Carol Black

26. Clytemnestra

I’m bending back the pages of The Eumenides, a little at a time, like my mother showed me when I was young. Easing the pages open, so as not to break the back of the book. 

I want to find the page where Clytemnestra tells her grief, the loss of her daughter, her unsleeping rage. 

The page where the Furies say the earth is overthrown.

I want to see the Furies sing for the sacrificed daughter, the murdered mother.

I want to see them as Erinyes: implacable, the unbroken ones. 

I want to see Apollo and Athena gaslight the Furies, tell them to be reasonable, to be rational, not to be so hysterical, those women of rage and darkness. I want to see them make their logical arguments, provide their evidence, construct the syllogism that underlies a civilization: that a mother’s body is just the vessel in which the child grows, the pot, the soil in which the seed is planted, that therefore only the father is the true parent, that therefore, ergo, rationally, logically, necessarily, it follows that only patricide is a crime against the gods, that therefore matricide is… does it even exist? Is it even a thing? Is it a will-o-the-wisp, a figment, a thing of smoke and fog?

And infanticide? And filiacide?

Is there even a word for killing a daughter, filia; or just for filis, a son? And if the word does not exist, then therefore––? Therefore––?

People tend to forget that Clytemnestra had two children killed by Agamemnon. It was not just Iphigenia, slaughtered like a calf; there was another, a tiny baby, ripped from her arms (as she reminds him, in case he forgot) — you dashed my living babe against the stones, from my breast with violence tearing him —

 — and how did she wind up being the bad guy again? 

Can the poor, scorched brains of Orestes

Figure out all the factors? Can he solve

 The arithmetic of the unfinished

 That shunts this curse from one generation to the next?

 Who can bring it to an end?

 When can it be brought to an end?

 How can it be brought to an end?

The Eumenides, by Aeschylus, is thought to represent the development of Athenian society from a ‘primitive’ system of blood vengeance — embodied by the Furies — to a more ‘civilized’ system of justice through rational inquiry, embodied by Apollo and Athena. In this final play of the Oresteia trilogy, Athena convenes a jury of Athenian citizens to adjudicate the latest round of generational trauma in the accursed House of Atreus, and to pass judgment on its current scion, Orestes. The Furies are pursuing young Orestes, who has killed his mother, Clytemnestra. He killed his mother because she killed his father, Agamemnon. She killed his father because he killed their daughter, Iphigenia (and her infant son by a previous marriage.)

After careful examination of the evidence, after taking statements from all the stakeholders, after much rational deliberation, this modern court of justice determines that only one of these murders calls for vengeance — the man’s. The murder of the woman is considered… justifiable, and the murder of the children is… not mentioned. The deaths of the children recede into fog, into the realm of the unspoken, the unthought. The homicidal father becomes an innocent victim while the bereaved mother becomes the prototype of raging female treachery.  

The Furies are not buying it. 

Daughters of Nyx, Mother Night (whom even Zeus fears), older than the Olympians, their wrath is not so easily deflected.  

The earth is overthrown, they cry. 

But in a remarkable sleight of hand, silver-tongued Athena, born of no woman, steps in and finishes them off. She persuades the ancient Erinyes, the Implacable Ones, to calm down, to soften up, to relinquish their primordial imperatives, and to become, henceforth, the Eumenides — the Kindly Ones. 

And just like that, an ancient system of karmic justice is replaced with a divinely ordained system of slick verbal manipulation in the service of the existing power structure.

I want to see them do it. I want to see Apollo and Athena talk circles around the Furies, I want to see them bait and switch and blow smoke in their faces, I want to see them construct the gaslight bullshit rationale that will become the glory of Athens, the foundation of Western Civilization, the reasonable basis, the rational discourse, the scientific evidence that can justify anything and everything, child-slaughter, slavery, sweatshops, scopolamine, submarine-launched nuclear warheads, you name it! 

I want to see them unhinge consequence from action, I want to see them deny and deflect and redirect thought, I want to see their gaslight bullshit splinter into a million fragments that fly around the world, settling on everything, sinking into everything, into our bodies, our brains, our dreams.

The earth is overthrown.

I want to see Athena bait the trap, lure the Furies in, make them the household pets of Athens. I want to see the ancient Erinyes tamed, declawed like cats.

And then I want to conjure them back; to bring back their blessings, to honor them again.

The babe torn from his mother's breast has ended in a plastic box.

The earth is overthrown. Neonatal intensive care is a profit center for the hospital.

Iphigenia stands by her father as he is sworn into office, cameras flashing around them. She no longer has to be tricked; she no longer pleads for her life; she knows the drill. She knows how to sacrifice herself for him, how to starve herself to be thin for him, how to hide the scars beneath her sleeves. Iphigenia gets straight A’s! 

The women of conquerors know the drill. They pretty themselves for the conqueror, they soften their voices, they make themselves sweet for him. They teach their children to crave the conqueror’s praise; they train them like dogs to seek his treats and prizes.

The conqueror, of course, is a pretty nice guy. It’s not his fault, after all! What can he do, realistically? This death-machine, this mechanical beast with its unquenchable thirst for blood and oil and rare minerals clawed from the earth by children –– it has conquered him like all the rest. 

And anyway, now women can be conquerors too! If they’re the best and brightest, if they score the highest, they can steal from the poor, jail the desperate, drone-bomb the powerless with the best of men! They can ravage the land, they can poison the water, they can scorch the earth like a girlboss! Their children, of course, can always be left to the care of conquered women.

But some–– a few–- lie waiting. Watching.

Never forgetting.

Clytemnestra waited for the torches to tell her of Agamemnon’s return. If Troy fell, if its children were slaughtered, its women raped and enslaved, its streets running with blood, its homes in flames, if Agamemnon was victorious, a hero, if he attained his heart’s desire, then the torches would speak. Mountaintop to mountaintop, beacon to beacon, along the coast from the Scamander to Argos, the flames would leap up, lighting the night, one communicating with the next. Bringing the news of the conqueror’s journey home.  

She was ready for him.