"Man and woman face each other in immensities of inadmissible and, therefore, destructive need..."
Steiner says the moment from which all forms of drama are born is the moment when a man meets a woman. But from where does this conflict stem? In the above quotation from one of his passages, the word "need" struck me most of all. In class the other day, we spoke of the origin myth in which men and women were once bound to one another but were then separated, creating the genders. I did a little research to find more on this topic, but with what little time I had, I couldn't find what I was looking for. All google searches pulled up unrelated articles about Paganism and worship of the mother (earth). Needless to say, that was pretty much a completely failed endeavor. However, that didn't stop me from thinking more in depth about what we discussed in class.
Keeping this concept in mind, I read some of Steiner's Antigones. By and by, I stumbled on this line (above) about such an "inadmissible" and "destructive need". And that's the root of it. Steiner goes on to speak of language and other interactions, but I think it's simpler than that. Despite any differences in social interaction, despite any fundamentally different perspectives inherent to each gender, perhaps the root of all the drama is this "need", our need to be close to another from whom we are inexplicably separated. We feel a kinship, an irresistible pull to the other, yet we have no means of defining it mainly because we are so tied to our own restrictions....the pleasantries of social interaction. And so, together we breed the white elephant in the room as it were.
Steiner characterizes these encounters on page 235 as "the oneness of love and hatred, of the need for union between man and woman and of the compulsions toward mutual destruction in woven in that need". Why does this meeting mean destruction? What is the nature of our interaction that drives us to our end? In the Homeric Hymn of Demeter, Persephone's life on earth ends with the opening up of a great chasm underneath her feet. She will never be the same after her abduction by a force greater than herself. The lord of the underworld doesn't simply grab her and run. The very ground opens up and swallows her completely. Destruction runs rampant in the tales of Greek mythology. Almost every interaction between man and woman (mortal or godlike), ends in tragedy or has some form of suffering and conflict inherent in that meeting. Do we really spell our own doom? Or is it societal restrictions on these interactions, in a word, the fear of feeling something beyond our means of control that cripples us?
From infancy we are taught to be separate from one another, yet at the same time, we are told that isolation is wrong. We spend the entirety of our lives trying to reconcile these opposing concepts. It starts innocently enough, with pink ballerina blankets and blue football jerseys. At first we don't really care; when we are really little, we don't see gender in terms of separation. Then, somewhere in the middle, we reach the stage where "girls have cooties" and "boys are gross". Sadly, we never really leave that behind. Even when the need to be together is unbearable, we never fully allow ourselves to become the same, to feel a certain oneness with another, see a bit of ourselves in someone else. We frantically search for differences. "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus". We adopt phrases like "men!" (spoken with disdain and frustration) and "chicks..." (spoken with an edge of the completely foreign and incomprehensible). Why?
If, as the Ancients believed, we were cut from the same being, if we are indeed two incomplete pieces of a perfect whole....why do we insist on destroying our counterparts, while, simultaneously perfecting our own self-destruction through inexcusable criticism and incomprehensible cruelty? Are we really that afraid to be whole?
Steiner says the moment from which all forms of drama are born is the moment when a man meets a woman. But from where does this conflict stem? In the above quotation from one of his passages, the word "need" struck me most of all. In class the other day, we spoke of the origin myth in which men and women were once bound to one another but were then separated, creating the genders. I did a little research to find more on this topic, but with what little time I had, I couldn't find what I was looking for. All google searches pulled up unrelated articles about Paganism and worship of the mother (earth). Needless to say, that was pretty much a completely failed endeavor. However, that didn't stop me from thinking more in depth about what we discussed in class.
Keeping this concept in mind, I read some of Steiner's Antigones. By and by, I stumbled on this line (above) about such an "inadmissible" and "destructive need". And that's the root of it. Steiner goes on to speak of language and other interactions, but I think it's simpler than that. Despite any differences in social interaction, despite any fundamentally different perspectives inherent to each gender, perhaps the root of all the drama is this "need", our need to be close to another from whom we are inexplicably separated. We feel a kinship, an irresistible pull to the other, yet we have no means of defining it mainly because we are so tied to our own restrictions....the pleasantries of social interaction. And so, together we breed the white elephant in the room as it were.
Steiner characterizes these encounters on page 235 as "the oneness of love and hatred, of the need for union between man and woman and of the compulsions toward mutual destruction in woven in that need". Why does this meeting mean destruction? What is the nature of our interaction that drives us to our end? In the Homeric Hymn of Demeter, Persephone's life on earth ends with the opening up of a great chasm underneath her feet. She will never be the same after her abduction by a force greater than herself. The lord of the underworld doesn't simply grab her and run. The very ground opens up and swallows her completely. Destruction runs rampant in the tales of Greek mythology. Almost every interaction between man and woman (mortal or godlike), ends in tragedy or has some form of suffering and conflict inherent in that meeting. Do we really spell our own doom? Or is it societal restrictions on these interactions, in a word, the fear of feeling something beyond our means of control that cripples us?
From infancy we are taught to be separate from one another, yet at the same time, we are told that isolation is wrong. We spend the entirety of our lives trying to reconcile these opposing concepts. It starts innocently enough, with pink ballerina blankets and blue football jerseys. At first we don't really care; when we are really little, we don't see gender in terms of separation. Then, somewhere in the middle, we reach the stage where "girls have cooties" and "boys are gross". Sadly, we never really leave that behind. Even when the need to be together is unbearable, we never fully allow ourselves to become the same, to feel a certain oneness with another, see a bit of ourselves in someone else. We frantically search for differences. "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus". We adopt phrases like "men!" (spoken with disdain and frustration) and "chicks..." (spoken with an edge of the completely foreign and incomprehensible). Why?
If, as the Ancients believed, we were cut from the same being, if we are indeed two incomplete pieces of a perfect whole....why do we insist on destroying our counterparts, while, simultaneously perfecting our own self-destruction through inexcusable criticism and incomprehensible cruelty? Are we really that afraid to be whole?
