have you no eyes?
oedipus didn’t say i didn’t know he didn’t lift his hands clean and call them blameless when sight arrived it made his body unlivable so he chose dark not as penance but because keeping his eyes would have been the lie — pride is stranger pride keeps its vision jaw locked mouth sealed a hand over the throat to stop the sound before it becomes confession they call it restraint virtue discipline — you and i talk about them in lowered voices we look at them with sickness in our eyes asking why they won’t just bend just let it spill why softness sounds like weakness in the mouths that raised us — you and i never learned how to swallow clean we learned early what stays inside rots denial leaves a taste have you ever swallowed it’s bitter familiar passed around like silence at a table — we let it spill once down the stairs washed it away we lived — so when they stand there dry-mouthed calling it strength to keep the poison out of sight we wonder didn’t you swallow too or did you just learn how not to gag — i’d rather retch than stay intact because relief has always been holier than pride and some truths they ask to be vomited or they eat you alive.
This poem was written after I read a passage in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, mixed with a conversation I had with a friend about pride. Pride, in that sense, is a complex and bizarre thing. It makes people cynical, and then convinces them that cynicism is strength. In the book, Kundera brings up Oedipus while talking about Czechoslovakia under communism, where many people later said “we didn’t know” after participating in or benefiting from harm carried out by the state.
Oedipus, of course, didn’t know either. He was born under a prophecy that said he would kill his father and marry his mother. His parents tried to escape fate by abandoning him, and he grew up elsewhere, unaware of who he really was. As an adult, trying to avoid the prophecy altogether, he unknowingly kills his real father on the road. Later, after saving the city of Thebes, he marries his mother, still blind to the truth. When everything is finally revealed, he blinds himself because he cannot continue to live having seen what he has done.
Kundera asks something along the lines of: “How can you stand the sight of what you’ve done? Have you no eyes?” and suggests that if you truly had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes. The question isn’t really about guilt for not knowing. It’s about what you do once you do know.
I think I’m trying to write about that choice.
Omgg woah, I’m reading the same book currently