The other day I arrived and returned to my high school to acquire a transcript. I also took the opportunity to reconnect with a number of my former teachers, some of whom I encountered serendipitously in hallways and classrooms. The whole experience impressed up me the major differences between my time in high school and in college.
In high school I felt whole, as it were, and I only returned to that cognizance of being after two arduously satisfying (or satisfyingly arduous) years out of the country. College, on the other hand, was a time of significant personal fragmentation for me. As look back, I realize that in my attempts to adapt myself to the social circumstances and cultural milieu of a northeastern liberal arts college, I ended up shattering my own personality by setting up multiple different relationships and personas that were collectively doomed to failure. In the lofty hopes of being able to experience all sides of the world, I tried to be everyone, but ended up being no one and destroyed (or almost destroyed) a number of friendships in the process.
At college I learned to think in polarities, as it were. This wasn’t a completely bad thing, mind you. After all, the ideology of opposed distinctions is one valid academic tool among many and has its uses. Unfortunately, I doubt it’s a very useful life philosophy for someone who likes to span various social categories.
In any event, revisiting my high school gave me a bit of an opportunity to wander around in the idea space of self-definition, specifically the question of how far one can push the limits of one’s identity in society without violating sensibilities, and whether or not this leads merely to a bland lowest common denominator. In other words, to what degree are we constrained to self-define always and only “against”, and if we attempt to reject this constraint, must that inevitably result in social dislocation?
Two further points: First, I’ve filed this under linguistics since it is at some level a matter of definitions and meanings. I suppose there’s some kind of fancy word for this type of psycho-sociological application…probably has the lexeme “-semi-” in it somewhere.
Second, the title quote is the 3rd line of Aeschylus’ Choephoroi; I’ve chosen Orestes as something of an avatar to this discussion for one main reason and two ancillary ones. The main reason is that I remembered the line as quoted in Aristophanes’ Batrachoi (1128), wherein Aeschylus defends himself against Euripides’ accusation of redundancy by claiming that by both “arriving” and “returning” Orestes alludes to two different aspects of his identity in coming to Thebes. Upon reflection, I felt something similar the other day at my high school.
As for the other two reasons, well…in considering options for a decent model for the discussion of the coherence of multiple aspects of one personality, the traditional “everyman” in Greek myth is Odysseus (cf. Joyce: “No-age Faust isn’t a man. But you mentioned Hamlet. Hamlet is a human being, but he is a son only. Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope, lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy and King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom and courage came through them all. Don’t forget that he was a war dodger who tried to evade military service by simulating madness. He might never have taken up arms and gone to Troy, but the Greek recruiting sergeant was too clever for him and, while he was ploughing the sands, placed young Telemachus in front of his plough. But once at the war the conscientious objector became a Jusqu’auboutist [bitter-ender]. When the others wanted to abandon the siege he insisted on staying till Troy should fall”.) . But he’s a little *too* traditional for my purposes. Besides, he’s got Athena on his side, and that’s just not fair.
Moving on from Odysseus, one might consider Oedipus, especially given how all of us men are supposed to derive our problems from his…or at least we were at some point in the recent past. But again, he’s still too much of a ready-made archetype in that much of the action that set in motion the tragic sequence of events centered on him, by and large happened without his conscious knowledge. In other words, Oedipus is in some sense more the name of a social process than of an individual human being.
So instead, I thought I’d move on to Orestes. He doesn’t really get put up on the pedestal too often, even in spite of the fact that he’s such an important figure in the (drum roll) Oresteia. Moreover, Euripides’ play about him gets a lot of bad press. But when you get down to it, he doesn’t seem to have been anyone all too special. Just some guy trying to do the right thing in a tough situation. Maybe it wasn’t the best of ideas, avenging his father by killing his mother and all, but BAM…next thing he knows, the Furies are after him. Eventually, the story (as Aeschylus puts it) ends well with the establishment of a venerable social institution. Keep your fingers crossed for me, will you?
Posted by evovae
