Michael Kinnucan, The Gods Show Up
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“The center of every tragedy is the image of a human being who has already died but keeps talking, someone whose face is a mask.”
The Gods Show Up by Michael Kinnucan
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It’s why the gift horse is a gift,
and there is always a tiny man inside,
though sometimes more than one.
You should look; peer as far back as you can,
because if he’s not playing piano,
he and his friends might be sharpening
blades inside that dark, inside
the horse’s belly, inside your sleeping city.
Twenty men crawl out of the gift: you’ll want to see this;
you’ll want to see how they spill into the city,
and open the gates, and paint everything
the color of burned flesh.
The war is ending. Achilles is dead.
Paris lives on in shame.
And one man
plays piano as the city burns.
I’ve been there. And because I didn’t look,
I never saw it coming
- Matthew Olzmann, The Tiny Men in the Horse’s Mouth.
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One recognizes true atë by two signs. First, atë must be inhuman, at once more and less than human: it must exceed the limits set by mortality. Atreus cannot be satisfied with the death of his enemy, with a human revenge; he has to call down the divine, to put Thyestes on the wrong side of the oldest laws. Second, atë consumes everything it touches; it renders both victim and criminal unclean, it erases the distinction between avenger and avanged, between aggressor and victim. Atreus’ crime is so terrible that neither he nor his enemy will live it down. Such acts will not be forgotten, will not exhaust themselves in the moment of action; they expand outward to contaminate observers, bloodlines, cities.
These two characteristics are linked: a more-than-human act cannot be contained in the human world, its consequences cannot exhaust themselves in the destruction of mere mortals, its reverberations do not die away. When he acts out of atë, a man passes beyond the bounds of mortality, into the dark world of the oldest gods. In hubris, men forget that they are mortal; in atë they forget the very boundaries which make mortal life possible. Once these boundaries are crossed, mortal action is unavailing; only the gods can restore them.
Incest, Cannibalism, and the Gods: The Rise of the House of Atreus, Michael Kinnucan
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The Gods Show Up
A mask hides a face, evidently—but it is not a disguise. After all, a disguise can’t appear as a disguise; it has to look like the real thing. But a mask announces itself quite clearly, rigid, closed, nothing like a face.
The face is legible in terms of what it discloses or fails to, what it never fully gives but constantly suggests. A mask is immutable, staring, implacable; there is “nothing” behind it to read.
A god’s desires are implacable and brook no appeal, while a human’s are changeable and often disappointed; a god’s actions always go to the absolute limit and can’t be undone, while a human’s are always in a certain sense incomplete, half-assed.
A human is just too partial, too speckled and subject and already-half-gone, for anything to be really true or false of him. Is he happy, is she sad? Maybe, a bit, for a time, but really—who can say, who can even care? That’s how it is for humans, unless and until they are tragic. The tragic hero is complete. You can call him unhappy (miserable, utterly broken) even before he is dead. For an instant he is something like divine. And then he dies, because there’s nothing left to do.
🦋 Read full story by Michael Kinnucan here:
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But the Greeks saw an absolute difference between mortals and gods, a difference which might be formulated this way: mortals are partial and complex, gods are complete and simple.
Michael Kinnucan, The Gods Show Up
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at some point in my twenties i became a wear socks to bed kind of girl and now what has been done is too total to be undone
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i cannot get over this .. i cannot get over this!!!!!
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Sing Shong, Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint // Black Box // R.M. Rilke, "The Guardian Angel" // George Seferis, "The Return of the Exile" (trans. Edmund Keeley) // Studio Dragon, Because This Is My First Life // John Banville, The Sea // Aeschylus, Agamemnon (trans. Herbert W. Smyth) // Anne Carson, "The Anthropology of Water" // Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life // @toupou39 on tw // Jennifer S. Cheng, "So We Must Meet Apart" // Madeline Miller, Circe // @chuunicalesimp // Richard Siken // Neil Gaiman // Richard Siken, "The Torn-Up Road" // Jamie Varon, "Does The Universe Fight For Souls To Be Together?" // Jennifer S. Cheng, "So We Must Meet Apart" // Sing Shong, UMI & Sleepy-C, Omniscient Reader (Webtoon) // Frank Bidart, "Guilty of Dust" // Lasah – Taixu // Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds // see 1 // André De Shields & Hadestown Original Broadway Company – Road To Hell (Reprise) // @toiriot on tw // Unlike Pluto – We're Screwed // @moonbends // m.h // Euripides, Herakles (trans. Anne Carson) // Unlike Pluto – We're Screwed // Google search results // @toiriot on tw // see 1 // Chxrlotte – Come With Me // @roach-works // Lasah – Taixu // Sing Shong, UMI & Sleepy-C, Omniscient Reader (Webtoon) // Chxrlotte – Come With Me // Frank Bidart, "Guilty of Dust" // @dsssctd_ion on tw // Hans Christian Andersen, "The Snail and the Rosebush" // Will Stetson – Writing on the Wall // Michael Kinnucan, "The Gods Show Up" // Richard Siken, "Planet of Love" // Sufjan Stevens – Futile Devices // Warren Zevon – Keep Me in Your Heart // Katie Maria // @SION_428 on tw // see 1 // Pablo Neruda, 20 Love Sonnets and a Song of Despair // Mitski – My Love Mine All Mine // Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Vera // Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 // Sing Shong, UMI & Sleepy-C, Omniscient Reader (Webtoon) // Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried (via @jomeimei421) // see 1 // @soracities // Black Box // see 1
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“The tragic hero is complete. You can call him unhappy (miserable, utterly broken) even before he is dead. For an instant he is something like divine. And then he dies, because there's nothing left to do.”
The Gods Show Up by Michael Kinnucan
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