Speaking with tongues of swallows

Perhaps the oldest extant drama available to us is Agamemnon by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus. Central to its effect is a protracted crescendo of tragic irony as the captive prophetess Cassandra tries to warn the unbelieving Greeks of the imminent disaster that is about to befall them at the climax of the piece.

Earlier today I tweeted that all poetry is achieved through tragic irony: it rearranges words to confer meaning on them in a way that precisely demonstrates words have no intrinsic meaning. In Aeschylus we find this poetry used in the service of religion in a way that places irony in the temple like a bomb. Everything since - all human history - is its slow detonation.

You must recall that drama started as a religious ceremony. The original performances of Aeschylus' play were highly ritualised. The plot was not original, but chosen for its religious significance. The audience were not there to be entertained, but were participating in a religious festival. They were not entitled to watch because they had purchased tickets, but were similar in role to the epoptes, the "onlookers" in a mystery religion, veteran initiates playing a passive role in the ceremony themselves, rather than consumers of entertainment. The transformational effect their participation had on them is documented by Aristotle in his Poetics.

My own personal sense of aesthetics relies heavily on this idea of setting aside a moment apart from time, of creating experiences that have a completely different and enduring status that confounds perceived limitations, events whose intersection and relationship with the everyday experience can only be described in terms of "before" and "after," not "part of," experiences that leave us altered.

The innovation of irony in these proceedings by the Greeks introduced a subversive element with a profoundly transformative effect. Words are no longer bound by rules of action and reaction in which they are just noises prompting ritualised responses or instinctive reflexes. The creation of one meaning involves the destruction of the previous meaning. Cassandra describes the experience as being "trampled by the god [Apollo]."

Words are not understood, and are acknowledged to be just noise, during this process. Clytemnestra describes Cassandra as speaking with tongues of swallows, saying "unless like swallows she doth use some strange barbarian tongue." Aeschylus understood that this transformation, this use of poetry as a forge of meaning, was not a painless process, and his play ends literally in a bloodbath, from which emerges a previously unimaginable reality, ironically arrayed in the triumph of reactionary forces, now transformed by their encounter with poetry into something terrible.

This transformation makes words suitable for everything we have used them for ever since. Poetry precedes logic by alerting us to abstract relationships between our new, artificial meanings. Logic precedes science by enabling these relationships to apply to evidence. Irony is the engine of this transformation of language. It destroys the ground on which meaning was first established to leave words leap-frogging each other indefinitely in our poetry just to survive and avoid free-fall.

And so we are alienated from everything to which our words once referred. Our noises no longer share affinity with the utterances of bird and beast. We can no longer express un-self-conscious kinship with leaf and stream. Henceforth we are forever trapped in a world of imagination, captives of our own stream of consciousness.

And we are alienated from each other. As I have discussed elsewhere, the world becomes a maze of cross purposes whose persistence is the most we can say about reality with our newly minted words.

Clytemnestra's description of Cassandra as speaking with tongues of swallows is her saying she is a foreigner, from the lands from which swallows fly south in winter. Irony makes foreigners of us all. It is the transformation of language by irony that requires us to explain rather than assume.

It is the epitome of that misunderstanding which is our only true way of comprehending the world.

Life is a sustained hallucination.

We are embarked upon an Odyssey through space where there is no death but parallax, as all the constellations drift out of alignment at our passing. We are a locus of positions from which the world may be observed, and everything we consider consistent and stable - the quantum throb of atoms embracing to form everything we see, the integrity of our personalities as we watch - are illusions whose persistence we mistake for reality, and they are revealed as our trajectories take us past the point of their chance coincidence.

The final reality that is accessible to human thought is infinite, eternal and without structure or purpose. It is indifferent to our conduct. We are divided from it by our finitude from which alone the appearance of structure and purpose arise. These truths glorify or annihilate each of us according to how our thoughts and actions have led us to apprehend them.

We are foreigners. We are aliens. We speak with tongues of swallows.