Oedipus Blindness Quotes

And if you find I've lied, from this day on call the prophet blind.

You, you'll see no more the pain I suffered, all the pain I caused! Too long you looked on the ones you never should have seen, blind to the ones you longed to see, to know! Blind from this hour on! Blind in the darkness-blind!

The novelist is condemned to wander all his life. Homeless and blind like Oedipus he wanders until death. And so let us protect the novelist and adore him, with pity, honor, and love.

Prometheus: Yes, I stopped mortals from foreseeing their doom. Chorus: What cure did you discover for that sickness? Prometheus: I sowed in them blind hopes.

As a rule, we don't like to feel to sad or lonely or depressed. So why do we like music (or books or movies) that evoke in us those same negative emotions? Why do we choose to experience in art the very feelings we avoid in real life? Aristotle deals with a similar question in his analysis of tragedy. Tragedy, after all, is pretty gruesome. […] There's Sophocles's Oedipus, who blinds himself after learning that he has killed his father and slept with his mother. Why would anyone watch this stuff? Wouldn't it be sick to enjoy watching it? […] Tragedy's pleasure doesn't make us feel "good" in any straightforward sense. On the contrary, Aristotle says, the real goal of tragedy is to evoke pity and fear in the audience. Now, to speak of the pleasure of pity and fear is almost oxymoronic. But the point of bringing about these emotions is to achieve catharsis of them - a cleansing, a purification, a purging, or release. Catharsis is at the core of tragedy's appeal.

Blind, lost in the night, endless night that nursed you!

The Eye-Mote Blameless as daylight I stood looking At a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown, Tails streaming against the green Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking White chapel pinnacles over the roofs, Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves Steadily rooted though they were all flowing Away to the left like reeds in a sea When the splinter flew in and stuck my eye, Needling it dark. Then I was seeing A melding of shapes in a hot rain: Horses warped on the altering green, Outlandish as double-humped camels or unicorns, Grazing at the margins of a bad monochrome, Beasts of oasis, a better time. Abrading my lid, the small grain burns: Red cinder around which I myself, Horses, planets and spires revolve. Neither tears nor the easing flush Of eyebaths can unseat the speck: It sticks, and it has stuck a week. I wear the present itch for flesh, Blind to what will be and what was. I dream that I am Oedipus. What I want back is what I was Before the bed, before the knife, Before the brooch-pin and the salve Fixed me in this parenthesis; Horses fluent in the wind, A place, a time gone out of mind. --written 1959

who seeks shall find; Who sits with folded hands or sleeps is blind.

Blind who now has eyes, beggar who now is rich, he will grope his way toward a foreign soil, a stick tapping before him step by step.

I’d wall up my loathsome body like a prison, blind to the sound of life, not just the sight.

I have a terrible fear the blind seer can see.

You with your precious eyes, you’re blind to the corruption of your life,

never should have seen, blind to the ones you longed to see, to know! Blind from this hour on! Blind in the darkness—blind!

Dear friend, still here? Standing by me, still with a care for me, the blind man?

your own father’s hands that served his once bright eyes so well— that made them blind.

You are the king no doubt, but in one respect, at least, I am your equal: the right to reply. I claim that privilege too. I am not your slave. I serve Apollo. I don't need Creon to speak for me in public. So, you mock my blindness? Let me tell you this. You with your precious eyes, you're blind to the corruption in your life, to the house you live in, those you live with- who are your parents? Do you know? All unknowing you are the scourge of your own flesh and blood, the dead below the earth and the living here above, and the double lash of your mother and your father's curse will whip you from this land one day, their footfall treading you down in terror, darkness shrouding your eyes that now can see the light! Soon, soon, you'll scream aloud - what haven won't reverberate? What rock of Cithaeron won't scream back in echo? That day you learn the truth about your marriage, the wedding-march that sang you into your halls, the lusty voyage home to the fatal harbor! And a crowd of other horrors you'd never dream will level you with yourself and all your children. There. Now smear us with insults - Creon, myself and every word I've said. No man will ever be rooted from the earth as brutally as you.

You, you’ll see no more the pain I suffered, all the pain I caused! Too long you looked on the ones you never should have seen, blind to the ones you longed to see, to know! Blind from this hour on! Blind in the darkness—blind!

Enter OEDIPUS, blinded, led by a boy.

I say that you live blindly in hideous shame with those you love most. You don’t see the evil that you have made your own.

listen to me. you mock my blindness, do you? but i say that you, with both your eyes, are blind: you can not see the wretchedness of your life, nor in whose house you live, no, nor with whom. who are your father and mother? can you tell me?

Relying on our acquired knowledge, we have ventured to discuss the question: Whether the soul is created before us? Whether it arrives from nothing in our bodies? At what age it came and placed itself between the bladder and the intestines, "cæcum" and "rectum"? Whether it received or brought there any ideas, and what those ideas are? Whether, after animating us for a few moments, its essence is to live after us in eternity, without the intervention of God Himself? Whether, it being a spirit, and God being spirit, they are of like nature? These questions have an appearance of sublimity. What are they but questions of men born blind discussing the nature of light?

So. I see where you're going—bus number 27 to a crossroads near Delphi. Look, I did not want, at any point, on any level, to kill my own father and sleep with my own mother. It's true that I wanted to sleep with Susan—and did so many times—and for a number of years thought of killing Gordon Macleod, but that is another part of the story. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think the Oedipus myth is precisely what it started off as: melodrama rather than psychology. In all my years of life I've never met anyone to whom it might apply. You think I'm being naive? You wish to point out that human motivation is deviously buried, and hides its mysterious workings from those who blindly submit to it? Perhaps so. But even—especially—Oedipus didn't want to kill his father and sleep with his mother, did he? Oh yes he did! Oh no he didn't! Yes, let's just leave it as a pantomime exchange.

Berlin failed to illuminate much with it beyond Tolstoy. The great man had wanted to be a hedgehog, Berlin claimed: War and Peace was supposed to reveal the laws by which history worked. But Tolstoy was too honest to neglect the peculiarities of personality and the contingencies of circumstance that defy such generalizations. So he filled his masterpiece with some of the most fox-like writing in all literature, mesmerizing his readers, who happily skipped the hedgehog-like history ruminations scattered throughout the text. Torn by contradictions, Tolstoy approached death, Berlin concluded, “a desperate old man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded [like Oedipus] at Colonus.” 5 Biographically, this was too simple. Tolstoy did die in an obscure Russian railway station, in 1910 and at the age of eighty-two, after abandoning his home and family. It’s unlikely that he did so, though, regretting loose ends left decades earlier in War and Peace. 6 Nor is it clear that Berlin evoked Oedipus for any deeper purpose than to end his essay with a dramatic flourish. Perhaps too dramatic, for it suggested irreconcilable differences between foxes and hedgehogs. You had to be one or the other, Berlin seemed to be saying. You couldn’t be both and be happy. Or effective. Or even whole.

Oedipus has taken the posture of Master Player executing terminal moves-but the moves are not terminal. Oedipus is able to bring nothing to an end. Even the act of blinding himself, meant as a kind of concluding gesture, only brings him to a higher vision. What Oedipus sees is not what the gods have done to him, but what he has done. He learns that what had been limited was his vision, and not what he was viewing. His blinding is an unveiling, and like all unveiling it is self-unveiling. Confronted in the end with nothing but his own genius, Oedipus is finally able to touch. The end of his story is a beginning.

In the ancient world the intuitive awareness of break boundaries as points of reversal and of no return was embodied in the Greek idea of hubris, which Toynbee presents in his Study of History, under the head of “The Nemesis of Creativity” and “The Reversal of Roles.” The Greek dramatists presented the idea of creativity as creating, also, its own kind of blindness, as in the case of Oedipus Rex, who solved the riddle of the Sphinx. It was as if the Greeks felt that the penalty for one break-through was a general sealing-off of awareness to the total field. In a Chinese work—The Way and Its Power (A. Waley translation)—there is a series of instances of the overheated medium, the overextended man or culture, and the peripety or reversal that inevitably follows: He who stands on tiptoe does not stand firm; He who takes the longest strides does not walk the fastest … He who boasts of what he will do succeeds in nothing; He who is proud of his work achieves nothing that endures. One of the most common causes of breaks in any system is the cross-fertilization with another system, such as happened to print with the steam press, or with radio and movies (that yielded the talkies). Today with microfilm and micro-cards, not to mention electric memories, the printed word assumes again much of the handicraft character of a manuscript. But printing from movable type was, itself, the major break boundary in the history of phonetic literacy, just as the phonetic alphabet had been the break boundary between tribal and individualist man.

Blindness is another classic castration symbol, according to Freud, and the template for the “blind prophet” goes back to the ancients, including the mythological backstory of Freud’s favorite tragedy Oedipus the King. That story is in some sense just as relevant to the tragic life of Robertson as it is to that of Freud, but in a very different way. Oedipus’s self-blinding when he realizes his own guilt links him to the blind seer Tiresias, who announces the king’s guilt at the end of the tragedy. Audiences would have known the mythological backstory of the seer and his blindness, just as they knew that of Oedipus. In his younger days, Tiresias had come upon two entwined snakes in the forest and touched them with his staff; upon doing so, he was transformed into a woman. After living as a woman for seven years, Tiresias encountered the snakes again, touched them, and was turned back into a man. Summoned to Mount Olympus to report on his experience, he revealed to Hera, in front of her husband Zeus, that (based on his extensive experience) women get much more enjoyment from sex than men do. Hera blinded him in punishment for revealing this secret, and Zeus gave him prophetic foresight in recompense. Tiresias thus reveals an ancient symbolic association between these two ideas, prophecy and sexual/gender liminality or boundary-crossing.20 The symbolism of the Sphinx, the guardian whose riddle Oedipus had to answer to become King (and thus to marry his mother), is also relevant here. Sphinxes are symbolic guardians of time,21 and not accidentally, sphinx is closely related to the word sphincter: a guardian (literally a “strangler”) designed to mainly admit the passage of things in one direction but sometimes capable of admitting other things traveling in reverse. As I hinted earlier, suggesting that the normal order of causality can be transgressed arouses similar hostile reactions from skeptical guardians of Enlightenment science that the prospect of a phallus—the ultimate “causal arrow”—moving the wrong way through a sphincter arouses in gatekeepers of patriarchal “Christian” morals. In a sense, Oedipus and Tiresias were permutations of the same basic possibility—transgression of some kind of sexual boundary, punished by symbolic castration but also (at least in Tiresias’s case) compensated with foresight. Transgressive enjoyment, which “impossibly” connects the future to the past, is thus what turns precognition into a psychoanalytic problem. As with Tiresias, the point of Oedipus’s story is not merely that he “traveled the wrong way through time” by marrying his mother and killing his father; it is that he committed these crimes and enjoyed them, and only belatedly discovered what it was that he had been enjoying. His guilt was not over his actions but over his enjoyment. Our ignorance as to our enjoyment (that is, our blindness to it) allows both the past and future to affect our lives in uncanny and seemingly “impossible” ways like the kinds of coincidences and twists of fate that seem to have characterized Robertson’s life.