◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Part One The Pattern I am Tiresias. I was the prophet of Thebes, and I have been blind for three thousand years, and in all that time I have never once been wrong — and it has never once been enough. Let me tell you how I lost my eyes, because it is the whole of what I am. The gods took my sight and gave me another in its place. Foreknowledge. The seeing of what is coming. They let me live on through generation after generation, and for a time they made me a woman, so that I have known this life from both sides. I have seen more than anyone who ever lived. And I am here to tell you that seeing is not the same as being heard. I stood before kings, and what I learned there you are living now. When Thebes was dying of a plague, I came to Oedipus, the king, and told him the truth. That the rot in the city was him. That he himself was the thing he was hunting. And he raged at me. He called me a traitor, a fraud, a man paid to bring him down. The one who told him the truth, he named his enemy. That is the first thing the proud ruler does. He does not answer the seer. He accuses the seer of treason. Later I came to Creon, who had made himself a tyrant, and warned him that his cruelty would bring the dead down on his own house. He too called me corrupt — an old fool selling prophecies for gold. Until the bodies were counted, and among them his own son and his own wife, and then, too late, he believed me. Do you hear the pattern? The ruler who cannot bear the true word. Who calls the one who speaks it a liar and a traitor. Who mistakes the man naming the disease for the disease itself. It always ends the same — with the king in the ruins of the house he would not let anyone warn him about. And here is the cruelest part of it. I was blind, and I saw everything. They had their eyes, and saw nothing. Oedipus could not see what he was until it destroyed him — and then he tore his eyes out, because they had never shown him the truth anyway. That is your condition now. You are not blind. You look right at the man. You see him every day. And you cannot see what he is. You have kept your eyes and lost your sight, and I lost my eyes and cannot make you use yours. In the second of these I will tell you why I still speak at all, after three thousand years of no one listening. For I have finally understood who I was always speaking to. It was never the king. Part Two The Chorus I am Tiresias again. In the first of these I showed you the pattern I have watched for three thousand years: the proud ruler who cannot bear the true word, who calls the seer a traitor, and destroys himself and his city rather than listen. And I told you that you, who still have your eyes, have gone as blind to the man as any king I ever warned. So why do I still speak, if no one ever listens? Let me tell you the ache of it first, honestly. To see the ruin coming and be unable to stop it. To be hated for the sight. I am not sure it was ever a gift. Perhaps the blindness was the mercy, and the sight was the punishment. And yet I speak. Because I have finally understood who I was always speaking to. It was never the king. The king is fated. Oedipus was always going to fall, and Creon, and this one too. I was never going to save them. But there was always a crowd on the edge of the story. The chorus. The ones who stood at the side and watched the king rage at the truth and said nothing, told themselves it was not their place. And they were the only ones in the whole tragedy who were free. The king is bound by his fate. The chorus never is. They could always have moved. That is you. You are not the king. You are the chorus — the one part of this story that could always, at any moment, have acted differently. Every generation, it is the chorus who decides whether the ending is inevitable — and every generation, it forgets that it can. So use the eyes I do not have. Look at him, and for once, see him. Say the true thing the seer is punished for saying. Do not wait for the bodies to be counted before you believe me. I have never been heard in time. Be the first. Be the ones who saw.