On my walk to school the other day, I saw a driveway that had been stripped to the ground, right down to the dirt. Clearly there had been something akin to asphalt there before, something to smooth the path for vehicles and said vehicles owners.
For those familiar with Geneseo, I was walking down Oak Street. For those unfamiliar, Oak Street is a short stretch of village road with beautiful oak trees stretching out across the thoroughfare. It is a residential street with plenty of well-kept old homes and I might add–although it is completely irrelevant–an abundance of cats. The property I was observing that day was one of those older, well looked after type places. I walked past this stripped driveway, lost in thought. My thoughts running along the lines of “I really need to write another blog post, but I feel like I’m drowning in my work load.” This is when I began to try and relate “The Bacchae” (per my assignment) to just about anything. Suddenly I stumbled across something:
The dirty driveway reminded me of how in “The Bacchae,” Dionysus brings his frenzied bacchanal into the pristine and controlled lives of the people of Thebes.The dirt beneath the driveway made me think of the bacchanal and the asphalt that was once there reminded me of the ordered lives of the people of Thebes before Dionysus came and disrupted their lives.
I began to wonder further. Perhaps all that Dionysus does to his followers is forcibly release what they have pent up. Emotions and urges deemed wrong, impulses. Feelings that one would ordinarily have kept suppressed beneath the asphalt of societal pressures and norms. The release of these emotions and urges without constraint had devastating effects on the peoples of Thebes. Yet, if one were to consider the release of such emotions in moderation, perhaps Dionysus’s prescription would work as a cultural catharsis. In this way, I wonder if we as culture* live too much out of touch with the knowledge of the dirt below us. I wonder at how the sight of naked dirt beside a home was startling to me. Is the cause of this startling effect a good or bad or not at all noteworthy thing?
It fascinates me how even in the contemporary world –with highways paved and smooth, sidewalks, well maintained parks–that the unrefined nature of dirt and earth still lurks beneath the surface. There is still a quiet chaos beneath our streets. A boiling bacchus waiting to happen. Yes, there is the pavement, the concrete, the asphalt separating us from the that chaos, that bacchus. But that artificial barrier is thin. There is not that much between humans and the chaos that Dioysus would have us release into our lives. Is this a good thing, I wonder? Could American culture do with a bit more dirt, or does it have enough, or too much?
Perhaps, just perhaps, it would benefit us all to see a bit more dirt now and then, to see the earth and feel a bit closer to the frenzy beneath us.
*The culture of the US