Life Is Not So Easy

I am preparing for the eight lectures I am giving in January and February in a mini course for senior citizens, in something called the Institute for Life Long Learning.  This will be my third course, the first one I taught in 2014, maybe, can't quite work it out.  I do distinctly remember, however, that the subject was ancient Greek tragedy.  I assigned a lot of tragedies, and really it did not matter if the students read them all carefully, or just consulted a synopsis.  I just wanted people who did not know anything about what is called "Greek Tragedy"  to get a little sense of it.  The subject is vast, the evidence very fragmentary, the facts can be obscure.  There are so few plays that survive from antiquity and almost everything is from the hand of the same three men, so as you can see, making any kind of generalization is extremely hazardous.  So we mostly talked about individual plays, or rather I did, and made very few assumptions about the art form itself.  I think for people raised in the Judaeo-Christian tradition it comes as a shock that the god figure, or in this case, figures, since their heaven was populated with quite a crowd, or possibly I should say that there was quite a crowd on Mt Olympos oh, this sentence is incomplete, so drawing myself up sharply and beginning in medias res, the ancient gods do not demonstrate any real love or even affection for mankind in general, and some individual gods sometimes have a real love or a real hate relationship with some particular human. So gods or fate could be extremely cruel to someone or ones for no particular reason at all.  Human existence is cruel in tragic drama, and what makes the audience accept it, I think, is that the humans who respond to impossible situations often with savagery or other reactions not exactly approved in our culture demonstrate incredible strength and moral courage.  I think of Medea who was ready to kill her children so as to exact revenge on Jason, her husband, who abandons her for a younger more important woman.  And since the only thing a male looks for in a woman is her power to breed his dynasty, Medea made herself have meaning and stature by destroying the children born of that union.  Likewise Clytemnestra had to accept that her husband's determination to sail the fleet to Troy meant that he was willing to sacrifice their daughter on the altar to propitiate the gods of the expedition, and so after he left she started sleeping with his cousin and when he came back she murdered him.  Moderns say she was punished for adultery but, no that's such a Judeao-Christian interpretation.  She was being strong by sleeping with his cousin and dirtying his bed, and in effect emasculating him, and then strong again when she murdered this same husband upon his return.  All for the daughter, which by sacrificing he had declared negligible and thus her mother's birth agony negligible.  So Clytemnestra was honoring her own womb and vagina even if it meant that she became a murderer in the eyes of her son who turned around and killed her.  I was surprised at how a class of eighty something year old women were more accepting of this than a teenager girl audience.  It is what makes teaching these courses such an interesting surprise......every time.