About ANTIGONE

Antigone is a complete closed circle of a repeated human tragedy. It symbolizes eternal Evil, the repeated drama that accompanies the human race like a curse. It changes form and expression, adapting to the conditions of place and time. But its essence remains the same. The same applies to the principal players in the drama. On one side are the persecutors, on the other, the victims. 
The gods of Evil symbolize the basic instinct of domination, of the thirst for power and authority. They are represented by Creon and Eteocles who express, through their actions, the dark side of man. 
Opposite them stands Oedipus, the most tragic of all characters since he has been chosen by Evil so that through him, mankind will be punished. 
Polynices expresses the fateful decision to fight Evil with Evil. Jocasta, symbol of woman has been chosen to suffer the ultimate trial, to become the mother of her son 's children, only to see him blinded and exiled under a curse, then to stand by as her sons tear each other apart before following them to their deaths: A whole city is destroyed with them and the Argive army will in its turn, pays heavy penalty for the curse that originates in the Centre of Evil which I call the "basic instinct" of the cursed human race. 
Out of the ashes and smoke of utter catastrophe, above the black- ness, rise two pure white figures like doves against a background of the darkness of death: Antigone and Haemon are no more than the obligatory innocent victims who will be sacrificed on the altar of ritual sacrifice, destined to propitiate the Shades of Evil, defiant and triumphant as ever. 
The stance and the words of Antigone will be recorded as the impossible hope of all those who need to believe that the Good is not dead and that one day the basic instinct of evil will be defeated by the weapons of Love, the source of life, and Justice, its beauty. 
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Even from my adolescent years I was conscious of the existence of these endlessly repeated cycles of Evil. At the age of fifteen I was destined to live at the centre of the cyclone, the Second World War, and so to observe and record certain of its characteristics that went beyond those of the times, assuming the dimensions of the lasting, of the eternal. I watched the destruction of Thebes being repeated again and again, acquiring, each time, new and monstrous dimensions. For a moment I believed, with millions of others, that the thousands, the millions of Antigones who were sacrificed at the altar of the basic instinct, of evil, would propitiate it to such a point they would soften its nature and that it would become less evil, even become good. A vain hope. 
Before one cycle closes a new one opens. Merciless, stronger than ever, it is as if evil becomes more defiant than ever, even more thirsty for ashes and human flesh. 
* * * * * * * 
As always, the lovers of the beautiful, the powerless followers of the Good, continue to fashion aesthetic likeness of human suffering in order to hang them as offerings in the imaginary temple where defeated humanity continues to be worshipped. 
And until now, unfortunately, no other way has been found for them to live, to think and to dream, those who live outside the magnetic field within which the base instinct of evil imprisons those who will be its instruments, persecutors and at the same time its victims in the service of a primordial curse that follows the human race like a curse. . 
With Antigone I have the feeling that I am exorcising the primordial Evil, raising against it, its image in miniature. 
But as I have done in my previous works, I am neither passive nor pessimistic, nor am I any more powerless in the face of the apparently universal dominion of evil. And this aesthetic "image", for the sole reason that it exists as an artistic act, is capable of raising up against Evil, the awesome rival, Love: Life, which has the power to surpass itself. This is precisely so as to signal to the human race its own superiority over the power of Evil, with the proviso that it must respect as it should, the gift of life. And this is the ultimate victory of Man over the gods. 
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The myth-making of the ancient Greeks transferred the passions and antagonisms of man -on a larger scale -to their anthropomorphic gods. Thus we see the basic instinct of evil expressed by such and such a god wishing to punish for such and such a reason mankind or even some enemy of the gods through mankind. Staging the Theban Cycle, that is, the tragedy of tragedies, since it refers to the greatest Evil -war -as a consequence of the greatest human weakness -the craving for complete power, the Greeks, in their wisdom, created the figure of the Woman/ Mother -the symbol of life, to sow the seed of Evil. 
Jocasta, the mother-symbol, will become the basic instrument in the hands of Evil because the myth-maker wanted to show that the disaster that will overcome man is a child of man himself. How should she act, and above all, how should such a creature sing? If I were to paint the sounds in which I place the action of Jocasta, her two sons, and the chorus who share in but also comment on their passion, I would give them the colour black, over which flashes of lightning and of volcanoes criss-cross, forming sharp angles that puncture the horizon and move onwards like a spear-carrying army of crusaders. 
For Jocasta to move, she must push aside these flaming columns that hold her a prisoner to her passions. The same applies to Eteocles and Polynices. Only at rare moments do they manage to rise out of the tragedy that stifles them to the surface of human nature, to become complete human beings instead of instruments of fate, to become mother and sons again, only to sink once more into the fierce passion whose only end is death. 
How contemporary reality surpasses, in fact, the imagination of the ancient Greeks! And how much sharper, that is more repulsive, it makes the image of war! For example, when bombs fall on a city, they transform it into a dead lands cape, and under the smoking ruins a mother lies dead, one who gave birth to the civilian and the soldier, to Hitler and to the innocent child. Our age has been filled with the ghosts of Jocasta and of the enemy-brothers who fight one other in single combat to the death. 
The law of the stronger is blasphemous. Unconsidered power fills the ruler with arrogance. It makes him forget and despise caution and restraint. It is he who personifies the basic instinct of evil in myth. But tragedy awaits even him in the end. Creon will lose his son, wife, sister and niece, reminding people that even the most powerful, the most terrible and hated, are only puppets in the hands of fate. Finally, from the fiery circle of the Tragedy of Tragedies, nobody will escape but Oedipus who, as we will see below, is guided by knowledge and self-punishment to salvation. 
But here is where Evil, like a black phoenix, is reborn each time from its own ashes. The memory of mankind seems to be crippled, because very quickly man forgets his suffering and before the fires of one catastrophe have been properly quenched, new fires break out. How can one admire such a creature? How can one respect him or pity him when, over so many centuries, he has not learned from his misfortunes? 
But look, how two innocent and pure creatures, the weakest of all -Antigone and Haemon -have come to raise the hopes of humanity on their shoulders! Their fundamental strength rests in Eros (Love). The crowning chorus of the work "Eros anikate machan" ("Love, invincible in battle"), which the chorus will sing for the first time, accompanies the two lovers to their common tomb like a hymn to life which reaches to the heights of true triumph when finally, drawing strength from their love, the lovers become spirits and light, dispelling forever the shadows of fear and death that the basic instinct of Evil has spread over humankind. 
But it is not only love that inspires Haemon and above all Antigone. Her pure nature rebels against the repulsive face of the tyrant. Respect for the dead, in the character of Antigone, symbolizes her concentration on the fundamental laws of life which, in the relationship between people, take on the character of the basic rules of harmony which reflect the Fundamental Laws of the Harmony of the Spheres from which the beginning and continuation of life is derived. 
The contrast between Creon and Antigone has a symbolic character, which must teach, act as a lesson, and guide people. On the one hand we have the ironclad power of Authority and on the other the naked, fragile presence of a pure girl who, however, has also been over- whelmed by moral repulsion, which is the invigorating strength of man-made values in the exact likeness of the life-giving burden on earth. This is what will finally triumph, will stubbornly progress in spite of the continuous and successive cycles of death which man's second nature places in his way, a negative nature ruled by the basic instinct of Evil. 
* * * * * * * 
I have left Oedipus till last. The irony of life willed, as long as he lived in ignorance, that he should be happy. He saved Thebes from the Sphinx without realizing that these were ploys of the gods to lead him into the arms of his own mother and from there to incest, to the breaking of one of the basic laws of life. Not knowing what he did, however, Oedipus was happy. He engendered children who were his offspring and his siblings at the same time. 
But he didn't know this either, nor did his mother/wife Jocasta or the city of Thebes. 
In Oedipus Rex, Sophocles describes Oedipus's journey from saving ignorance to catastrophic knowledge. A mysterious inner strength leads him to discover the truth which will mean not only his own end but that end of all those around him, his relatives and his fellow citizens, of Thebes itself. 
You would think that Solomos's line "Light flashed and the young man knew himself" was written for the tragic king of Thebes who, in a symbolic gesture, gouges out his eyes so as not to see the world which involuntarily reminds him of his crime. 
And the chorus will say "Blind are his ears, his mind, his eyes," with its terrible acoustic accompaniment, in Greek, of the repeated sound "t", which has given this single line the power to reverberate eternally through the ages. 
Paying the price of knowledge, which is the blinding of the mind, of hearing and sight, Oedipus overcomes the circle of Evil which has bound him since he was an embryo and being truly at the centre of the tragedy which he himself unwittingly stirred up in himself and around him, he becomes a man incorruptible in his stubborn defiance of the gods that pursue him. Incorruptible, means free, unfettered, capable of speaking as an equal with the gods who join forces to squeeze awe, dead bodies and laments out of humans. 
With the gaining of knowledge, Oedipus emerges pure from his sin: "Be pure, Oh Man Keep your words and deeds in harmony with the sacred laws of the universe." So Oedipus through knowledge and Antigone, through her sacrifice, acquire the fundamental gift of life, which is their concordance with the Laws of Universal Harmony. 
The exodus from the walls of Thebes is symbolic. Oedipus knows that he is leaving behind him forever the City, which the gods selected to test the resilience and the limits of man through his person. But the poison has spread and passed into every citizen, every house, every stone and because of this the city will be punished, will disappear. And for this purpose the worst possible means has been chosen; Polynices will lay siege to his own land with the Argive army. Eteocles, defender of Thebes, will not save the city from its fate, nor will Polynices alter the fortunes of the Argive army, despite the mortal combat between the brothers. Over their bodies and that of Jocasta, the two armies will destroy each other and Thebes will be transformed into a heap of ruins. The spirit of Evil will triumph, brandishing the Theban Cycle as an eternal symbol. 
One man will survive this biblical catastrophe and it will be he who unwittingly provoked it: Oedipus. But before he abandons the accused city for ever, he will criticize the people because they spend their lives giving way to the powerful, denying their real selves and when one day they realize their mistake it is usually too late. Oedipus drives out the supporters of the tyrant in disgust: "Go! Go! I don't expect people to have a memory. I don't want to hear any more the voices of people worshipping, fearful. I don 't want to hear empty words. I know the voice of your Lord very well- tyrannical, autocratic -but the tyrant will pay." 
And so Oedipus, the last of men, will become the first. His trial led him to knowledge and knowledge to self-punishment and self- punishment to freedom. 
"I am guided by azure light sent from very far away, in the depths of the Infinite. There, I, too, am going. I will become light! I will become light! I will become one with the light of the Galaxy!"