Last week, I saw a bumper sticker that said, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”
The next day, I saw a production of Blood Wedding, a revenge tragedy that ends with a double homicide. The play opens with a woman slicing a loaf of bread. She offers her grown son some, but he wants the knife. The mother withholds it. Her husband and older son were knifed years earlier, victims of an on-going feud.
The son tells his mother he wants to marry. The mother objects to his choice of bride, who once dated a man related to their enemies.
Her son reminds her that this man was eight years old when violence took his father and brother. The son also points out that his fiancé didn’t marry that guy, anyway. He’s now married to someone else. And the son takes the knife.
Blood Wedding was written by Federico García Lorca in 1932, but it plays with haunting modernity in today’s Windham County, where I live, and where the underlying violence of our culture erupts fairly often, with death by homicide resulting.
Off the top of my head, I can enumerate half-a-dozen murders in my rural neighborhood: A man stabbed his domestic partner in the middle of the afternoon at a gas station in Brattleboro. A man was stabbed with a ski pole at a party a few miles from my house. A woman I know bludgeoned her husband with a garden rake. A man I know shot another for taunting him about his girlfriend. More recently, a woman was executed on the side of the road for stealing drugs from her dealer. Ten days later, a coop employee fatally shot his supervisor.
The human propensity for violence is ancient and deep. And despite any number of religious dictums against it, our culture seems to be obsessed by it, as manifested in the literature of Western Civilization, from the Greeks to the Elizabethans to modern times, with stories about revenge and violence from TV to the movies.
But I wonder if we haven’t been misreading these stories. The violence in Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story is meant to warn, not to copy. We’re supposed to remember that revenge always fills at least two graves, while those who survive are stunned into sorrow – the audience included. These stories are prompts for creative reasoning and spiritual change, not more violence.
This alone can be a dangerous message to convey. Garcia Lorca, the playwright, was himself murdered in 1936.
Still, in 2013, it’s important to be reminded by works of performance art like Blood Wedding, of the need for civic dialogue as a means to tame our violent natures in order to live peacefully, with shared community standards. Gun control may be a part of this discussion, but first we would do well to better understand our own violent natures.