But tragedy wants us. If it refused Alonzo Quijada, it still wants us. Tragedy wants us, but not as its heroes. Nor as its clowns. It is not that tragedy has been recently sidestepped by more efficient forms. Let's not presume cosmic laughter. There is still at work, the ratcheting of tensions which tighten inexorably around a fatefully climatic release. And on to a secondary dissipation. And then thirdly, towards miserable deflation. Do not be so quick to imagine that tragedy has become historically obsolete, that its form somehow no longer adheres to the world. If you cannot make out its trajectory, then your blindness to its mechanism only accelerates it further - if by miniscule increments.
Tragedy is still a matter of the long way round to a catastrophic loss of energy which has already been written. There must be an avoidably unavoidable end. So, yes tragedy wants us. We are its hired workers. We are employed as its peripherals, its zero hour contract collateral. We labour incrementally at its edges, shoveling fuel into the furnace, neglecting the flood defences, leaving doors unlocked and safety catches off. It is in our job description to commit the accidents which contribute mere particulars to a totalising process - the accidental forms which become attached to what must be. And notwithstanding our forebodings, all that will happen will not happen because of us - our inconsequentiality to tragedy's working out is such that we cannot even claim that it will happen to us.
