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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.
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