Decomp News: OEDIPUS TEXT

Greek archeologist just released findings of a newly discovered scroll accredited to Sophocles's. It turns out to be an alternate ending to the landmark Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex. The new ending seems to foreshadow real world events and world governments are bracing for the reaction. The new ending puts in doubt many of humanities paradigms projected onto us by the ancient west. One Anthropologist who had a early look at the scroll was heard to of said “time is a creation of the ancient Aristocrats, so they can horde immortality and kill the poor. Tragedy is not natural it’s a conspiracy.” Decomp was able to find a leaked copy of the new ending. Here it is in full.

IOKASTE: Oh my cursed husband, who wants to untie all knots and solve all riddles. My husband would have taken the open jar from Pandora, held it upside down, and tapped the bottom for good measure. It is as if he cast this spell on us himself. We would have died happy without his curiosity. The men who have the key to the mystery are old. If these questions had waited a few more years, we would have been left without answers. I rather Thebes was sacked and my children and I were placed in the lowest of slavery. We would at least have our past glory, now there is nowhere on earth we can go to avoid this shame. Somehow, Mars has thrown the net of hated vengeance across my family’s entire life.
APHRODITE: Queen Iokaste, why are you bothering Zephyr with your words? He cares not for our problems. Instead, seek help or consul from me. IOKASTE: I speak anytime and anywhere because someone must be always eaves dropping on my family and conspiring to create the deepest woes. The only way such a complex plot against my family could be woven is if everyone and everything was in on the conspiracy. My childhood teacher, that tree, the ants beneath my feet, my own eyes conspire against me. The ruin I am evading unfolded many years ago; I cannot escape what has already been done.
APHRODITE: I can’t standing seeing you like this, dear daughter. How is your husband and family different from when I saw them just two days ago?
IOKASTE: They are none different. The only thing that has changed is that I know all my family’s relations. Only one fact changed in my understanding of the world. My child by Laios lived.APHRODITE: Is that not good news?
IOKASTE: My husband and his riddles! He thinks he won a kingdom with a riddle. He thinks solving this new riddle will save his kingdom. He is Cerberus, chasing his own tail into Hades. My husband has promised Thebes’s honey, but he comes back with bees and a bear.
APHRODITE: Calm yourself you sound like a drunken oracle!
IOKASTE: Oracles, yes. They have spun this web through time snaring my family. A curse we inherited, a curse that arced over his grandfather and great-grandfather who lived happier lives. A cursed arrow of Apollo that struck through both of my husbands on the same day. Why must my children pay for a curse from a dead man onto a dead man? Pelops has damned the innocent!
APHRODITE: Iokaste, tell me everything as clearly as you can.(Iokaste speaks aloud all the events for the first time)
APHRODITE: Oh Apollo is harsh and heartless! He will cut down men as if they are no different then wheat! The will of some Gods is for both kingdoms and curses to be inherited. If you do wrong now, it will leave a stain on man until that line is wiped out. The immortal mind may see the transition of grandfather to father and to son as one person. Some trespasses are too great to be paid for in one lifetime. If I were a god, I would weigh a man’s soul by his own passions.
IOKASTE: Priestess, is Oedipus not a good, honest, and just King? Has he willingly done wrong?
APHRODITE: Everything you say I know as true, but what can I do? All I can do is make offerings and pray to Aphrodite.
IOKASTE: But even she cannot change the past.
APHRODITE: The past has not changed, it is the same as it always has been. What she can change is Apollo and Mar’s absolute authority. When a god makes a judgment against man, man will always be guilty unless another god makes a judgment against that god.
IOKASTE: Then let us act.
APHRODITE: I warn you the goddess is more likely not to act unless she already planned to intervene, but my goddess is love and too much impossible evil has happened for me not to believe that impossible good could also happen.
Part 2

[ Iokaste and Aphrodite rush towards the palace they see Oedipus leaves the herdsmen.]
OEDIPUS: I can’t even die here; I would taint Thebes like a rancid dog in the well. Oh my children… guilty of being my vile offspring, sentenced to be in a station below lepers. Foul destiny humiliating me in my agony.
IOKASTE: My Oedipus, look at him broken like a bag of tar, blood and bones. He is passed death, as I should be. I must…
APHRODITE: We must speak with him, “King Oedipus over here!”
OEDIPUS: Speak, I spoke enough today. I spoke my way into Hades. I avowed my way into a trap. Wife, oh it pains me to see you, I have wronged you!
IOKASTE: You have solved your riddle. Oh horrible riddle that unravels our skin, that makes barn animals out of kings.
OEDIPUS: I walk on four legs, I am a sick dog.
APHRODITE: Listen to my consul the two of you. How are you different from yesterday? Oedipus you had killed that man on the road yesterday just as today. You are strong and wise as you were yesterday. Your children have not changed into harpies. The only thing that has changed is how you think of yourself and your family.
OEDIPUS: Priestess has your size not changed. Do you not speak in divine tones? If I am not mistaken, this is a goddess before me.
APHRODITE: I have also seen a plot has been woven against my children and me. For I am your great-grandmother and this curse is to eradicate the line of Mar’s and myself. My brother Apollo plots against me and the medium I control. I play heartstrings like a harp and he uses the threads of destiny to strangle his victims. He aligned himself with Hephaestus to avenge our forbidden lust. They want to cleanse the earth of our seed. However, I caught them in their plot.
OEDIPUS: But great goddess this does not change my hideous curse.
APHRODITE: Curse?! You have Olympian blood running through you. Mortal laws of husbandry do not apply to you. You are not human cattle, you are of divine stock. The divine lord of all gods, Zeus, bore children by what you would call sisters, aunts, and nieces. Do you call the all-powerful Zeus cursed? Do you call all of us who govern the cosmos cursed because we propagate ourselves from within?
OEDIPUS: But what are we to do great goddess, we are still scorned by man? Even if this holds true for gods, we must live among and according to men and their customs. We must also leave Thebes. If we do not Apollo will continue his pestilence on our people.
APRODITE: All of this has been foreseen. On the docks, there is a ship. That ship is destined for lands the people of Thebes have not seen nor heard of. Your children and their children’s children are predestined to populate these lands and you will call it Arkansas. THE END?!

Decomp book Review

My salted slug eyes struggle I got backwards x-ray vision where the sidewalk ends you’ll find decomposition. Help a brother rub one out join him under the over pass sniffing aimlessly orange pills. These are the days, before I knew my number. I have a dead see scroll version of “Maybe Will See”. Letters worn stickers on a kabbalah rubik's cube. He was an older man when he wrote it. He was leaving his mindset of a drunken blue-collar worker teetering between nihilism and nirvana. Instead, he was entering a state of reflection and cautious optimism. He no longer wanted to point out the pointless; he wanted to impart wisdom into the world. He opens with humankind’s greatest endeavor, (no not fucking) the exploration of space (cheating on Gaia) . He was born in 1920 and saw many of the innovations of the 20th century unfold; such as television, computers and humankind going to the moon. He has some insight into what these events represent. He does not care about the details of the endeavors; he only glosses over them. What was important for him, were the effects these events had on humankind. They distract us, they make us believe in a lofty ideology that we are not genetically predisposed to believe in, and it keeps us “from doing things to ourselves” (Stanford 1080). This poem is about humanity’s need to escape from itself so it does not do self-inflicted damage. When speaking of man’s exploration of the final frontier He states, “I am for this.” He sounds like a hopeful parent of a juvenile delinquent who approves of the positive effects that high school wrestling may have on their child. Man needs to channel his violent energies into something mysterious and infinite like the universe.
By innovating, our hunting instinct is eclipsed by our gathering instinct. “Our poking around” which “is pleasurable” stops us from attacking ourselves and others (Stanford 1080). Bukowski falls from the heavens into the mundane by making an enigmatic connection between space exploration and better peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Bukowski’s better sandwich could be like the creation of Tang, a side effect of advancement in technology. With this perspective, technology and exploration would be our salvation. The sloth, caused by the convenience of technology, coupled with the religion of science, would mesmerize us. The sandwich could also represent the fact that everything is more vivid to those that participate in a life explored. The exploration of space gives everyone hope, a reason to wake up. The next day could bring untold mysteries that could take a lifetime to digest.
Bukowski sees two sides of humanity in this poem; he sees a curious inventive side and a war-like, suicidal, and destructive side. Charles Bukowski, like all men his age, had lived to see many wars and many innovations, and he prefers our preoccupation with innovation to war. Seeing new things replaces man’s ever-acute nihilism with curiosity.
The title “Maybe Will See” has a desperate optimism to it. He believes our growing understanding of the universe is a distraction from doing bad, but what if humanity finds something? He creates a glimmer of hope and maybe his distraction turns out to be the Holy Grail. Maybe we will see. I pissed on the track.