From what I recall, the storyline of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone was really rather obtuse. In fact, I barely remembered it when I looked up the SparkNotes for it a few months ago. It was boring and insignificant. Even in conversation today, years after reading it hastily for high school’s weekly English assignments (which I still dream about to this day, just last week actually), the plot still strikes me as irrelevant, Hellenic spuming (spit-fuming), meaningless aged-garb that perhaps captivated Greek audiences then for reasons I do not discern. I mentioned it in a discussion with my friend Wyatt over phone today. He wholeheartedly agreed that Antigone exists as a memory drably arrayed upon the chronology of high school and as nothing more than that.

Originally, Antigone resurfaced in my mind back in December. I was writing a piece for my poem Vespers about Lassen Peak in northeast California. To me, Shasta and Lassen are teenage landmarks, pimples of the earth broken out from the magmic heart of our planet. The land around them is desolate and yet lush, as perhaps the basaltic fringelands of Hawaii’s newest eruptions bursts with bright green upon a black waste. In Lassen and Shasta country, the dawn light echoes upon an open smooth sloping land of pines and prarie, rocks assembled in a tossed fashion on the soil (as if thrown there by a great force, like dust in the palm of a young girl).

Madison Cunningham’s album Authenticity could not be a better backdrop to that region. It sings of a young woman’s journey in the world. She breaks out against the old establishment of going with the crowd to please others, and in doing so falls into the ironic conformance to nonconformity. It is a young woman’s heart, fretting against the temptations to be someone who she is not. Definitely well-written, definitely richly acoustic, definitely youthfully-charged. She resonated then with a very forward Christianity, and that is very evident in her lyrics and self-examining stories. It is a Joan of Arc faith, too enwrapped in the world-encompassing vision of the ideals acquired at the threshold of adult abstract consciousness which allows many a young adult to produce the most profound sorts of ideas. Nevertheless, it is a true story in a specific season of life, as all stories are, and I find it beautiful despite the potential for stress arising from singing along with her somewhat racing opinions expressed there. Her more recent music reflects personal development. In a way, she has grown more mature by entering an older tradition of music. In another way, she is becoming the object of her earlier fears, a follower in the floodplains of a Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan style and content. I await her even better music in perhaps six or seven years, once she has moved past reaction and re-reaction.

My opinion of Antigone the character is shaped by the Lassen-Shasta volcanic lands and by Madison’s brave, bright shown heart in that early album. The a-bit-too-bold-to-see-the-less-than-fictive-world kind of energy drives through all three: the staunchness of Antigone’s decision to bury her brother even though it means her other brother will put her to death for it. (Antigone and Ismene’s older brothers got into a fight, actually a bit of a Thebesplitting war, after Oedipus the King died, yes that Oedipus. The loser, although technically both brothers died, was left on the battlefield unburied; Antigone decides she cannot let her brother—the good one—be given to the ravens and buzzards. So she risks her life to give him a proper burial. And, yes, she is killed for it. Surprise! It’s a Greek Tragedy.) The bashful outbursts of those now-dormant yet young mountains (which were teepees for the Great Bear before the white man came…see Myths and Legends of the Pacific Northwest by Judson for more on that.) The eternally Joan-of-Arcian faith of Madison Cunningham’s first album.

Antigone seems like a lame character and her story, a lame plot. There are three acts—but why! It reads like an excessively detailed obituary, not an exciting or memorable play, hardly profound. Dreadfully boring. Not even the kind of tragedy that would leave the Hellenes throwing their popcorn wildly in excited response. Oedipus Rex, now that’s a tragedy. You are abandoned by your parents to be orphaned, then rise to power, kill a king and marry his wife, only to discover after raising children with her that she was your mother and the king, your father. That’s a story! Deciding to bury your brother and getting punished by a power-greedy brother…yawn.

Or so I thought. I’ve been getting the New Yorker for like a year now. I don’t really like the magazine at all. It’s erudite, pretentious, exclusive, and focused on New York happenings. I got it for a discount (I think $20 or $5 because I could get Wired along with it). But then I neglected to disable the auto-renew, and I treated its weekly arrival like a bout of bad weather rather than acknowledging that I paid for it after all, and they extracted another $150 from me for the year without me knowing it in an email. They know that, at least. The only real value is in having the full play-by-play of COVID hitting New York City from the New Yorker, which is pretty cool in hindsight. The Seinfeld in me says, I suppose everyone needs useless wasted mail in their life; it makes sure you feel like other pieces of mail are special in comparison. So we should pay for useless things so we can have something to complain about. Today, one of those useless printed things came in the mail, during my call with Wyatt, shortly before we bitched about Antigone’s foibles. Well, there happens to be a poem about Antigone in this issue.

Before I proceed with the poem, think of the tens of thousands of COVID bodies strewn in makeshift big rig trailers refrigerated to keep them stored until a proper burial. Think of the dismality of being in that time, and how bleak life in general must seem amid such death, especially when the government is stepping on your grief. “For God’s sake, just let me bury my brother if it’s the last thing I do” is probably something someone there has said this year. The meaning of life amid so much death and sadness would appear as a desire to simply bury someone well.

When you lose everything—your parents, your cherished last not-evil-or-warped family member, your dignity, your sense of belonging and protection in your home country—perhaps your final sense of power would be to stand up for the memory of value. There is nothing else in life but the meager scraps of scratching dirt over a beloved’s body and laying flowers on the pile, saying a few words, shedding a tear. If life is terminal and the loss, terrible, why not have a glorious closure to it? Maybe the best thing we can do in life is to prepare for death and honor the death of those we love. Maybe a good death is worth dying for, living for, even if it’s not your own. There is no greatness we need attain thereby, it is simply for the personal value. And in that way such a story becomes worth preserving, great even if it is a distractingly long obituary.


August 29, 2020
San Luis Obispo