Yesterday’s discussion of Antigone got me thinking about the futility of human action. I think this idea is central to Anhouilh’s play, while perhaps not directly mentioned it feels like the impetus behind Antigone’s rejection of happiness. She does not want to defend her “happiness, like a bone . . . like dogs that lick everything they small.” Rather she wants “everything, right now . . . whole and complete” or else nothing. But we can not have everything at once. Inherent to the world are forces of constraint against acting on our unfettered desires. While we may have total control over our ontological destiny, the course of our lives is prescribed. We must, by the very nature of existing in a social world make compromises. To do otherwise is to live outside society. This is possible, but it is rare. This is the monk immolating himself with gasoline on the streets of Saigon. This is Che Guevarra the relentless disciplinarian. In nearly any case one might look at it ends in death.
In Antigone both our heroine and Creon take this uncompromising stance. The difference is in how and why they do this. For Creon a choice is an action, it is a thing one does. It is to ‘roll up your sleeves . . . and plunge into [life] up to the elbows.” A choice is labor. For Antigone, a choice is an ontological stance. It is not the mere thingness of action, but the very act of being itself, from which ones actions are derived. For Creon a choice is a kind of enslavement, for once one makes the choice one is tied to the course of actions set forth by that choice. For Antigone choice is freedom, for it proves that one can live free inside ones soul regardless of what material circumstances one finds themselves in. Life then is meaningless, in that the course of actions is prescribed yet it is not without value. In fact it is of the highest value precisely because at every moment one is free to choose.
I have recently been listening to the band Nirvana again. Specifically the recording of their MTV Unplugged in New York session. The album speaks directly to this same idea of the futility of human existence. In this album we see both the ironies of a prescribed existence as well as the futility of human achievement. Or rather that socio-material achievement bears no Real connection to authentic human existence. The music was recorded shortly before Curt Cobain killed himself after fleeing rehab. The album was released shortly there after. I remember being in Seattle not too long after his suicide while visiting my older sister. We drove past his house and it was surreal. A house in, as I remember it suburban Seattle, wrapped in white plastic like a Christo installation, or a funeral shroud, on the side of a green tree covered hill.
One of the most interesting things to me about Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged album is that almost half (6 of 14) of the songs are covers. It is an amazing exploration of not only a musician’s work, but the influences that went into making it as well. Songs by The Vasalines, The Meat Puppet’s, David Bowie and most interestingly Leadbelly. Performing so many covers in the evening’s performance gives us an amazing insight into the texts that have Prescribed these musicians.
At the same time we see the countervailing forces of the commercial music industry. This is after all MTV. This is the highest refinement of corporate music marketing. Take pure youth rebellion and repackage it into an easy to digest acoustic format. And one gets the sense that Cobain understands this, and that this understanding goes into the musical selection. It is not that the musical selection rejects or even subverts the commodification. Rather it accepts commodification at face value and chooses instead to construct a work with such tension that it fits, albeit awkwardly right into the packaged box presented by the corporate agents.
Leadbelly’s work operates in a similar way. Most recordings of his music were done by the Library of Congress. They exist as artifacts of Black Southern American life. They are given the official government seal of approval. Yet he was a criminal and a minor thug. It is quite an irony that Hip-Hop musicians today are reviled by the establishment for portraying musically the life they live, or had lived prior to their musical careers, yet the Library of Congress gave the OK to a murderer and a thief.
At one point in their set Cobain breaks his guitar pick and there are no spare one laying around. He says, with searing irony, “I thought we were a big famous rock band.” He knows his role has been prescribed by the choices made, yet finds himself facing the same mundane problems any other rock musician might face. But it is in the finale to that evening that he truly transcends his prescribed role and by wholly embodying his condition is able to go beyond it. After an evening of songs chronicling his battle with heroin addiction throughout the subtext, he plays All apologies that asks rhetorically “What else should I be? All apologies.” He follows this up with a cover of Leadbelly’s In the Pines retitled Where did you sleep last night. In telling this story of a woman who’s husband dies under mysterious circumstances, his voice becomes narrator to an internal battle in his soul. The course of action may well have already been determined, but the authenticity of the act has yet to be chosen.
We can hear an echo of Antigone’s rejection of happiness when Cobain says, “I wish I was like you, easily amused.” For while Creon may think that accepting death is easy, what he does not, and indeed can not understand is that to live in that place of holistic authenticity is the most difficult proposition of all. How easy it would be to simply accept the text one was written into at face value and not delve any further. How easy to make one choice and allow inertia to carry you onwards. To live unconcerned with with the value of living, believing it to have a purpose outside the text and thus to stay the course, is easy. One can see in Antigone’s “beautiful . . . grey . . . world without color” Cobain’s “pines, where the sun don’t ever shine.” It is a world of tragic beauty where the only possible conclusion of any value lies in death. But the value is not in the death per se, rather the value is in the choice. Or better the choosing. The value is manifest in a rejection of the thingness of being in favor of the Being of one’s text. Death is the ending we all face, but how we die just as how we live is the real concern. This sentiment comes through strongly in the words of yet another musician, “I’d rather be a freeman in my grave, than living as a puppet or a slave.”
