TIRESIAS and the truth revealed- Eliot and Camilleri

Tiresias and the truth revealed

“How many yous have you been?
How many,
Lined up inside,

Each killing the last?” Kate Tempest

“What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem” T. S. Eliot

"Since I can no longer see, I see things more clearly". Andrea Camilleri

Outstanding, noteworthy, impressive - these are the adjectives that better describe the  show broadcast by Rai Uno  on the 5^th March 2019, where Camilleri talked about Tiresias in the enchanted, magical Greek Theatre in Syracuse (the event had taken place on the 11^th June 2018).

That famous mythical character has always inspired intellectuals, writers, poets and philosophers through centuries.

Omero, Sofocle, Seneca, Dante, T.S. Eliot, Apollinaire, V. Woolf, Borges, Pound, Pavese, Woody Allen, Pasolini, Primo Levi are some of the authors referred to by Camilleri during the show and he well explained the intricate reasons for such a huge interest in Tiresias. He himself said he has always been fascinated by Tiresias and not only because he has become blind lately like the mythical figure but for some more remarkable, notable reasons.

Tiresias is turned into a woman by Hera (the wife of Zeus), as a punishment for having killed, with a stick, a female snake while having a close intercourse with a male snake. For seven years he lives as a woman and he probably experiences, as Camilleri points out, a male body but also, and that is maybe the most important aspect, a female view on the world and surely he lives all the troubles of a woman trying to face thousand activities and situations at the same time! What a difficult condition for a person who has always done one thing at a time!

In other words, he learns to see the world using another viewpoint and that is the first reason for being so intrigued in the story of Tiresias.

Being a man or a woman changes your way to approach the reality around you, having a relevant impact on your identity, on your true self.

That is already a good reason to talk about Tiresias and be captivated by his story. When he is again a man, after seven years, he has learnt how a woman acts and reacts to actual experiences and how she feels sensations and release emotions.

However, the story of Tiresias does not come to an end with him being a man again.

He is punished once more by Hera and this time he is made blind but at the same time he is given the gift of predicting the future of all the people he will come across, and, that is not all, he will live seven different lives but not continually!

As a result, his existence will be very long but also tough, if we consider his state of blindness. At the same time, people are likely to take a special interest in him as he can foresee the future.

Now the question is- is it a good thing or a bad one to be able to see things that are still to happen in the future? Is it good to be endowed with special gifts? Is it bad to be doomed to tell the truth?

Hence, who does Tiresias, the seer, stand for? Who is that special prophet who cannot see but can foresee the future? Is he the artist? Here we are!

Tiresias embodies the figure of the artist, of that who sees things that common people cannot see. But does that bring happiness to him or is that a source of distress, sorrow, anguish ?…..

The answer is not difficult-knowledge of the future does not always bring happiness and joy. In fact most of the times that awareness may cause sadness and grief….but it is the only truth and in being that it may help keep on living as humans, authentic individuals being aware of the meaning of their lives.

The reference to Primo Levi and his state of prisoner in a debasing, brutalizing  Nazi death camp is particularly relevant. As Levi wrote down, he managed to avoid being turned from a human into a non-human thanks to poetry and its special gist .

Once again, for an artist, poetry has the power to help him face reality as it is, triggering a sense of solitude but also encouraging  him to maintain his standards of behavior and beliefs, his elevated moral values, his humanity.

After having discussed about the numerous intellectuals, poets and writers dealing with the mysterious figure of Tiresias, eventually Camilleri gets to talk about the uttermost work by Thomas Stearns Eliot -  The Waste Land.

And it is not by chance that he does that referring to the lines telling the episode between the typist and the clerk, where Tiresias probably wants to communicate, though in a cryptic way,  his readers a relevant idea, a message or prophesy that could reveal the secret of the poem, its substance-  the modern human condition is just  degradation, squalor and shattered morals.

In doing so, Tiresias highlights the condition of modern people entrapped in a state of  cultural and moral decline, and he also shows how the lack of awareness of that state does not make them escape but on the contrary they keep on living with a sense of loss, spiritual desolation  and cultural confusion. They are emotionally dead.

Is that the same message conveyed by Camilleri?

Are we currently living in a world connoted by incomprehension, disillusionment, desolation,  moral  decay- a rootless world lacking high ethical qualities?

Do we need to ‘wake up’ and start a spiritual rebirth?

In Britain, the talented rapper, playwright and spoken word artist  Kate Tempest has recently tackled the same myth. In Hold your own the myth of Tiresias is made contemporary and crucial.

Tiresias  is introduced as “a boy of fifteen”, “kicking a tennis ball, / Keeping it up, / the boy on the street in his sister’s old jumper”, and is finally depicted as the mythic figure condemned  to tell the truth to people too distracted to listen.

“To really see the state of things is lethal,” Tempest  says but not to be able to see the truth brings only misery. “It’s safer,” she advises,

... just to see what we can bear.
Exhausting being fear-struck;
howling, weak-willed.
Much nicer to be bathing in the glare
of all that we have built to shine and
soothe us 

what use are eyes at all in times like  this?

Yet the artist is a special person and in spite of deep sorrow and a condition of upsetting awareness almost a devastating, shattering one, he can see what common people, the others, cannot see.

Poetry is seen again once and forever as it was perceived by Levi-despite being overwhelming, shocking and  catastrophic for its qualities of revealing the truth, poetry is always worth while, as it makes you be yourself even during drastic bad changes, harsh complicated situations, difficult conflicting states to be endured.

It is an extraordinary, amazing, unusual way to hold your own.

One more time poetry saves human beings from being dehumanized and, I would like to say, as Shakespeare pointed out four centuries ago, it is the only eternal truth!

That is the meaning of the words used by Camilleri ’I’d like to meet you here in this theatre in 100 years’ time….Yes…. his wish for all contemporary distracted and confused people is

 ‘ Poetry will live for ever! ‘ It must !'