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Alcestis Backstory
Donald Kunze
Marriage and the
hearth-fire. Detail from |
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Introduction. The
story of Alcestis comes from Greek mythology but is more famously
known through the version offered by Euripides, the Greek tragedian.
Scholars have often, for this reason, been tempted to see Alcestis
as a tragedy, but the form and traditional placement of the drama
(as a performance set between two more serious works) indicates
that the original audiences very likely understood it to be a
farce or satyr-play. The inclusion of Heracles as a character
would, in itself, be an indication of intended comic reading.
Heracles was a combination satyr and miles gloriosus or
bragging soldier. We would know him today in the form of simple
but courageous types such as "Rocky." I'm looking at Alcestis in terms of this alchemy of the central hearth. Fire was not only a magical component in the tradition of Medieval alchemy, it played a primary part in the Empedoclean quartet of elements and has been a central feature of nearly every theory of culture, including Vitruvius's. The Stoics aligned fire with the animus, the spark-like component of life, inserted like a wedge (coelum) into passive matter. That fire also contains the spirits of the dead and is specifically to be tended by a woman is our first clue. The second is that the hearth has required special spatial treatment within the household. As a "vent" to the realm of the dead, it had to be protected from the view of strangers. But, another custom is both curious and important. During a wedding ceremony, the daughter had "demonstrate" her unwillingness, to avoid offending the manes she was leaving in order to take up service at her husband's hearth. The enduring customs of carrying the bride across the threshold, of disguising the bride as a corpse, and of having the groom pantomime a struggle to abduct his bride descend from the view that the father's manes would be offended at the departure of someone who had been, symbolically, their bride.  The fact that marriage in many cultures involves a complex negotiation of boundaries and manipulation of visible appearances suggests that a study of the boundaries themselves has much to reveal about the relationship of domestic space to the "liminal" spaces of belief and magic transaction. This study proceeds "topologically" to establish some insight into the play Alcestis and its precedents, ancient marriage customs, and the evolution of domestic space; and also to refine a topological study method that, using boundaries as its main notational sign, is capable of demonstrating a logic amidst the complexities of architectural behavior.
Boundary Language In order to make sense of complex human
use of boundaries, some system of record-making is required. As
a system, it should be capable of recording and transforming the
subtle and often unnoticed details of boundary behavior. In short,
the records should in some sense constitute a "boundary language"
capable not only of describing but simulating boundary conditions
in their full complexity. As a notational system, boundary language
should have three virtues.
 The Möbius condition: the Cretan Liar paradox involves the speaker's reference to himself (1). Boundary language makes a basic topological distinction between "reality," which is conditioned by conventional meanings and cultural practices, and "the Real," which is surplus to the network of signifiers. The Real is, quite literally, "unmeaningful," but it is nonetheless very significant and even commonplace. What is more, the Real often is the source of new meaning, as in the case of the "hapax logomenon," the creation of a novel term that has significance "immediately," such as the tuffet sat upon by little Miss Muffet. The point is that meaning seems to work on a system of reference to precedents: established meanings with assigned orders (2). In fact, meaning is, as Frascari suggests, "macaronic" not a mish-mash of linguistic polyglot but, rather, expressions that combine and supersede other conventional systems of meaning. "Macaronic" meaning illustrates this important point about boundary language: that the Real's precedence over reality is a matter of the scale of meaning. Macaronic meaning includes the invisible with the visible, the unknown with the known. The speech of alchemy is, by definition, "macaronic." Alcestis is a story about an escape from
the teleology of the symbolic relationships of the traditional
family, but the escape at first seems Pyrrhic: Alcestis must die.
Hades is outside the realm of life in the same way the Real is
outside the realm of the symbolizable. The story uses a literary
device, the substantiation of Hades into a realm, complete with
a ruler, Death, which heroes may visit and return. In this way
the Real is something we can "talk about" although our
expressions must be tongue-in-cheek. In the story, teleology structures
the audience's expectation that Alcestis is done for, and the
escape from teleology, the revelation of the Real as a return
from Hades, disrupts the traditional domestic realm through a
joke. The scale of readaptation that engages the comic has been
denied by many classical scholars but is an essential part of
the "logic" of Alcestis as a play. At the "macaronic"
scale, Heracles' buffoonery is apparent and pointedly undermines
Admetus's moral basis. Boundaries in Alcestis Normally, the critic begins with a text or other work and dissects it, either by finding the historical or motivational ground or by showing that certain structural features produced an inevitable outcome. This approach is based on a notion of categories that can be subdivided, refined, and redrawn to fit the case at hand. Through this tactic, a critic may distinguish the important from the trivial, the valuable from the inconsequential. The boundary serves this critical approach by being neutral and untroublesome: a distinction that is nothing more than that; something that can distinguish an object, character, or theme for dissection. Following this path, Alcestis as a story would be easily traced back to stories in Greek folklore, related to domestic customs and use of language, and articulated as "evidence" of whatever else the critic wished to emphasize. The problem is that frequently one puzzle is exchanged for another, and the connections based on categorical distinctions have done little more than parse untested assumptions about the nature of history, art, and culture.
The predominance of intransitive boundaries in the daily life of cultures makes the academic confidence in a putatively "normal" boundary inappropriate and misleading. Intransitivity itself can be traced to the (paradoxical) condition of self-reference. In the production of myth and art, self-reference generates "knots," or problematic structures, that guide the unfolding of poetic experience. By joining these cases into what can be called "the Möbius condition," knots of various kinds can be related through a common topology, and the condition of self-reference can be shown to be one of the most productive sources of cultural forms and practices. The common topology of self-reference is not unlike a "silent system of signification" operating beneath surface meanings, and so the name "boundary language" is not completely inappropriate, although I don't intend to imply that the topology is a "metalanguage" or, in fact, a language in any strict sense (3). In the process of playing out the consequences
of boundary language through the story of Alcestis, I will rely
on some terms developed by the psychologist Jacques Lacan. These
give some concreteness and background to some otherwise difficult
concepts, such as the "necessity" of the victim to be
paired or split and the relation of this split to an "anamorphic"
condition lying within a symbolic situation. This is not an attempt
to reduce architecture to psychology but, rather, show how psychology,
architecture, and many other things, sharing a common relationship
to the topologies described as a "language of boundaries,"
can more readily inform each other. The Story King Admetus is looking for a way to escape dying. The god Apollo, who had been "exiled" as a mortal slave in Admetus's household (in punishment for killing the Cyclops, beloved of Zeus), repays his good treatment there by making a deal with Death to extend Admetus's normal allotment of life. A bargain is struck: Admetus can live if he finds a relative willing to die in his place. Everyone refuses him except his wife, Alcestis, who agrees to die in his place on the sole condition that Admetus not remarry. Heracles happens to visit Admetus just at the time of Alcestis's funeral. Admetus tries to shield Heracles from the funeral ceremonies, fearing that it will scare away this illustrious guest. Heracles pries the truth out of a servant and decides to rescue Alcestis by storming the gates of Hades and bullying Death out of yet another victim. Alcestis is brought back, but Heracles decides to play a joke on Admetus, in repayment for lying about Alcestis's funeral. He disguises Alcestis as a veiled "young bride," a gift that, after not much wrangling, Admetus accepts, violating his deathbed oath to Alcestis. Because the "bride" is "really" his wife, he's technically innocent of violation, however, except that the audience is fully aware of his deeply compromising behavior. Humiliated, Admetus accepts his heroic wife back, and Death is twice cheated. The story of Alcestis involves a negotiation across a "tricky" boundary the trickiest, in fact. Are the circumstances and details of the story about cheating death incidental or significant? Interlacing "signatures" of boundary behavior predominate. For example, Heracles' visit evidences the Greek practice of hospitality. Heracles is put up in a part of Admetus's palace that is cut off from the funeral proceedings, but this is not an unusual arrangement. Fustel de Coulanges relates that the custom of shielding the family hearth from the view of strangers, or vice versa, was long-lived. The evolution of a space inside the house dedicated to the hospitable treatment of strangers required a topological redefinition of the function of the house. Another boundary theme has to do with marriage. Wives and daughters were the official priestesses of Hestia, goddess of the hearth. The gods of the hearth fire, the manes, were exclusively masculine. The masculine fire and female guardians were ritually married, and the virginity of daughters and fidelity of the wife were matters not of morality but severe religion. Without this symbolic marriage to the fire, the family risked breaking the sacred bonds with the ancestral dead. All sense of identity depended on the gods of the hearth. When Heracles asks Admetus who has died, the King's ambiguous answer reflects the ambiguous status of the wife in the family. She was both inside and outside the family. As a woman, even as queen and mother, she would never be included in the line of ancestral identities that served as family gods. Yet, she tended the fire where they dwelled. When a daughter left her father's household, it was necessary to falsify this event for the sake of the manes, who would be offended if she left voluntarily. The bride thus feigned resistance, and the wedding was made to appear to be in some respects a funeral. The married daughter then tended her husband's hearth and manes. The wedding's inclusion of devices emphasizing the bride's unwillingness point to an ambiguous relationship to the hearth. It is often difficult to tell whether the point of a custom is to shield the hearth from being seen or seeing. The function of the gaze, in fact, seems to operate in the direction from authority to its subjects, rather than the other way around. It is the manes who must not see the daughter defect to another's hearth. This helps us understand the particular
structural parallel that unites the story of Alcestis with the
"backstory" of Apollo's exile as a mortal. Alcestis's
spell in Hades is equivalent to Apollo's slavery in the world
of the living. The implication is that of three concentric zones:
the first occupied by gods, the second by mortals, the third by
the dead. But, because Hades is also the location of the family
gods, a certain twisted circularity is suggested. We can't simply
put the Olympians on top and the dead on the bottom of a linear
cosmos. The bottom is somehow related to the top. Revising the Direction of the Gaze In view of Jacques Derrida, the gaze emanates from the viewer and travels towards objects of desire, control, etc. Jacques Lacan points out, however, that the psychological mechanics of this gaze is precisely the reverse. The object of the gaze gazes back precisely at that point where the subject "sees himself implicated by his desire." That point, the "objet petit a," or "small other" (autre), is the object-cause of desire that in ways that remind us of Zeno's paradoxes about Achilles and the Tortoise, the arrow that cannot reach its target, etc. generates its own uncrossable distance between pursuer and pursued. The "small other" has many architectural counterparts. For reasons that are quite interesting but cannot be fully elaborated here, this "object-cause of desire" is traditionally associated with vents, hearths, jewel-like spaces, and "poché" (concealed) spaces. These can both define or destroy, "from the inside out," the authority of the "Big Other," whatever form that authority might take. Just as the small other is a surplus to the Big Other, it is a part of the Real that is surplus to reality. The small other, the object-cause of desire, is almost always related to some phenomenon of anamorphosis the visual embodiment of transformation that combines opposites in an "ingenious" fashion. Getting a bride from the father's house to the husband's, getting Alcestis back to the land of the living, and developing a hospitable Greek domestic space are all parts of the same problem involving . . . The twist may be internal to thought and language, as suggested by the common linguistic roots of words that are "subsequently" opposite, such as altus (both "high" and "low"), sacer (both sacred and infamous), and hostes (both guest and enemy). In Alcestis, this "twist" connects depths the Hades to the absolute heights of Mt. Olympus somehow, and we are led to think of the famous Möbius band, the strip of paper turned once before being rejoined with its other end. The twist is also a theme in the backstory of the backstory, the reason for Apollo's exile. Apollo had been in love with a mortal, Coronis. When she betrayed him even when she was pregnant with his child, his sister Artemis, killed her. But, Apollo regretted this murder and, on the funeral pyre, pulled his child from Coronis's womb. The child was Asklepius, the legendary physician who acquired from Medusa's blood the power of life and death. Zeus, jealous of Asklepius's powers, struck him dead with a thunder-bolt. In retribution, Apollo killed Zeus's darling, the Cyclops. As punishment, Zeus exiled Apollo to the mortal realm of Admetus's household. Apollo's exile is analogous to Alcestis's
death, but the "offset" that makes human life equivalent
to death for Apollo allows for an "overlap" of function.
Furthermore, the connection between the two stories, and Apollo's
own backstory reveal a resonance between common structures. If
the gods, heroes, mortals, and dead that populate the story create
a series of steps, each alike but one "below" the other,
they also demonstrate that the structure of the step is the same
whether we're on at the top or bottom of the stairs. It's not
even clear whether the top and bottom are actually two different
places. Anamorphy The most interesting artifacts of this resonance are the "anamorphic" elements that appear in the main story and its backstories. "Anamorphy" usually refers to the specific kind of image hidden inside other Don. The anamorph is a kind of trick that requires the viewer to take up a special viewpoint. It implicates the viewer, both in terms of this new position and what can be seen from it, when it's recognized. Shakespeare cites this in Twelfth Night: "Did you never see the picture of 'we three'?" (II.3.16). The picture showed the heads of two fools, one upside down. The image of an ass was visible from the side, however, and when the viewer occupied the right spot, he became "the third fool." This implication of the audience as an active element, "moving to the side of the normal viewing position," is important. In Alcestis the audience's position is the key to the essentially comic/satiric tone of the drama. The audience, like Alcestis and Apollo, occupy the position of "the third fool" the position of foolishness but also insight. Anamorphy as an idea includes any example where a bi-valent condition includes or implicates someone (a "third person" or "outsider" usually) who must shift position in order to accomplish some "impossible task" or "irrational act." Apollo must shift position in his exile, Alcestis (Admetus tells Heracles that she's an "outsider") shifts from live wife to dead bride. An anamorphic element accompanies or precedes both shifts. For Alcestis, it is the figure of Heracles, who as a hero, is simultaneously god and mortal. Even the word "hero," which originally meant just "the dead," reflects this ambiguity. Heroes had the privilege of visiting Hades and returning, and it is this double citizenship that makes him useful in the play. For Apollo, the anamorph related to his exile was his son, Asklepius, model and founder of medical practice. Born of a mortal mother and divine father, Asklepius additionally had the bivalent power of life and death, acquired through a pharmaceutical, the blood of Medusa. Blood from the right of Medusa's body could kill, that from left could bring the dead back to life. Zeus, alarmed that this power had fallen into mortal hands, had destroyed Asklepius with his thunderbolt. Apollo's murder of the Cyclops
beloved by Zeus was an act of revenge, but not without its cultural
implications. The Cyclops not only was the progeny of Zeus, his
single eye and cave dwelling were emblematic of the unidimensionality
of divine authority. In our terms, the Cyclops was limited to
a literal interpretation of reality. The giant's nature was extended
to the practice of early religions, which rigidly adhered to the
oracular signs derived in the practice of auspices. Laws were
literally interpreted, and families were laws unto themselves,
admitting no exceptions of hospitality or civic development. "Cyclopean"
societies were thus monadic, isolated, and tyrannical. "Destroying
the Cyclops" was equivalent to establishing the customs of
hospitality, which Apollo enjoyed in the household of Admetus,
though a slave. Slavery, culturally and historically, was one
means of transforming Cyclopean societies into modern, "hospitable"
ones. Slaves, who gradually gained status and social respect,
humanized society from the inside.
The best known illustration of the Gödelian nature of self-reference is the Cretan paradox. The Cretan says that "All Cretans are liars." The statement as such produces two logically opposed results. If the Cretan, like all Cretans, is lying, then the statement must be false. But, if the statement is false, then it confirms the claim that all Cretans are liars and therefore is true, as a specific example of the general cultural practice. The paradox is not resolved, but it is realized as a joke about the Gödelian situation in general by the audience, whose position as a "third fool" is taken up through the anamorphy of the statement. As the audience "walks around to the 'side' of the true-or-false statement of the Cretan," it realizes its own human Cretan nature. The Cyclopean order does not permit this
"enthymemic" audience relationship. One does not laugh
at the Cyclops, especially while in the cave. In The Odyssey,
the evolution of hospitality is miniaturized in the episode where
Odysseus confronts the literal Cyclops. Odysseus, consummate liar
and trickster, can get in and out of the Cyclops' cave and even
buy time by giving the Cyclops a false name, "Nohbdy,"
which fails to rally the neighboring giants. "Nohbdy"
remains, in the Cyclopean mentality, a pronoun, while the Greeks
escape through the cave's vent by means of the Real, the proper
name. Macaronic meaning incorporates the Real by extending its
scale to embrace the audience (enthymemic) relationship. A Graphic Model There are many examples of intransitive boundaries in culture. Functionally, we say that they perform the "Gödelian tasks" of sorting out self-reference, ideological conflicts, dramatic situations, and theological conceptions. Their visible evidence is varied. The caduceus of Asklepius, showing two snakes twisted about a staff immediately suggests a doubled and intransitive boundary condition. The popular image of the Uroborous, the serpent whose mouth consumes its tale, is equally direct. The labyrinth and its variants, such spirals and knots, convey the fractal-like qualities of self-reference. Often the evidence is non-visual. Plots, songs, verbal devices, spells, and even names can embody the intransitive.  For the sake of brevity, we can use the short-hand symbol of the "zig-zag," a chip of the labyrinth so to speak, to suggest that every boundary crossing is a complex act. The zig-zag locates a "point of anamorphosis" an object or element that admits of two or more distinctively different but equally coherent interpretations. On one side of this element is the authority of some "Big Other" whatever seems to underwrite, produce, or empower the anamorphic presentation. On the other side is the subject who, more than anything, is immobilized or transfixed by the anamorphic element/event.  Because this position is fixed by the symbolic relationship that binds the Other, the anamorphic communication, and the subject into a comprehensive set of symbolic relationships a "network of signifiers" so to speak another position has to be taken to see the "zag" of the "zig-zag." This act of displacement seeks a position to the side of the subject "fixed" by the network of signifiers. Moving outside of the symbolic in-line relationship to the authoritarian Other, another kind of subject takes the place of the subject-as-victim. Because this substitution usually involves a "convenient fiction" (Ø), the substitute is described by a neologism as a "fictim" (victim plus fiction).  From the new vantage point outside the symbolic relationships between the Other and the subject, the "fictim" can discover, through the anamorphic qualities of the situation, a "surplus" of the other, a "small other" which "frames the Other from the inside." This is the vent-like or jewel-like escape route that deconstructs the authority of the Big Other an element that frequently dresses itself up in the popular culture Don of the "fourth dimension."  Lacan-speak. The terms "Big Other," subject, and "objet petit a" ("little other") are drawn from the psychologist Jacques Lacan and the sociologist Slavoj Zizek because, more than any others, they have shown how the reverse-direction gaze (object to subject) works in topologically consistent ways to structure cultural spaces and events at all levels. This is not an attempt to rewrite architecture as psychology but, as mentioned above, to find multiple foundations for a "boundary language" describing the "topologies" of human spatial experience. My diagrams don't correspond exactly to Lacan's, but they come close to uniting Lacan's various accounts into a single Möbius-band structure, something Lacan didn't do without introducing extraneous elements. Lacan's famous point about the human mind really being outside, in the objects and spaces around it, makes perfect sense to artists and architects, who are keenly aware that the physical environment is charged with psychic value, and that this value serves culture by providing ever-renewable sources of energy. The significant breakthrough offered by Lacan is the reversal of the presumed direction of the gaze. This enables power to be most present in the "presumably passive" acts of perception, where there is no actual "Big Other" around pulling the strings. The "back-projection" of power and authority is a more useful model for the imagination, which produces complete worlds using fragmentary experiences and objects. Freud-speak. One way of getting into the essence of the Möbius-like structure is to consider Freud's famous three stages of personal development: oral,anal, and phallic. In this theory, sexual interest is displaced from one part of the body to other parts. Satisfaction at first centers on oral activity, is relocated to anal/excretory functions, and finally relocates to the phallus. Lacan's important addition to this view is that the phallus is not the same as the penis. The phallus is, most generally, anything that appears and disappears, anything that is capable of breaking the laws of scale-relations, anything that might be produced ex nihilo by some external stimulae. Therefore, women as well as men can possess and use the phallus. Phallic qualities pertain to art, cinema, games, and experiences of all kinds. Zizek has applied the three stages to describe the transition, in cinema, from the initial consumption of Don (oral), to the rearrangement and manipulation of Don in editing (anal), finally to the concentration of interest in small objects that turn out to have crucial significance. Hitchcock's famous "tracking shots" exemplify the phallic technique perfectly. As in the film, Notorious, the camera focuses on some small object (in this case, a key) from a high and distant vantage point. The tracking shot slowly closes in on the object, and the audience becomes aware of its pivotal importance in the plot. In Notorious, the key opens the wine cellar where Ingrid Bergman's Nazi husband, played by Claude Rains, has concealed samples of uranium. She has slipped the key off her husband's key-ring, but if the champaigne runs out during the party, Rains will notice that the key is missing. Subsequent shots of guests gulping down champaigne a bit too quickly put the audience in a state of frenzied anticipation. The "ticking clock" technique becomes extremely effective.  This is the basic structure of the "boundary language diagram," or "BoLaGram." The region on the left delineates the interests and objects of the "Big Other." Flow of power, authority, etc. from left to right defines the place of the subject ($) on the right. Attempts to reorder this authority, to re-organize the symbols without departing the system of signifiers, is the "anal" reconstruction moving from right to left. Phallic reorganization brings in three distinctively new elements. First, the subject's substitute, the "fictim" who, through a fictional or imaginative escape (Ø) is able to gain a new vantage point from which the oral/anal exchange reveals its anamorphic aspect. The object and cause of this phallic reorganization is the "small object" that re-frames the situation "from the inside." As the object of the phallic view and a surplus of the Big Other, this small object is in the position to restructure the authority of the Other. The key in Notorious is a perfect example, in this sense. It is a surplus of the Other, the object of the anamorphic view captured by the tracking shot, and is the "key" to both the wine cellar and the plot. Strikingly, when Rains discovers Bergman with her co-spy and lover, Cary Grant, they "fake" a kiss to make Rains think that they have met in the cellar for a tryst. Rains is to "mistakenly" think they are in love, but they are in love for real, making this kiss a perfect example of the anamorphic deconstruction of the gaze. From Big Other to subject, to fictim, to anamorph, to the small other, and back to the authoritarian Other again, is a cycle with a Möbius-style twist or flip in it. This logic can be refined into a plot diagram for the main story of Alcestis.  The Möbius condition follows the action, from Admetus's directive to find a substitute (in effect, to find a subject and "bar" him or her), Alcestis's "fixation" within the network of symbolic relations set up by Apollo's deal, Heracles as the substitute subject isolated by the fictional concealment of Alcestis's funeral, the anamorphic "value" of Heracles as hero able to visit Hades and return, and the disguised bride used to "undo" Admetus by tempting him into revoking his oath to Alcestis. The play's "happy ending" is brought about because the objet petit a, the object of desire, was also the original cause of desire and barred subject, Alcestis. The oral, anal, and phallic "stages" can be applied to the progression of drama within the play, particularly because the focus of characterization shifts from Admetus's thoughts and actions to Alcestis's to Heracles's. Heracles, a "phallic figure" par excellence, is predictably just the kind of anamorphic guy capable of retrieving a little other, a surplus of Mr. Big. This graphic characterization would be interesting enough in relation to the "topological economies" of boundary behavior, but more can be learned by finding this same structure in the several "backstories" of the play. There are two distinctive ones, the story of Apollo's exile to Admetus's household as a slave, and the story explaining the reason for this exile Apollo's failed romance with Coronis, his rescue of Asklepius from the funeral pyre, and the destruction of Asklepius by Zeus.  True to the nature of alchemy's search for "prior element," such as the "philosopher's stone," the Möbius topology shows how Apollo himself was in the position of the barred subject that Alcestis occupies in the main story. Without needing to know the cause, the important antecedent conditions leading to the story of Alcestis tell us that Apollo had been sentenced to exile in Admetus's household. What we barely realize, however, is that the structure of Apollo's exile will apply, element for element, to Alcestis's death and rescue by Heracles. The next step is to examine the conditions leading to Apollo's exile. This is the intriguing story of Apollo's love for a mortal, Coronis. Apollo appointed a crow (whose name is related to "coronis") to watch over his lover in his absence. The crow reported her deception with a mortal, Ischys, and in revenge, Apollo's sister Artemis shot her full of arrows.  The story of Apollo's romance and murder of Coronis provides the necessary link. Apollo kills Coronis but saves Asklepius. Zeus kills Asklepius, Apollo kills the Cyclops in revenge, and Zeus punishes Apollo. Apollo is treated kindly by Admetus, Apollo rewards Admetus, Apollo cheats death, Heracles again cheats death, and Admetus gets his wife back, most think undeservedly. The back-and-forth motion of action and reaction, crime and punishment, is complemented by an "eccentric" action using anamorphic devices to produce an "unraveling" effect. Is this topological Ur-map useful for creating interesting plot lines only, or are there broader implications? We can go one step further if we consider the ambiguous relationships that bind together light, the hearth fire, the spirits of ancestors, the evolving laws of hospitality, and ancient ideas about the physical universe. These relationships are not to be lightly undertaken, nor can it be treated here with the level of detail they deserve. A preliminary projection of what Zeus, Apollo, Asklepius, and the Cyclops may have meant in more general terms is possible, however. It's necessary to remember that the Greek household was governed by the ancestral spirits thought to reside in the family hearth. As mentioned in the opening lines of this article, the wife and daughters were responsible for maintaining the all-important flame that connected the living family to the dead ancestors. But, it's also important to regard the "literal physics" of this relationship that these "priestesses of Hestia" were thought to be married to the flame. As mentioned above, important ancient words and phrases frequently have opposite meanings. There may be, at an even more primitive level, the necessity of opposition that charges every truly significant substance such as fire with this built-in polarity. Our topological model suggests that this is the case. For fire to be the gateway to the realm of the dead certainly involves a few contradictions, but no less contradictory are the customs that define the role of women in ancient households. The play Alcestis in fact can afford to joke about the inability of Admetus to say whether Alcestis is a member of his family or not. In a legal sense, the place of women was unresolved. On one hand, it appears that their position was drastically inferior; on the other hand, they are entrusted with the most serious and important functions of household religion. The twisted topology of narrative and myth is outdone by the constantly flipping boundaries of authority that define domestic space. In a summary BoLaGram, I have attempted to re-state the program of the ancient household in terms of the bipolar nature of light. As a compound of darkness and light, the fire requires a "marriage," a conjunction of opposites. This is embodied by the symbolic marriage of the wife to the hearth fire.  The dark spark-like and secret element embodied in Zeus (lightning) is carried into the Stoic notion of the two-part psyche: animus as a counterpart to the passive anima. The idea is that light is necessarily a composite entity, something brought famously into poetic thought thousands of years later in Blake's famous inverted phrase "Darkness shining through the light." One thinks of the effect of the after-image, the luminosity of gems, and the conjunction of dawn and sunset by so many languages.  The Vitruvian theory of origins: discovery of fire. Ian Martin (trans.), Architecture, ou Art de Bien Bastir de Marc Vitruve Pollion, Autheur Romain Antique, Paris, 1547. The Serial Function The re-use of the same structure for the main tale and antecedent "backstories" suggests that the boundary conditions can be linked together in a series. This is important in developing stories and other artworks with depth and internal resonance. As levels develop, elements can leapfrog over the hierarchical or temporal order and create new strings within the work.  Serial linking can serve many useful purposes. First, it enables the development of levels within a work of art. Second, it permits internal symmetries among those levels to develop "on their own" new themes and possibilities. Classic anthologies such as The Canterbury Tales and A Thousand Nights and One Night make it clear that just stringing episodes together is not the point. Closure, curvature, and internal symmetry are pervasive and instructive. Of the other arts, only architecture can equal (and surpass) literature's ability to use the anthology structure. Cities, districts, buildings, and rooms descend in scale but each maintains its own sense of order and completeness. Clearly a building is more than a collection of rooms, and the anthology principle of relating parts to a whole that exceeds the simple sum is manifest. This might be a good occasion to return to a solidly architectural context, where "authority" is simply the injunctive quality of a building to coerce certain behaviors. From this power of decorum, the inhabitants are spatially restricted (the "barred subjects," $) but of course they may obey or disobey, use or misuse. Outside of this system of structured symbolic relations, architecture's goal is pleasure, comparable on many levels to the Lacanian term jouissance, or phallic pleasure. This goal must be achieved through a "cross-program" that anamorphically converts elements within the imposed network of signifiers (the main program). The devices commonly used are associated with concealed spaces (poché), vents, jewel-like elements, delayed symmetry, and details. With architects notorious for their pursuit of pleasure within architecture, such as Carlo Scarpa, Manuel Vicente, Morris Lapidus, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and Alvar Aalto, such strategies and devices are easily recognized.  Summary Alcestis not only demonstrates a certain primordial relationship of domestic space to the idea of the hearth and the bipolar nature of fire and light, but the structure of the play and its backstories provide a kind of model of relationships derived from the expanded notion of the intransitive boundary. The diagram that plays out these relationships not only describes the twists and turns of the plot and its antecedents, but it suggests relationships that would have resonated for the original audiences. The boundary language diagram is schematic. It simplifies and understates relationships. But, it does demonstrate the need for theory that recognizes the directionality of the gaze towards the subject a directionality that his been difficult to address from within the frameworks of deconstructive criticism. Because boundary language theory incorporates popular culture and is open to other theories of mind, behavior, architectural form, and so on, it is offered as a framework or tool rather than a theoretical manifesto. The debt to Lacanian psychology is taken on willingly, and the enthusiastic "applications" of Lacan to various fields (philosophy, film theory, political science, etc.) by Slavoj Zizek are extremely useful. Up until now, my research has concentrated on showing how boundary language is consistent with mathematical theories of boundaries. My main sources have been George Spencer-Brown, Francisco Varelo, Louis Kauffman, and Jay Kappraff. Boundary language seems to veer from Spencer-Brown's "calculus" of form at just the point where, as Kauffman points out, the issue of self-reference arises. Even then, boundary language is consistent with Kauffman's adaptation of the calculus to fractals, imaginary numbers, and self-similar forms. Boundary language is most effective with the visual-spatial-temporal art of cinema. The screen, the fixed audience's position, and the limitations of filming work like the control in a scientific experiment. Architecture is more complex in most ways, and the role of weathering, ruin, re-use, and mis-use play significant roles. Still, it is possible to say that boundary language is capable of speaking for all arts as well as for describing everyday activities, artifacts, and events. Alchemists of the Middle Ages were adventurous and sometimes foolhardy in their search for essences and the control of matter by psychic processes, but the spirit of their project was admirable. Alchemists today are those who assert that the goal of knowledge is pleasure as well as truth and that the means of pleasure-in-truth is the recognition of the role of the knower in the construction of the known. Boundary language excels in this quest, because it is able to articulate directly both the pleasurable aim of knowledge as well as strategies for reaching it through mirrors of self-reference and self-encounter. When Vico wrote that verum ipsum factum, the point was that truth can be found in the nature of the made. The philosopher's stone is the adamic heart of this truth, the ipsum, that truth makes itself itself, and with pleasure.
Notes
References Euripides.
Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis.
Graves, Robert.
Kappraff, Jay.
Kauffman, Louis.
Kunze, Donald.
Kunze, Donald.
Kunze, Donald.
Lacan, Jacques.
Menand, Louis.
Sbragia, Albert.
Spencer-Brown, George.
Vico, Giambattista.
Zizek, Slavoj.
Prof. Donald Kunze
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