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Martin, Bobby, and Aeschylus
By: Dr. Bradley Olson
That awful summer 40 years ago, that summer which witnessed or gave birth to–-I don’t know which–-a summer of tremendous, violent convulsions and transformations around the world was made more terrible for me by the sudden, unexpected death of my grandfather. I was a child, awash in death that summer--the deaths of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and my grandfather--death that seemed completely senseless and unsettling. For the first time, life seemed unpredictable and threatening to me. Things happened, as a result, that I never would have dreamed of. Receiving word of these three deaths, I saw my father weep for the first three times in my life, and, after the first of these deaths, I heard remarkable words that have unceasingly rung in my ears for 40 years.
When Robert Kennedy broke the news of King’s assassination in Memphis to a largely African American audience in Indianapolis, he spoke in an unprepared, unrehearsed, and astonishingly unguarded, heart-felt and soulful manner:
“…we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times.
"My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: 'Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'…. Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” (Italics are mine. To read the text of, or listen to this speech, go to http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/rfk.htm. Video of RFK delivering this speech may be found on YouTube.com)
Kennedy spoke with such deep sadness and compassion. And wisdom. Phenomenal wisdom for one so young. Wisdom born of the pain falling, as Aeschylus said, drop-by-drop upon his own heart. I believe that the assassination of his brother, four and a half years earlier, profoundly altered his world-view, and equally transformed his thoughts about purpose, meaning, and existence. He seems to have come around to viewing others and the world genuinely through the eyes of love, and this was never more evident than on this painful April night. To paraphrase the poet-scholar Anne Carson:
He talks to himself where he has to
where the soul oh
where the
soul with its soft
edges
cuts
into
the
sharp
body.
“We have to make an effort to understand…” but how do we comprehend the incomprehensible? How do we understand the soft edges of the soul cutting into the sharp body? How do we understand the leave-takings and the loss enforced upon us by Death? How are we able to calculate, how are we able to perform the emotional math and arrive at the sum total of that which we have lost and that which we have gained?
Thomas Hardy said, “if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.” In Hardy’s formulation is a brilliant gem of conceptualization and truth. The way to the Better, the way to healing, the way to redemption is to no longer allow oneself to avert one’s gaze. It is the willingness to bear witness that “tames the savageness of man and makes gentle the life of this world.” It is the eyes that are the doorways to the soul, or as the Troubadours of the Middle Ages used to sing, the eyes are the scouts for the heart. Wherever, and upon whatever, we train our gaze, that image enters the soul, and its penetration may be felt as wounding no matter the valence (relative goodness or badness) of the image. In fact, whenever we open our hearts, whenever we open to knowledge or understanding, we invite a wound. Why must this be so? Aeschylus teaches us “we must suffer, suffer our way into truth.” In this manner of suffering, we encounter the paradoxical relationship between pathos and mathos, suffering and its significance. In that relationship is life itself, pain becomes a stimulus and a gift and is not only the essence of human existence, but is the very stuff of human transcendence. We die into our lives, as some Sufis say. This is what, in psychoanalysis, I often refer to as the death of the ego.
All great tragedy, in the sense of literary genre, communicates this paradoxical intent of suffering: we are challenged and trapped, perhaps between or perhaps because of, our character and our fate. Take, for example, Oedipus, who upon learning that he has fulfilled the prophecy and indeed killed his father and married his mother, takes the brooch from Jocaste’s gown and gouges out his own eyes, says to one of his friends that indeed a god compounded his pains, “but the hand that struck my eyes was mine and mine alone.” The momentum of tragedy threatens to crush us as if it were some terrible engine of fate, yet it also summons up, if one only refuses to avert ones eyes, the human capacity for transcendence. C. G. Jung notes that it is only something that feels so overwhelming that it threatens to destroy us, which can make us conscious of, or put us in touch with our own wholeness.
Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, they were ambushed. The Greek word for ambush is lochos, an ambush that cries out for revenge, but in another usage, lochos means a bed of childbirth, too. This is the question we must ask ourselves: what is being born out of these tragic ashes? The only way such a birth is brought to term is by the willingness to not avert ones gaze, to pay attention, to bear and bear witness to the tragic in life. Even when the savagely violent and vengeful Furies are awakened by the terrible wounding of a moral code as they are in Aeschylus’ brilliant trilogy we know as the Oresteia, the force that transforms them is the compassionate gaze of Athena, the willingness of the goddess to bear compassionate witness to their plight transforms them into the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones. While they never stop being the Furies, the disparate parts of them are unified, and they are become whole. In this wholeness of being they also become the Semnai Theai, the Awesome Goddesses who sanctify the law, a new creation with essences of each of the former ways of being. The Oresteia moves from violence and split off consciousness into wholeness, justice, and compassion; it is a story of creation, a story of “taming the savageness of man and making gentle the life of this world.”
When we violently and blindly impose our will upon our world, those we love, even upon ourselves, we are unable to explore the creative potential that attends destruction; we are not able to journey into the soul of compassion and bear witness to our lives; we are not able, at some point, to go on, for violence and oppression, physical or emotional, eventually stops and then, what remains? Only love and a compassionate gaze can create something that endures, something that continually reinvents itself. Only with love and compassion can one undertake the exploration, the ensoulment if you will, of the world.
The world opens itself to love and compassion, and while the opening may still be a wounding, it is a bittersweet wound, an opening, a chance for the soul, and is to be submitted to gracefully in the knowledge that, as T. S. Eliot writes, “In the end is my beginning.”
Dr. Bradley Olson is a Jungian psychologist in private practice and co-owner of Mountain Waves Healing Arts in Flagstaff, Arizona. He is also a frequent lecturer and writer whose topics intersect with mythology, psychology, spirituality, and culture. To contact him about this article, e-mail Dr. Olson at mythopoesisme@aol.com or visit mwhealingarts.com.
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