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Oedipus has been called the first detective in literature.  He’s more properly the first memoirist, I think.  When Oedipus sets out to discover why plagues have descended upon Thebes he doesn’t know that he will uncover his own crimes - crimes that he didn’t seem to know he’d committed - or that they’d be so ghastly.  Killing the king his father and marrying his own mother rank right up there with the worst sorts of asaults one can do to oneself, let alone others.

Although his case may be extreme, to some extent his trajectory is exactly what all memoirists must undergo. For almost everyone has been offended against by circumstances, sometimes grievously, and it’s up to each of us to discover what those offenses were and whether or not we are implicated in covering up any of that information.  For that is what we all do.  We forget so we can protect ourselves.

The way is perilous, of course, and it aways leads us through the six stages.  When we realize we have a story that needs to be told we are, truly, Orphans who set out on a Pilgrimage towards truth.  It’s the wrestling with what we find that takes us to Warrior-Lover stage.  Many people give up.  Those who maintain the struggle find themselves moving into a different relationship with their own past.  No longer intent on proving anything, they just want the truth, the insights, to emerge… and that’s what the Monarch wants.  There is no condemnation, but there is understanding and a rejection of what is evil.

Sophocles needed two plays to get Oedipus to a place of peace (Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus) which probably is the most eloquent testimony to the hard work required.  Yet he does get there.  He makes the final transition when he stops blaming others and accepts that he sinned because he didn’t try, earlier, to work out just what it was that was going on in his birth circumstances.  He ran away, and paid the price. He surrounded himself with delusions of success, and they were not substantial.  For he always knew he was fated to kill his father and marry his mother which is why he fled his adoptive parents.  And when he does kill a man and marry a woman he doesn’t inquire as to the circumstances.  Why?  Because the pay off was too good - he got to be a king.

So - what are the things that stop us, honestly, looking at what we need to look at? What are the illusions we prefer to the truth? And why do we prefer the comforts of the delusions, rather than noting what Oedipus does finally achieve, when he becomes a Magician?

That’s what the memoirist asks, too.