The acoustics of the night
Our story in this issue about the acoustics at the ancient theater of Epidaurus reminds me of my experience several years ago with ancient theater—long-range.
I wasn’t in a theater, but in those prehistoric days we had just bought a newfangled VCR and I had taped a broadcast of one of the ancient tragedies on Channel 13: I believe it was Aeschylus’ the Eumenides. I used to get up very early in those days, practically in the middle of the night to do my writing, and then I would do some calisthenics to loosen up and start my day and I would watch what the wonder of my new VCR had taped for me.
One night it was the Eumenides and as I stretched and did my regulation number of sit-ups and push-ups on the empty living room carpet, with my family sleeping in the next room, and the night enveloping the world outside, I listened to the terrible words of unremitting passion and grief penned thousands of years ago when man seemed to stand alone against the universe and I marveled at the courage of those Greeks who had defied the fate of all the other ancient people and had stood proudly alone announcing their individuality and their individual grief--as though it were new-born.
But at the same time, with the darkness shrouding the world around me, I felt the naked chill of these words, which expressed in such polished verse the sheer animal cry of fear and unbearable agony we all must face when the terrible hour befalls us. Because while we carefully build our perfect little world, and we think it so safe from all the dangers that lurk out in the darkness, and we try to insulate it from the chance of fate, the fate that lurks out there for all of us and will visit us one day, regardless of how good or pious we’ve been, those words that were penned thousands of years ago might suddenly ring very true and be the only adequate expression of our disillusionment and grief.
The ancient Greeks were wonderful about discovering what made us all joyously human—their thought was like a new Spring. But they weren’t foolish enough to imagine their bravado could change the face of the world or the fate of man, no matter how wonderful he and she might be. And so they gave us an expression for our joy, and an even deeper expression for our sorrow, and in the night of our unsettled dreams, their words will always ring true and seem like an uneasy premonition.
I put away that tape after that night, and it’s now lost in the stacks of videos and newfangled DVD’s piled up everywhere in the house (I have two teenagers). But that night still haunts me, and the words I recorded so imperfectly on my old television set (with the rabbit ears) I know will revisit me some day.
Dimitri C. Michalakis
