Oedipus: Master of his fate

Greek tragedy, universally and almost by definition, centered around the disquieted lives of the wealthy and nobly engendered. When one considers the works of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides all of the protagonists (and antagonists) are either in the direct descent of royal lineage or closely approximating some familial relation to such status. This was a central concern for Arthur Miller when he was penning Death of a Salesman: that tragedy, like all other occurrences influencing the human condition, extends its province to the affairs of conventional men and women. In Luis Alfaro’s Oedius El Rey, he “millerizes” – yes I am engaging in that pastime of making a verb of a proper noun - Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and reweaves the panorama of this ancient drama, retaining and distilling its essence; casting it with renewed vigor in the midst of Latino culture and thereby making it a staged version of a fanfare for the common man.

With minimal props and inventive directing at the Magic Theatre in Fort Mason, Oedipus El Rey debuts with flourishes which invoke the classical elements - a chorus echoing the Grecian tradition of strophe, epode and antistrophe, the hubris of mankind, the oracular vision – but add a new system of poetry steeped in the Chicano tradition – the Sphinx becomes a bruja, the elders of the community curanderos. It is a transfiguration which embodies the age old question of kismet and destiny. Whereas this is answered unerringly in the original (Oedipus is fated to his doom from birth), Alfaro revivifies it for his audience. This Oedipus may or may not come to his doom through freedom of will. Much less shrift is given to the avoidance of predestination and much more imbued in the arrogance of men drunk on power. And there is multiplicity in that also: all of the inmates of the prison from which Alfaro’s Oedipus emerges have self-styled themselves gods and demigods, and this blustering audacity – the acts they commit from its wellspring – is their undoing. Certainly fatalism is part and parcel of the tragedy but the striking note in Alfaro’s symphony is solipsism and the isolation this indulgence visits upon those who partake of its libations.

Above all, Alfaro makes it approachable. Even if one is not acquainted with Sophocles and has never heard or read the tale of his Oedipus, this El Rey is knowable. Creative touches in direction further amplify and balance out the amazing voice of the writing with significant attention to details; from the synchronicity of the chorus and the oracles to the light-hearted wedding ceremony to the confrontation between Creon and Oedipus to the passionate love-making between Jocasta and Oedipus, the play breathes and pulses. (An aside – The singing of “Always and Forever” brought me back to those halcyon high-school days and I found myself singing along).

Critically, there is one other theme which surfaces and is tied like a flower in bouquet to the whole of the production. Respect for one’s elders, and their life experiences is found wanting in the soi-disant god El Rey. Because he will not listen, he will not hear, he is the author of his own fate and the captain who takes his ship into stormy waters to circle endlessly without berth or port, literally and figuratively blind. Alfaro reinforces for us what we know, even when we choose to forget: Destiny is what we make through our actions and choices.

Gay Marriage Debate: Idiotic Argument

I caught wind of one the arguments being proffered by the lawyers defending California's notorious Proposition 8. It runs something like this: the primary purpose of marriage is for the procreation of children. The judge in a pretrial hearing indicated that he had performed as his last marriage a ceremony for a couple that were 95 and 83 years young, and inquired if this should not have been done. Of course the answer is obvious and even the lawyers advancing the foolhardy notion were quick to assert that he should have married this venerable couple. Besides the fact that in no point in the history of marital relations in this country has ANYONE ever been asked whether or not they intended to propagate or spawn anything beyond the unifying love of two individuals, logically you do not need to marry to beget. Is not the basis of the law suppose to be logic? Naturally, the reason for such a moronic statement is to find some narrow corridor to disqualify gays, much like the past notion that was utilized to indicate that Blacks were not quite human. I pray that Justice is not so blind as to be infected with this idiocy.

In Absentia, a Haiku

Whether we wait upon our lovers, children, family or friends - whether it be waiting for renewed connection, a decision, or an epiphany - there can be an intensity which haunts:

Purloined moments wait
And in the absence of you
Restless thoughts assail

Entreaty of the heart

If one could be drunk on love...such a large thing pressed into a thimble of emotion. It calls for a haiku:

Inebriate love
down to the dewy lees drink
liquor of my soul

Writing Resumed

Anyone who scribes for a living knows how much effort is required to put pen to paper, and daily produce. Difficult blocks often come up and the valiant writer takes a break only to return to the source of inspiration. This poem marks out the perspective of someone renewing themselves through their work, remembering how writing calls to the soul:



Desire wells in fissures suffused by fear

like breaking sunlight filtering benighted sky,

The pen, set in motion, through openings

in the crust, once more attempts

to love a page ensouled with passion

vulcanized in twin chambers,

fed by grain imbrued feverishly

the color of sunset before

the autumn moon's coal-scarred swath

hawkishly descending, represses the tide

Hearts may be stopped, instruments blunted,

but purpose, fiery as lava, blazons

past worn passages guttering in shadows,

inscribes and marks the sheaf,

innervating minds to the testimony of the word

gifting moments expression untrammelled by trepidation

unsealing the ardor of hands,

consuming margins of the page

exploding to the surface in a molten hail

whose train sharpens the stars and

professes the perfusion of rapture unbound

Fledgling

A poem I wrote a few years back but have never shared broadly:


Under the velvet of upturned leaves,
Sanctioned beneath green gauze and trembling,
The languid child strains against the womb
Wrestling equally with the practice and idea
Constraint is that bridge
Half caressed in sunlit memory,
Half crumpled in neoteric ruins,
Where the world girds society
And morality's skyscrapers sentinels
Known peripheries, planted just a stone’s throw
From the mire and muck of the extraordinary

Contest as it wills, the lash is firm
Effluvium lines the cottony membrane
There, in that spark of life, in that brace
Which straddles the crossing, groping
The child stirs towards seraphic peace-
The dizzying stillness of death settling-
Plunging without a whimper, without complaint
Releasing restraint, relishing its throes:
To die to live to love to hurt

Somewhere we cease to try, somewhere we become
Somehow we need no learning, somehow we come to know
The child within relaxes its grasp
Ruptures the verdigris placenta, scatters the leaves
Arrives in the limpid atmosphere
And walks upright, in time, in rhythm:
To die to live to love to hurt

Counting: A Poem

Counting slow brushes of rain,

he feels at last alive

though not free

even in heaven's wet embrace

fragments of prison,

he called life, intrude

war sounds, distance-striped vision

barely meets one moment from the next

always loss, he considers,

of self we forget:

to stay, to be here now,

love's deprivation the common chorus,

counting inadequate measures:

our wealth, our will, fearing judgement

counting everything

without counting ourselves

"I remember," he thinks

within the storm liberation looms

this time he counts the strokes

made by the meeting

of his and heaven's tears

seeing no difference

Ideas Does Not A Reality Make

"It's a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment. If you were born of ideas, then all you have are ideas," so opens one of the chapters of Man Gone Down which chronicles the ups and downs of a Black intellectual raised in the post-Civil Rights Era at a climactic point in his life. It summed up a groundswell of feeling I was experiencing watching our current President at the UN and the subsequent G-20 Conference.

I could not help but wonder where were all the ideas of the pre-election fervor had gone. To my endless inquiries of EVIDENCE of change I have been met only with deaf replies. Where is the normalization of relations with Cuba? Where are much vaunted reforms? The closure of the wars abroad? The realization of smart power? The healthcare overhaul seems to be a mote in the eye which will be washed away like a speck of dirt during the morning's ablutions.

The reality is that the Obama Presidency itself is a grand idea, fed by the American imagination but simultaneously riddled with the shortfall of American idealism. Americans are haunted by the idea of equality, bracing to embrace the idea of it but unwilling to recognize that validating humanity means demystifying any particular notions of racial identity, cultural origin and thus any attachments-favorable and unfavorable-to these. In effect this particular Presidency is a social experiment, and experiments always imply a norm (i.e., control group) versus a delta (i.e., change group). Of course, the most snowed under regarding the experiment is the titular head of the country, and this is attributable to the realm of ideas without action that have circumscribed the world from which he has sprung.

I fear that an ensuring passage of the novel presages much of the future of Presidential idea: "I suppose I should have been a superhero or an agent with no mission-AWOL, lost, forgotten, like a cold war relic, the laboratory, the training camp blown-up, the notes destroyed, my creator insane or in ashes...I should have been a vampire or a werewolf. But if that were the case, then there would be some kind of unbroken bloodline tracing back to the original. I feel artificial, man-made, like saccharin or LSD, something synthetic that was fucked up but issued nonetheless. I should have been something inexplicable, but at the same time nameable-a tolerable paradox, a recognizable dichotomy...guardian of the land of the obvious; and, obviously, phenotypically different. My internal conflicts need be expressed not in words..."

But unfortunately words and ideas are all the grass which has grown since the taking of the oath. We are masters of the oratory, and wielders of the image, but manifestation is a discipline we have yet to brandish and exercise with truth. There were smatterings in the press of the term engagement in dealing with other sovereign powers last week. The veritable question is, "How engaged are we with ourselves within the American landscape?"

The Beauty of Day

Ablaze and radiant, morning salutes the dawn
brushing aside the mascara of clouds
resolutely striding through bilious winds
humming on the larynx of the earth
fluttering on rimed lips of heaven
until color breathes through the sky
spilling in a heady stream of iridescence
vermilion, azure, and amethyst droplets
to stir the imagination and prick the brow
bearing loveliness once more into the world

Another Day of Living

Frustration bristles,like unruly hair
messy and tangled, an annoying menace
too much work here, too little pleasure there
the right mind gifted to the wrong heart
family nominally but strangers in reality
effort given to elusive success,
sloughing off despair, half asleep
slurping the morning coffee, berating tea
the endless mountain of meetings
followed by the empty landscape of endeavor
gym-toned, perspiring useless hope
And all these moments are the windows of Life

Declined Access: Healthcare

I have listened as the healthcare debate raged back and forth over the past two weeks. And it seems that the scare tactic being utilized to block a public option is the question of cost. Now while I would not advocate spending willynilly, it does strike me as ironic that whenever the issue of paying for those necessary social goods which ultimately benefit the society as a whole, the specter of expense is resurrected to haunt the halls of public conscience. Curiously, this spook never raises its head when the military budget is up, or when voting for financial support of some rogue national power whose agenda benefits U.S. aims, despite said polity's lean away from democratic rule. But the reality of day should surface and banish the lingering shades of doubt: what is requisite for life - for all members of our community - should never take a backseat to the potentiality of debt. After all, whether or not, a public option is passed the healthcare industry is headed towards an explosive implosion due to unwieldy expense and an overrated fee structure. Will our elected officials have the courage to exorcise the demons laying waste to the commonweal or shall we succumb to despair and sever our limbs in a futile attempt to preserve the body?

Beginnings of a short story: Gathering The Tribe

This week sees the initiation of short story installments on my blog. For the first one I have selected a contemporary topic.


On the eve of a Presidential election, two U.S. Senators in separate locations awaited returns. Both had engaged in the fray of politics, though one lacked the years of experience of the other; and both, while playing to their constituencies, had advocated lies. Of course, neither considered them untruths but a matter of expediency to whatever end they deemed appropriate. And in doing so they continued the grand tradition, the inalienable pageantry, from which American Presidents arose.

Fragments of Father

Two years have given us the full measure, and still the hole left by my father's loss gapes. In reaching for the memories sometimes it feels like trying to capture rain, and the realization dawns that each drop is its own precious keepsake:

Sunset & Shadows

Indeterminate memories surface
on the rim of sundown's flange,
murky is the mind's eye, misted,
recall's uncertain grasp steadies
the fog, uncoiling Time, untwining
inaudible is the voice, cloistered
nubilous the final image, obscured
all I can reclaim, across distance,
is a prosaic portrait, near trivial,
of a young son with father, clasped,
warmed in the shadows of closing day

Summer's Pear

Hugo, your continued inspiration flowers:

Luxuriant as honey, sweet as figs
my pear tree - Pereira - flourishes
bursting in darkness, white blossoms
against hardy brown wood, branching
into gray eyes and fruity fuzz,
swathed in the pinnate silk of Love