Poisoned Chalice

For the last few weeks, I've had occasion to think deeply about the term 'a poisoned chalice'. A chalice is of course a ritual cup (from Latin calix, also Greek kalyx). The point about it being a ritual cup is that in the right (or wrong) circumstances, you are forced to drink from it; and if it proves poisoned, well, too bad.

Like many interesting phrases of the kind, this one originated from Shakespeare. It comes from that very familiar Scottish play — the one in which the intelligent eponymous monarch is harshly treated and maligned by the foreign playwright who is pandering to his own monarch. Here is the quote, from Act 1 Scene 7 of the play:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come.
                                          But in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice
To our own lips.

The situation the Family has been mulling over is of course one in which a not-so-righteous leader has been eliminated by his own act, and there is as yet nobody who wants the chalice so ingeniously poisoned by that person.

And yet, somebody has to take the chalice, once an honourable vessel and now tainted by the venom of serpents. It is appalling that what should reside in the tail of the wyvern now comes forth from its mouth. But there it is, and only the Divine can do anything about it.

Goatsong

The Greek word from which we get the English 'tragedy' is τραγῳδία; it is best translated as 'a song of the he-goat'. Most people believe that this is because such performances were carried out just before a goat was sacrificed to the gods.

I was having one of those fractured chats with the Hierophant, about current events, when we noticed the similarities between some of those events and a traditional Greek tragedy: there is a heroic figure with a flaw (hamartia, ἁμαρτία), which blossoms into overweening pride (hubris, ὕβρις); there is a Greek chorus of wailing women; there are aspersions and dispersions with interspersions; there is an agent of retribution (nemesis, νέμεσις). There was only one thing missing.

We wondered if there would be a modern Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides to write the play. It would probably have been a smash hit in some circles.

As it is, in local circles, already some supporters have made mention of the terrible opposition this figure has faced since he dropped the green and black for the blue and gold, and found favour with neither. It is like invoking the Angry Ones (Erinyes, Ἐρινύες) to say such things.

Doctor Evil

The archvillain in the story is always over-the-top. His nature encourages the audience of a melodrama to boo and hiss his every action. Slowly as he begins his fall, his acolytes and henchmen desert him or are eliminated because they fail him. He becomes sensitive to every implicit slight, no matter how slight or how imaginary.

And then comes the revisionism. Slowly, the story of how a plodding scientist wades in blood becomes the narrative of a brilliant scientist steeped in white robes and the holy sanctity of the laboratory. Slowly, the story of how a defiant chap mauls his mentors and badmouths them at every turn becomes the story of how his mentors were never good anyway, and besides, he too has his detractors who were once mentored by him.

And the stories come out all over the place, each one more fantastic than the one before. Where a distant figure attempts to manipulate a young person, now we have the father-figure who teaches the child every week, only to be betrayed. The lies accumulate. The evil doctor eliminates anyone who objects to the stories, and then tells more stories. He doctors reality, and indoctrinates the unwitting.

He hears tales he wants to believe, about imaginary crimes committed by otherwise hardworking and decent folk. These legitimise his own deeds, help him believe that he is not so evil, just misunderstood. And he weaves those tales into his narrative. He creates a hero myth for himself, for all villains deep down want to be heroes in this kind of drama.

Will he be believed? There's no doubt that some will believe out of the innocence of their hearts. There's no doubt that others will believe because it suits them to believe. We wait with bated breath, but sooner or later the denunciation comes — the truth will be spoken, and the evil which has clouded the minds of his tools begins to disperse.

But what's this? These tools love to have their minds clouded. It spares them the bright touch of reality, a reality in which they lose significance and power. They would rather the darkness, within which their poison has an impact that they perceive more fully, that they feel is more real.

It amuses us, we who are the audience. But for some of us, before the lights come up and the actors take a bow, we wonder: "What if it were true? And what if there really were people like that?"

And the reason we feel uneasy thereafter is that, yes, there are.

Nobody Expects

This is a dark room, in an unlisted building, on a nondescript street – one of many such in an unnamed and imaginary state. A few people (it is hard to tell how many are in this dark room) are present: an Inquisitor, a Subject, a supervising medical officer, and some other figures with brutal silhouettes.

=====

Inquisitor: What is your name, rank and serial number?

Subject: Wolf, Lone, 008.

I: (motions to unseen presences)

Beating ensues.

I: (pleasantly) Let's begin again. What is your name, rank and serial number?

S: E Rhodes Stitt, Rear-Admiral, 18671948.

I: Whoever you really are, you will address me as sir, sir.

S: Sir, sir.

I: (motions to unseen presences)

Beating ensues.

I: (pleasantly) Let's continue, sir.

[This sequence, from the motion to unseen presences to the continuation, repeats several times. We will henceforth refer to it in this transcript as Refrain, by which is meant that the sequence repeats as transcribed with no deviation.]

I: What is your primary mission, sir?

S: As stated in my deposition. Sir.

I: Please state it again for the record, sir.

S: To carry out an holistic programme of education resulting in the development of premier doctors, scientists, authors, and suchlike. As in my deposition. Sir.

I: Why do you use the article 'an', sir?

S: The Greeks used a small mark to indicate the presence or absence of the aspirate and so the 'h' in words like 'historian' and 'hologram' does not exist as a proper letter. Indulge an old man in this. It is nothing more than...

Refrain

I: I put it to you that it is not consonant with the vows you have made to this country that you should use invisible letters thusly, sir. And furthermore, you are wasting public funds in providing extraneous and irrelevant educational components. Sir. Why do you use the word 'premier', sir?

S: We seek to produce graduates who are in the top 0.02325% of the national population. This is considered by many to be 'premier' grade education. Sir.

I: This is elitism, and we are a democracy, sir. But who do you mean by 'we' and 'many'? Sir.

S: I mean myself. There are no others. And 'many' is statistical...

Refrain

I: Who are 'we', sir? Who are the 'many'? Sir.

S: [Transcript shows heavy censorship here.]

I: Thank you, sir. And what is your main activity in pursuing your mission? Sir.

S: (sounds a little dazed) We groom these young people to be...

I: (interrupting) What did you say you do to them? You groom them? Unspeakable. Vile.

Refrain (x3) [At this point, the supervising medical officer intervened.]

I: We will return to these issues again, whoever-you-are sir. And it will not go well for you if you continue to digress. I am not here to be educated by the likes of you. Sir.

Exeunt Inquisitor and entourage.

S: (to himself) Heh, at least I got him to beat me up so that I could avoid calling him sir.

Dramatis Personae

This morning I woke up as usual, and everything had changed. It was a hot day, just as many before it, and so it was not the heat that raised my hackles. Rather, it was the sudden crushing awareness that though much is taken, not so much abides. Though we are not now that strength which in old days moved Earth and Heaven, we are not any useful strength anymore. We are caught up in toil, labour, the inadequate apprehension of an inadequate world.

Greet the criteria. Meet the criteria. Act as if the criteria are everything. And die by the criteria, proud in your triumph. What a sad lot we are, what a violated mission we pursue. In some sense, we are the guardians of Hermetic mysteries, for Hermes was the great father of Autolycus 'Lone Wolf', and Autolycus of Anticlea 'Withstanding Glory', and Anticlea was mother to Odysseus 'Much Hated'. But that is just mythologizing.

In reality, I was born into the family of the Registrar. And he said, the Mission is that all should be good, all should be God-fearing, all should be grown into manhood and womanhood. Not for my ancestor the tinkly chimes of buzzwords, shifted and redefined at will. No. He was blunt and violent with it. A ruthless man, he, who scorned both the Presbyter and Method of his youth and love, naming himself but one of many Brethren.

He would have spat upon the feet of heathen images, he would have asked, "What fills the spaces? What place is this which claims to value what its values no longer know to name?" But sadly, I am not him, I am not him at all. I come from an effete and paltry generation. We no longer stand up for what is bright and hot and deep and of the Spirit. We fall to the wayside, attracting candidates because we no longer have faith that the Spirit will send them to us.

We make our own mission. We no longer value manhood and womanhood, but we value some imaginary holism. For who among us is whole? What is whole? It is folly and rampaging humanistic pride to seek a whole which only God can provide. We are whole despite our flaws because we are defined as whole, because the Logos writes us whole, not because we can dance a minuet over two crossed swords while declaiming the merits of a maritime climate when making economic gains.

Here we are. We should ask, is our God a Gardner, a Goleman, a Golem, a Csíkszentmihályi? Or is He God, ineffable, incorruptible, all-wise and terrible in His wrath? We should ask many things. But one thing is not in doubt: the mission that we have is not the mission that we began with.

A Real Hoot

Yes, that was Alan Ayckbourn's comedic interlude, Relatively Speaking, which I just caught at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. It's an old play (first staged in 1965), yet simple and hence timelessly Brit. That kind of farce never dies, mock as you would. Here's an outline, courtesy of the BBC.

Ah, I wish I were young again! Sigh. I remember the days I used to have season tickets to such things.

Belief

It has always struck me that the Easter week fills the role of 'pagan fertility rite' very well. It is uncannily resonant (if not downright consonant in parts) with Robert Burns's version of the old British folksong, John Barleycorn, for example.

I have seen many movies of the crucifixion before, some compassionate, some agonized (or agonizing), some artistic, and some all of the above. To me, the best representations are those that don't highlight the gore and bloodshed. They cut to the essence of it; the sacrifice of the holy for the unhallowed.

I have good historical reasons for feeling this way. If we were to be historically accurate (for example) about pre-industrial England, we'd have to put more horseshit on the ground than can be found in any film. You wouldn't be able to see Sherlock and Watson in the London fog. And Arthur's brave defence of Celtic Britain would be bogged down by poor equine breeding stock. The story of the Christ doesn't need historical accuracy because no matter how much gore we put in (yes, we know about Roman crucifixions) the blood on-screen cannot sanctify the story any more than it is already sanctified.

John's gospel puts in succinctly. At the end of John's account of the latter part of Easter week, he says that what has been written is 'that you might believe.' That is all there is; the crucifixion and burial occupy a scant, terse 26 verses or so. Read the account yourself to see the difference between Bible and Hollywood.

Hence I am going to go out on the limb of a tree and say this: the accounts given are terse for a reason. They do not sensationalise because of two reasons: 1) it is not necessary to do so - the story speaks for itself; 2) it is not possible to deliver the true impact of Jesus' death and its aftermath, no matter how hard you try. Emotional impact, yes. Spiritual impact, no. The problem is that the former can act as a counterfeit for the latter, and it often does.

So away with all these gloomy meditations on the death of Jesus of Nazareth. "He is not here; He is risen!" says the Good Book. It is a time of joy. With the brethren of the Eastern Churches, we should greet each other thus:

"Χριστος ἀνεστη !"
Christ is risen!

And the response is "Ἀληθως ἀνεστη !"
In truth, (He is) risen.