Another Neurodivergent Queer Writes A Blog!

Aeschylus, Eumenides 276-279:

ἐγὼ διδαχθεὶς ἐν κακοῖς ἐπίσταμαι
πολλῶν τε καιροὺς, καὶ λέγειν ὅπου δίκη
σιγᾶν θ᾽ ὁμοίως· ἐν δὲ τῷδε πράγματι
φωνεῖν ἐτάχθην πρὸς σοφοῦ διδασκάλου.

Taught among evils, I understand
the right time for many things, when it is just to speak
and to be silent alike; but in this matter
I have been instructed to speak by a wise teacher.

The whole sentence is pretty great, honestly—which is a statement saying nothing given that this is a sentence composed by Aeschylus.

Orestes has just arrived in Athens supplicating Athena for a hearing to judge his matricide committed to avenge his mother murdering his father, which was itself revenge for Orestes’ father killing Orestes’ sister Iphigenia in a convoluted sacrifice to Artemis—all this is conveyed in ‘this matter.’

Anyway. That line! Taught among evils, I understand. It packs a wallop, and I think it’ll be the line for the tattoo to celebrate my PhD (…eventually lmao).

Ego didakhtheis en kakois epistamai.

My undergrad Greek culture prof and all around mentor told me once that κακά, kaká, is the same thing we mean by ‘caca’: it’s shit, whether actual or situational.

Didaskein ‘to teach’ (past aorist participle, ‘(have been) taught’), is of the same root as Latin docēre ‘to teach,’ past participle doctus, ‘(having been) taught,’ which when made an agent becomes doctor, ‘one who teaches having been taught.’

And epistamai is the verb at the center of epistemology, the study of how we know what we believe we know. It is a word of fundamental knowledge, a form of ‘to stand’ (στα-/sta-) found in Latin stāre, past participle status, as in ‘what’s your status?’

It is the perfect line.

So I wrote it out on a slab of cardboard, then wrote it again in red, then again in purple. And then I cut it up. And seeing ‘ego’ split in two gave me the idea to add bits of that to a cardboard mosaic I’d already started the day before.

Something about this just captivates the hell out of me. The evils—the shit, that is—so present, so horrendous, how they demand the eye in a horror-show font, just as they are so obvious in my own life, just as I’ve learned from within the midst of evil.

And what is evil? Prejudice and indifference, selfishness and a particularly American myopia rendering people empathy-free, the evils that have taught me more than the beautiful things (tà kalá, the antonym of tà kaká), even as I’ve spent so much of my life whirling about in an attempt to keep the beauty in view.