Page 14 - GALIET EURIPIDES´MACARIA´S GIFTS: The Angel IV

Galiet & Galiet
reflected one’s fragility when the wheel of fortune turns and the gods abandon us. This obscure affectation, in a way, arouses feelings of fear, anger and horror at the socio-political injustice, cruelty, derived from King Eurystheus’ tyranny in one extreme, and of pity, of empathy, of brotherhood, of solidarity in the other. We are placed in their shoes and those who have suffered exile, the ‘illegals’, only those, who have walked the endless miles, in the mud, crossing rivers and mountains letting go of their babies and their elderly, missing siblings, being shot at, can truly know, understand, feel, be touched by Iolaus’ family ordeal.
Those who arrive arriving with their feet torn, their hearts callused, their souls inundated with pain and misery bringing oceans in them, flooded with tears and tears, reciting poems and prayers, holding on to the cross 3⁄4 and there is no resuscitation 3⁄4 their humming in the central jungles, the poetry of exodus sung 3⁄4and there is no resuscitation 3⁄4 their journeys, their poems becoming scars on their skin whose writing is perforated with blood-ink and machine gun, broken vein and bone dust. To know that this is not far from today’s hideous realities is to feel old Iolaus struggles, the tension between fate and liberty. Iolaus accepts, though hurt and frustrated, the inevitability of his fate. The audience, so to speak, feels his despair and the devastation of his “cruel hope” after the “fury of the storm” hits again, when the gods drop him and take away Demophon’s promised hearth, his hope of hopes: a home to land on. In this state of mind, after the audience is emptied into, inside, this emotional roller coaster 3⁄4 the heights of safety, the lows of loss 3⁄4 an apologetic Macaria leaves the sanctuary. Though she has heard Iolaus anguished soliloquy, she has not heard the last blow.
My Name, my essence. Macaria. Euripides has named me, Macaria 3⁄4 the “blessed one” 3⁄4 perhaps to entice us, to trigger in us what her “blessed” role and actions might become, lead to. The audience, familiar with Macaria as the
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