Tagged — Jamie Lyons
The thing about Aeschylus, the Father of Tragedy for fucks sake, is he understood that civilization is just a thin membrane stretched over an abyss of blood and screaming, and he had the balls to rip that membrane open and shove our faces into it. This wasn't some ivory tower poet gently suggesting that maybe humans had flaws. This was a guy who'd stood in the phalanx at Marathon, felt the spear go through the guy next to him, and then came home and wrote plays about the gods themselves being petty, vindictive bastards who'd crush you for sport.
The Oresteia doesn't give you catharsis. It beats you over the head with the fundamental impossibility of justice. Agamemnon murders his daughter for favorable winds.
Clytemnestra axes her husband in a bathtub. Orestes kills his mother because Apollo told him to. And then the Furies, these ancient nightmare creatures, get gentrified into "the Kindly Ones" through what amounts to a jury trial and a real estate deal. It's absurd. It's brilliant. It's Aeschylus looking at the foundational myths of Greek culture and saying: your civilization is built on matricide and the gods are making it up as they go along.
Seven hundred years before anyone was screaming into microphones in basement clubs, here was a guy taking the sacred stories everyone revered and exposing the rot underneath. Prometheus Bound? That's not heroism. That's raw defiance nailed to a rock, screaming that the new boss is the same as the old boss, just with better PR. Zeus is a tyrant, power is arbitrary, and the only authentic response is to keep talking even when they send an eagle to eat your liver daily.
What gets me is how Aeschylus never flinches. No redemption arc for Agamemnon. No neat resolution that makes the audience feel better about themselves. Just the acknowledgment that we're caught between forces we can't control: fate, family, the churning machinery of vengeance. And the best we can hope for is to face it without lying to ourselves about what we are.
He gave us tragedy not as entertainment but as a necessary violence, a controlled burn to prevent worse fires. And he did it in language that could peel paint off walls. That's the real savage beauty of it: Aeschylus made confronting the worst truths about human existence feel like the only thing worth doing.
Engineering 2018
The Garden Isle. Land of chickens running wild through parking lots, where the roosters crow at three a.m. like they’re announcing the apocalypse, and the trade winds smell of plumeria and possibility. The Mysians. Three lines remain. “Hail, Caïcus and ye streams of Mysia!” That’s the opening. The hook. The ancient Greek equivalent of “Once […]
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Speculation 2017
Philoctetes, that poor bastard marooned on Lemnos with nothing but his festering wound and his famous bow, becomes this perfect metaphor for anyone who’s ever been discarded by the machinery. The Aeschylus fragment’s almost gone, just scraps really, which makes it even more tragic because we’re left rehearsing ghosts under some absurd totem pole like […]
ReadEngineering 2015
I’m going to tell you about something that happened on a Saturday afternoon in October, and you’re going to think it’s either the most pretentious thing you’ve ever heard or you’re going to get it immediately. There’s no middle ground here. That’s just how it is. 2:45 p.m., October 3rd, 2015. The hold of the […]
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Engineering 2015
Here’s the thing about standing in the Pacific at dawn, reciting words that haven’t been heard in their original context for two-and-a-half goddamn millennia: you’re probably insane. Or maybe that’s the only sane response to a world that’s forgotten how to have actual experiences that aren’t mediated through a screen or commodified into bite-sized chunks […]
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