Turpentine Mouthwash

1. Getting out of her way wasn't hard, but it was difficult. What I mean is that she lived like a hurricane, big eyes and big hair, ready to smile that witch smile or cut you down. What I mean is that you saw her coming a mile away, a thousand miles away, you heard her name whispered in warning, carved in the fucking stones saying 'do not go there.' But all those warnings did little to convince me. When she came skipping down the street she looked like a girl, and nothing more. 2. So I got sucked in. It happens to the best of us, and the best of us prostrate ourselves to whatever she needed. The midnight screaming fights, those were for the best. The first knife she pulled, the one she swore up and down killed her mother and father and then pointed at my heart, that was a catharsis long needed. I lied to myself with born-again ferocity, ignored the strange brown stains under her fingernails and the watery glimmer in her eyes. Then she showed me the tattoos. 3. The ...

Oedipus Rex tears his eyes from their sockets, self inflicted punishment for his inability to see clearly. In Antigone, the heroine (Oedipus's exiled daughter, for those fans of continuity) is surrounded by the suicides of her friends and family. In Sophocles version, these horrors are piled on with the aloof air of a divine insurgency. When Seneca the Younger remade the plays (because there is nothing new in show business) he ramped the violence and occultism up, turning tales of hubris into tales of revenge. It's grim stuff. The tension builds, the stakes raise, and the hero, despite his best intentions and honorable actions, finds every avenue of action closed to him. By the end of the play the audience is begging for some release and all too wise to the hero's doom. They want only a cessation of the tension, and exhale only as Oedipus laments his blindness, or when the villainous Clytaemenstra stands over the butchered bodies of brave Agamemnon and unheard C...