DATABLEED READS Thom Eichelberger-Young’s ‘THE LAST WORDS OF SERGEANT METAPHYSIC’
In Sophocles’ tragic play Aias, the Greek hero Ajax gives what is referred to by scholars as the ‘deception speech’. Following the death of Achilles in the Trojan War, Ajax was thought by many to be the rightful heir to his divine armour, but instead, the kings Agamemnon and Menelaus gave it to Odysseus. This snub drives Ajax to murderous revenge although, unbeknownst to him, his vengeance plans are thwarted by the goddess Athena, who fools him into thinking he has killed kings, when in fact he has killed cattle. Labouring under the belief that he has murdered those who have dishonoured him, Ajax’s gives his speech, which deceives listeners into believing he has had a change of heart and accepts the kings’ decision. However, for reasons upon which scholars do not agree, at the end of the speech, Ajax falls upon his own sword, killing himself.
We might think about this Greek epic in relation to Thom Eichelberger-Young’s ‘The Last Words of Sergeant Metaphysic’, particularly since the poem’s epigraph derives from Sophocles’ play. The eponymous Sergeant functions as a contemporary iteration of Ajax; one who perhaps reflects our own time. In Aias, Ajax represents the traditions of his day, which prioritized “talent, merit, loyalty, and integrity” (Hanalt 2015, 96). Unable to adapt to a new reality – a world built on democracy and consensus – he kills himself in ‘absolute rejection of life itself and the changes that time causes’ (Hanalt 2015, 96). If we consider Eichelberger-Young’s Sergeant Metaphysic as a contemporary Ajax, then their last words might similarly operate as an absolute rejection of the various seismic socio-political and technological shifts taking place in our current moment; shifts which pose significant challenges to a science of absolute truth and unchanging reality.
Translated, the poem’s epigraph reads ‘[l]ong and uncountable time makes manifest / the hidden and obscure and hides the rest’ (Hanalt 2015, 94). It is a fitting preface, since the panels of the poem are interwoven with traces of the incomprehensible and the indistinct: murmurings, invisible presences, overheard voices, strange transmissions, encoded language, distant sounds and mysteries. As last words, they are a polyphonic embroidery in which voices, variations of stories, myths, fairy tales and music overlap.
The poems allude to a general sense of existential decline; a downward, vortical movement, as of water draining down a plughole. Each monolithic block of text is subject to forms of slippage, errant words leaking into margins, just as life – in the poem – seems to be circling a drain. The panels are punctuated with extinctions and apocalypses; poisons pervade the text: wildlife bait, radiation, nuclear events, petrochemicals, metastasizing energies; and bodily injuries recur throughout, in the form of aortic chasms, bleeding membranes, bone fractures, and eradicated breaths. Further still, the text is haunted by the kind of monsters who populate interstitial times; in particular, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the quintessential Gothic symbol of a fear of change, whose vampiric presence echoes that of contemporary labour-extracting, polluting corporations of industry. Sergeant Metaphysic’s last words, it would seem, are eschatological in tone. Maths, calculus and geometry no longer hold their magic; stories have infinite variations; history is a living thing that can be manipulated in the present; and metals can be mixed to make alloys for M16 rifles. Nothing, in other words, is fixed or absolute.
‘Do you recognize the allusions?’ one of the panels asks, underlining the importance of hidden meaning within the work. The panels draw not only on Sophocles, but a vast bricolage of archaic and contemporary myths and materials, from Rabelais to Virginia Woolf’s family tree to McDonald’s jingles. The fragments of a genealogy of metaphysics shored up against ruins of digital and social media narratives and the consensus of popular opinion. Sergeant Metaphysic might represent an old, dying world, and these are the last overheard words which categorically reject whatever might replace it.
ReferencesHanalt, E. (2015) ‘A Man Out of Time: Aias 646-692 by Sophocles’, Transference 3: 1,
94-7.