proof. Walking proof that the universe does not give a fuck about your prayers, does not give a fuck about your righteousness, does not give a fuck about which side God was supposed to be on. The gods play with loaded dice. They always did. They always will.
A new cancer appears and he is forced to save his people by rooting out the cause. That’s the thing. That’s the whole thing. That’s the engine.
Because Oedipus is the detective and the criminal. The surgeon and the tumor. The cop and the perp and the witness and the body. You cannot, cannot, root out the cause without destroying yourself, because you are the cause, you were the cause from the jump, you were the cause before you even knew there was a case to solve.
The tragedy isn’t that bad things happen. Bad things happen all the time. The tragedy is that you’re complicit in your own destruction and you don’t know it. You don’t know it until it’s too late. And by the time you know, the knowing is the destruction.
And we’re going to do all this. In a military chapel. In invented language. As a staged reading. For an arts festival.
Because free will is just the name we give to choreography we can’t see.
See you there.