by Piotr Augustyniak
1.
The loss of my father. But not when he died — the earlier loss, when he was still alive, yet returned from Troy as one who could only die, as one who had lost his life beneath Troy. This is my journey to the origin. Beyond the entire arrangement of the world grounded in common sense and clear divisions, opinions, certainties, distinctions: life–death, good–evil, beginning–end, and so on. The loss of the father decenters the subject. I have felt myself in this way for a long time now. A decentered individual, incapable of concentrating on its own persistence, of focusing on the maintenance of itself. And yet, despite the pain, capable of wonder and contemplation before the abyss of the world.
At this single point my fate becomes entwined with that of Orestes.
2.
Orestes recalls his father, whom he saw ten hours before his death. He does not answer the phone. He has switched off social media. He sits alone at his desk. He wonders what to do with Clytemnestra. That evening Hermione told him that he had changed. The great war, exile, revenge — all this now seems distant to him. He left the family home when Agamemnon was still beneath Troy. He sought refuge in a sacred place. In Delphi, at the feet of the greatest of the gods. Growing up there, he practiced the god’s secret knowledge, only later to take employment in a theatre picturesquely embedded in the Delphic hillside. He worked hard. He settled well. He has a position, he has a good life. But now, after his father’s death, he has the courage to admit to himself that he feels mortally tired of it all. The art he had practiced for years had long since become cheap entertainment for the masses. The society of the spectacle: anything at all, just to have something to watch; anything at all, just to keep before one’s eyes the soothing opium of spectacle; anything at all, simply to feel at least a little part of it. This brings much pleasure, many agreeable sensations. Well-being reaches its peak. Almost exactly as in Plato’s cave. This is what Orestes thinks, sitting at a desk buried in books that have long since begun to make him nauseous. He does not know what to do with all of this. He reads little, but he still thinks. The neglected drama of his father. A death that came to him long before he died. He was killed by the Troy of the present. And by the pity of Clytemnestra, who intuitively understood the suffering of his dead life, his dead persistence, his non-life, lasting since the moment he returned to Mycenae. These are the secrets of this story. Passed over in silence in the myth. Not staged in the theatre. Orestes, too, cannot give them voice. Resigned, he lets his arms fall and thinks about the abyss of life, about the bottomless well of its mystery, full of vipers and primordial springs. The caves of Arcadia call to him. The wastelands of the mountainous South summon him. He thinks of packing his things, slipping quietly out of the house, and setting off to meet them.
3.
How heavy the nights are, with cramps in the thighs and calves. The whole body trembles. The mouth cries out. Here is the reverse side of the daytime composure, the “calm” he maintains. The organism fragments. The muscles burrow and contract separately. Full of accumulated tension and helpless before it, disorganized, orphaned. This is how Orestes reacts to his father’s death. To the fact that he died because Troy had already killed him long before. Yes, it was Troy — virtual, unnamed, undefined in his imagination, and therefore all the more powerful — that took his father from him. By making him unreachable, incomprehensible, and absent at the same time. And so Orestes’ body trembles and jerks, contracts, rebels. And he bristles at the thought of Clytemnestra, who wanders helplessly through the deserted palace.
He has no conscience to kill her, yet he sees no other way to help her free herself. Clytemnestra, too, is already dead. And, truth be told, so is he. Killed, like Agamemnon, by Troy. Turned inside out and mutilated. Long since ripped open. One does not kill the dead. That is not done. So he thinks of her helplessly and once again feels the painful cramp and trembling of the body. Lonely, he listens to the steady breathing of Hermione, whom he wakes after a while so that she may help him stretch his aching calf.
4.
Today Orestes went with Clytemnestra to the notary. He declared that he renounces the inheritance. Electra was there as well; it is only unclear what became of Iphigenia, their youngest sister, who after finishing secondary school left and vanished without a trace. She sent only a letter saying that she would not return and that they should not look for her. She wanted to flee as far as possible from their sick world. She had the greatest grievances against Agamemnon. Ah, Iphigenia. How similar she is to Orestes! He too — although he has not disappeared forever — wants nothing to do with any of this. He does not want Mycenae. He does not want jewels. He does not want valuables. He wants nothing from his father. He dreams only that it might end, and that he might leave Clytemnestra behind. Dead already for a long time — since the disappearance of Iphigenia, or perhaps even earlier. But how is one to abandon someone who is entirely dead?
5.
For a long time Orestes had experienced his birthdays as days of dreadful sadness and barely suppressed fits of anger. When his father died, for the first time he felt joy and a desire to celebrate. The thought that it was Agamemnon’s dead persistence that had weighed on him so unbearably, until he came to hate his own existence, fills him with consternation. So it was not my own despair that I felt — he thinks — but my father’s? The son’s sorrow is therefore the father’s sorrow?
6.
Agamemnon never truly returned from Troy. Nor did he ever conquer it. He is still there. He walks beneath its unconquered bastions, full of furious helplessness and resignation. Only his specter returned home. And it was this — only this — that was murdered by Clytemnestra. And Orestes? Orestes knew this. He knew that Agamemnon was no longer Agamemnon. That the one who left had not returned and would not return. That is why he himself delayed his return to the family home for so long. Or perhaps, like his father, he too never returned at all? Perhaps only his specter visited Mycenae, in order to carry out a spectral retribution upon a specter — for Clytemnestra, too, had long since become one. One thing is certain: after all this, the house itself — Mycenae — also proved to be a specter.
7.
What pains Orestes most is that Agamemnon forgot him beneath Troy. Forgot? Perhaps not entirely — but he did not think of him. And if he did think of him, Orestes never learned of it. From time to time he called him. Agamemnon would answer, but usually he could not talk. Several times Orestes visited him during the siege. He tied certain hopes to these visits, but Agamemnon seemed not to notice them. He was polite, he gave a feast, they drank wine. Orestes spoke about himself. Agamemnon said little. He did not seem fully present. He was always strangely tense. This tension passed over to Orestes. The next morning, at dawn, he was dismissed. Later Orestes thought that his father was trying to protect him in this way. He thought so — or rather, he wanted to think so. For he knew well that it was something else. Agamemnon did not see a man in him. He did not see him at his side. It never even occurred to him that his son might become a warrior.
What pains Orestes most is that it was not the drive for victory that obscured the truth about him for Agamemnon, but a slipping into helplessness. Into a disgraceful, painful hopelessness. Yes, he remembered Orestes — but he did everything to keep him at a distance. So as not to burden him with his failure. That was the only thing he gave him. Keeping him at a distance, so that he would not take part in his shame, in his Trojan disgrace. Only as a specter was he a father. A specter of a father he was. And yet he loved Orestes. And Orestes loved him. That is why the memory of Agamemnon hurts so much. And that he was not there when he was, and that now he is not there at all.
8.
Orestes keeps returning in his thoughts to the visit to the morgue. He did not really know what one does there. How one is supposed to behave. The changed, bluish, dead body dressed in a suit that was too large. And yet still him. “See you, see you, daddy, father, so very—” The rest of the words stuck in his throat. It is unimaginable to see the dead body of one’s father. To have the feeling that he will open his eyes at any moment. But far more unbearable was the awareness of how distant they had grown. How very much — and for how long — they had not been together. And that it had long since been too late to do anything about it. He had been a broken man, locked in his obsessions. He yielded to them. He allowed them to destroy him. Agamemnon. Orestes cannot forgive him for this.
Clytemnestra did not go inside. She left him there with it, alone.
9.
What astonishes Orestes and leaves him powerless is Clytemnestra’s fear of being alone. Aegisthus was not only her revenge. He was also her despair. By leaving for Troy, Agamemnon orphaned her as well — while still alive. She had been a widow from the very first day of the expedition. And it is precisely for this reason that there are moments when Orestes longs to kill her. So as not to feel this constant reproach. The reproach directed at Agamemnon, but aimed at the whole world. Orestes wants nothing to do with it. He does not want to carry it any longer.
10.
Clytemnestra kept asking Orestes for death, while at the same time begging him to spare her life. Such was her incurable and blameless perversity. At last she herself impaled herself on the sword which she had torn from his belt and hurled herself onto its blade, crying out: “Do not kill me, spare the breasts that fed you, the womb that bore you.” Cunning, perverse, wretched Clytemnestra. She ran herself through the belly, and under the weight of her collapsing, crumpling body the sword slid upward, tore open the chest and pierced the gurgling larynx. But this is not the worst of it. The worst is that this scene repeats itself endlessly. Every one of their meetings, every conversation, takes on this course.
11.
Orestes burdened himself with guilt; he stood on the brink of self-torment. He sought rescue with his god, but the god’s proximity no longer brought him relief. So he went to Athens, where a council of experts pronounced him innocent. The report demonstrated that Clytemnestra had suffered from outbursts of self-aggression with a psychopathological basis, for which Orestes bore no responsibility. The opinions of the jurors and judges were, it is true, divided, but in the final instance he was lawfully acquitted.
12.
Orestes feels terribly alone. Though he does not, in fact, long for people. “Everyone has abandoned me,” he thinks. “Only the symptoms of paranoia have not abandoned me.” He still sees and hears the Erinyes pursuing him. With effort he explains to himself that these are only dark images of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, of their deaths in life and of his own entanglement in them. When they close in on him, he seeks refuge in Hermione’s arms. And when even there he cannot find rescue, he thinks that he must find Iphigenia. He himself does not know what he is hoping for.
13.
As the years pass, Orestes begins to spend more and more time in the wild recesses of Arcadia. The Erinyes, the shadows of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, have faded in his memory. With difficulty he is able to recall their faces. Once they oppressed him; now they have become his emptiness. A nothingness that devours him. That is why he chose the wild places. The sight of people irritates him. Sounds, colors, tumult. The vanishing shadows of those who were responsible for his coming into being take his breath away, tire his eyes, cloud his senses. The silence of Arcadia — its terrifying calm, its stilling before a wild storm — this is now Orestes. A bit of an oddity, a bit of a philosopher. A sage, or merely a madman? What is he still seeking? What does he expect?
14.
Orestes fled to the back roads and deserts of Arcadia from his father’s Troy, from his mother’s Mycenae, from his own being torn between them. And there he found what he was seeking. “Alas, cry out — yet let joy prevail!”
15.
Once his father appeared to him in a dream as a great shadow, as a powerful figure. In life he had been fading, already seeping in advance across the boundary of death; in the dream he rose up, growing immense. He dreamed that Agamemnon was walking about, searching for a way to be embodied once again. And Orestes began to be afraid and to avoid bodily closeness. “I do not want to be his father. I do not want to be a father at all to beings like him. There is no sense in repeating this torment called life.” But one night his fear turned into wild passion, and once again he made love with Hermione.
“Alas, cry out — yet let joy prevail!”
16.
“Alas, cry out — yet let joy prevail.”
Explanation
The Troy that killed my father long before he died was global capitalism and its Polish, neoliberal, transformational offshoot. My father set out to conquer it and returned from its walls defeated. He set out — that is saying too much. It came to him and forced him to take part in a battle he did not want, did not understand, and for which he was not prepared. It was not his war.
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This text is an excerpt from the author’s new, as yet unpublished book devoted to the figure of Orestes, titled Only the Song of the Abyss Remains.