Balance Freyja Jaguar - Tragedy and Thuggishness

This is a thought that hit me yesterday while I was walking past Capital Repertory on North Pearl. The show that's there now, The Crucible by Arthur Miller, isn't one of my favorites I must say. The company did an admirable job of it, though I also recognize that the part of Abigail Williams isn't all that well written. And she's the one who everyone's afraid of. I guess it doesn't have to be well-written--it sort of underscores the vacuity of our civilized culture that it isn't, though I sincerely doubt that was Mr. Miller's intention. In fact, I was thinking about his essay about how "modern" man can have tragic figures. In an odd way I agree with him, but that's because I was thinking of the civilized notion of the "noble."

Basically, if Shakespeare was alive today, he'd have to be writing his tragedies and history plays about folks like Bush, Cheney, the Gottis, the Russian Mafia, the yakuza, etc. Really, today's ultimate "tragedian" is John Woo, of Hong Kong violent film fame. Because the whole civilized notion of "nobility" is really a palimpsesting of all the blood and gore that went into the creation of say, the Plantagenets and the Tudors, the French and Castilian monarchies, etc.

In fact, if we were to get to a more fundamental notion of the "noble" that bypassed civilization, then the ultimate "tragic hero"--that figure who's perfection itself with a tragic flaw--would have to be your average Indian or indigenous tribe member, the very like of which we all emerged from centuries ago. The generic Indian's tragic flaw would be guilelessness and a lack of street sense, and then getting swept up/aside in the maelstrom cancer of civilized progression. The more violent Indian/indigenous would have found his role in the civilized realm fairly quickly, although to be fair most were probably used as soldier fodder for wars waged at a grand scale. All of us are destined to be et up by the civilization maw over time, unless we somehow find our way out of the quicksand.

First thing we do though is stop digging, stop our flailing about and get calm. Perhaps we'd then be able to float over to the shore rather than be pulled under by the muddy sucking of the quicksand.