Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991) is an adaptation of Sophocles' play, Philoctetes, written in the 5th century B.C. In Heaney's version, it was first performed at the Guildhall, Derry, Ireland, on October 1, 1990.
Philoctetes, by James Berry
Philoctetes was a Greek hero of the Trojan War renowned as an archer, having inherited the great bow of Hercules, which was known never to miss its mark. Maimed with a foul, suppurating wound to his foot, Philoctetes was marooned by his Greek compatriots on the small island of Lemnos ten years before the play opens. Now, still battling the Trojans, the Greeks have heard a prophecy that only Philoctetes and his bow can lead them to a final victory. So they have sent the cunning Odysseus and the youthful son of Achilles, Neoptolemus, to Lemnos to persuade the bitter Philoctetes to return and lead them in battle.
The Chorus, when not doubling as Odysseus's ship's crew, serves the common role in ancient Greek drama of greater wisdom or foresight than that of the protagonists. They set the first scene by noting, unflatteringly but with an eye to their own complicity, the self-regard and overbearing pride of the heroes, Philoctetes, Hercules and Odysseus:
All throwing shapes, every one of them
Convinced he’s in the right, all of them glad
To repeat themselves and their every last mistake,
No matter what.
People so deep into
Their own self-pity, self-pity buoys them up.
People so staunch and true, they’re fixated,
Shining with self-regard like polished stones.
And their whole life spent admiring themselves
For their own long-suffering.
The young Neoptolemus is exempted from this critique, and it is his growth into mature manhood, generous and kind in true friendship, and without duplicity or guile, that constitutes one of the play's two central themes. The other, linked to the first, is Philoctetes' ultimately successful struggle to give up his self-pity and rage at the comrades who betrayed him, rejoin the Greek cause, and thus be cured of his wound. The interweaving of these two themes, the vicissitudes of developing trust and friendship between these two, is the heart of the play, as it moves from a kind of death-in-life to a genuine change of heart, emergence from a life dictated by past suffering to one embracing greater authenticity and a still wounded but more capacious, honest and forgiving justice.
It is in this context, in a penultimate but not final moment, that the Chorus utters the lines adopted as the subtitle of Reckonings. Its moving speech is worth recording in full, as it speaks of our own struggle, too, and echoes through every page and thought of this journal:
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
None of us is without wounds. None of us escapes the wounding of others. We all speak sweet double-talk, lose hope, sleep when we should wake, fail to see, bear, hurt, betrayal and their armor of body and heart.
We can, as well, join others in healing and forgiveness, that "utter, self-revealing double-take of feeling." That sea-change, giving and receiving, that change of heart, is what we call grace, and it can happen not only once in a lifetime but over and again through a lifetime. Not often, perhaps, with whole heart and full-fledged trust, nor without distress, but still "someone is hearing the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term."
"I leave," says Philoctetes at the very end of the play, "half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk, and the half-true rhyme is love."
Full circle. For the poet-translator Seamus Heaney has begun his play with an epigram, these hard and beautiful lines of W.H. Auden:
‘O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.’
Seamus Heaney (1939 - 2013)
