Pandora was entrusted with a large jar. The gods gave it to her for safe keeping. She was supposed to keep the lid on tight, but she opened it because she was curious to see what was inside, and evil spilled all throughout the world. The ancient Greek myth assures us that Hope was still left in the jar, but it is not so reassuring to be told that Pandora was the first woman on earth, and that she is responsible for the mess; much like the first woman on earth was Eve, and she ate the forbidden apple out of a similar curiosity, and caused all the evil, suffering and chaos that we see.
In Jordan MacLachlan’s scene of evil, chaos, depravity and despair, Unexpected Subway Living, it is not a woman who stands at the head of the train, spilling evil into the world from a jar. It is an old man. He lets the whole grotesque parade fall from a big bag. He doesn’t open the bag because he’s curious; his expression is of someone who has suffered a lot, and who is sort of indifferently turning that suffering over to the world now.
From his bag come the terracotta figures that populate the train. The train is a microcosm of life on earth. Where is Hope? I see it in the little unpainted birds who look placidly on every scene. They hop through the train. One bird peers down at the foot of a man who smokes and stares out the window with a haunted look on his face – but the bird is not haunted. Another bird observes a miserable snow man who is sweeping up; but the bird is not miserable to see it. Two birds watch a woman give birth. The woman has a darkened expression, but the birds are unaffected by her mood.
Is Hope, then, being able to witness suffering and misery, while remaining calm and cool, like the birds? Is hope a kind of bed-like stupidity, innocence, or not understanding? But the birds don’t seem stupid or innocent. They simply don’t partake. They watch, but they don’t fight. They watch, but they don’t hold guns. They don’t get drunk.
Maybe Hope is remembering that the human story isn’t the only story that is playing out. There is also the bird story. There is also the train story. The human story is the story of stories: tragedies, dramas, dilemmas…but the universe is not a human story. There is nothing terrible, tragic, vengeful or demonic about the train which holds them all, and which moves steadily into the night.
Pandora forever regretted what she did, but she was never punished because Zeus knew what she was going to do in advance. The universe knows what’s going to happen with us, too: we’re going to kill each other and fuck and cry. The universe doesn’t punish us. We punish ourselves. We punish each other. We get embroiled, because our story is the story of stories – like the story of Eve’s curiosity, or Pandora’s curiosity, or the story of that tired old man who flung his bitterness from his sack, and loosed all the misery into the world.
