Howling Hecuba

Tragedy.

Over and over in recent classes, Prof. Sexson repeats one phrase, "the tragic sense of life". It seems simple enough....but I keep coming back to that phrase, that exact combination of words, in my mind. What does it mean to perceive life in a tragic sense? Or to wallow in that rich and horrifying, dark and foreboding side of the everyday? Perhaps this simple combination of words means to truly experience life, an act that in itself is hopelessly tragic and endlessly terrifying.

Shakespeare once said that we are actors on a stage. Well if we are, what is the theme of our days? Do we frolic in the throes of comedy? Or do we spurt onto the stage our tragedy and pain...like blood, so real and...undeniable. Perhaps we act the tragedy, a tragedy so hopelessly absurd in the immensity of its own pain that it transcends itself, skimming along that all too insubstantial line alongside comedy. Laughter and tears, we cycle through laughter and tears in our days on earth, in all the varied turns of fortune's wheel.

Hecuba laments in Euripides' Trojan Women, "Fortune is a whirling dervish that twists and turns and leaps now this way, now that. Success is not of man's own making." And, in the end, our Chorus reiterates, "Like smoke blown to heaven on the wings of the wind, our country, our conquered country, perishes. Its palaces are overrun by the fierce flames and the murderous spear." "The name of the land will pass into oblivion. [. . .] Hapless Troy is finished."

Tragedy.

Regardless of what we think of Hecuba, what we assign to her through the multifaceted veils of time and place, we should but witness her pain, the pain of an entire nation screaming in agony. Actors attempts to embody the complete desolation of hundreds of thousands of people somehow fail to meet the ultimate crescendo of the tragic sense of life. Always, they hold back, unable or unwilling to fully prostrate themselves before the vision. Too often we turn away from tragedy because we cannot take the pain. We must. Go back to it. Witness it; make it a small something of what you are so that those people never truly die. To live faithfully one must contain all of life, tragedy and comedy combined.

Hecuba watches, helpless, utterly helpless as her nation is destroyed. The blood runs in the streets and the haunting cries of the slaughtered reach even the palace walls. Her warriors are defeated and dishonored. The army has fallen. She sees the loss of two sons in a war of folly. Her husband is murdered, her children scattered. In this tiny play, we see this woman receive the news of a daughter's death, another's grim fate as concubine to her enemy....and the third.... her fate is unspeakable. This daughter, Andromache, loses a part of her self and her soul. Her child is torn from her arms to be smashed into all too unforgiving stone. She will marry another enemy. Hecuba buries Astyanax's frail body and with it, Troy itself. In the final scenes, the entire city is engulfed in flames, its children scattered to all the far-reaching corners of Greece.

Imagine for a moment....going on in that knowledge, with that sight seared into your very soul. Imagine living the rest of that life, as a slave when once you were great....a queen. We witness it. Through Euripides, we live it, and Hecuba herself lives in our living.

How can we go on? How does Hecuba....go on. Somehow we do. Call it laughter, call it hope....somehow, and without pretense, we go on, even when the very heart of darkness fills our cup of life with acidic nectar.

There is something within us. And that something....goes on.