So he did.
He killed his daughter and sailed off to be a hero.
While Agamemnon spent ten years practicing ethnic cleansing across the Aegean Sea, his wife Clytemnestra stewed over the murder of her daughter. She took a lover named Aegisthus.
When her husband returns to Mycenae, Clytemnestra and Aegis-thus murder Agamemnon and then assume the crown.
Years later, the son of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, a guy named Orestes, comes to Mycenae. On orders from the god Apollo, he murders his mother and Aegisthus.
Unfortunately, there are these mythological things called the Erinyes.
The Erinyes, or the Furies, are the living embodiment of vengeance. They torment anyone who breaks the basic rules of society.
One of these rules: don’t fuck with hospitality customs.
Another: don’t kill your mother.
The Furies chase Orestes all over Greece, until one night, they fall asleep and Apollo spirits Orestes away to Athens, where the matricide begs help from the goddess Athena.
Athena puts Orestes on trial in Athens. He gets prosecuted, he has to defend himself.
The trial ends with a split jury. Athena casts the final vote in favor of Orestes, which frees him, and which also pisses the Furies off.
They scream and shout about the sorrow they’re going to wreak upon the world as revenge for the insult. They spit and they foam.
Athena, meanwhile, is the face of reason and calm. She soothes the Furies, slowly, suggesting a better function for them in the world. Why rage when you can help mankind and be worshipped? Who wants all that grief when life can be easy?
The Furies agree and undergo a metaphysical transformation.
They become the Kindly Ones.
They’ve been tamed by Athena, the personification of Wisdom.
The Oresteia is an allegorical representation of a major event in human history. It’s a stand-in for the establishment of civil justice. It’s about how societies maintain order in the face of outrageous crimes.
The theme is so universal that all you have to do is engage with any website for about five minutes before you find yourself in the middle of the same debate.
The Oresteia offers a comprehensible vision that works on shared assumptions of how human beings operate.
You might not be able to claim blood for blood, but the court system still allows you a claim of retribution. Wrongs are made right and the world is put into order.
There will be justice.
But not vengeance.
If Jesus had been advising Orestes, this is what he would have said: Forgive your mother for killing your father. Ask her to kill you next. If she refuses, bring her into your home and feed and clothe her. Love her. And expect no reward for doing as I command you. There is nothing you stand to gain by this mercy other than mercy itself.
One must have as much sympathy for the perpetrator of a crime as for the crime’s victim.
This is an inhuman standard.
Even Celia, who wasn’t human, couldn’t wrap her head around it.
Taken to its furthest logical extreme, the implication is that people don’t have to follow the scripts of their lives.
You are more than your base urges.
You don’t have to be as terrible as everyone else.
You don’t have to burn with pointless judgment.
There is another way.
And it is guided by absolute mercy and radical compassion.
This crazy hick showed up in sophisticated ol’ Jerusalem, where everyone posted on social media about the decline of society.
And he spoke of love and forgiveness and mercy and brotherhood.
And he told the people of Jerusalem that they didn’t have to follow the scripts of their lives.
So they killed him.
199,900 years of shitting in the living room.
He was crucified, given the lowest of all deaths.
“Ow, that really hurts,” said Jesus when the Roman legionnaire Casca Longinus thrust his spear into Jesus’ side.
“Give a fuck, me,” said Casca Longinus. “Haddaway and shite, you poof.”
Then Jesus died.
And maybe he came back to life.
Who fucking knows?
Anything’s possible in a world so supranatural that Donald J. Trump ends up in control of 6,800 nuclear warheads.
Chapter Eighteen
Bleak House
To understand how I ended up winning a $1.2-million judgment in a lawsuit against an Internet stalker who libeled me as a rapist, we have to go back to the early dim days of when I first decided to be a writer.
This was back around 2007 AD, when I was newly arrived in the city of Los Angeles.
I went west after the collapse of a romantic relationship that had lasted seven years, and I had moved to Los Angeles with the unconscious desire to be one of the people who come to California to die.
Much to my surprise, it turned out that moving to Los Angeles wouldn’t kill you.
So I had to do something.
Being a writer seemed as bad a fate as any.
In the first decade of the Twenty-First Century AD, there was a vogue called blogging.
Blogging happened when people operated websites and used those websites to publish their own inane commentary on the issues of the day.
There was a sense, then, that one could somehow launch blogging into a career as a writer.
Don’t ask me to explain this.
I did the same thing as every other pathetic would-be writer in the first decade of the Twenty-First Century AD.
I started my own blog.
I offered inane commentary on pointless bullshit.
My blog attracted a small but dedicated readership. I’m sure that the daily writing probably helped in some way, but fuck me if I can tell you how.
One member of that small but dedicated readership would end up becoming a huge problem.
At the time, I didn’t know their real name, but they’d left several comments on my blog, and they’d always use the same pseudonym: “Oyster the Clown.”
The comments were about me being a big ol’ homo.
In June of 2008 AD, the same person had sent me an email.
It made no sense.
This was the full extent of the communication between me and Oyster the Clown.
By 2009 AD, I’d stopped writing on the blog.
The website was still there, with its senseless opinions getting no younger, but I couldn’t be bothered.
I was doing a million other things, including figuring out how to get books published.
If my career as a writer felt non-existent when I was sexually harassed by Amber Tamblyn, then in 2009 AD I was something below that.
My career wasn’t even a career.
It was a stupid little idea on which I’d wasted too much time when I could have been doing things that actually made money.
Literally no one knew me as a writer.
There was nothing to know.
I should also mention that this happened before I lived in San Francisco.
I had yet to be exposed to the mendacity of the people who make money off the Internet.
My faith in humanity was not yet murdered.
I was much softer.
Over Thanksgiving of 2009 AD, while I was celebrating the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, someone went on the website of Vice and left comments on about fifty articles.
Vice was a media platform that specialized in gross-out journalism and videos in which a sneering idiot from Brooklyn would visit a war-torn locale and contextualize the havoc in terms that could be understood by American children.