Antigone is like a compass that points underground, always drawing her closer and closer to her home. The tide, inexorable. The cave into which she is banished opens up for her like a wound and heals around her. Or perhaps it is like a flower turning toward the sun. Haemon, like a bee, goes in for the nectar and gets enclosed in the petals as they close for the night. Haemon, good son, tries to save his father.

But Creon, through free will, becomes his own one-man plague. He gives birth to death. Antigone, mother of herself, cyborg, executes her self-destruct program. Gets up, wears a different woman’s body in every space and time, and does it all over again. In Korean, in French, in English. Every time I see her I eat all her technology and spit the death out; it is hers alone, she fought for it, and she made it herself with her own veil. What is the last thing each of us will wear on our last day?

Haemon, always the bridesmaid, never the bride, consummates his marriage with his own sword, plunges it into his own body, with father as witness, father as almost-victim. Why does he kill himself? Is he just a pawn in the gods’ punishment of Creon? An object to be taken away to force Creon into an empty room in which to live out the rest of his miserable life?

The oedipal blindness was contagious. Creon and Tiresias and his boy made a triangle, but Creon wouldn’t take the eye in time. He threw it across the floor, but it was too late. In everyone’s heart he thought he saw money hunger, betrayal, disobedience.

As a woman, Antigone was born disobedient. How dare anyone not be born a man? But sons don’t grow on trees. Sometimes hillsides, with their ankles pierced, bawling, abandoned. Outside, strangers. The sky my protean ceiling everywhere I go. Antigone and her survivor sister, Ismene, dare to be seen by us, the audience of Athenian citizens (men) outside the palace. They slip into the building and head straight for the altar, the space of sacrifice.

Altar, thusiastérion. The meeting place between god and worshiper. In Latin, adolēre + altus. Get high, Antigone, then get low. The meeting place is Polynices’s body. Let the river take you to your family. Leave Ismene above to remind Creon of those he banished and those who abandoned him, he, a man of excess almost equal to Antigone’s excess.

What is a cyborg but a hybrid creature of excess? A thing that exceeds the sum of its parts. A thing that has extended its powers, enhanced, even superpowered. Antigone, the supernatural. The uncanny. Unheimlich, Freud’s word. Un-home-like. Antigone the homeless, Antigone the stranger, Antigone the royal, Antigone, in place of mother.

A woman is like a hollow horse. All made of doors. All made of space.