chapman e240 world ancient literature spring 07

Home Page for English 240 World Ancient Literature

2007-05-09T16:31:00.000-07:00

Welcome to E240 World Ancient Literature

Spring 2007 at Chapman University in Orange, California

This blog will offer posts on all of the authors on our syllabus. I will post two kinds of notes: general and page-by-page. Both kinds are optional reading, but I encourage you to read the entries as your time permits. While they are not exactly the same as what I may choose to say during class sessions (i.e. these are not usually exact copies of my lecture notes), they should prove helpful in your engagement with the authors and in arriving at paper topics and studying for the exam. Unless otherwise noted, the edition used for our selections is Lawall, Sarah, ed. The Norton Anthology of World Literature. 2nd. ed. Vols. ABC: Beginnings to 1650. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN-10: 0393977641; # ISBN-13: 978-0393977646.

A dedicated menu at my wiki site contains the necessary information for students enrolled in this course; when the semester has ended, this blog will remain online, and a copy of the syllabus will remain in the Archive menu.

Week 15, T’ao Ch’ien

2007-05-08T16:31:00.000-07:00

Please check back in future. I will be posting material on this author as soon as time permits.

Week 14, Kalidasa

2007-05-01T16:30:00.000-07:00

Please check back in future. I will be posting material on this author as soon as time permits.

Week 13, Luke, Matthew, Augustine

2007-04-24T16:29:00.000-07:00

Please check back in future. I will be posting material on this author when time permits.

Week 12, Virgil's Aeneid

2007-04-17T16:28:00.000-07:00

Notes on Virgil’s The Aeneid

There’s a strong sense of teleology in Virgil’s Aeneid—many noble gestures must be left aside because of the collective task to be accomplished. Aeneas’ personal actions seem to be always scripted by that larger task, haunted by necessity. In this sense, there’s a degree of sadness about the founding of the great Empire-to-be. Virgil understands what’s involved in the founding of empires, just like the man understood big banking when he said that robbing a bank is nothing compared to what goes into founding one.

As for the Trojans’ treatment of the Carthaginians, Virgil makes Aeneas and his men appropriate the good signs given to that people. Their founding period must be harvested to create the momentum leading Aeneas towards Italy. The legend of Troy allows Virgil to assert that the Romans are equal to or superior to the Greek heroes of the past. They may be younger, but their legends go back to the fall of Troy, Homer’s battlegrounds. The destruction of Troy is necessary to the founding of a new civilization. The Greeks can lend authority and serve as a mine of cultural materials, but ultimately it’s Rome that wins. Greek epic must be subsumed (as in Hegel’s term aufheben, participle aufgehoben—preserved and cancelled) into Roman literature and history.

Odysseus had a task, but Homer narrated its accomplishment by fully drawing out all of that hero’s dangerousness and tendency towards excess. Odysseus is familiar with restraint, but only because sometimes he doesn’t allow himself to be subject to it. Aeneas, by contrast, serves a task beyond his own horizons—he has to serve as the living agent of an entire people’s history, not just re-secure his own kingdom. That transpersonal goal forces him to betray Dido, a fellow exile who treats him kindly. Not everything he does is “pious” in a sense we can approve. Aeneas adheres to prophecy, sometimes to his own discomfiture. We might be excused for thinking that Virgil “read Freud” since so much of what Aeneas does seems driven by his status as an agent of civilization—his private erotic energy gets rerouted along lines favorable to Rome’s public, collective doctrine of imperium, not his own love life. At times, Aeneas is almost machine-like, driven by his dedication to the future Roman Empire. It may seem ruthless of him to leave so many friends and loved ones behind, first in Troy and then on the way to Italy, but he has no choice—Aeneas is a corporation man for Rome, Inc. He is the founder of an institution, so he must suit his words, actions, and even thoughts to the needs of that institution, repressing and redirecting his own private desires.

Of course, that necessity also means Aeneas suffers deeply, and seems noble and stoic in the worst of situations. For the Romans, self-sacrifice is one of the greatest virtues since Rome is bigger than any one person. Aeneas is endowed with insight into this (in the form of responsibility towards his crew and his people), and he bears it as a heavy burden. He is responsible for the success of a huge, impersonal order, and there will be little comfort for him either along the way or at the end. Odysseus’ desires are more immediate and personal—he wants to make his way back to his own wife and son, and reclaim his island kingdom.

The Aeneid isn’t really about Aeneas—it is about Rome. As Moses Hadas points out in his History of Latin Literature, no one said being an agent of destiny is easy (155). But Virgil believes in the Roman religion, and in the sanctity of Rome itself. He also seems to have been aware (as in Georgics IV) of Jewish millennialist prophecies, and he imports this messianic sense of history into his work on Rome. Augustus is a messiah-figure who first brings a sword, and then provides the prospects for peace and honor. Rome is on a divine mission of imperium, which will involve bringing order, stability, and civilization to the conquered and assimilated peoples. It involves making oneself and one’s civilization a model for others to follow.

The Aeneid justifies Augustus as the first Roman Emperor, and heralds a new day for Rome, with peace and stability at home and the export of Roman practices and ideals to supposedly less advanced peoples. (A modern analogue would be the French under Napoleon, or the British Empire.) The rationale we refer to as “imperium” surely developed over time, and no doubt there remained a strong element of profiteering and militarism in Roman conquests. But the ideological claims were also strong. The Romans felt that they had something worthwhile to offer others—improvements in their standard of living, and (to some extent) eventual citizenship.

But the celebration of peace betrays a strong need—times before Augustus were difficult and violent. Decades of strife preceded the civil wars that racked Italy before and after the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE. Not until 31 BCE did Octavian (Augustus) defeat Marc Antony and Cleopatra to become sole ruler of what was now openly an empire, no longer a republic (even a dysfunctional one). Augustus kept up the semblance of Republican sentiment, but nobody really believed Rome would return to a republic any time soon, if ever.

Page-by-Page Notes on The Aeneid

Book 1

1056-57. The metanarratival moment: Aeneas gazes at images of his own struggles in Troy against the Greeks. Art has a lot of power at this juncture—the images help Aeneas to move forwards in his quest for temporary refuge with Dido, on the way to founding what will become Rome. There’s some irony in that fact that the temple is dedicated to Juno, who favors the Greeks, not the Trojans. But even in Juno’s temple, the Trojans hold their own. They have Zeus on their side (somewhat), along with Apollo, Aphrodite, and several other gods. In another sense, the legend of Troy, its artistic representation, makes action possible. Greek art makes Roman history go.

1059. The Trojan remnant’s speaker pleads that defeated men don’t go plundering—true, but ironic since the Trojans will be responsible for much sorrow in Carthage before they leave. And of course the Romans will later defeat the Carthaginians in a series of devastating wars.

1060-62. Dido welcomes Aeneas and pays homage to him, offering him equal terms in her kingdom. That kingdom is itself new—they’re building it just as Aeneas lands there, in fact. He will usurp all this energy, frustrating it at the source and stealing it for the benefit of the Trojan survivors.

Book 2

1063-70. The Wooden Horse-inspired finale to the Trojan War is here recounted—as the saying goes, “fear the Greeks, even when they bear gifts.” Still, Aeneas can’t afford not to engage in some deceptions and betrayals of his own when it’s his turn to carve out his destiny and follow the gods’ orders. On page 1075, however, Coroebus’ stratagem to don Greek armor backfires—at this point, the Trojans are not licensed to do such deceptive things.

1070-75. What limitations does Virgil impose on Aeneas as an individual hero? How has Hector undercut Aeneas in his desire to go down fighting? Only Hector could have single-handedly saved Troy—too late for that; Aeneas’ job is different. Single combat isn’t his province—leading the entire people is his task.

1076-80. One of the most replayed scenes in ancient legend and history is the subject here—the death of old Priam even shows up in Hamlet, spurring Hamlet on to take his tardy revenge. Aeneas’ narration affirms Greek heroism in the sense that Priam taunts Neoptolemus with Achilles’ chivalry towards a grieving father. But Neoptolemus’ slaughter of the old man shows that Achilles was the exception, not the rule. Homer sometimes portrayed the Trojans as feminine and weak, but Virgil represents the Greeks as liars and barbarians.

1079-85. After Aeneas’ mother Aphrodite brings home to him the futility of clinging to Troy, she sends him off to gather his family. Now that the gods of Troy have gone from their burnt-out altars, what is left? Piety to one’s ancestors and the hope of a new beginning elsewhere, a new place for the gods to dwell and favor the Trojan remnant. But not everyone will be allowed to come along—Creusa must die with the old order, so that Aeneas may have his new Italian wife as already foretold by Hector’s shade. Pietas must be broadened to incorporate loyalty not just to family, but even more so to the state and its imperatives. Those who want to go with Aeneas are mostly young people, without strong enough ties to “ruined Ilium” to make them go down with the City.

Book 4

1085-88. Dido’s affections for Aeneas are described as “madness,” and herself as prey to a hunter. In classical times, this kind of reference wasn’t necessarily a putdown, but in Virgil’s case it seems to be—Dido is the victim of a noble species of madness. She is not fully in control of herself, and (although the gods seem to be behind her lovestruck condition) that problem is more than enough to seal her doom.

1088-93. Juno contrives to detain Aeneas, and Venus slyly goes along, probably knowing that her son will eventually be roused to set sail and abandon Dido to madness. King Iarbas is angry over the marriage to a foreigner when Dido, whom he had helped, has already rejected him. So he prays to Jupiter. Dido’s passion is not politically astute, and (with Rumor’s help) it destabilizes her country, stripping it of foundational purpose. The Queen tries to shape events according to an essentially private passion—something a ruler can’t afford to do. Jupiter sends Mercury to harangue Aeneas, and the tactic works—he immediately turns his mind to his role as guardian of his Trojans and renewer of Trojan power in Italy. The episode reminds me a bit of Circe’s captivity of Odysseus. Like Odysseus, Aeneas wastes a lot of time doing nothing while his kingdom’s danger increases.

1093-98. Aeneas decides in favor of deception—he’ll just leave in mid-winter when Dido isn’t expecting him to sail. She confronts him, calling him a liar and cheat. He covers up by pretending that he never intended to deceive her and that besides, he wasn’t actually married according to Trojan custom. This is a low point for Aeneas, at least in terms of heroic quality. His will is not his own at this point, and he must sacrifice his private and personal desires for the greater good of Troy (and the future Rome, a kingdom he won’t live to see). He openly describes Italy as his “love.” The pursuit of kingdom and eventual empire can’t allow a female get in the way. Virgil seems entirely conscious of the contradiction here—Romans prize honor and loyalty above all, but the founding of the state in which those values are so highly prized was accomplished by an act of betrayal. That Dido is the leader of Rome’s future enemy (and not a Trojan or Italian) doesn’t entirely remove the contradiction.

1098-1106. This part is mostly about Dido’s “fatal madness.” The Queen tricks her sister Anna and gets her to make a pyre with all the artifacts of her love for Aeneas atop, and then ascends the pyre, feverishly thinks through the situation, and stabs herself. This is an emotional high point in the epic—but the character who gives fullest vent to unrestrained passion is doomed. Virgil acknowledges the power of passion, but dramatizes its harsh consequences and insists upon containing the passions. He also emphasizes the notion that the gods wanted it this way, so really there was nothing Dido could do. She’s a magnificent character, but it’s not in the fates that she should succeed. Aeneas isn’t entirely robotic here—as T. S. Eliot would say, “only those who have strong personalities know what it is to try to escape from them.” We are conscious that he is making a sacrifice. On 1105, Virgil’s teleological, typological emphasis shows: Dido’s scream and the subsequent noise is like the fall of Carthage itself—of course that looks forward to the final destruction of Carthage in the Third Punic War in 146 BCE (see Polybius’ account). Juno is hardly unsympathetic, favoring the Greeks and disliking the Trojans as she does—so she sends Iris down to cut the necessary lock of Dido’s hair for passage to the Underworld. As for Augustan distance from Dido, the historical necessity of this is obvious—there’s perhaps even some cruelty in the magnificence accorded to this precursor of a people that the Romans crushed. Anyhow, it may also be that her passion represents an always potential danger—giving in to private, individual feelings at the state’s expense. To be Roman involves knowing what is not Roman, what one may fall prey to.

Book 6

Like Dante after him, Virgil is concerned to bring order to our perception of the underworld as an ethical universe. He sticks to concrete descriptions and categories, and Aeneas’ experience in the underworld is tied to the demands of Roman teleology. Things were much wilder and less clear-cut in Homer’s Odyssey, and Odysseus departed the underworld just before its terrors overwhelmed him. Aeneas behaves with piety towards the dead: Misenus will have his burial, and Palinurus will receive compensation. But Deiphobus, betrayed by Helen, remains in tattered “skin.” As for Dido, she remains hostile and prefers Sychaeus. It will be war to the death with Carthage. We are treated to a vision of the new line of rulers, especially Lucius Junius Brutus.

1109. Palinurus’ story is told, and the Sibyl is firm in dealing with him. The dead mustn’t be allowed to assert primacy over the living Aeneas.

1110. Charon’s distrust of Aeneas must be overcome; the future of Rome is the subject to be addressed here, and that is more important than protocol in Hades.

1112. Dido’s anger is unquenchable even in death. The dead continue to hold on to the attitudes that characterized them in life, and again we see how conflicted the Roman concept of heroism is: we know that Aeneas had betrayed Dido, so this moment must be an anguished one for him.

1113-14. Deiphobus rails at Helen and that wily Greek, Odysseus.

1115-17. Rhadamanthus’ judgments are described. In general, Hades is a well structured place, more so than it is in The Odyssey. At 1117, we hear of the blessed and how they live: Orpheus, Dardanus, and others.

1118-23. Anchises surveys the future of Rome. At 1119, the souls of a thousand nations are represented as “bees.” The text suggests that the source of life and history is spirit, and describes Lethean and Orphic purification. Aeneas learns his personal future: Lavinia and their son Silvius. Alba Longa is to be the precursor of Rome. As for Romulus, his mother was the priestess Rhea Silvia, and his father was Mars. Augustus Caesar is here, too. So are Numa and his descendants, and the account covers Rome’s art of pacifying other people—one of its great strengths, according to Virgil’s Anchises, who says to Aeneas, “Roman, remember by your strength to rule / Earth’s peoples—for your arts are to be these: / To pacify, to impose the rule of law, / To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.”

1123-25. Marcellus, Augustus’ nephew, is lamented in advance, by way of indicating both the joys of victory and the frustrations of dynastic hopes. Aeneas is sent back through the Ivory gate of false dreams. Perhaps that is the case because he must act more from impulse than from conscious guidance by the underworld. He must not be directed too closely if he is to accomplish his destiny in an authentic way. Structurally, Book 6 caps off Aeneas’ wanderings. Virgil will cease striving with Homer and his old stories. In Book 7 he announces that he is ready to move on to characterizing the deeds of the new race forging itself out of the defeated Trojans. “Back to the future,” in other words, and the focus will be on human enterprise, although the gods still have an important part to play.

Book 8

1125-29. Venus orders up a shield, rather like the one Achilles’ mother Thetis had made for him. The literary device here is ekphrasis, the verbal description of a visual art object. Rome’s crises and founding acts, and heroism and law-giving, are central to this book. This path will end at Actium in 31 BCE, where the future Augustus Caesar will defeat “Asiatic” Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The book ends with a procession of conquered races, subjugated to the Roman people.

Book 12

1129-34. The history that Virgil describes after Book 6 is complex and at times painful; the founding of a whole race of people involves much loss, confusion, and sacrifice. The Trojan remnant find that whenever a new nation is founded, it is founded over another people that was already there. When Aeneas spreads his picnic table, so to speak, he spreads it on somebody else’s lawn. He will need a special alliance with the gods to be successful. Lavinia, Aeneas’ future bride, was already promised by Latinus of the promised land, Latium, to Turnus, King of Rutulia. Turnus leans on Latinus to stir up a battle. Throughout, Latinus’ heart isn’t in this fight, really—he wanted a peaceful union with the Trojans, while Aeneas wants to fight Turnus in single combat. But a battle must come for the founding of “Second Troy.” In Book 12, Aeneas kills the implacable Turnus, who won’t mingle with or be co-opted by the newcomers and who had killed Pallas, son of Aeneas’ Italian-colony ally Evander, founder of Pallanteum. Turnus has his virtues, but it is Aeneas who is the true “Roman” hero.

Week 11, Lucretius

2007-04-10T16:28:00.000-07:00

Notes on Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura

The Golden Age of Latin Literature, adapted from Moses Hadas’ A History of Latin Literature.

Ciceronian: (70-30 B.C.) Cicero, Lucretius, Catullus, Cinna, Nepos, Sallust, Varro

Augustan: (30 B.C.-17 A.D.) Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Livy.

Titus Lucretius Carus (98-55 B.C.)

Lucretius lived in a time of turmoil; amongst the major historical events of his day were the following:

90-88 B.C. Marsian War—Italian allies demand and win right to citizenship
89-85 B.C. First Mithridatic War –the King of Pontus invades Asia minor
88-82 B.C. General Sulla marches on Rome, Civil War with Marius’ followers.
82-80 B.C. Sulla dictator and then retires
74-63 B.C. Third Mithridatic War
73-71 B.C. Spartacus’ slave rebellion in Italy, put down by Pompey and Crassus, who become consuls
60-60 B.C. Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar form “first triumvirate”
59-51 B.C. Caesar becomes consul in 59, in 58 begins conquering Gaul ; in 58-57 Cicero exiled, Clodius tribune.
55-54 B.C. Caesar invades Britain—this is around the time Lucretius died
49-49 B.C. Caesar refuses to disband his army, crosses Rubicon River
49-45 B.C. Civil War in Rome; Caesar defeats Pompey at Pharsalus in 48, is dictator 47-44, when he’s assassinated by Brutus, Cassius, other Republican conspirators
43-29 B.C. Second Triumvirate’s formation and destruction: Marc Antony, Lepidus, Octavian. When the dust settles, Octavian becomes “Augustus.”
27-14 B.C.-A.D. Augustus Caesar rules; Julio-Claudian line runs through AD 68: Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero.

Materialism vs. spiritual explanations. Lucretius would have little sympathy with the Bible, which claims that an all-powerful God has created humans to worship him. Like Blake, Lucretius would see such a god as “Nobodaddy,” a creation of fools to calm their anxieties that was then taken over and systematized by power-seeking knaves. His overriding message is that there is nothing between us and felicity but superstition and failure to reconcile ourselves to “the nature of things”.

Since—like Marx and Freud—he opposes metaphysical claims as vain delusion, Lucretius offers a materialist explanation of human development and the universe. The interesting thing here is that he insists on free will along with the pure materialist “atomic theory” that supposedly causes everything to happen. If you want to see into the heart of nature, you need first to understand that the movement of irreducible atoms is responsible for everything around you. You cannot see the atoms or their movements, but you can infer their existence from inferences based on sensory experience.

The Truth: What is his philosophical stance designed to accomplish? Well, of course, the first goal of a philosophy is simply to be true. However, practical Roman that he is, Lucretius also has a rhetorical task to accomplish for his learned hearers. That task is to offer an esoteric sense of permanence amidst the flux. Matter is neither created nor destroyed—an insight strikingly similar to that of Albert Einstein 2000 years later. Lucretius must describe one component of the world that is permanent—atoms; everything else must pass through the cycle of birth and death. It is not quite true, therefore, as Heraclitus says, that “all things give way, and nothing abides,” or that, as Shelley will write, “nought may remain but mutability.” That would be true of compound bodies, but not of the atoms that compose them. The atomic structure of the cosmos abides: there will always be space and atoms. Lucretius takes that for philosophical truth.

What to make of it? We must reconcile ourselves to the nature of things, and if we are wise, we may derive comfort from this knowledge. Lucretius probably would not see his solution as workable for everyone, but only for the learned and philosophically minded. What do you suppose Lucretius would say to someone who points out, “what terrifies ordinary Romans is also what comforts them. The source of both their anxiety and their hope is religious belief”?

Why Poetry and the Epicurean Muse? The fact that Lucretius is a materialist, not given to fanciful explanations of things, why then does he resort to “winged poesy” to get his point across? Why not write a nice dry prose tract, as I have it in my Latham translation? Here’s a fine hexameter passage from Book One that promises us that carefully chosen words crafted into poetry will help reveal to us the very heart of things:

Nec me animi fallit Graiorum obscura reperta
difficile inlustrare Latinis versibus esse,
multa novis verbis praesertim cum sit agendum
propter egestatem linguae et rerum novitatem;
sed tua me virtus tamen et sperata voluptas
suavis amicitiae quemvis efferre laborem
suadet et inducit noctes vigilare serenas
quaerentem dictis quibus et quo carmine demum
clara tuae possim praepandere lumina menti,
res quibus occultas penitus convisere possis.

Why do poets like Lucretius? Well, partly because he is such a keen observer of nature, and partly because he meditates so insightfully on the flux of things—the poet’s task is in part to achieve a sense of intelligibility and constancy while not covering up the difficulty of dealing with nature or with human passion. Lucretius offers us a chance to maintain a fresh perception of the universe and ourselves—”make it new” would be as good a slogan for him as it is for the Modernists.

In Book Five, Lucretius discusses many plausible alternatives for natural phenomena. In our own time, science offers the simplest possible theory to explain the order of things—we may recall Einstein’s remark about genius consisting in the ability to make things as simple as possible and no simpler. Lucretius does not seem very interested in this insistence on simplicity, even though he is a thoroughgoing materialist. It is not that he deviates from straight-line explanation in favor of arabesque curves, but rather that he is a pluralist who will give us several plausible explanations for the same thing. It is not far from this procedure to poetry.

To be continued with book-by-book notes as/if time permits....

Week 09, Buddha, The Jataka, The Bhagavad-Gita

2007-03-27T16:27:00.000-07:00

Notes on Buddha’s Three Cardinal Discourses and the Buddhist Jataka.

The Three Cardinal Discourses are entitled “Setting Rolling the Wheel of Truth,” “The Not-Self Characteristic,” and “The Fire Sermon.” One thing is obvious about Gautama Buddha, as accounts of his personality have come down to us: he is unencumbered by desire or ambition, and has disinvested himself of all stock in the body. Unlike George Costanza’s nutty father on Seinfeld, he doesn’t have to shout “serenity now!” out of desperation, but is truly free. Why, then, does he bother talking to others about spiritual matters? His reason for taking up the role of teacher and prophet is compassion for those who (to varying degrees) don't yet know what they need to know, and therefore do not live as they should. The ignorance and suffering of others, it seems, calls for a response on the part of those who have become enlightened, so liberation isn’t the same thing as irresponsibility.

How easy or how difficult does he make attainment of serenity sound for others, and what style does he adopt to convey his message? Much in Buddhism comes down to promoting acts of constructive self-annihilation and renunciation of materialism. The Four Noble Truths are that life is suffering, that suffering is a product of attachment or desire, that it’s possible to let go of such attachments, and finally, that there’s a specifiable path to follow towards liberation. That is a very simple, straightforward message: misdirected desire makes us unhappy, but right conduct and attitude can bring us peace. On the whole, Buddha counsels reorientation of one’s sensibilities and attentions away from the self and towards the community, though not in an ostentatious way. Buddhism is often called “the middle way” because it doesn’t preach extreme asceticism, but at the same time the concept of self-sacrifice for others’ welfare seems to be very important to this philosophy, which differs markedly from western outlooks that emphasize the primacy of the individual and the satisfactions of material accumulation. I will leave the specifics to the notes available online along with the sermons themselves, but basically, the Eightfold Path, as the first sermon sets them forth, consists in right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. (The BigView.com offers lucid explications of these categories, but you can find them all over the Internet. See, for example, The Buddhist Reading Room, which provides a wealth of materials and links).

What is especially noteworthy about Buddha’s views on attachment is that he applies them to everything: attachment to anything whatsoever—our thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and so forth—and consequent appropriation of them as mine, belonging to me, leads to delusion and misery. Fundamentally, it seems, the self is a delusion. That is a point we can also find in the Baghavad-Gita, beautifully enunciated by the god Krishna. Buddhism differs in a number of significant ways from Hinduism (see Brian's Syllabus), but in some respects it is consonant with it, and the point I just made is a key area of agreement: the small-s “self” or autonomous ego is a function of our greedy and anxious desire for security and gain. To put the case lightly, Buddhism and Hinduism both seem to be on to our “control freak” tendencies and possessiveness.

As for stylistics, Buddha surely doesn’t construe knowledge in an Aristotelian or Baconian fashion: patient inductive research and the gradual building up of knowledge into theories are not his method or goal. He has already achieved serenity, and that isn’t something we can capture in fourfold or eightfold divisions, or classify in the usual western way. Nonetheless, even though we are talking about something language can't really express—absolute peace and an intuitive sense of truth, Buddha characterizes enlightenment's stages as attainable in degrees, with each degree of attainment giving us a kind of satisfaction, though not of the sort that comes from object-relations. The sermons’ divisions are heuristic (teaching) devices: they help Buddha convey his main point that suffering is a product of desire—we covet objects, we covet security, we turn people into objects, and so forth—and that it is eminently possible to overcome such tendencies. He conveys in a constructively paradoxical style a message about acts of letting-go and letting-happen, not making-happen. This distinction seems to be common to several eastern philosophies and religions: while the west is often about spiritual struggle, or “making-happen,” eastern wisdom has to do with the letting-go of delusions and the letting-happen of intuition and wisdom. That’s an overstatement, of course, but I think it’s worthwhile as an initial distinction.

With regard to The Jataka, its stories are about Buddha’s incarnations, so they teach us about Buddhist ethics. Purification is important, and so is a strong sense of community. Buddhism preaches respect for all creatures and rejects emphasis on human rank or caste (important considerations in Hinduism) and instead promotes egalitarianism and community. Buddhism privileges the spirit of self-sacrifice. The hare, for example, sacrifices its life in the flames, giving its body as alms, and this is described as a constructive, purifying act of self-annihilation, one that forces others to confront their own selfishness. In another of the tales, a selfish king sees the error of his ways when he is confronted with the courage of a monkey who gives his life to save his comrades; the monkey’s broken body becomes a bridge whereby they pass to safety and escape the king. Of course, there are always those who take kindness for weakness, but Buddha is offering an uplifting code of conduct that will inspire as many as possible: devotion to the welfare of others is the way. Buddhism is “worldly” in the best sense: it makes us think through how we treat others and consider the consequences of our behavior in that respect. The stories in The Jataka sometimes entail punishment, but that really isn’t what they are about. Punishing those who do wrong is undeniably satisfying for a while, but it’s almost certain to make them withdraw into their own ego-shell and “forget” or deny that they have done wrong—not exactly a recipe for spiritual enlightenment. The punishments suffered by the selfish characters in The Jataka (like the greedy merchant in the first tale) seem designed to enlighten, not simply to cause pain and distress.

Finally, a good question would be, “to what extent can we take Buddhist ethics seriously in a western market society, one based on the desires of consumers for many more “things” than they need?” Capitalism thrives not on the buying and selling of basic foodstuffs and other necessities but rather on the producing, selling, and buying of all that which goes beyond need. Capitalism thrives on the production not only of goods but, more importantly, of people’s desire for an endless series of goods above and beyond what they need. The market sells us buying and selling, consumption, as a lifestyle, a world view: it takes advantage of the fact that we are creatures of excess and extravagance. (No wonder King Lear gets so upset when his daughters take away his hundred knights: “O, reason not the need!” he exclaims, “Our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous.”) So how can we accept Buddha’s antimaterialism and “not-self-ism”? Can we at least use those ideas as a hedge against confusing our love for commodified objects with an appreciation of genuine value? Buddha offers a perspective outside the system. (Differences aside, the same is true of Jesus, who rejected materialism and said, “Take no care for the morrow” and “My kingdom is not of this world.”) A modern, semi-Buddhist ethos might say something like, “well, if you’re going to be consumers, at least live lightly in the presence of the object-system; don’t get attached to the objects you buy and consume or take buying and consuming as the purpose of your lives.” To the contrary, the capitalist order’s proponents would surely prefer that we be chained to a process of serial obsession and consumption, and unable to think outside the commercial box in any way that threatens to restrict the flow of our desire for objects and the satisfactions they bring. Buddha himself was high-born and could have taken full advantage of wealth and position, but he rejected those things, and chose to help others. It is possible, after all, so perhaps enlightenment is to some degree attainable by anyone who understands that it is a worthy goal and who wants to achieve it. Of course, wisdom itself is commodifiable—we can turn anything into a “product,” and thereby neutralize the transformative potential it may otherwise have had. But why not end on a positive note? This will do:

The greatest achievement is selflessness.
The greatest worth is self-mastery.
The greatest quality is seeking to serve others.
The greatest precept is continual awareness.
The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.
The greatest action is not conforming with the world’s ways.
The greatest magic is transmuting the passions.
The greatest generosity is non-attachment.
The greatest goodness is a peaceful mind.
The greatest patience is humility.
The greatest effort is not concerned with results.
The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go.
The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.

Atisha, an 11 th-century Tibetan Buddhist master.
(http://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/)

General Notes on The Bhagavad-Gita.

The Individual or “Self”: We tend to think of the individual person as a fully self-contained, autonomous agent. “I” am not “you,” and you and I are not “them.” Everybody, we like to say in our post-romantic fashion, is in at least some sense unique, and by this we seem to mean that something in us precedes any possible determination or shaping influence by outside forces like the society into which we have been born, the political order that subjects us to its imperatives, the expectations of our parents, the linguistic order, and so forth. We sometimes acknowledge that forces beyond ourselves are partly responsible for what we become, but that sort of acknowledgement usually makes us uncomfortable. Freud, Marx, Foucault and others have in their various ways insisted to our discomfiture that the forces that produce “us” as individuals are powerful and relatively autonomous—how does one combat the Unconscious, international capital, Ideological State Apparatuses, or Power? But how does The Bhagavad-Gita deal with the concept of the self? What constitutes it? It seems that the Gita author or authors would accept neither the idea of the self as an autonomous, unique agent nor the idea that forces such as “society” straightforwardly determine who we are as individuals. The Gita insistently claims that the self is a delusion stemming from ignorance and entirely dependent upon a strong desire to find security and permanence in our relationships with objects and with other people in their narrow selfhood. Ultimately, this desire boils down to fear of death. The only security an individual can truly hope to attain, counsels the Gita, is to be found in the knowledge that the small-s self has its source in the ultimate Self, Krishna. When a person realizes this truth, the fear of death recedes and a whole new world opens up. This is a key point in the Gita—when we no longer see the world “through selfish eyes,” so to speak, we see it in an entirely different, liberated manner. As William Blake says in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “a fool sees not the same tree as a wise man sees.”

Why is the self a delusion? Well, it’s just another concept that doesn’t explain anything. Nietzsche makes a fine point when he says that the expression “lightning flashes” may be useful, but it’s also a lie. We perceive a “flashing” in the sky, and then we invent a noun (lightning) to account for the instrumental cause of that flashing. But “lightning” is just a word, an empty concept, an abstraction. To say “lightning flashes” is at best shorthand for “go see what I’m talking about: flashing,” but it doesn’t explain the flashing activity that we see. No, it makes us think we do, which in turn makes us arrogant because (supposedly) now we know so much. As country folk say, “it’s not what you don’t know that gets you in trouble, it’s what you think you know.” Try substituting for “lightning flashes” the phrase “I do” or “self performs action,” and you can easily understand the Hindu and Buddhist notion of why the individual ego is a delusion: the noun “self” is an ex post facto construction we use to explain things and relationships that we really don’t understand. Arjuna says to Krishna something like, “I am the doer of my deeds, and am deeply attached to and responsible for their results,” and the latter entirely disagrees with that assessment. You only covet the fruit of your actions if you cling to the notion of self as an entity that covets, that tries to extend itself by means of things and deeds that in fact limit and attenuate, that hinder the path to enlightenment.

Consequentiality of Actions: Based on our delusory notion of the autonomous self, w e generally make a close connection between what we are and what we do. We like to say that as individuals with free will, we are responsible for what we have done and are doing. Deeds entail consequences and (supposedly) reveal the essence of a person. Existentialism, one of the most popular western philosophies, encourages such notions by means of its Sartrean dictum, “essence follows existence.” We might even say that we treat the deed like a thing, a commodity, with which our identity gets caught up to the point of identification: you are your car, you are your deed! This is a powerful tendency in modern western societies, with their strong emphasis on competition for the right to accumulate material goods, the achievement of carefully specified goals often tied to or allied with economic production and consumption, and the eventual accountability of all “evildoers” at the bar of justice. What does this book say about such a viewpoint? It counsels action, to be sure, but action in a peculiarly detached manner: action in what the text calls “the spirit of worship.” Can you act in such a way that you don’t expect to own or control the results of your actions? If so, you’re acting in the way the Gita suggests you should. If you act on the basis of some kind of “reward/punishment” or “success/failure” scheme, if you expect recognition and admiration for what you do, then the Gita would suggest that you’re not acting in the right spirit. This sort of selfish action is somewhat like that of a mediocre actor who “plays to the crowd” rather than just trying to be true to the part.

The Path to Enlightenment: On the surface, this seems simple— Krishna says all you really need to do is appreciate him, listen to his wisdom, and concentrate on him. If you do that, you’ll escape the seemingly endless cycle of death and rebirth. Too much spiritual storm and stress may turn a person into a fanatic who can’t act in the detached manner that Krishna advocates. I don’t think the Gita’s idea of “devotion” (which is the best path, in the text’s view) amounts to anything like zealotry—if salvation is pursued anxiously and obsessively, the seeker will move farther and farther away from enlightenment and liberation. Perhaps that is where some westerners go astray when they make contact with eastern philosophy: they become fanatics determined to cast off immediately everything they ever knew or did. Inevitably, I suspect, this fanaticism leads to disillusionment. Hindu religion involves devotion, but wisdom seems to be more a matter of “letting things happen” than of anxiously trying to make them happen. Of course, it makes paradoxical sense to point out that it takes a lot of work before a person can just “let truth happen.”

Structure: the book is dialogic, a conversation between the charioteer-god Krishna and Arjuna the warrior. As Krishna unfolds his truths, Arjuna plays the practical man and asks, “yes, but we are restless, how can we live up to all this advice?” Which question elicits variations and alternatives from Krishna . We move towards a penultimate vision of Krishna as both Destroyer and Preserver. He is life and death, beautiful and mild, terrible as the lion killing its prey. This vision is too much for Arjuna—be careful what you wish for! So Krishna becomes mild again, and conversational. The text returns to the theme of wisdom and the right path, and before it ends we are given something of a jeremiad against the losers who don’t get the idea. But the book doesn’t end on such a sour note, returning instead to the necessity of renunciation and the achievement of right attitude and understanding.

Text’s Status: How does this book compare to The Bible with regard to the status posited for the text? Well, the latter work makes more claims for itself as necessary for salvation. But the Gita sets itself forth as a husk you can work through to get at the kernel of truth, so that you won’t need the printed words anymore. The Four Gospels deal heavily in winnowing the wheat from the chaff; they are consequential, linear, black and white in their morality. Forgiveness is possible and there’s much magnificence of gesture, but individual sinners are closely bound to their actions. One might see Jesus as a transgressive figure, a revolutionary who breaks the law to fulfill it—but the strict law of observance reigns and is turned inward, as when Jesus says that even to think of adultery is already to have committed it.

Chapter-by- Chapter Notes on The Bhagavad-Gita.

Edition: The Bhagavad-Gita. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York : Three Rivers Press, 2000. ISBN 0—609-81034-0. Page numbers do not apply to the Norton Anthology of World Literature selections, but the commentary is compatible.

Chapter 1. Arjuna’s Despair.

41-45. Dhritarashtra, father of the Kaurava warriors, sits beyond the story’s frame, requesting from the poet Sanjaya that he relate what happened in the fateful days of the Battle of Kurukshetra. He, too, will have a chance to derive enlightenment from the story. As Sanjaya recounts things, Arjuna asks Krishna to drive his chariot to a commanding place where he may view the entire field of battle. Time seems to stand still, opening a space for sustained reflection. Arjuna is not yet enlightened, and needs to know the precise relationship between himself and the actions he is about to perform. At this point, he is overwhelmed, and grieves over the imminent loss of his kindred in the battle, and the confusion and disorder he believes will necessarily result.

Chapter 2. The Practice of Yoga.

46-53. To clear away the thicket of Arjuna’s illusions, Krishna must first help him redefine what is meant by the term “self” and what is meant by “action.” He tells him to let go of his grief, which stems from attachment to his kindred in their perishable, mortal form. The truth is that such a connection is selfish—Arjuna is thinking more of himself than of the others whose loss he fears. Krishna seems to counsel that while family and caste are important, they are not to be fetishized for their own sake, or for the comfort and advantage they bring to oneself. The general comments I made above about “the self” apply well to this chapter. The Self transcends ego or personhood and cannot die; it is as imperishable as modern physics says matter is indestructible. Some of the language in this chapter may remind us of Jesus in The Gospels. For example, Mark 3.31-35: 3:31 There came then his brethren and his mother, and, standing without, sent unto him, calling him. 3:32 And the multitude sat about him, and they said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee. 3:33 And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brethren? 3:34 And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! 3:35 For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.

Saint Augustine follows this lead in The Confessions, too, in the way he deals with the passing of his mother Monica—he treats her with great regard, but at the same time he does not cling to the mortal element in her, saying that it would be selfish and an insult to God to behave that way. Krishna doesn’t preach stoicism; what he suggests is that Arjuna should act with detachment and that he should treat whatever feelings or sensations that come to him with indifference. He should do his duty as a Kshatriya warrior, and not worry about the so-called death of his relatives. At 52, Krishna speaks to Arjuna in terms he can understand: not to do your caste-based duty is shameful, it constitutes failure and disgrace.

53-60. What is the wisdom of yoga? All of the yoga types— of action, wisdom, devotion, and meditation, as they’re usually described—counsel that whatever a person does or thinks, it should be done or thought in “the spirit of worship,” and not for the sake of the results. Taking unwise account of the results to be attained from actions leads only to enslavement to desire and ambition, whether one’s own desires and ambitions or those of others. Reading the Hindu scriptures with some ulterior motive in mind, it seems, would be just as misguided as acting for personal gain. Regarding religion in this way only leads to empty ritualism and, in the end, disillusionment. The text is very clear on these points at page 54: “Act for action’s sake,” it says, and “unnecessary are all scriptures to someone who has seen the truth.” From 56-60, Krishna explains that the essence of yoga is rest, meditation, detachment. He calls for a reorientation of purpose when a person acts: the one who acts should be centered not in him- or herself, but rather in Krishna , the all-encompassing Self.

Chapter 3. The Yoga of Action (Karma Yoga).

61-63. Arjuna does not yet understand Krishna’s message, it seems, since he sees only paradox in the command to act: action is necessary, but action, he thinks, must be bad because it enslaves the doer. So on 62-63, Krishna varies the message, saying that action is necessary, but that so long as a person acts in the spirit of worship, it will not have the results Arjuna fears.

65-66. Krishna suggests that those who know about yoga do not try to impose enlightenment, but inspire by example.

66-70. Krishna himself keeps the cosmos going by means of action, as he says at 66, so inaction is not the aim. Human beings must act, but they must not covet the results or outcomes; they must not attach their desires to their deeds, and try to control what happens after they have acted. Krishna posits a reciprocal relationship between gods and human beings: “by worship you will nourish the gods / and the gods will nourish you in return” (63). What is the cause of “action”? The three gunas or qualities that arise from nature: sattva (spiritual, having to do with purity and spirituality), rajas (worldly, having to do with action and process) and tamas (unholy, having to do with inertia). It is not the ego that we should consider the performer of actions, but the gunas, which, if I understand correctly, exist in all things and bind the body to the spirit; as Krishna says on pg. 158, they “bind to the mortal body / the deathless embodied Self.” (This is an important consideration in Indian dietary practice, by the way—a healthy diet reinforces the balance between mind and body, while an unhealthy one destroys that balance. See, for example, the clear explication about yoga, the gunas and cooking at Sivananda.org.

Towards the end of the chapter, Krishna explains why a certain withdrawal from the senses is advisable—he says that desire strikes us first through our senses, so people must learn to control their reactions to sensory experience. Again, stoicism or simply “not feeling anything” doesn’t seem to be what is counseled here. Rather, the key thing is how a person responds to sensory experience, feelings and desires. Embedded in this text is a hierarchical notion of the mind being more valuable than the body.

Chapter 4. The Yoga of Wisdom (Jñana Yoga).

73. Krishna’s method entails variation and elaboration, the partial unfolding of truths to which the text returns repeatedly. Here he explains that all honest action leads to him. Indeed, a person rooted in wisdom is already “there,” so the book’s employment of location-words is more a device than an actuality; the “path” described is circular, not linear.

75. Here Krishna thoroughly redefines the concept “action.” Action isn’t simply “doing things”; this kind of busy-action may amount to doing nothing at all. In fact, says Krishna , in this sense the wise do nothing at all since wisdom consumes the content of their actions. As an American Secretary of State once said, “don’t just do something—stand there!”

76-77. The various “offerings”—sacrifice, the objects of the senses, action, etc.—almost don’t matter; what matters is how you do what you do. Right-spirited action is worship. What Krishna advises here resembles the preaching of Buddhists: a constructive, gentle form of self-annihilation. Experience itself can be considered an offering to Krishna if it’s approached rightly. Those who act honestly are, he says, “freed of themselves” (77).

78-79. Krishna says that the seeker should find a teacher. How to learn? Well, first the person who wants to learn must know that learning consists not in the accumulation of facts and so forth, but rather in the clearing away of deeply rooted illusions that stem from self and society. A person teaches not so much by imparting truth but rather by modeling how to learn. Oscar Wilde’s quip is relevant: “Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” (“A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated.” The Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Isobel Murray. Oxford : Oxford UP, 1989. 570. ISBN-10: 019281978-X.)

Chapter 5. The Yoga of Renunciation.

81-87. This chapter furthers the transition away from what we would call narrowly construed Cartesian dualism (cogito, ergo sum or “I think; therefore, I am” being the key precept). It seems that the errors of connecting doers with actions, being attached to one’s desires, and being attached to the results of actions, are symptoms of this primal intellectual mistake. In my view, the text values the things of the mind and spirit over the body, but I also think it warns us against deriving from this hierarchy a narrow, ego-centered conception of the self as something purely intrapersonal. The point isn’t to dismiss one’s embodied existence altogether so as to exalt Reason or anything of that sort; it’s to understand how the mind and body work together and how the individual is related to constructions that go well beyond the narrow confines of the “little-s” self. The chapter’s central statement occurs on page 83: when a person offers his actions to Krishna , the text says, “sin / rolls off him, as drops of water / roll off a lotus leaf.” Such a person has shed the illusion of self and thereby connected to the cosmic Self that is Krishna , and purification is a natural result of the transformation. I suppose someone determined to deconstruct the text’s metaphysics would suggest that this Self is the ultimate “center that is not the center,” i.e. that it’s the metaphysical concept set beyond investigation so as to ground everything else Krishna says. That would be a fair point, but I find it more interesting to attend to the manner in which the text’s representational and dialogic strategies try to slip away from this difficulty and to produce genuine enlightenment. The representation of infinity and absolutes in religious texts may be mostly intended to instill a certain perspective on things, a way of living in the world without losing hope, not to deliver something that really cannot be conveyed in language or by means of images. The point is to keep the mind and spirit open, not to shut it down. The vastness of the Gita’s time frames swamps teleological thinking—its cycles seem run in billions of years, a frame too great for the mind to comprehend. In Job, the protagonist is instilled with such a perspective after God recounts his sublimities: Job says simply that God has spoken “things too wonderful” for a mortal to understand, and that silence is the only appropriate response.

Chapter 6. The Yoga of Meditation (Dhyana Yoga).

88-98. It seems as if the yoga of action is to be pursued only so that one can reach a level of maturity sufficient to practice the yoga of meditation, which yields serenity. Reigning in the mind is necessary since it’s natural for it to wander during meditation. If possible, one is supposed to reach a temporary state of silence wherein the flow of language and emotion stops. A person who has ever attended to this incessant internal chatter for long will know how difficult it is to make it stop or even to slow it down, even for a moment. As the Shakers say, “‘tis a gift to be simple, ‘tis a gift to be free.” Western people seem addicted to self-consciousness. The romantic poets analyze and sing well regarding the potentially infinite and maddening regression of acts of self-consciousness: “I am thinking about myself thinking about myself thinking about myself . . . .” Where does that attempt to gain complete mastery over the psyche lead but to despair? How is it supposed to engraft a person into a state of wisdom, or rather (to be more accurate) into a process of thinking that yields wisdom? No wonder poets like Shelley pine because they can’t become like a skylark or a nightingale, even for an instant—see his excellent poem “To a Sky-lark.” It isn’t too difficult to think of analogies for the meditative transformation Krishna describes: Heidegger’s wonderful line about that need to refine one’s thinking to the point where one can perceive “a single star shining in the sky” (like Krishna’s “single object” on page 90) bracketing out all else, captures something of the transformation. More generally, how many people have ever really seen the night sky, free of interference and diminution by city lights, human language, and anything else that might get in the way? To do so is to be liberated from oneself, at least for a time; the stars have power to draw us beyond the confines of ourselves: self-annihilation, so to speak. A need for serenity and silence need not be construed as a flight into mysticism and irrationalism: instead, opening up a space for contemplation involves the bracketing-out of quotidian things like language, ordinary eventuality, and polluted sensory perception; where this cannot be accomplished, it involves knowing how to deal with what cannot be avoided so as not to be bound to it and determined by it. Finally, the chapter makes a broad offer of what in western terms might be called salvation: Krishna says that nobody is ever utterly lost; even the one who wanders may “cleanse himself” of sin “through many lifetimes” (97), and thereby reach the goal of liberation.

Chapter 7. Wisdom and Realization.

99-101. This chapter begins with mention of the rarity of seeking, and the even greater rarity of attaining, a true understanding of Krishna . At 101, the god explains that he is the excellence in all things, though he is not himself bounded by such excellence: “I am the taste in water,” he says. Desire is sanctioned so long as it is in accordance with duty. Apparently, one can find Krishna in anything excellent—”I am the arc of the ball as it flies through the air; I am the sound of the ball as it drops through the hoop / without touching the rim.” How’s that for a basketball analogy? Or perhaps Krishna is the best thought one has while reading a text, the one that comes and goes as quick as lightning—illustrating Moses Maimonides’ conception of learning as taking place through a series of illuminations, of “flashings” that come and then leave one in the dark again.

102-05. Krishna describes the sage as one who has sought the truth and who is now at rest. Page 104 is central to this chapter since Krishna declares himself “beyond all knowing”—a fact obscured to “fools” who, tied to the cycles of their own desire and aversion, believe he can be reduced or reified to a limited form: something, that is, that they can wrap their narrow minds around.

Chapter 8. Absolute Freedom.

106-112. Freedom is described on 107 at “union with the deathless” Self of Krishna, which can be realized only by a kind of devotion not reducible to mere ritual. At 110, we again see the vastness of the text’s time frames and the shifting or ever-expanding quality of its conceptual frameworks: Krishna says that “one single night of Brahma / lasts more than four billion years” and that “beyond this unmanifest nature / is another unmanifest state, / a primal existence that is not / destroyed when all things dissolve.” This kind of successive revelation of Krishna’s dimensionality I sometimes try to represent by drawing a series of concentric circles—every time the last dimension of reality seems to have been revealed, you have to draw another circle. Or picture yourself sitting somewhere, and then “situate” that scene in a much larger one encompassing your surroundings, and then the still larger one that would encompass that, and so forth, ad infinitum. The chapter ends with the thought that a wise person, dying, “reaches / the supreme, primordial place” (112). I suppose that the Gita author would agree with William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that birth is a kind of “fall” into the realm of materiality, and that “if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

Chapter 9. The Secret of Life.

113-20. This chapter prepares the way for Krishna’s subsequent self-descriptions and manifestations. The “secret” that Krishna promises to unveil is that he pervades all things, is the source of all things. On 118-19, he makes the startlingly broad claim that “all those who worship / other gods, with deep faith, / are really worshiping me, / even if they don’t know it,” and concludes by saying that “no one who truly / loves me will ever be lost.”

Chapter 10. Divine Manifestations.

121-30. This chapter is partly about how Arjuna may visualize Krishna , and again, it prepares us for the “cosmic vision” of the eleventh chapter. Krishna offers many beautiful and exalting images—the lion, the flower, the wind, the river Ganges ; he also employs more ineffable language such as “time” (127), “death that devours all things” (128), and “the wisdom of the wise” (129). He ends the chapter with the words, “I support the whole universe / with a single fragment of myself” (130). On the whole, the chapter offers a series of intuitions, not one coherent image or description of Krishna , because the point we are to understand is that he is ultimately not representable in any finite shape, either in images or in language. Krishna also explains that he is both Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer, the two gods Shelley invokes in his “Ode to the West Wind”: “ Wild Spirit, which art moving every where; / Destroyer and preserver; hear, O, hear!”

Chapter 11. The Cosmic Vision.

When Arjuna asks to see Krishna as he really is, the latter endows him with special eyes with which to view this celestial wonder. Arjuna gets infinitely more than he bargained for since Krishna shows his divine aspects as the embodiment of the Hindu Trinity of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. We are told that Arjuna “saw the whole universe enfolded” (134). This sight is properly infinite, so the text’s descriptive language seems designed more to instill wonder at the sublimity of Krishna’s true nature than actually to body it forth. Only Arjuna, with his temporarily adequate eyes, can see what is described to us. The sight does not bring comfort to Arjuna; it brings terror at Krishna’s “billion-fanged mouths” that “blaze like the fires of doomsday” (136). When Arjuna asks for a spoken description, Krishna declares, “I am death, shatterer of worlds, / annihilating all things” (138) and drives home to Arjuna the imperative to act, to do his duty as a member of the Kshatriya caste, a warrior: indeed, explains Krishna, he himself has already acted, and the battle has already taken place: all the warriors will die, and Arjuna the limited being is not truly the doer of the deeds that “will occur.” This “dazzling, infinite, primal” (141) form of Krishna cannot be endured long, so at Arjuna’s request he returns to his milder dimensions, and explains that only through devotion—not by “study or rites / or alms or ascetic practice” (143)—can he be known as he is.

Chapter 12. The Yoga of Devotion (Bhakti Yoga).

Krishna privileges devotion—centeredness on him, offering up one’s actions to him—as the best way to achieve mokhsha or liberation and escape the cycle of death and rebirth. Mystical worship of “the unmanifest” is more arduous for embodied beings like humans; the devotion to which Krishna refers seems to consist in devotion to him “as if” he were himself an embodied being, the way one human being might be devoted to another to the point of never allowing other imperatives to get in the way. The spirit of “surrender” is greater, Krishna explains, than practice, meditation, or knowledge (146)—such spiritual efforts are worthwhile techniques, not the thing itself. But ultimately, Krishna says with great generosity, all spiritual roads lead to him, though some may require longer and more difficult journeys than others. The supreme contentment he describes is, he says, beyond any human feeling—beyond even what we call “joy.”

Chapter 13. The Field and Its Knower.

The field is the body, with its ten senses. This is the main idea of the chapter—knowledge and its object are interrelated, it seems. Desire and aversion are included in the field; they are the two main things to watch out for because they have harmful effects on a person’s capacity for devotion to Krishna .

The ten senses or indriyas: Swami Jnaneshvara Bharati says that a human being is “like a building with ten doors”: the five exit doors or karmendriyas are eliminating, reproducing, moving, grasping, and speaking. The five entrance doors or jnanendriyas are the cognitive senses of smelling, tasting, touching, seeing, and hearing. The point is that one has to become aware of all these in order to become detached from them, to turn inward (pratyahara) by means of meditation. Simple denial of sensory experience isn’t good—rather, one gradually understands that the senses, though necessary, are ultimately unreliable and don’t give the only kind of knowledge. We are more than the body.

This chapter again says that the self is not the cause of actions; actions arise from Nature. Here is how the text explains this point: “Nature gives rise / to changes in the field and to gunas. // Nature is the cause of any / activity in the body; / the Self is the cause of any / feelings of pleasure or pain” (153). A bit later, the Gita says that it is Nature, and not the self, that causes actions (155). Again, unitary notions about the ego, some abstract self that makes things happen, are delusory; an act is the coming together and parting of many forces in motion. The terms “Self” and “self” are important to distinguish in this book: the capital-letter Self is a cosmic entity and is not to be reduced to Nature or the gunas (which are best explained in the next book); it is that eternal part of us that transcends ego and personhood and temporality, the part that is pervaded by Krishna . It is not the limited, bounded ego.

Chapter 14. The Three Gunas.

The three gunas are the three prime qualities of nature—sattva (spiritual), rajas (worldly) and tamas (unholy), which constitute all life (158). They “bind” the body to the deathless Self. The point is that the little-s self is too narrow a conception—the capital-s Self is a trans-subjective reality; we are all part of a vast cosmic Self. I think the idea is that the gunas, the prime qualities of nature, are the “doers” of actions. This is not the same thing as fatalism or determinism—there has to be something that is aware of itself to make such a determination as “I am not the doer of the deed.” It is sometimes said that karma is all about action. That’s what the word means, but I believe we are not to take it as a western-style cause/effect or “sin” model of transgression and punishment. The yoga of devotion can take us beyond concern with action. Pure devotion leads us to become unattached to action, realizing that your “little-s self” is not the center of the universe. We come to look upon the realm of action in a serene, detached manner. So Arjuna the warrior should participate in war, and yet, in the highest possible sense, not be “doing” anything at all. This is to redefine the concept of action in a profound way.

Chapter 15. The Ultimate Person.

Visualization technique becomes important again here: the Gita pictures the upside-down world tree, “this world of sorrow.” Krishna is said to be the supreme Person, beyond eternity. The author isn’t satisfied with even the grandest, most capacious concept because concepts, by their very nature and function, must contain, limit, and narrow things down to a level of specificity and simplicity at which we think we understand them. This is a useful function—we tame and comprehend the world by abstraction, but it is not an end in itself. Krishna says he is beyond beyond. “How utterly utter,” as the C19 aesthete would say, making fun of superlative language. Whoever understands this philosophical maneuver and representational strategy, it seems, knows Krishna and is devoted to him.

Chapter 16. Divine Traits and Demonic Traits.

This chapter seems almost condemnatory, though that’s understandable: desire, anger, and greed are the three main gates to hell. They all result, I presume, in attachment to the material realm in a narrow and selfish way. The demonic are people who do attach themselves to their desires and their aversions, seeing themselves as the doers and the center of all things. If they understood, I think, they would not behave the way they do: the fundamental problem is one of misunderstanding, not knowing the true nature and cause of action.

Chapter 17. Three Kinds of Faith.

Everything in the realm of Nature can be divided into sattvic, rajasic, and tamasic: food, worship, etc.

Chapter 18. Freedom Through Renunciation.

Relinquishing is a more important distinction than renunciation because beyond the issue of renouncing desire, one is still confronted with orienting oneself with any action whatsoever—even, for example, worship. An embodied being can’t give up action altogether; such a being can only relinquish the results of the action. You worship for worship’s sake, not because you hope to get something from it or want to feel upright, etc.

A final thought: it’s tempting, with our western vocabulary, to say that this Hindu text advocates self-overcoming. That’s one way of looking at it, but it doesn’t quite capture what I think Krishna is saying. Self-overcoming sounds like struggle—the Germanic idea that life is always striving to be other (Leben ist andersstreben.) But isn’t that to say that desire is the essence of life?—that we are never satisfied with who we are, always want something more, and so forth? It makes us sound like country folk who yearn to visit the big city, like those characters in the musical Oklahoma . That doesn’t sound Krishna-like to me. I think he’s saying the necessary adjustment isn’t so much to struggle as to let go and become free. Think of the common Buddhist example of how understanding happens: you concentrate and concentrate on one of those funny-looking dual-images, and all of a sudden, you just see it properly; you understand or become unconfused. Your delusions have slipped away and have been forgotten, and understanding comes peacefully. It isn’t a matter of arduous “getting of knowledge,” as when we stock our minds with facts; it is a matter of letting understanding happen. Eastern philosophy and religion sometimes call for intense self-discipline in meditation, yoga, etc., but the emphasis is on the fact that these practices allow immediate and intuitive understanding. Not building, but clearing away and opening up, is the aim.

211-21. Mohandas Gandhi’s essay “The Message of the Gita” interprets the Gita as non-violent. I believe this approach stems from Gandhi’s decision to read the text in light of present-day needs, in a time when consciousness has moved beyond the conservative, caste-based system within which the Gita was created. It’s obvious that Krishna counsels Arjuna to do his duty as a member of the warrior caste, but Gandhi’s point is that on the whole the text teaches us about “perfection” (212) and “self-realization” (213). At 218, Gandhi further says that acting without desire to control the outcome of one’s actions, as the Gita surely does, leads a person to reject violence and untruth as principles of action. Both involve an attempt to force or deceive others into getting them to do what you want them to do. He concludes with the thought that “Like man, the meaning of great writings undergoes evolution.”

Week 08, The Mahabharata

2007-03-20T16:26:00.000-07:00

Book-by-Book Notes on The Mahabharata.

Book 1. “Origins” (959-65).

960. Be careful what you wish for, as the saying goes: Kunti has borne Karna (Vasushena) to the Sun God, and GQ9dhara the wife of Dhrtarashtra, who having pleased the sage Vyasa had wished for 100 sons just like her husband, strikes her womb in frustration. But Vyasa again helps her, giving her instructions on how to bring about the birth of those 100 sons. Duryodhana is the first to be born. The Brahmanas warn that the omens are bad, that the boy will destroy his race, but the blind Dhrtarashtra’s love prevents him from destroying the child first. We also hear that Pandu’s eldest son Yudhisthira has become king upon his father’s death.

961. Karna survives his mother’s attempt to kill him. The young man respects the Brahmanas, and Indra rewards him with a sword. (The four classes or castes of early India are the Brahmans or learned men, the Kshatriya or warriors, the Merchants, and the Laborers.)

962. Here is related the manner in which Kunti chose Pandu as her husband. But then Pandu shoots what appear to be two deer mating, and it turns out that the male is actually a sage. He curses Pandu, who is told he’ll die the next time he has relations with his wife. Well, this interdiction leads indirectly to the birth of “the sons of Pandu” when Kunti declares that she will bear children by several gods. So by Dharma she has Yudhisthira, by Vayu she has Bhima, and by Indra comes Arjuna.

963. Madri, Pandu’s other wife, bears Nakula and Sahadeva by the divine Asvins. But when Pandu is overcome by desire for Madri, he dies. His sons excel Dhrtarashtra’s, which creates enmity especially in the eldest, Duryodhana. He and Bhima (born on the same day), we can see, will become rivals. Drona is born, and Drupada becomes King of the Northern Pancalas.

964-65. Drona gets angry at Drupada, and goes to Hastinapura, where Bhisma appoints him tutor to his grandsons. Drona extracts a promise from Arjuna, the exact nature of which as yet he doesn’t specify. Arjuna shows his skills in martial contests, creating envy. Karna (who is unknowingly a half-brother to the Pandu sons), performs with equally great skill, and his challenge to Arjuna endears him to resentful Duryodhana.

966. When the question of rank arises, Duryodhana simply declares Karna King of Anga, cementing the affinity between the two men. Drona now calls in his favor, which is that he wants Drupada captured and brought to him. Drupada is freed, but resents Drona fiercely. Drupada’s daughter Draupadi is born around this time.

Book 2. “The Assembly Hall” (967-83).

967-74. Yudhisthira is challenged by Duryodhana to a dice match, which, as the editor’s note explains, is by no means improper since Yudhisthira is only meeting his responsibility as Universal King and obeying the Kshatriya code by accepting a challenge. Well, he loses all he has, including his brothers, his wealth, himself, and their common wife Draupadi. The question is, was he still his own man when he gambled away Draupadi? This becomes a legal conundrum for both the Pandavas and Kauravas assembled in the Hall. Duhshasana treats Draupadi with contempt on 973-74, infuriating the Pandus but causing delight in Karna. Bhisma does not know how to resolve the legal dilemma.

975-83. Arjuna counsels patience to Bhima, explaining to him the “The king was challenged by his foes, and, remembering the baronial Law, he played at the enemy’s wish. That is our great glory!” But again they argue over the riddle, and again Duhshasana mistreats Draupadi. At 977, Bhima is infuriated with Duhshasana when the latter disrespects Draupadi. At 981, a frightened Dhrtarashtra pacifies Draupadi, who redeems Yudhisthira and the Pandavas. Bhima remained outraged at the conduct of the Kauravas, and has to be restrained. Why did Dhrtarashtra allow the game to go on? He explains, “I wished to see my friends and find out the strengths and weaknesses of my sons. Yudhisthira goes into exile with his fellow Pandavas, and as the summary explains, the Karauvas refuse to give back what they had taken.

Book 5. “The Preparation for War” (983-89).

983-85. Krishna, at the behest of Dhrtarashtra, tries to persuade Duryodhana not show such disrespect for the scriptures, for Dharma. But Duryodhana refuses to listen, and Krishna accuses him of merely being envious. “By poison, by snake, and by rope, in fact by every means, you have attempted the destruction of the sons of Pandu” (984-85). At this, Duyodhana hisses like a serpent and stalks out of the court.

985-89. Karna plots to capture Krishna to keep him from combining with Dhrtarashtra, and Dhrtarashtra can’t control events anymore, if indeed he ever could. The plot against him earns Krishna’s scornful laughter. At 986-87, Krishna informs Karna that he is “morally the son of Pandu” because of his status as Kunti’s son by the Sun God. Karna refuses to abandon Duryodhana even when his mother pleads with him and the Sun-god himself makes it clear that he supports reconciliation with Arjuna. Karna apparently cannot abide what he believes would be the dishonor of betraying Duryodhana, and says that, win or lose, he will retain either “merit” (if he wins) or “great glory” (if he should lose). He will fight Arjuna, who pairs up with Krishna, his divine charioteer. At 989, Bhisma says that while he will not kill the sons of Pandu, he will at least aid Duryhodhana’s Kauravas; Bhisma is bound not to harm them since he promised a long time ago to help the king of Hastinapura without regard to persons. On 989, Balarama says that the great struggle to come “is surely ordained by fate and cannot be averted.” He avows his equal love for his two pupils Bhima and Duryodhana, and goes off to purify himself; he will not stay to see the Kurus destroying one another. But later he will return to see Bhima and Duryodhana fight.

Book 8. “The Book of Karna” (990-94).

990-91. Karna requests that Duryodhana ask Shalya to serve as his charioteer since Arjuna has the divine Krishna. At first, Shalya is insulted because he doesn’t consider Karna’s birth high enough to merit his aid, but he responds to flattery. Karna confides his troubled state of mind regarding the curse leveled at him by Parasurama, whom he had tricked into giving him a celestial weapon. (This is a bit confusing—is it a different weapon from the one given him by Indra earlier?) It’s said that he will forget the invocation necessary to make the sword function just when he most needs it.

992-94. Bhima savagely kills Duhshasana in battle, and says, “I consider the taste of this blood superior to that of my mother’s mil, or honey, or ghee, or wine…” (992), avowing further that the second half of his vow—to kill Duryodhana—will soon be fulfilled. Karna duly suffers a chariot accident and forgets the magic invocation for his weapon, and Krishna first upbraids him for his poor behavior in insulting Draupadi during the dice game episode, and then kills him. Karna’s death is described in heroic terms; it is said that his head “fell like the Sun disappearing in the blood-red sunset behind the western hills” and that “from the body of the fallen Karna a light, passing through the atmosphere, illumined the sky” (994). The Kauravas flee the field in dismay.

Book 9. “The Book of Shalya” (994-98).

995-96. Duryodhana takes flight from the battle, and goes down into the waters of a lake that he has “charmed by the power of his wizardry” (995). The Pandavas hunt him down, but at first Duryodhana is reluctant to fight; he says “clad in deerskins I shall retire to the forest. Friendless as I am, I have no desire to live” (996). But he finally comes around when Yudhisthira promises him he will be king if he wins. Balarama comes to watch his two disciples Bhima and Duryodhana fight; he will witness what the others call the two warriors’ “skill in battle” (996).

997-998. When Balarama objects to the way the battle plays out, Yudhisthira excuses Bhima’s murderous fury against the fallen Duryodhana (the hero has kicked him in the head), saying that the Kauravas had brought this sort of treatment upon themselves by betraying the Pandavas in their exile.

Book 11. “The Book of the Women” (998-1000).

998-1000. Dhrtarashtra is brought low by sadness, knowing that he has lost so much after disregarding Krishna’s good advice to make Duryodhana allow the Pandavas five villages rather than taking their entire kingdom. Krishna allows Dhrtarashtra to vent his anger against a statue of Bhima, which is smashed while the real warrior is elsewhere. Dhrtarashtra is relieved to hear that he has not really killed Bhima. Then the Pandava brothers visit Gandhari, who has lost her one hundred sons. Bhima’s explanation of his “unfair” tactics by no means placates her (he says he had to kill Duryodhana in an unfair manner since it wasn’t possible to kill him fairly). Why did the Pandavas have to kill all one hundred of Dhrtarashtra’s sons? Her anger somewhat scorches Yudhisthira. After consoling Draupadi and Gandhari, Kunti curses Krishna: “Thirty-six years hence you shall, after causing the death of your kinsmen, friends, and son, perish by ignoble means in the wilderness” (1000).

Book 12. “The Book of Peace” (1000-01).

Yudhisthira and the Pandavas undergo a month of purification, but the king is in despair, saying, “I am an evil-doer and a sinner and the cause of the destruction of the earth. Seated as I am now, I shall starve myself to death” (1000). He is consoled effectively by Vyasa, and his kingdom is restored to him. He then pays homage to his uncle Dhrtarashtra as supreme lord. Bhima is made crown prince, and Arjuna becomes “responsible for resisting hostile forces and punishing the wicked” (1001).

Week 07, Confucius, Chuang Chou

2007-03-13T16:25:00.000-07:00

General Notes on the Analects of Confucius.

The complexity of the moral system in this text may stem from political necessity. As Lau says in his introduction to the complete translation, even before Confucius’ time, observing human behavior was considered an important way to gain some control over current and future events. People are unpredictable, and if you want to derive some sense of regularity from them, you have to study carefully how they behave. Confucius held some political offices connected to the Chou dynasty court, and he is concerned about this matter, too—he treats his disciples in accordance with their respective understandings.

Benevolence. The main quality of a gentleman is benevolence. It seems that in keeping with his flexible way of defining things, Confucius doesn’t offer any single statement, but makes us work at piecing together a sense of what the gentleman is, and how he must behave. First of all, the term seems partly connected with social class, as it sometimes is even today—i.e. to be a gentleman is to be well born, of a certain social standing and not exactly a member of the seething masses. Ancient societies had no problem maintaining strong distinctions between the lower orders and the higher-ups. But it also isn’t only a class-based term; the gentleman may be judged in terms of his character and his conduct, too. Lau explains clearly what “benevolence” entails:

1) Don’t make others do things you wouldn’t want to do yourself. This sounds a lot like the golden rule.

2) Love your fellow men. The family comes first here, but the affection extends in ever-lessening degrees to much more distant groupings. Confucius writes in support of a dynasty based on the clan-inheritance system, but we can see an impulse towards universalism here; he is capable of saying “love your fellow men,” even if he may not mean precisely the same thing as we might mean.

3) Do your best, do your duty—for the sake of doing so since Confucian ethics doesn’t really depend on concern over punishment in the afterlife. This seems similar to the idea set forth in the Gita: act in the spirit of worship, not self-aggrandizement.

4) Benevolence entails self-overcoming and observance of the rites, or, more broadly, religious and social custom. These are received wisdom, and, along with music and philosophy, they help to bring a sense of order to life, especially given the generally unpredictable and unruly character of people. Lau reminds us that self-interest is something Confucius understood to be a powerful chaos-maker in society and politics. Maybe this constant interest in “the rites” is annoying to modern westerners—American culture values rebelliousness (think “Boston Tea Party”) and individualism in that modern, post-romantic way. But many ancient cultures think of the self as more of a public construct. Confucius isn’t a Spartan advocating the life of the mess hall and the military camp, but the point is that a gentleman grows up respecting the rites, developing and learning in accordance with them. There is room for a notion of individualism, of personal integrity and reflectiveness—but the self is given a priori the pattern of the customs and traditions, and learns the value of moving along such a path towards wisdom and maturity. It would be arrogant, I think, to put this down as “conformism,” even if Confucianism is often used by Westerners like Ezra Pound to mean something like “strict order, respect for rank,” and so forth.

Other related virtues—they complement one another—are courage and reliability or living up to one’s word so long as that doesn’t mean being stupidly rigid. Then there are reverence in religious matters, and respectfulness in outward manner and in accordance with the station of the people around you.

Education. I think it’s true that the courtly notion of education was strict and labyrinthine—we’ve all heard the term “Mandarin” applied to mean something like “an erudite person who is remote from ordinary people.” But it’s silly to generalize like that—Confucius evidently doesn’t see education as merely the passing on of facts; it is lifelong and process, part of a perpetual formation of character. Notice that he doesn’t call himself a sage, and insists that he’s never even met one. The sage is an ideal, not a reality easily achieved. Maybe even that is going too far, since as we said, the point of Confucian morality isn’t to strive for recognition—it is to do one’s duty and treat others generously but according to their status and merit.

General View of Social Order. It’s not so difficult to see that Confucius’ society emphasizes order and harmony. Most likely, such an emphasis counteracts powerful real-life tendencies. There was plenty of political violence and probably a good deal of social unrest at times. Plato’s Republic was written in the aftermath of Athenian democracy’s self-inflicted implosion and defeat at the hands of Sparta—it is something of a wish-fulfillment. I don’t know that Confucius is in quite that position, but evidently, he had no illusions about his ideas being broadly applied as principles of government and social harmony. He has to settle for influencing his disciples, who will try to broaden the influence of his example to as many people as possible. This is a philosophy about how to develop sound individual character.

Another thing to consider with regard to Confucius’ vision of social order is his insistence on the way the common people—for whose good the whole political order is ultimately arranged, we are told—are influenced by the good (or bad) example of the nobility and ruling elite. Confucius claims that the common folk are like grass, and the nobility’s actions and words are like the wind that blows over the grass, bending it. The people take their “set,” so to speak, from their betters. What is American government founded on but a healthy distrust of government, coupled with an insistence that those whom we elect not tell us what to do in any area of life where it isn’t absolutely necessary? I’ve noticed that a certain slice of the electorate conflates leadership with moral example—there’s no harm in rulers behaving themselves (it’s embarrassing when they don’t, and can be dangerous if it touches upon matters of state), but a lot of us have trouble with the idea that we’re paying elected officials to set a moral example for us because such notions tend towards authoritarianism. In a sense, I’m paying the pols to carry out the public’s business, not to tell me how I should behave in my private affairs. Some of our presidents would probably never have been elected had we scrutinized their moral fabric or even their mental stability the way we do today—Jefferson was a complex and moody man to say the least, and Lincoln was subject to profound depressions.

Confucius’ sayings are at times rather cryptic and paradoxical, but they sound like the authoritative words of a master. They have come down to us at second-hand, as things said in response to questions asked by disciples of varying degrees of wisdom. I think this fits Confucius’ outlook well—he responds in particular ways to particular people at particular times. He isn’t preaching from the mountaintop; he’s talking about practical things in the here and now, and trying to explain to others why they ought to respect themselves and the relative dignity of other people, whatever their rank.

Page-by-Page Notes on the Analects of Confucius.

823. Confucius says that at seventy years old, a person’s understanding frees up development in accordance with the Way. The ruler is urged to teach by concrete example. What to do? Raise the virtuous, promote meritocracy.

824-25. Benevolence: respect for all, reverence for some. Benevolence is perhaps wisdom long continued, and involves overcoming internal and external barriers. A gentleman should maintain appropriate bearing and speech, consider the context and circumstances of words and actions. Tact is essential.

825-26. Music, religious rites, received customs—not chaos-inducing self-assertion—should be our pattern for development. Statecraft plays a major role in promoting this path. A gentleman should have a certain temperament: one that makes him generally capable rather than merely proficient in a few areas. Confucius and John Henry Newman the Victorian author would agree in that regard: Newman promoted a truly liberal education that would form a person’s character and temperament; above all, liberal education makes a person capable of continuing to learn, and learn quickly. Above all, a gentleman sets a good example for the commonfolk.

826. The young, says Confucius, deserve awe. Those fifty and under should have the potential to develop themselves authentically, at least if they live in a state that follows the Way. So in a sense, Confucius is promoting a “youth culture,” in spite of all the reverence for the old we associate with traditional Confucianism. I doubt, however, that he would agree with Oscar Wilde’s quip, “the young know everything.”

827. Undue sorrow is appropriate, Confucius suggests, if the person you grieve for has earned it. As the Bible says, “there is a time for every purpose and for every work.” It is somewhat less than human, perhaps, to measure out one’s sorrow, confining it neatly by means of the old rituals. Is it not in the very nature of sorrow to have something excessive about it? The deepest sorrows are in response, after all, to events that rake us to the very core of our being. Passage 26 is particularly fine: Confucius is tolerant of the others’ busybody counsels of perfection, but when Tien says he simply wants to “go bathing in the River Yi and enjoy the breeze on the Rain Altar, and then to go home chanting poetry,” Confucius is impressed. Tien’s wish is best because it flows from a sure knowledge of the wellspring of joy: to follow one’s heart in the proximity of the rites, concretely and simply.

828. Benevolence is discussed again. The golden rule is to treat all with respect and with due regard for their station in life. Government by good example is best. Encourage everyone to respect themselves by respecting their duty. It isn’t simply “rank” that matters. One must occupy well a certain station and fulfill one’s responsibilities. People are bound, bonded together, by a strong sense of reciprocal obligation. Even so, Confucius knows that it may take generations to achieve order, based on the multiplication of personal example. Is this because he believes self-assertion will keep cropping up? Sure. Also that the unwise can “teach by example,” creating thereby a prevailing climate of stupidity and greed. To what extent is Confucianism applicable today, we might ask? We live in an age of manufactured consensus, simulacra, global villagism, and so forth. Can cultural learning happen by means of concrete example? What is the root of us?

830. Education is not the same thing as extreme erudition. I agree—it seems best to “think along with” a text rather than simply to regard it as information to be received as fact and memorized.

831. The Odes are a channel for legitimate expression, and they help induce harmony. Society works like music; we must play in tune together, or there will be not euphony but dysphony, chaos, ugliness. We can’t escape our humanity, says Confucius. He is no primitivist. The state should guard the rites and customs. People live within the state, which is not, therefore, to be understood as a mere set of arrangements whereby some people will superimpose order on the lives of other people. Confucius and the nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Hegel might agree on at least one thing: the state is the nursery and guarantor of true individuality. We become who we are under the auspices of the governmental and social order.

Page-by-Page Notes on Chuang Chou’s Chuang Tzu.

835. Chuang counsels self-sufficiency, but not pride in accomplishment. It’s implied that since the Way can’t be known in its entirety, we shouldn’t presume to have met all its demands or to have followed it since we can’t verify our claims. Chuang’s basic approach is perspectivalist, but even that term seems inadequate since it invokes the “here/there” distinction that Chuang finds troubling. In his paradoxicality, he resembles the pre-Socratics, and his approach towards the misleading aspects of language and concepts seems quite similar to Nietzsche’s proto-deconstructive analyses many centuries later.

836. Lien Shu hears from Chien Wu about a “Holy Man living on faraway Ku-she Mountain.” He chides Chien Wu for not crediting the man’s perfection and wisdom. Such a man resists definition, he explains: in his perfections, such a sage remains aloof and refuses to be defined by things, events, or desire: “Though the age calls for reform, why should he wear himself out over the affairs of the world? There is nothing that can harm this man.”

837. Chuang Tzu tells a story about a traveler who made good money and achieved social advancement by buying the rights to a salve for chapped hands that the inventor had failed to capitalize on. The lesson here is that ingenuity pays. Chuang Tzu next explains that Hui Tzu’s shu tree is actually quite valuable in its uselessness, and has something to teach him: “If there’s no use for it, how can it come to grief or pain?” Chuang here seems to be setting forth an anti-utility, anti-purpose ethos. Hui Tzu should adapt himself to the tree’s being, not the other way around.

838-39. Tzu-ch’i’s views on desire are excellent. He suggests, I think, that openness to desire is fine, but we mustn’t try to ground our lives on attaining the object of our desires. We won’t find any false carpe diem claims in Chuang. He also says that “Great understanding is broad and unhurried; little understanding is cramped and busy,” and that those of little understanding “drown in what they do.” Is the body the key to understanding? Well, it doesn’t seem to be the case, based on what is said here: “Once a man receives this fixed bodily form he holds on to it, waiting for the end. Sometimes clashing with things, sometimes bending before them, he runs his course like a galloping steed, and nothing can stop him. Is he not pathetic?” (839) Are words vital? It’s not certain: “Words have something to say. But if what they say is not fixed, then do they really say something?” Or does the Way rest upon something other than these things? Tzu-ch’i says that the mind teaches itself: “If a man follows the mind given him and makes it his teacher, then who can be without a teacher?” (839) Evidently, Chuang’s is not Confucius’ “little accomplishments” philosophy: we find in Chuang a different definition of “the Way,” one suggesting it is not realizable in custom or society.

840-41. The paired categories “this” and “that,” says Tzu-ch’i, amount to conceptual slicing and dicing. The distinction-making into right and wrong (moral categories) stems from desire. But desire for what? For certainty and stability, comfort for mind and body. We humanize, anthropomorphize everything around us. Consider Nietzsche’s Apollo/Dionysus argument, in which both are of twin birth, like obverse/reverse. The similar point is that the sage embraces everything, and rejects only rejections implied by the distinction-makers and anthropomorphizers. So understanding should rest in what it doesn’t understand, and go by “the torch of chaos and doubt” (841 middle). All firm definitions of the Way are false. Heaven is the equalizer, and one should relegate all to “the constant” (840). Tzu-ch’i says, “A state in which ‘this’ and ‘that’ no longer find their opposites is called the hinge of the Way. When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly. Its right then is a single endlessness and its wrong too is a single endlessness. So, I say, the best thing to use is clarity.” Difficult language, to be sure, but at times Chuang’s simplicity is remarkable: says Tzu-ch’i, “A road is made by people walking on it; things are so because they are called so. What makes them so? Making them so makes them so.” When people stop walking on a road, they stop calling it a road, and it isn’t a road anymore. There’s no need, therefore, to get fooled by abstract concepts into confusing words with the world itself. Not all philosophers would agree (if indeed I understand Chuang’s point correctly) that we can keep the two distinct, but the clarity of his remarks is excellent: he understands that “concepts” are impositions on things, not sufficient explanations for them.

842-43. Tzu-ch’i suggests that understanding should “rest in what it does not understand” (842) since “If the way is made clear, it is not the Way.” The sage embraces things, leaves things as they are: this simultaneous embracing and letting-be constitutes success. See 842 1/3, 843 near bottom. We should consider what this philosophy offers by rejecting rejections and the lure of facile concepts and oppositions. See 840 mid: making into one equals allowing, letting be. Tzu-ch’i says that “Ordinary men strain and struggle; the sage is stupid and blockish. He takes part in ten thousand ages and achieves simplicity in oneness. For him, all the ten thousand things are what they are, and thus they enfold each other.”

844-45. I believe that here Chuang is allowing his characters gently make fun of Confucius’ upbeat, social understanding of the Way, of its respect for rank. Chuang recognizes that you can’t look to society’s workings for the “natural order of things.” Why not? Because we humans are inveterate self-promoters, substituting our perspectives and desires for the world, swallowing up or vacuuming all else into our acts of definition and understanding. So who is the man: Chuang Chou or the dream butterfly? See 845 top.

845. The cook Ting teaches Lord Wen-hui something important. He follows the Way, he suggests, by simply doing what he does. His wondrously deft carving of an ox isn’t simply a matter of conscious technique: “After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now—now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants.”

846-47. The old tree’s uselessness—its resistance to men’s needs and desires—protects it. Carpenter Shih has learned to respect the forest, its way of remaining beyond our limitedness. The tree speaks to him in a dream and disinvites comparison, asking, “If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large? Moreover you and I are both of us things. What’s the point of this—things condemning things? You, a worthless man about to die—how do you know I’m a worthless tree?” Crippled Shu, too, remains outside the pale of usefulness, content to be unworthy of notice, though the philosopher notices him.

848-50. Master Sang-hu dies, and Confucius, in Chuang’s telling, sends condolences by Tzu-Kung. Confucius realizes that the man’s friends did not really need condolences. They sing and weave silkworm frames, and don’t lament. Confucius praises them for it, says that he, by contrast, stays in the realm, and thrives in the Way as fish in water: “Fish thrive in water, man thrives in the Way” (850). The emphasis on annulment of change sounds Confucian, but the kind of uncertainty Chuang embraces sounds very different. And singular Meng-sun? Well, he makes no distinctions but wails because others do. Confucius suggests that one may do well to “go along and forget about change” (850 bottom). I think he’s reasserting his perspective: go with, not against, the rites and customs. As for the Masters who didn’t need Confucius’ Hallmark-Card, is there a mild criticism here? Does their joy come from protest against death rather than calm acceptance? (Whitman’s “sane and sacred death.”) We recall Confucius’ willingness to indulge himself in “undue sorrow.”

852-53. Duke Huan learns a lesson about book-learning from the wheelwright P’ien: “When the men of old died, they took with them the things that couldn’t be handed down. So what you are reading there must be nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old.” So much for the Miltonic idea that “a book is a living thing,” I suppose. P’ien’s example of his “knack” for working with a chisel and mallet suggests that just as you can’t really teach people manual skills—they must learn for themselves, for the most part—there’s a great deal that can’t be captured in language.

854. Chuang Tzu is lectured in a dream by a skull on the rhythms of the living and the peacefulness of the dead. He had previously presumed to question this very skull, and had been using it as a pillow. But it’s clear that the skull thinks it has the best of the situation, and points out that life is full of troubles and tasks. It’s hard to see how the living could embrace this philosophy of nothingness and tranquility, but the passage seems to privilege the skull’s viewpoint.

858. The Yellow Emperor learns something about the nature of kingship from a boy tending to some horses: “Governing the empire I suppose is not much different from herding horses. Get rid of whatever is harmful to the horses—that’s all.” Stripping away the ceremony and flattery, the boy is suggesting, leaves the Emperor with this simple imperative as his guide.

Week 06, Plato, Classic of Poetry

2007-03-06T16:24:00.000-08:00

Introduction to Plato

1. Socrates’ lineage as a philosopher allies him with his “pre-Socratic” predecessors who tried to provide explanations for natural phenomena without invoking the gods. To varying extents, Heraclitus and his fellows were trying to explain natural things in a natural way, not by enveloping them in mystery. Socrates sometimes speaks the language of fable and literature, but on the whole he’s a strong proponent of rational pursuit of truth.

His model of knowledge is similar to mathematics, which offers us irreproachable truths independent of empirical verification. Socrates himself, unlike Plato, doesn’t really advocate a systemic philosophy, though he seems certain that his method of questioning is the only way to arrive at the truth.

What kind of truth? Well, wisdom or understanding differs from the ordinary techne of craftsmen in that the latter don’t investigate first principles; they just start from the most convenient and practical place and go from there. They are pursuing practical ends, not trying to reason their way back to the essence of pottery or shoes. Which, of course, doesn’t keep them from asserting that they know all sorts of things they don’t—things far beyond the narrow limits of their craft. Socrates, however, is interested in finding out what virtue and the good are, not in what can be done with them in immediately practical terms.

The Platonic/Socratic way of philosophizing assumes a fundamental split between philosophical wisdom and the things and pursuits of this world. That willingness to split the world from philosophy is obviously problematical, but it results in an attractive emphasis on human potential and integrity: we admire the whimsical, yet lordly, figure of Socrates standing up to the vulgar mob that condemns him for exposing their stupidity. And isn’t exposing people’s ignorance a service, and therefore “practical” in the deepest sense? It is the beginning of education—we must be thrown back upon our own resources if we are ever to learn anything.

That’s what Socrates’ dialectic is meant to do: he rigorously tests individuals’ claims, and almost always finds those claims unsound. Such an experience should set people thinking on first principles and revive in them the knowledge they’ve forgotten, even if deeply rooted and traditional illusions keep them from getting to that point. People need illusions, we moderns have come with rue to admit—perhaps that’s what gets Socrates in trouble. Taking candy from babies may be easy, but it doesn’t make babies like you.

2. Socrates’ view of education can be summed up with a quip by Wilde: “nothing worth knowing can be taught.” In the dialogue Meno,Socrates shows how he has simply drawn geometrical knowledge from within a slave boy. Metempsychosis and anamnesis are the key terms here—we have always known what we know at present; it’s just that we need to recollect it and, if necessary, get rid of the illusions and other factors that may be getting in our way. The dialectic can stimulate us to make this recovery.

Contrast this view with the ordinary one that school is all about getting crammed chock full of facts so you can do well on tests. Our entire culture is geared towards that goal. Primary and secondary teachers are told to “teach to the tests” rather than emphasize the learning that Plato and Socrates advocate. The desire to make sure kids are learning is admirable, but I suspect that what we do at the primary and secondary level turns education into social control and makes it into little more than a bourgeois ticket to the good life—not an encounter with potentially life-transforming materials of any kind, whether in the sciences or humanities. Self-development of the modern post-romantic kind isn’t the agenda of Plato and Socrates, but they have something worthwhile to teach us about education—pardon the contradiction.

3. Chariot of the Soul: Refer to the Phaedrus as a segue from education to Socrates’ disdain for the multitude: the charioteer or soul must restrain the bad steed (base desire) and help the good steed (noble desire—something like emotion) set the right course in life. We are impelled towards our objects, but it makes all the difference which part of our passionate nature is doing the impelling. Plato figures the soul as tripartite, with one part being reason and the other two being more passionate: there’s mere appetite, and there’s the capacity to be moved by or towards something in a higher, more sustainable way.

4. Refer to the Analogy of the Cave to deal with the theory of the Forms and how it’s connected to the ignoble many versus the wise philosophical few. The mind needs to become acclimated to its surroundings—the cave-dwelling ignoramuses are blinded by the Truth, while the philosopher is blinded by the darkness upon reentering it to help others. At this point we can move to The Apology: here Socrates has been roped and dragged down into the Cave, and the natives are hostile. No wonder Socrates himself is defiant, though he doesn’t directly condemn his judges—that would be unkind and contradictory to his mission and his nature.

General Notes on The Apology of Socrates

Socrates may be a new kind of hero. Just as Plato participated in a shift from old ways of thinking to new ones—a scientific, rational method for apprehending truth—he does Socrates the honor of redefining the heroic ideal. Were it not for his sense of humor, Socrates would come across as almost Christ-like. Consider the famous words of Jesus, “my kingdom is not of this world.” Socrates is a man who lived his life ironically; indeed, Quintilian, in discussing figurative language, uses Socrates as an example of irony because he went around asking people questions and appearing to know nothing while at the same time carrying out his mission as the wisest of men. Socrates is a model citizen of Athens, a man who respects his city’s institutions though perhaps he doesn’t care much for the individuals in the assembly.

It will be necessary to explain Socratic dialectic (elenchus) because the method is not very evident in the dialog. It seems that the audience in the text is not worthy of the dialectic. On the one hand, the charges leveled against Socrates are true—they boil down to something like “Socrates tries to change our minds, and he makes us and our children uncertain of what we already know.” This is hardly a legal charge, although it has been falsely cast in legal terms. The accusers have made an extra-legal communal charge—there simply is no place for a man like Socrates in their version of Athens. Socrates must have known that Athenian law was not always pure or objective—consider, for example ostracism. It seems like a spiteful custom. Notice that Socrates assumes there is hostility against him and that such hostility is in fact a sign of his success. Well, Socrates was always a good citizen: he fought bravely in Athens’s wars, served on the Council during tough times, and yet he must have had no illusions about the impurity of Athenian democracy as a vehicle for truth or justice.

So Socrates limits his attempt to counter the charges against him to a few sallies that show their complete absurdity and contradictory nature. But showing how silly his opponents are isn’t really the point, and he doesn’t care about the outcome. After all, he is an old man and claims to have no great fear of death. The self-defense Socrates offers, therefore, does not seem much more serious in a legal sense then the accusations made against him. Socrates displays sublime calm in the face of peril.

Doesn’t Socrates invite his death? He demonstrates his role as a gadfly, stinging Meletus, Anytus, and all his accusers, humiliating them with a chuckle, answering his own rhetorical questions—none of these things would endear him to a jury of moralistic Athenians. In addressing his particular audience, Socrates deliberately annoys them, thus reminding them why they dislike him.

But there is a more serious side to Socrates in this dialogue. By his bearing, he reaffirms the rock-solid quality of the realm he supports—the realm of absolute ideals such as truth and justice. You can put truth and justice on trial, but you cannot win; they will redefine you and your society even if you despise them. Socrates demonstrates the faith all great revolutionaries have: faith in the power of a direct correspondence between their actions and their perception of truth. There is in such revolutionaries no wavering, no cheap rhetoric, no fear. Behind the bantering of Socrates, there is purifying fire, as evidenced by the occasional flashes of anger. Socrates is a man who suits his words to his audience, who knows their minds and treats them appropriately—but not in a way that compromises his ability to stay true to the mission given him by Apollo.

Socrates is a complex figure, not a simpleton. He remains a “stranger at the gates” of Athens, just as when Odysseus comes home to Ithaca, he is a stranger who must prove his worth anew. Socrates never tries to undermine the assembly or its decisions, so he remains a good citizen no matter what his accusers say. See the dialog Crito, where Socrates says he has no desire to escape and that he respects his city’s laws too much to do so. At the same time, as a philosopher he takes up a position outside all ordinary human justice because he knows that he is the man coming back down into the cave as in the parable, and so he cannot fully acclimate himself to the darkness of the assembly and the trial, nor can the judges in the assembly respond with anything but hostility to him. He will be judged on the basis of his entire career of peripatetic questioning. So now they have got him “pinned and wriggling on the wall,” to borrow from T. S. Eliot.

The point of the dialog, therefore, will be rather to respond with bemused dignity and with some measure of stoic indifference to his accusers. Plato casts Socrates as the quintessential Greek bearing up under pressure, responding actively to a fate imposed upon him by forces he cannot control. His only weapon is his mind, and he has been confronted with the brute power of an idiotic citizenry. In sum, Socrates falls victim to the tyranny of the majority—always a risk in a democratic system.

He upholds the principle of law as something transcendent, though here personified; that’s always a difficult case to make: we ourselves make such abstractions, a materialist might say, and so have difficulty maintaining them as truly independent of us—mention the idea that law is in fact part of the “superstructure,” a tissue of language that enforces codes pertaining to private property and citizens’ identity, conduct, and relations with other citizens.

Notes on The Classic of Poetry

“Fishhawk.” Who is the speaker? It seems that the speaker is collective, not individual. This poem isn’t a direct love lyric, but rather a communal lyric that asserts a harmony between the processes of nature and human emotions. The girl the speakers sing about is no doubt a maiden favored by the prince.

“Plums are Falling.” This is similar to the combined action/thought pattern in “he loves me, he loves me not” while plucking a flower. I find that it conveys a sense of how the mind turns even sharp observation of material acts and things to its own account. The woman in this poem is just picking fruit, but she’s thinking of something else. Marriages at this time would surely have been arranged, as they were in most ancient cultures, but the woman here suggests that she can assert at least an opinion, a kind of general desire for happiness and a “fine” husband. I’ve read that plum blossoms are symbols of courage and hope, heralds of the new year.

“Dead Roe Deer.” The situation here is in one way obvious, in another enigmatic. The maiden has been “led astray,” but how should we interpret her response to the situation? The dead deer perhaps symbolizes the girl’s loss of innocence. I’ve read that if one came across a dead deer, it was considered auspicious and proper to cover it as described in this poem, i.e. by wrapping it in white rushes.

“Boat of Cypress.” The poem is probably best understood as being about the speaker’s sense of betrayal at the hands of a lover. So how does the poem show the speaker dealing with her discontent? How is the leading image, the boat of cypress, related to the theme? Well, this image often (according to Arthur Waley) symbolizes the back-and-forth motion of a person’s intentions. The Odes, as Confucius will later say, help one compose oneself in such situations.

“Gentle Girl.” The poem is interesting in the sense that the girl is placed beyond all objects of the senses; she’s the very source of beauty. But at the same time the speaker, in the girl’s momentary (?) absence, concentrates on the material objects with which she is associated.

“Quince.” The exchanges aren’t equal materially—only the color of the gifts seems to make a rough match. But the love match is what matters. The man redefines objects for their symbolic value, and so a precious object can serve as proper “return” for an ordinary one, and vice versa. The Norton editors mention this poem to highlight the sense of egalitarianism that runs through these poems; as they put it, the gods don’t “play favorites,” and the Chou dynasty rulers seem to have respected the common people they ruled.

“Chung-Tzu, Please.” As the editors say, the poem is an offering of sorts to an overly excited lover. His behavior is a bit wild, and it’s a violation of decorum—the girl is becoming embarrassed about what her family and people in general might say about this manner of courtship. Reticence reigns even in revelation—the girl is enamored of Chung-Tzu, and the poem admits as much. She’s redefining his role as a lover, telling him how he must behave if he is to keep her affection and prosper in his suit. The material boundaries he crosses, the damage he does to the garden, violates her sense of belonging, her security. In ancient cultures generally, the individual’s sense of self is defined largely in relation to a communal order; a person’s “sense of self,” as we would say, is from the outset informed by the voices and opinions of respected others in the community. This way of understanding “personality” differs markedly from modern, post-romantic Western insistence on the uniqueness and radical autonomy of the individual. I would not care to overstate this argument since it’s foolish to suppose “people didn’t use to have a self way back when” (there’s truly “nothing new under the sun,” and the ancients could no doubt teach us a thing or two), but there’s a difference in emphasis to be reckoned on between ancient Chou culture and our own.

“I Went Along the Broad Road.” This short poem is apparently about a momentary meeting in the road between (in the first stanza) two old friends, and in the second, two former lovers. The speaker is concerned that no friendship or affair should ever be completely forgotten.

“Rooster Crows.” This poem is related to the traditional “dawn song,” as we would call it in western literature. Here, though, the point isn’t to curse the dawn for breaking the lovers’ idyllic time together; instead, the female speaker spurs the man on to go and do some work before he returns. I get the sense that these are courtly lovers, not peasants—the speaker has jewels to give, and they both will live the good life, replete with attendant harpers, fine wine and excellent food.

“Willows by the Eastern Gate.” Seems like an assignation had been set, but one partner didn’t keep it. The other’s mind remains fixed upon the place, wistfully or obsessively. The place knows nothing of the proposed meeting, but it is associated with the meeting in the speaker’s mind.

“She Bore the Folk.” Chiang or Jiang seems to have been one of those mortals who bears divine children to a god, in this case to the Jade Emperor, co-ruler of Heaven along with Jade Pure or Yuan-Shi-Tian-Zong. (See http://www.godchecker.com/ on Chinese Gods.) Lord Millet is her first-born of this god, and the boy grows up in a natural realm that both nourishes and abandons him. In turn, he establishes a close, productive relationship between ordinary mortals and the land that sustains them; Chou culture is agrarian, and this poem seems to be about the foundations of their society and political system. Lord Millet established the rites that the people still carry on with in the present time of the poem; their agricultural labor itself seems to be part of what is meant by “the rites.”

Week 05, Aeschylus

2007-02-27T16:24:00.000-08:00

Introduction to Ancient Greek Theater, Followed by Notes on Aeschylus’ The Oresteia (Updated with some corrections 2/11/08)

Books and Online Resources:

Didaskalia: Ancient Theatre Today. http://www.didaskalia.net/index.html. 3-D theatre and mask reconstructions, excellent introductory material on Greek and Roman theatre and stagecraft.

Easterling, P. E. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Kaufmann, Walter. Tragedy and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.

Ley, Graham. A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1991.

McLeish, Kenneth. A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 2003.

Perseus Project. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ . Electronic texts (original languages and translations), critical studies, etc. An impressive resource for classicists.

Pomeroy, Sarah et al. Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

Religious Roots of Tragedy: The Festivals of Dionysus at Athens were called the City Dionysia, which was held in March or April, and the Lenaea, which was held in January. Though classical theater flourished mainly from 475-400 BCE, it developed earlier from choral religious ceremonies dedicated to Dionysus.

The God of Honor: Dionysus was an Olympian god, and the Greeks celebrated his rites in the dithyramb. In mythology, his followers were satyrs and mainades, or ecstatic females. We sometimes call him the god of ecstasy, and as Kenneth McLeish says, he “supervis[ed] the moment when human beings surrender to unstoppable, irrational feeling or impulse” (1-2). His agents are wine, song, and dance. Song and dance were important to Dionysian rites, and the participants apparently wore masks.

At the festivals, three tragic writers would compete and so would three or five comedic playwrights. The idea was that each tragedian would present three plays and a satyr play; sometimes the three plays were linked in a trilogy, like The Oresteia. So the audience had a great deal of play going to do during the festival seasons; the activities may have gone on for three or four days, with perhaps four or five plays per day. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival provides something like this pace.

Organization: How were the festivals organized? Well, the magistrate was chosen every year by lot—the archon. Then, dramatists would apply to the magistrate for a chorus, and if they obtained a chorus, that meant that they had been chosen as one of the three tragic playwrights. After that affair was settled, wealthy private citizens known as choregoi served as producers for each playwright. The state paid for the actors, and the choregos paid chorus’ training and costumes. So there was both state and private involvement in the production of a tragedy or comedy.

The Playwrights: Aeschylus 525-456 B.C. / Sophocles 496-406 B.C. / Euripides 485-406 B.C.
Aeschylus composed about 80 dramas, Sophocles about 120, Euripides perhaps about 90. Aristophanes probably wrote about 40 comedies. Dramatists who wrote tragedies did not compose comedies, and vice versa.

The playwright was called a didaskalos, a teacher or trainer because he trained the chorus who were to sing and dance. As drama developed, the playwright also took care of the scripts and the music. He was something like a modern director, and may at times have acted in his own plays, especially in the early stages of his career. A successful dramatist could win prizes, but generally, playwrights were able to support themselves independently by land-holdings. Sophocles, for example, was a prominent citizen—he served as a general and treasurer. Aeschylus was an esteemed soldier against the Persian Empire, and his tombstone is said to have recorded his military service, not his prowess as a playwright.

The Theater: The theater for the City Dionysia was located on the south slope of the citadel of Athens, the Acropolis. The Didaskalia Classics site offers 3-D images of a later reconstruction: http://www.didaskalia.net/studyarea/recreatingdionysus.html.

The theater had three parts:

1. Theatron: this was for seating around 14,000 spectators; it was probably at first of wood, but later it was of stone. 2. Orchestra: this was for the chorus to sing and dance in and for the actors, when their function was developed. 3. Skene: this was at first a tent-like structure that served as a scene-building, and it had a door for entrances and exits. The Oresteia requires one, though perhaps the earliest plays didn’t. Costume was important, too, because it could be used to determine factors like status, gender, and age.

The chorus remained important in drama, especially in Aeschylus. At some point, a choregos (legend says it was “Thespis,” hence actors are “thespians”) stepped forth and became the first actor, or answerer (hypocrites). So the composer was the first participant to turn choral celebration into what we call drama, with a plot and interaction between characters. Apparently Aeschylus or Sophocles added a third actor. The former’s early plays required only two actors, but even that was enough to make for interesting exchanges between the chorus and the actors and, to some extent, between the actors and each other. With three actors, of course, the possibilities for true dramatic dialogue and action are impressive.

Audience: Would have consisted mostly of male citizens—the ones who ran Athenian democracy by participating in the Assembly. There would probably have been very few, if any, slaves or women present, and perhaps some resident aliens or “metics” and visiting dignitaries. Drama was surely a male-centered affair, as was the political life of Athens. Public speaking was vital in democratic Athens—anyone who was someone in the legal/political system needed to know how to move and convince fairly large numbers of men. Theater and political life, as we shall see from Aeschylus, were in fact closely connected: the same skills were required, and the same class of people participated (male kyrioi, or heads of households who also performed military service). So while the stuff of tragedy seems almost always to have been the ancient myth cycles, the audience watching the plays would have felt themselves drawn in by the dramatists’ updating of their significance for the major concerns of the 5th-century B.C. present. And that present was, of course, the age of the great statesman Pericles (495-429 B.C.), who drove home the movement towards full Athenian democracy from 461 B.C. onwards and who at the same time furthered a disastrous course of imperial protection and aggression that had ensued from victory in the Persian Wars around 500 B.C. Greek tragedy grew to maturity in the period extending from the battles of Marathon on land in 490 B.C. and the naval engagement at Salamis in 480 B.C., on through the Second Peloponnesian War from 431-404 B.C., in which the Athenians lost to Sparta the empire they had gained during half a century of glory following the victories over Persia. Athens’ supremacy didn’t last long as such things go, but it burned brightly while it lasted, and festival drama, along with architecture, sculpture, and philosophy, was among its greatest accomplishments. So the dramas took place in one of the most exciting times in Western history—both heady and unsettling at the same time, shot through with violence, democratic and artistic flowering, victory, and great loss.

Tragic Masks: The masks tell us something about tragedy: with linen or clay masks, a single actor might play several roles, or wear several faces of the same character. (Visit Didaskalia’s interactive 3-D mask page at http://www.didaskalia.net/studyarea/visual_resources/images/masks/mask_mm/rotmask1.html.) Wilde said, “give a man a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth.” His quip should remind us that masks don’t discourage expression—as Kenneth McLeish says, they had religious significance in the theater: participants in Dionysian rites offered up their personal identity to the god, and further, he continues:

“Wearing a mask does not inhibit or restrict the portrayal of character but enhances it, allowing more, not less, fluidity and suppleness of movement; and the character created by or embodied in the mask and the actor who wears it can feel as if it has an independent identity which is liberated at the moment of performance—an unsettlingly Dionysian experience” (9).

That emphasis on what we might call expression is important especially because—Aristotle’s claims about plot being the soul of tragedy notwithstanding—not much happens in many Greek tragedies. Instead, chorus members and characters “take up an attitude” towards the few well-packaged, exciting events that take place on or off the stage. The action is important, but the characters’ words and attitudes help us, in turn, gain perspective on the action. Perhaps when Aristotle emphasizes plot so much, he’s taking for granted the great power of the Dionysian mask to support the plot in driving the audience towards catharsis. Character, he says, will reveal itself in relation to the play’s action.

Aristotle’s theory of drama—we didn’t cover this much in our class, but if you would like to read something about it, please see my Fall 2007 E491 Literary Theory blog (http://www.ajdrake.com/blogs/491_fall_07/), where (in the entry for Week 2) I cover The Poetics in some detail. In Aristotle’s view, a well constructed plot that follows probability and necessity will induce the proper tragic emotions (pity and fear or terror), with the result being “catharsis,” a medical term that may be interpreted as “purgation” (of emotion) and/or as “intellectual clarification.” I should think that the tragic emotions, once aroused, become the object of introspection; thereafter, the audience attains clarification about an issue of great importance—for instance, our relation to the gods, the nature of divine justice, etc.

Notes on Aeschylus’ The Oresteia

Background: the House of Atreus, adapted from Apollodorus’ First- or Second-Century CE compendium The Library of Greek Mythology.

Pelops married Hippodameia, a success he achieved when the lady convinced Myrtilos to murder another suitor, Oinomaos, by rigging his chariot to fall apart during a race. As he died, he cursed Pelops and his descendants. (Pelops was the son of Tantalos, who, aside from having shared ambrosia with mortals, had also tried to fool Zeus and served him a banquet containing his son Pelops as a sacrifice, thereby bringing punishment down on his head; Pelops was then brought back to life.) Well, two of Pelops’ sons are Atreus and Thyestes (though in Aeschylus’ version, they are his grandsons, fathered by Pelops’ son Pleisthenes). Atreus married Catreus’ daughter Aerope (granddaughter of Minos), but Aerope fell in love with Thyestes. Atreus had promised to sacrifice a golden lamb to Artemis, but instead killed it and locked it in a chest. Aerope gave the lamb to Thyestes, who then used it to win the kingdom of Mycenae—it seems an oracle had told the Mycenaeans that they should seek a Pelopid for their king, and Thyestes then insisted that they should choose the man who possessed a golden lamb. This was convenient, since he just happened to have stolen it from the unsuspecting Atreus. But Zeus later took Atreus’ part, which resulted in the banishment of Thyestes. One day Atreus, now king, found out that his brother had slept with Aerope, and decided to seek revenge—he invited his banished brother back to court on the pretense that reconciliation was possible, but then he snatched Thyestes’ sons Aglaos, Callileon, and Orchomenos from the altar of Zeus (god of suppliants, as Homer tells us), cut off their limbs, and served them as a meal to Thyestes. An oracle told Thyestes that if he wanted counter-revenge, he should sleep with his daughter Pelopeia. He did, and the union produced Aegisthus, who went on to kill Atreus and return the kingdom to Thyestes, ruling with him jointly in Mycenae. Agamemnon, the doomed hero of Aeschylus’ trilogy and of course the brother of Menelaus, Helen’s husband, was a son of Atreus, and he had supposedly helped to capture the adulterer Thyestes, father of Aegisthus. Agamemnon married Clytemnestra (Helen’s sister) after murdering her first husband (Tantalos, son of Thyestes). So when Aegisthus participates in the plot to murder Agamemnon, he is taking his revenge for the outrage Atreus committed against Thyestes.

The lesson that emerges from this troubled tale is that both Atreus and Thyestes are steeped in outrage, incest, and blood, and in fact their father Pelops had long since drawn a curse on himself that landed on their heads. The best thing descendants of these people could do is opt out of the House, but of course that’s not possible, so they all suffer for the sins of their fathers. Things only get worse when, at least in one version, Agamemnon listens to his priest Calchas and sacrifices his daughter Iphigeneia by Clytemnestra from military necessity—they need a fair wind to make it to Troy and pay back Priam for the dishonor his son Paris had brought to Menelaus of Sparta by stealing away with his wife Helen. So Clytemnestra has a powerful reason to despise Agamemnon, and so does Aegisthus, her lover.

Line-by-Line Comments on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, from The Oresteia

1-44. The Watchman has been commanded by Clytemnestra to watch for the signal-fire indicating that Troy has fallen. He says that Clytemnestra maneuvers like a man, and he refers darkly at line 42 to the secrets of the House of Atreus, or, more directly, the secrets of Agamemnon’s house. At line 25, he invokes the motif of light versus darkness, greeting the daybreak as “dawn of the darkness.” This mention will come to seem ironic given that the Furies represent a dark upwelling from Hades. Another small thing worth noting is that the trilogy begins with a man on the lookout for fire-beacons as a sign of victory, and ends with references to the torches with which Athena and her helpers light the Furies’ way to their place of honor.

45-258. Here, the Chorus shows us one of its functions: simply to fill us in on things that happened before the play. But almost immediately, around line 55, they begin to complicate that task by taking up an attitude towards what they relate. Much of a Greek play can, indeed, consist in just such adopting of attitudes, whether on the part of the Chorus or of the main characters. This Aeschylan Chorus of old men judge by outcomes, and hold patriarchal values that lead them to distrust and largely discount even the strong woman Clytemnestra, who rules by proxy for Agamemnon. They invoke the gods frequently, but seem inconsistent in their statements about the relation between the divine realm and human events, desires, and predicaments. Still, what they say near the beginning of their speech here is prophetic: the Trojan War, they say, has taken on a life of its own, and there’s no way to “enchant away the rigid Fury” (78), thanks to Paris’ deep violation of Greek hospitality. Fury rages during and follows after war, as they suggest. The old men apparently resent the loss of so many kinsmen and the interruption of their normal lives during such a long, drawn-out military expedition. They lament their own situation, saying that they have been dishonored: they are the “husks” (80) of Argos, the non-heroic elders who have remained behind with women and children. On the whole, the Chorus registers the tensions that the trilogy’s individual characters and gods must work out: the status of women, the role of the Olympians, the power of the revenge cycle, and the province of law.

The elderly Chorus members claim (line 112ff) that they still have the gift of persuasion and perhaps even of prophecy: they link themselves to what the prophet Calchas had said about a sign sent by the gods, namely a pair of eagles swooping down upon a pregnant rabbit and thereby infuriating Artemis. This event may have presaged the sacrificial killing of Iphigeneia by the Greek kings, Agamemnon foremost among them. At line 150, they speak of Clytemnestra as “the architect of vengeance” in a manner that places her alongside the enraged Artemis, and fear what she may do when Agamemnon returns. Much of what the Chorus members say at this point consists in venting their frustrations about their personal situation and their anxiety about the war’s consequences. (Later on, we shall find a new and more action-oriented kind of language at work in other characters.) But they try to hold on to some degree of hope, and wish piously, “good win out in glory in the end” (125 and 160).

The Chorus next introduces the theme of the fall of royal houses (line 165ff), a pattern that began with the gods: while the male principle may reign supreme, its rule has been anything but serene since the patriarchal gods Kronos, Saturn, and Zeus fought with one another. At line 180, the Chorus claims that we may “suffer into truth” and that we shall attain “ripeness” (182) or a degree of wisdom and balance. They believe, in other words, that we learn only through suffering. The Greek passage for lines 180-84 runs τὸν φρονεῖν βροτοὺς ὁδώ- / σαντα, τὸν πάθειμάθος / θέντα κυρίως ἔχειν. / στάζει δ’ ἔν θ’ ὕπνῳ πρὸκαρδίας / μνησιπήμων πόνος : καὶ παρ ’ ἄ- / κοντας ἦλθε σωφρονεῖν. / δαιμόνων δ έπου χάρις βίαιος / σέλμα σεμνὸν ἡμένων. (It’s the same passage that Robert F. Kennedy found moving and quoted as “ Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”) From line 200-57, the Chorus goes on to detail Agamemnon’s frenzy in killing his daughter, and the bind in which he has been placed—he can either do justice to his own daughter and let down his fleet, or he can do justice to the public cause and kill his daughter. Either choice will bring consequences. Agamemnon realizes he may bring another curse upon his own house. His was not a willing sacrifice, so it was not a pure one.

258-358. Although the Chorus members say they trust the Queen, towards whom they now turn to address, they keep peppering her with doubts, and at 277, Clytemnestra says she feels they are treating her like a child and ridiculing her, and she explains how she set up the torch-signal system as a way of learning the outcome of the Trojan War: “And I ordained it all. / Torch to torch, running for their lives, / one long succession racing home my fire” (313-15). Her words are rewarded with the pronouncement, “Spoken like a man, my lady, loyal, / full of self-command” (354-56).

359-492. Clytemnestra having re-entered the palace, the Chorus praises Jupiter and the Goddess Night. Now they see the fall of Troy as justice, momentarily realigning themselves with the Queen’s view. But they continue to emphasize the pain and anguish caused by war, and by line 470, they have returned to questioning Clytemnestra’s authority, finding it impossible to accept that a woman can rule.

493-682. The Herald enters and first informs the Chorus that the war has indeed ended. He gives us the soldier’s perspective on war, with all its confusion, despair, and triumph. Agamemnon is nearby. When Clytemnestra enters at line 580, she publicly declares her loyalty to the soon-returning King; she has been, she insists, utterly faithful and pure: “in ill repute I am / as practiced as I am in dyeing bronze” (607-08).

The Herald departs after telling the Chorus (which remains after Clytemnestra returns to the palace) that Menelaus has been swept away by the sea-storms that hit the returning Greek fleet. Like Odysseus of Ithaca, Menelaus is destined to do some wandering before he makes it back home, in his case to Sparta. As for the cause of the storms, here is what Apollodorus says in his compendium of Greek myths:

“Troy is sacked … Lokrian Aias [Ajax], when he saw Kassandra clinging to the wooden statue of Athena, raped her: for this reason the wooden image gazes up to the sky … As they were about to sail off after ravishing Troy, they were held back by Kalkhas[Calchas], who told them that Athena was enraged at them because of the impious act of Aias. They were on the verge of slaying Aias when he ran to an altar, so they let him live. After all this they held an assembly, during which Agamemnon insisted they stay and sacrifice to Athena. So Diomedes, Nestor, and Menelaos all left at the same time. The first two had a good voyage, but Menelaos encountered a storm … Agamemnon left after making his sacrifice, and put in at Tenedos. Thetis came to persuade Neoptolemos to wait two days and make sacrifices, and he obeyed her. But the others left and were overtaken by storms in the region of Tenos, for Athena had begged Zeus to send a storm upon the Hellenes. Many ships sank. Athena threw a thunderbolt at the ship of Aias. As the ship fell apart, he scrambled to safety on a rock and declared that he had survived despite Athena’s designs. Then Poseidon struck the rock with his trident, splitting it in two, and Aias fell into the sea and was drowned.” Apollodorus, The Library E5.22-6.6.

683-793. The Chorus members set forth their view of the Trojan War’s cause: Helen. That view is hardly uncommon, though I wouldn’t pin it on Homer’s epics—Homer is more sophisticated than that. (Gorgias of Leontini deals the anti-Helenistas a blow in his famous “Encomium of Helen,” providing a number of argument-lines in the great lady’s favor.) But the Chorus members say also that “Only the reckless act / can breed impiety, multiplying crime on crime” (751-52). As the Norton editors point out, this view departs from the common one that too much good fortune in itself is enough to bring disaster on mere mortals.

794-841. Agamemnon completely misses the point of the Chorus’ warning about disloyalty at home. The conquering hero is tone-deaf, a politician-king too drunk with his own glory to hear what others are saying to him or, at least until the end of his address to the Chorus, to notice that Clytemnestra has been hauling out the Tyrian red carpet for his entry. He thinks the most important thing now is to establish a tribunal to hear “this cause involving men and gods” (830). He may be addressing the Chorus’ concerns as he understands them—i.e. the traitors, whoever they may be, must be tried and punished. His next words are full of unintended irony: “Wherever something calls for drastic cures / we make our noblest effort: amputate or wield / the healing iron, burn the cancer at the roots” (834-36).

842-976. Addressing first the Chorus, Clytemnestra tries to build sympathy for her loneliness and suffering during Agamemnon’s long absence at Troy. To the King himself, she explains that their son Orestes has been sent away, supposedly to keep him safe in case disaster should strike at home. Dissembling her rage at him, she overcompensates by insisting that he must enter the palace only by walking on a Tyrian crimson or purple carpet. Agamemnon distrusts this gesture and finds it excessive, declaring bluntly that his wife is trying to reverse their roles and make him out to be an effeminate dandy: “You treat me like a woman. Groveling, gaping up at me! / What am I, some barbarian peacocking out of Asia? (912-13) Agamemnon himself has already spoken like a true politician, flattering and impressing the Chorus, but now he finds his wife’s words and gestures insincere. Clytemnestra manages to bend his will to hers even as they both compete in a display of strength. The Trojan War was initiated to avenge an act of inhospitality and betrayal, and now the chief among the Greeks’ returning heroes is to be brought down by the supreme inhospitality of his own wife.

977-1031. The Chorus is terrified, and seems to hear a “dirge of the Furies” (994) promising death to Agamemnon. There may be some hint of the Atreides’ history, but it seems that as yet the exact nature of the threat is not specified. Perhaps, as the editors suggest, the Chorus fears for Agamemnon because of his “triumphant excess” in the Trojan War, wherein so many on both sides have died.

1032-1368. Cassandra the captured Trojan priestess of Apollo builds suspense while we await the outcome of Agamemnon’s somewhat unwilling entrance into the palace. Refusing the Queen’s devious invitation to enter after Agamemnon, Cassandra laments and rails wildly, retelling the curse of the House of Atreus, which she describes as “the house that hates god, / an echoing womb of guilt, kinsmen torturing kinsmen, severed heads, / slaughterhouse of heroes, soil streaming blood” (1088-91). She reinvokes the horrible banquet to which Thyestes was treated by Atreus (see above, “ Background: the House of Atreus”) , and tries in vain to make the Chorus understand that even now the slaughter is being prepared as Clytemnestra casts her “net flung out of hell” to trap Agamemnon and render him helpless for the death blow. Cassandra finely refers to herself as the “last ember” (1174) of burning Troy, and laments her city’s losses. When the Chorus members ask her how she knows so much about the shameful history of the Atreides, she explains her relationship with Apollo—the god, enraged at her last-minute refusal to have intercourse with him, burdened her with the gift of prophetic powers that would nonetheless carry no weight with those Cassandra tries to warn. She knows now that she was brought to Argos to meet her fate alongside Agamemnon, and in the end resigns herself to it, asking only in her last dirge that “when the avengers cut the assassins down / they will avenge me too” (1348-49).

1369-1604. The deed is done, and Clytemnestra is by no means in the mood to quiet down and “lawyer up,” as they say on today’s crime shows. No, she positively exults in her bloody act: “Words, endless words I’ve said to serve the moment— / Now it makes me proud to tell the truth” (1391-92). She even struck the King a third time, she says, for good measure, and standing before the Chorus, she declares, “I revel / like the Earth when the spring rains come down, / the blessed gifts of god, and the new green spear / splits the sheath and rips to birth in glory!” (1412-13) Agamemnon, she says, is her “masterpiece of Justice” (1430), and although the feeble Chorus would banish her on the spot, she is at this moment more conquering hero than Greek woman—quite a transgressive thing to be in a patriarchal culture like that of the ancient Greeks, and not a role acceptable to the Chorus, who in spite of her heroism see her as a deceiver rather than as the bold warrior she wants to be. She has long resented and loathed Agamemnon for several reasons. There was his covetousness regarding Achilles’ prized concubine Chryseis over in Troy—now Cassandra lies dead in proxy payment for that insult. And when the Chorus invokes Helen as the cause of it all again, Clytemnestra turns on them furiously: “never turn / your wrath on her, call her / the scourge of men” (1491-92). At this point, the Queen claims to be nothing less than the Fury that follows the doomed House of Atreus: “Fleshed in the wife of this dead man, / the spirit lives within me, / our savage ancient spirit of revenge. / In return for Atreus’ brutal feast / he kills his perfect son—for every murdered child, a crowning sacrifice” (1528-32). Agamemnon was, of course, the son of Atreus, so killing him is payback on the part of Thyestes. Perhaps most heinous of Agamemnon’s outrages, however, is the fact that he sacrificed daughter Iphigeneia for the fleet’s sake on the way to Troy, as Calchas the priest directed him.

1605-1708 (end). Aegisthus, son of Thyestes, enters and reminds everyone of the dreadful banquet to which his father had been treated. Together, he and Clytemnestra somewhat ignominiously brave the feeble old Chorus, with Aegisthus even claiming he will work to civilize the rude people of Argos. The play ends with Clytemnestra’s declaration to Aegisthus, “Let them howl—they’re impotent. You and I have power now. / We will set the house in order once for all.” Which remark, of course, sounds like the mother of all premature conclusions: there simply is no way to set the House of Atreus in order—at least not here in Argos itself.

Line-by-Line Comments on Aeschylus’ The Eumenides, from The Oresteia

1-65. Pythia prays first to earth and tradition, and then she mentions Phoebus Apollo, the civilized and prophetic god. Apollo speaks for Zeus. She praises Athena, Dionysus, and Zeus. We might take this prayer as foretelling need to placate all the gods, and the Furies later. As Simon Goldhill says, relations in the divine order mirror the uncertainty and strife we see in the human realm. Right after this prayer, at line 33, Pythia appears to be shaken: she envisions first a man, Orestes, coming as suppliant to Apollo’s Oracle at Delphi. She also sees beings that she can’t identify and that must have to do with pollution. From lines 33-65, Pythia insists that Apollo must purge his own house: the gods are not exempt from the need to purify their order after their deeds have befouled it.

66-96. Apollo promises to help Orestes. Even Apollo does not name the Furies, though he calls them eternal virgins and obscenities. He counsels Orestes to go to Athena’s sanctuary. At line 85, Apollo says he’ll devise the master stroke—it seems he admits some responsibility for what has happened. Orestes wants strict justice, which Apollo knows must be tempered with compassion or at least with a sense of realism. The Furies are loathed by men and gods, so they will all have to come to terms with these creatures.

97-139. Clytemnestra rouses the Furies. She says that for those she killed, the charges of the dead will never cease. Her own Furies owe her something—a dream is calling them, she says. The Furies cry out in their sleep, “Get him.” A dream calls them, and now Clytemnestra calls them. The underworld’s shades are not phantoms—they are real and have real effects upon those they visit. At line 136, Clytemnestra insists that the charges she levels are just. As always, she does not lack for eloquence combined with a certain bluntness. Orestes having escaped, the Furies awaken.

144-75. The Furies speak, first lamenting the loss of their prey. The quarry has slipped from the nets—that’s the same reference used in reference to Clytemnestra’s killing of Agamemnon. She will set them on Orestes as hunters. Unless this happens, thinks Clytemnestra, there’s no justice. Around line 173, the Furies accuse Apollo of polluting his own shrine.

176-232. Apollo argues with the Furies, who (at line 151) have accused him of taking away their prerogatives. He sides with civility, reason, and order, employing a series of violent images to describe the Furies—they belong with wild animals and with people who act like wild animals. Apollo doesn’t accept their right to be where they are. But isn’t he denying the prerogative of the revenge cycle, which he calls unacceptable and loathsome? He says the order of Olympus will be against the Furies, but that won’t happen at the trilogy’s end. Apollo accuses the Furies of being unbalanced in their notions about justice: they privilege Clytemnestra because killing a mother is killing irreplaceable flesh and blood, and with that proposition the male god disagrees. At line 222, Apollo puts his faith in Athena. At line 230, he says that Orestes would become a terror to gods and men, a frustrated suppliant, if his killing of Clytemnestra isn’t validated. Incivility and not keeping one’s word, not observing proper relations between gods and men, are Apollo’s greatest anxieties. He has no problem with more or less “forgetting” how the Olympian order itself came to power, it seems.

233-407. Orestes prays to Athena’s statue, but his call for help isn’t answered at once. The Furies, with their references to hunting, appear to him first. Notice the reference to the Eagle of Zeus hunting the hare. At line 235, Orestes says he’s purified, his hands are clean. But he’s still an outcast, and the Furies don’t recognize his statement as valid. They have come to a holy part of the City, thirsting for blood.

253-73. The Furies speak of their kind of justice—blood for blood, not Athenian law. They invoke the might of Hades, their own realm. They don’t see this invocation as a call to perpetual anarchy: the accounts of men’s deeds are written on Hades’ tablets. Revenge, as Sir Francis Bacon says disapprovingly in an essay written around 1600, is “a kind of wild justice.” The Furies favor the argument from antiquity: their justice is binding upon men and gods, and it predates (and therefore supercedes) written law and civic institutions. Perhaps Aeschylus wants to show the persistence of tradition even in the fifth-century-BCE present. One cannot wish away the violent past or the traditional ways of dealing with it. Even settled law and order are always beset by the threat of violence, and it’s vital not to forget that fact.

287-90. Orestes invokes Athena; he wants justice without a battle. He wants a new settlement for himself and Argos.

304-06. The Furies assert their own parallel authority: they must sacrifice Orestes to their own law, unwillingly, which is corrupt sacrificial practice. (Ritual sacrifice of animals, by the way, called for getting the victim to “nod” approval of its treatment.) Just as Apollo said he would use a spell, so will they. They sing a chain-song to bind human beings, a song we must balance against the Olympian hymns at the trilogy’s end, and vice versa. The two songs must, that is, be made to harmonize.

307-407. The Furies extol the independence of their own realm, and the result is an oxymoronic hymn of fury. They pray to their Mother Night (Nyx), and call Apollo a whelp. Nobody can shake their grip, and the Fates have given them independence even from the gods. They mock the notion of a trial, standing instead upon their rights. They insist at line 363 that Zeus wouldn’t champion Orestes or Apollo. Everyone is arguing over what the gods will do. Neither do the Furies accept Orestes’ washing of his hands—see line 362, where he is still described as “streaked with blood.” At lines 372 and following, the Furies mock men’s dreams of grandeur—so much for human pretensions, aspirations and illusions; they will be swallowed up by this realm that antedates even the order of the gods. Proleiptically, the dreams of grandeur referenced by the Furies would include Athenian edifices of law and stone: the classical and golden era of art. All these ways of building up humanity will be lost when the Furies sing and dance. Their language threatens to undermine human beings’ attempts to use these artistic forms in the service of civilization. Here we are close to the territory of Friedrich Nietzsche’s early writing about the inseparable “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” elements in Greek culture—a great deal of what we call “civilization” seems to depend upon what Nietzsche labels forgetting—forgetting the necessary violence and cruelty that went into the beautiful forms and practices we deem worthiest of humanity. The Furies, at least (and in their unforgiving manner), don’t want us to forget. If they had their way, we may imagine the bad memories piling on top of earlier bad memories, the outraged cries filling the air with cacophony until all is overwhelmed. It would be our own fault since, after all, the Furies don’t commit the outrages themselves. Even so, the earth would soon become unlivable.

Apollo, by contrast, is determined to make his hymns to reason and Olympian order prevail: harmony will replace anarchy. This point connects to Aeschylus’ probable view of drama’s power—it’s an art form that urges harmony (or at least a working settlement) between man and god, an understanding between them. As always with the Greeks, aesthetics turns out to be more than mere entertainment or relief; it’s part of the strategy we have devised to maintain our place on earth and in the presence of the gods. From lines 399-403, the Furies deny any possible evolution from the wild and violent to the civilized. At line 401, they refer to their own prerogatives as law. Apollonian constructions that help the Greeks endure are not to be allowed. One possible contradiction emerges from lines 396-407: the Furies say that they have their pride, but they also admit that they have been banished to the realm beneath the earth. Nonetheless, their assertion of eternal privilege and sacrosanct status does not entirely square with the facts. It seems that change can occur, in spite of the Furies.

408-449. Athena enters, armed for combat, in defiance of what Orestes had asked. Both the Furies and Orestes start off equal in Athena’s eyes—she mixes them together. The Furies must name themselves as curses and daughters of the night. Athena is fair-minded and she will accept the facts. The Furies, meanwhile insist again that revenge never ends as far as they are concerned. Athena distinguishes between the name of justice and the act of justice; she would like to see a settlement amongst the warring parties. At lines 444 and following, a pivotal moment occurs because the Furies exhibit some interest in a settlement—this may come as a surprise considering what they claimed earlier. The point Athena makes to them is that oath-taking should never lead to injustice. As Simon Goldhill says, we are dealing in part with an argument over the purpose of language—how does it mediate between or affect the various realms?

461-65. Orestes says to Athena that he has purified himself, and then explains why he killed his mother. Apollo shares the guilt, Orestes says. He implies that he was in a bind: he had to avenge his father, or face punishment. Orestes wants to know if he has acted justly, and he wants things to end.

484-85. Even Athena will call for a full trial—humans must get involved. She acknowledges the Furies’ power. So she is in a bind, too, along with Agamemnon over Iphigenia, Clytemnestra over the murder of Iphigenia, and Orestes over both his parents. It seems that the divine realm mirrors the uncertainty of the human realm with regard to relationships.

497-99. From the interaction between men and gods will come a way to settle the problems permanently. A new justice that will involve all three realms.

506-71. The Furies sing a powerful song: if Orestes wins, they ask, what’s the point of living? Violence would overwhelm the cosmos. They say 536-41 that they want a settlement and ‘‘ measure.’’ At this point, revenge consists in measure. We will find later that Athena agrees with them, at least to an extent. The Furies see themselves as powers bringing order and measure when humans threaten anarchy. They ally themselves with a kind of justice we might not have given them credit for understanding. In essence, they counsel that fear restrains men and women from doing injustice, that fear lies at the heart of religion itself—who will respect the gods if there is no fear, if all is decided and arranged on the basis of shallow reason?

What, therefore, must happen? Humans must accept the Furies as a counterforce, and must accept them into the civic space and psyche of Athens. In being accepted, they are renamed as “the Well-Abiding” rather than the Erinyes or Furies. Are they transformed, or are people’s perceptions of them transformed? It seems to me that the latter is the case. Violent impulses and movements must always be hemmed in by the Furies’ “tide that threatens to sweep the world.” Anarchy and violence are present in the founding of civic order, and cannot be banished entirely. Rather, we need words, song, dance, law, and magic charms to contain it and yet embrace its presence and power over us. See line 517: we can only define true justice against what threatens it. Anarchy faces those who deny the Furies’ power.

585: Apollo says he’s partly responsible, and asks that the trial proceed. He has always said he trusted Athena.

591-614. The Fury leader questions Orestes, who turns to Apollo. The Fury leader is playing lawyer at this point—this “lawyering up” constitutes tacit consent to the trial, to the institution of a new kind of justice. They want to be players in this new game.

630-84. Apollo argues back, using Athena as his main exhibit in favor of the male principle. She sprang from Zeus’ head, and Zeus is the most powerful god of all. From 643 on, Apollo offers a lawyerly description of Clytemnestra’s crime. His enthusiasm, though brief, evokes her exultant language transforming the deed. At 650, the Furies remind Apollo that Zeus shackled his father Cronos. Apollo’s response is emotional, not rational—he’s really praising might as right. Still, when humans do an injustice, it’s irretrievable, while Zeus can make things right. But the Furies still want to know at lines 661-63 how Orestes could possibly fit into the civic order given what he has done. From 665-84, Apollo makes his concluding speech or “peroration” to warlike Athena, as a negation of the female principle. But Athena is still a goddess, so things are more complicated than Apollo credits. He appeals to the male principle in Athena, who was not, we recall, born of a mother—she sprang fully grown from the head of Zeus.

692-725. Athena sounds much like the Furies as she calls for the casting of lots. Neither anarchy nor tyranny should be the goal; we must never banish terror from the gates, not outright. The Areopagus will remain “swift to fury.” Notice the reference to keeping watch, which is the way the trilogy began. Athena’s act is foundational—here she inaugurates and defines the powers of the Court of the Areopagus. There seems to be a mixing together of the male and female. She mentions the Amazons who fought Duke Theseus. Notice the phallic language Fagles (our translator) employs. The Amazons sacrifice to Ares, god of war, and Athena is standing with the Amazons. As for the Areopagus, the term ties in to contemporary politics just before Aeschylus’ play was produced. In 462 BCE, a democratic, anti-Spartan reformer named Ephialtes tried to limit the still mostly aristocratic power of the Council of the Areopagus mainly to homicide cases. He was later assassinated, and in 461 BCE Pericles took over the reformist party and became the ascendant power in Athens until his death in 429 BCE. (That was a few years into the disastrous Second Peloponnesian War with Sparta that lasted from 431-404 BCE; the first one stretched out undeclared from 460-445 BCE). Perhaps Aeschylus’ audience would have seen the playwright’s own attitude as favoring the aristocratic Council; but one can’t be too sure about this thesis since in the play, as some critics have pointed out, the Court seems to have only the powers Ephialtes himself wanted it to have.

726-48. Here Apollo and the Furies argue. Both threaten each other. They’re all waiting to see how things will turn out. On the whole the Furies aren’t very good prosecutors—the new kind of law, born of compromise, will require a suppleness in administration and mediation that the zealous Furies lack. The only arrow in their quiver is the “slippery slope” argument that if their claim be denied, anarchy will prevail and the bloodletting will never cease. But the ten judges of the new Areopagus that Athena has founded on the site of an Amazon challenge to Duke Theseus will prove able to handle the complexities, the balancing and stressing act, required to keep the City going in future.

750. Athena declares in advance that she will vote for Orestes.

760. Orestes prays to Apollo for an end, one way or the other. They say much the same—either they’ll go down forever, or they’ll win. But things won’t be so clear-cut.

768-790. Freed, Orestes praises Athena, Apollo, and Zeus, promising Argos’ friendship with the Athenians. He says he will visit punishment on anyone who breaks the deal. He sounds like Athena and the Furies here.

791-899. The Furies reel and lament, repeating themselves in an elegiac passage. Athena bears with their anger, and shapes it. At first she doesn’t have much success. The Furies complain that much has been taken from them. Athena promises them a home. I don’t see that they change; rather, the perspective of gods and humans alters in their favor.

912-40. The Fury leader wants the power to bind people forever, and Athena acknowledges that they are connected with the dark soil, rooted in the earth. They will be the power that underlies the City and its institutions, and whoever denies this power will face disaster. This granted, the Furies have no reason to deny Athenians the produce of their rocky soil or render the people barren.

951-1058 (end). Athena promises clarity of relations between the realms. The Furies will have a clearly defined space and role, and will suffer no dishonor. Her Olympian hymns and promises function as something like a magic spell. In Christian terms, one thinks of Faustus summoning Mephistopheles, prince of darkness. But with the Greeks we are dealing with pre-Christian legend, so it isn’t “evil” that we see in operation in The Oresteia. The forces threatening the social space and the individual psyche are summoned in this trilogy by means of divine intervention, song, spectacle, and dance. The Furies are invited into the City, become associated with what is best in it, and are there to stay, undergirding its bright surfaces and great accomplishments. Athens can’t just banish the Furies; the City must come to terms with them, renaming them and welcoming them as guarantors of all it holds dear.

Week 04, Homer, Pindar

2007-02-20T16:23:00.000-08:00

General Notes on Greek Culture and Homer’s The Odyssey.

One of the best short introductions I’ve ever heard concerning ancient Greek culture is the rather Nietzschean one I heard years ago from Martin Schwab of UC Irvine. He asks us to consider Fragment 42 by Sappho: “Eros seizes and shakes my very soul / Like the wind on the mountain shaking ancient oaks” (Ἔρος δαὖτ' ἐτίναξεν ἔμοι φρένας, / ἄνεμος κατ' ὄρος δρύσιν ἐμπέσων). “Eros,” the God of love, is treated as a personalized agent, not just as a physiological passion. There is constant interaction between such external agents and the human individual. The speaker can respond to what is being done to her. Eros comes from without and is a force to be reckoned with, but Sappho’s speaker can show her mettle by the way she actively embraces this power rather than shrinking from its potentially destructive effects. Similarly, in Greek tragedies, protagonists can position themselves with respect to whatever catastrophe the gods or other human beings (as well as their own mistakes) have set in motion. With a mixture of joy and anxiety, Sappho’s speaker stands on the hillside prepared to be shaken, though not uprooted. A well-rooted persona, she lets herself be shaken; she contributes to the unfolding event because she is strong enough to let herself be overcome. The Greeks admire strength, then, both in the sense of physical valor and in the sense of remaining open to the extremes of experience. Odysseus exemplifies such openness, and nowhere is this quality more evident than in the books I have chosen to assign, 9-12, in which the hero recounts his long story of adventure to the nobility and citizens of Phaeacia, where he has found dry land after the dreadful raft-wreck that he suffers upon leaving Calypso’s enchanting island. The poet’s imperative is to send Odysseus home to re-establish his sovereignty in his native kingdom of Ithaca, but these four books betray how difficult that task is: the worldly-wise, resourceful Odysseus, always the accomplished talker, seems to relish his experiences at least as much as any intended outcomes, and he warms to the polite demand that (like a good guest) he should render an account of himself to those who have graciously extended him their hospitality. I’ll move on to some observations about Books 9-12, but first, here is some further introductory material about The Odyssey as a whole:

The consensus is that around 750-720 BCE, The Odyssey (a later text than The Iliad) was written down in complete form. The earliest surviving full manuscript is that of Laurentianus, 10 th-11 th century CE, although fragments of the text exist from the 3 rd century BCE, when there were several versions in circulation, including a commonly accepted or “vulgate” edition. Our text is probably the vulgate as corrected by the Alexandrian scholars of the third century BCE and later corrupted somewhat by successive copyists.

The storylines of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey take us back another 500 years, to 1250-1225 BCE (the late Bronze Age), which some historians believe culminated in a war between the Greeks (then called Achaeans) and the inhabitants of Troy, in modern Turkey. What were these “Achaeans” like? Well, around 2000 BCE, Indo-European people entered southern Greece , and encountered an already well-developed Minoan culture. The Myceneans or Achaeans overcame and yet borrowed from Minoan culture. Then came (perhaps) the warlike sailing expedition to Troy , in which the Achaean host proved victorious. Around 1200 BCE the glorious palace-centered lifestyle of the Mycenaean civilization collapsed during a period of invasion, and a Dark Age spanning from 1150 BCE to 750 BCE set in, during time which a people called the Dorians swept down into Greece and settled. But by around 800 BCE, the population had begun to grow, and half a century after that the city-state form of governance began to take hold in Greece . That emergence coincides roughly with the date of composition for Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. So Homer’s time was one in which a so-called Dark Age had just begun to lift and a more settled and prosperous order was on the way. The way he describes Greek life perhaps owes more to his own day than to the glorious past in which his heroes lived and acted.

It is impossible to say exactly who “Homer” was. Was he in fact the glorious blind bard of tradition, or an entire series of authors? As Homer’s best modern translator Robert Fagles says, whatever the truth may be and some middling stylistic/narratival discrepancies aside, the texts we have certainly read like the products of a single master storyteller. Experts say some parts of the two epics are older than others, and of course the written texts come from a long oral tradition in which episodes may have been recounted in their own right. Perhaps what we now have is a “stitched-together” masterpiece woven by someone who knew all the stories and their interrelations.

Homer’s poetry was meant to be heard, not read. I will read some of the original to give you a sense of its rhythm and sound. I like Fagles’ translation because I find in his version the four qualities that Victorian classicist Matthew Arnold identified as Homeric: rapidity, directness of idea and diction, and nobility. It sounds great when recited aloud. Homer impels us forward with great ease, maintaining our interest—he doesn’t dawdle (unless we expect the terseness of modern newspaper articles) or become pompous or needlessly complex, and he even describes ordinary things with such appropriateness that, as Arnold might say, his descriptions don’t break the text’s overall “nobility” of expression and subject. Homer is resourceful like his hero, Odysseus—never at a loss to find the right way to respond to his subject or situation. Since the genre we are dealing with here is epic, what are its key qualities, and how does The Odyssey show them?

1. The hero is of high standing, and usually of national significance. Odysseus is king of Ithaca , a Greek island and its mainland surroundings. He’s also something of a Greek “everyman”—the type of strong, wily character that Greeks everywhere admired.

2. Homer’s subject is heroic deeds, battles, and long journeys. For example, the Iliad is about the ten-year Trojan War; the Odyssey deals with the ten-year wanderings and homecoming of Odysseus after the Trojan War and with the maturing of his son, Telemachus, into a young man worthy to take his father’s place. The story in both epics begins in medias res (in the middle of things). By the time the Odyssey begins, the ten-year Trojan War has ended with a Greek victory and Odysseus has been wandering still another ten years; he is now ready to return to Ithaca and re-establish his authority there. The poet refers as necessary to the previous twenty years’ events, and makes Odysseus recount his own wanderings to his temporary hosts in Phaeacia. (The Odyssey’s immediate action, by the way, takes place over approximately 40 days.)

3. Epic verse is elevated and heroic in tone, but not “pompous.” We often find epic similes likening human things to divine or grand things. Epic heroes are generally “godlike” rather than merely mortal in ability and lineage. The ocean that causes Odysseus so much heartache is not just any drab ocean, it’s an oinopos pontos—a “winedark sea,” the province of Poseidon and many nymphs. And when the sun sets, Homer’s verse often memorializes this everyday event by inserting a variant of the lovely stock phrase, “the sun sank, and the roads of the world grew dark” (3.557 Fagles; 497 Perseus online Greek edition: δύσετό τ' ἠέλιος σκιόωντό τε πᾶσαι ἀγυιαί.).

4. The action involves both humans and gods. In the Odyssey, humans like Odysseus, the gods on Mount Olympus , and the underworld realm of Hades all have dealings with one another.

5. The setting is world-wide, or even cosmic, in scale. Many of the places mentioned in The Odyssey are probably real, but some—the further west one goes—are obviously mythical.

6. The story is comic, not tragic; that is, although there may be a great deal of violence and suffering, the hero is successful in his exploits and upholds the values of his culture. In a tragedy, the story begins with the hero at the height of power, and then comes a fall that the hero deserves because of his or her “hubris,” or arrogation of inappropriate powers.

7. The poet-narrator is objective and does not interpose himself between us and the story. Homer doesn’t leap out of the poem and start telling us about himself, or even about the fictional “narrator.” In the Odyssey there are, however, some interesting references to “bards” and to weaving and singing—actions that we may take as referring to the craft and significance of poetry.

8. Epic is designed to carry out a cultural task: as Martin Schwab of UC Irvine says, an epic is a long poem that participates in and tries to affect the civilization it describes. This is certainly true of great works such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and Milton ’s Paradise Lost. Just to take the last-mentioned example, it’s clear that Milton wants to place the failure of the Puritan cause he supported against the British monarchy in the broad context of human error, both political and personal. In The Odyssey, while Homer pays tribute to Greek wanderlust and openness to experience of all kinds, he seems determined to suffuse the difficult, post-heroic era in which he and his hearers/readers live with the resourceful valor of an earlier heroic age (circa 1250 BCE). Odysseus, a worldly adventurer and warrior who has relations with gods and demigods, must return home to make order in the small-scale domestic setting of his native Ithaca.

Line-by-Line Notes on Homer’s Odyssey, Books 9-12.

Book 9

Readers of The Odyssey know that Odysseus is a resourceful character who can size up other people and situations and find a way out of a tight spot. He is self-possessed enough to know when to conceal or dissemble his intentions and identity, and when to speak and act directly. This is a man who knows when to talk and when to act; his actions, words, and thoughts (insofar as we are granted access to his thoughts) nearly always seem to be appropriate and consonant with one another. He responds with courage to the situations that fate, the gods, and his own passions confront him with. Odysseus, then, is the ideal Greek—not perfect, perhaps, but always worthy of emulation. The subject of Book 9 is the interaction between Odysseus and crew and the Cyclops Polyphemus. How does Odysseus get his men in trouble and out of it? The men would prefer to steal their dinner and run, but not their captain. He is insatiably curious—a quality for which the narrator by no means condemns him throughout The Odyssey, but one that he will have to restrain if he is to regain his old status as King of Ithaca.

12-32. At this point, Odysseus’ task as storyteller to the Phaeacians parallels that of the narrator throughout the epic: to arrange the past in such a way as to make some order emerge, to derive some lesson from it all. Words are a vehicle for expression, but they are also a medium of self-restraint (taming, containing); they help us put our experiences into order and renew our acquaintance with priorities.

33-41. Odysseus admits the great power of Circe and Calypso, but insists that they never really stole his heart since “nothing is as sweet as a man’s own country” (38). The very names of these two witches derive from the Greek for, respectively, “circle” (but the word for “hawk” is very similar) and “to cover (kalypto).

44-70. Odysseus and his men encounter the Cicones. The Greeks dally, slaughtering sheep and drinking too much, and the Cicones band together to drive Odysseus’ men to a rather ignominious retreat. The problem isn’t that they sacked the place—Odysseus actually seems proud of his decision to do so, and such action is evidently nothing new for him (piracy wasn’t a dishonorable trade, in the ancient Greeks’ view—at least not until Classical times). The problem is that they don’t know when to move on. In light of the task they must still accomplish (the homecoming), their behavior is no longer heroic, and mutiny is the logical result. Many an ancient battle was surely lost after it was won simply because the weary, ill-remunerated troops couldn’t resist stopping to plunder what they had taken by the sword.

93-117. It seems that marijuana-like “calm-down” narcotics have been around forever, to judge from this episode. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Lotophagoi (Lotos-Eaters), the plant is most likely a North African variety called “ziziphus lotus, a relative of the jujube.” According to Homer’s fanciful episode, the lotus plant induces forgetfulness—of family and homeland, heroic quests and high words, everything. It quenches desire for everything but the lotus itself, and for sleep. Odysseus hurries his men back to their ships in the face of such danger, and indeed he hurries past the tale itself as he tells it to the Phaeacians. If we want more, we will have to look to Tennyson’s modern poem, The Lotos-Eaters, where the “brother Mariners” sing in a dilatory stupor about their resentment of the gods and of the “toil” that is the lot of human beings.

118-259. Now it’s on to the main event—Odysseus’ encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus. This giant lives a life of pastoral ease, and cares nothing for the laws of hospitality. That kind of life (or something even easier) was what the crew wanted when they came into contact with the lotus plant, but such a life isn’t for men of action. Law and labor are the mainstays of mortal life. Driven by Odysseus’ curiosity, the Greeks behave in a rather un-guestlike way towards Polyphemus, and for once the men seem wise in their preference for simply making off with some of the delicious cheeses to which they’ve been helping themselves.

260-316. Soon enough, Polyphemus returns from his herding, only to find that strangers have taken up residence in his home. The giant turns out to be no better a host than the Greeks are guests, and we find him (a son of Poseidon, apparently) mocking the power of Zeus, god of suppliants. He flatly rejects Odysseus’ attempts at civil conversation, and wants only to find out where the men’s ship is so he can destroy it.

316-411. At this juncture, Odysseus is forced to work up a clever scheme, and his best means is Polyphemus’ tree-length wooden staff, which the Greek crew must sharpen and harden by fire while the giant bolts down six men. Οὖτις ἐμοί γ ' ὄνομα : Οὖτιν δέ με κικλήσκουσι / μήτηρ ἠδὲ πατὴρ ἠδ ' ἄλλοι πάντες ἑταῖροι ’ (“Nobody is my name: Nobody—that’s what my mother, my father, and all my comrades call me.” Perseus 9.366-67), says Odysseus, making the best of a bad situation. The brute Polyphemus has little command of linguistic subtlety, so the captain’s wordplay (along some extreme but carefully timed violence) is an appropriate way to defeat this uncivilized brute.

412-528. The hideous scheme of blinding the one-eyed Polyphemus pays off, but still Odysseus and his men must do some high-quality feigning to make it out of the cave alive: they pretend to be the giant’s sheep, and the trick works.

529-630. The danger really should be past by now, but Odysseus’ recklessness nearly gets him killed along with his entire crew. He just can’t resist the opportunity to deepen Polyphemus’ psychological wound: he declares his proper name, Odysseus. This exuberance will, of course, cost him dearly, as it gives Poseidon all the more reason to be angry with him. It commonly happens in Greek literature that a character’s most admirable trait (whether exercised too strongly or not, as it is here) is what gets him or her in trouble. Odysseus’ daring is admirable, but it is also reckless. The pre-Classical Greeks aren’t much given to praising restraint for restraint’s sake or defining virtue as the mean between extremes (as Aristotle would later do), but knowing when to keep one’s name to oneself is something Odysseus really needed to do at this point, and he has failed to do it.

Book 10

17ff. Odysseus tells his war adventures to good effect, and recounts how he stayed a month with Aeolus, god of the winds. The god gives him a bag of favorable wind, but on the tenth day of sailing, Odysseus’ resentful crew open the bag, supposing that it contains riches they deserve as well as their captain. The crew are remarkably inconsistent and very much driven by their passions: this time it isn’t fear that spurs them on, it’s their resentment of an obviously superior man’s privileges.

62ff. Aeolus rebuffs Odysseus when he returns with a plea for yet a second bag of winds. As so often in ancient literature, bad luck is considered a mark of shame—an unlucky person is like someone with a deadly contagious disease, and is to be shunned. It’s hard to see how Odysseus’ crew really deserve any help at this point: they’ve been disloyal. (Of course, one might question Odysseus’ decision not to tell the crew what was in the bag—he doesn’t seem to trust them, perhaps with good reason.)

115ff. Odysseus’ scouts meet the daughter of Lestrygonian King Antiphates, but soon thereafter the Lestrygonians eat two of Odysseus’ men, and he rows away with only his own ship and crew—the rest having been destroyed by huge rocks. This is what their abuse of Aeolus’ magical gift has brought them to: they have been reduced to barely sufficient human toil.

148ff. Odysseus and his men reach Aeaea, where the goddess Circe dwells. She is the daughter of the Sun and Perse. Odysseus kills a stag to feed his men, and tries to cheer them up.

243ff. Circe, the first of the two nymphs with whom Odysseus must contend, is presented to us as an enchanting songstress and spinner of webs: Κίρκης δ ' ἔνδον ἄκουον ἀειδούσης ὀπὶ καλῇ , / ἱστὸν ἐποιχομένης μέγαν ἄμβροτον , οἷα θεάων / λεπτά τε καὶ χαρίεντα καὶ ἀγλαὰ ἔργα πέλονται . τοῖσι δὲ μύθων ἦρχε Πολίτης ὄρχαμος ἀνδρῶν , / ὅς μοι κήδιστος ἑτάρων ἦν κεδνότατός τε …. 10.221-25, Perseus. Fagles translates these lines well as “deep inside they heard her singing, lifting / her spellbinding voice as she glided back and forth / at her great immortal loom, her enchanting web / a shimmering glory only goddesses can weave” (10.242-45). This passage might be compared to the slightly fuller vignette of Calypso in 5.65-84, Fagles translation.) Circe’s name Κίρκη may be derived from the Greek noun kirkis (“circle”), which would be an appropriate connotation because she hinders Odysseus, threatening to trap him in an inappropriately comfortable , carefree “domestic” situation when he still has heroic work to do. Circe first draws the captain’s men (Eurylochus excepted) into her charmed circle, making them forget their quest to return home, and then turns them into swine. It makes sense to suppose that the pig is Circe’s choice for Odysseus’ crew because pigs, while intelligent, are traditionally represented as easily led by desire—they wallow and feed happily, oblivious to the fact that they are being fattened to satisfy their captors’ appetite.

302ff. Odysseus, with a gift of moly from Hermes to protect him (Wikipedia describes moly as “a magic herb with a black root and white blossoms”), goes forward to confront Circe and her magic spells. This herb does what it’s supposed to do, and Odysseus remains as he is. Or at least, he remains the same in outward form. Circe has another kind of magic—the power of sex—that will work on this recalcitrant man over time. In any case, the men are returned to their original form.

472ff. Eurylochus, still afraid of Circe’s tricks, resists Odysseus’ decision to bring all his men back to the goddess’ halls. But the captain gives in to luxury and his host’s voluptuousness, and his men must remind him that it’s time to go. Sometimes for the Greeks, “giving in” to the power of sexual impulses is a mark of strength (as in the Sappho poem I’ve used, or as in William Blake’s grand line from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained”), but things don’t play out that way in this instance. At 506-12, Circe claims that she is offering the men a chance to recuperate and recover their strength before setting sail again. But an entire year passes, and when the men finally convince Odysseus to depart, Circe springs the information upon him that a trip to the Underworld will be necessary.

553ff. Circe gives specific directions to Odysseus on how to reach Hades: he must enact the proper rituals to enter this third of the three realms and wrest from it the knowledge he needs. Odysseus must go to Persephone’s sacred grove and to the “House of Death,” which seems to represent Hades itself, or the entrance point to that realm. At a certain sacred spot, Odysseus must pour libations of milk, honey, wine, and water, sprinkle barley, and vow to sacrifice to the dead generally and to Tiresias specifically when he returns home to Ithaca. The book ends on a sour note when the foolish Elpenor, besotted with wine, falls off the roof of Circe’s palace to his death.

Book 11

What attitude will Odysseus adopt towards the trip he must make to Hades and towards the shades he meets when he arrives there? The conclusion of this episode is chilling, and repays consideration: the shades crowd around Odysseus, terrifying even his stout spirit. One way to view Book 11 is to say that it shows Odysseus trying to gain the knowledge he needs and to maintain perspective in the midst of what threatens to overwhelm him. His trip to the Underworld is a severe trial as well as an opportunity to learn and satisfy his heroic curiosity. We recall that the three realms ( Olympus , Earth, and Hades) must remain distinct but in communication with one another. Those communications aren’t always easy—a point that Aeschylus reinforces later in The Oresteia. Hades has powers and prerogatives of its own—its presiding god is, after all, one of Zeus’ siblings, along with Poseidon and Hera.

65ff: The dead are commanded by Odysseus, but they in turn exert a strong influence upon him; they have their own demands to make. Even the drunkard Elpenor, who fell off the roof of Circe’s palace, implores Odysseus to observe the proper cremation and burial rites. A Greek owed this to the dead; it helped to put a cap on a person’s life, and made his transition to the Underworld go smoothly. But Tiresias makes a prophecy about Odysseus extending beyond the epic. How is Odysseus to take this? Does it round off his own life?

95ff: Gender is a main theme in Book 11: Odysseus’ mother Anticleia is dear to him, but he won’t speak to her until he fulfills his main mission, which is to get the knowledge and guidance he needs from Tiresias. Anticleia reinforces Odysseus’ desire to return home—in this way, like many of the dead, she participates as well as communicates with those still in the land of the living. And her account of what it’s like to live in Hades makes the affairs of the living seem all the more attractive. Hades isn’t really a place you want to dwell in or upon, so it must be that what we do on earth is of the greatest importance.

After Anticleia, Persephone sends Odysseus a catalog of famous royal wives and daughters. Of course Odysseus’ goal is to get home to Penelope, and even Agamemnon later admits that she, at least, is trustworthy, but even so this book shows some real concern for maintaining proper boundaries around the action proper to the male and female gender. The Greeks like strong women and can admire a transgressor like the still living Clytemnestra, but at the same time she must be taken down for her “male” actions because they are not permissible for a woman. (A point I draw from Martin Schwab of UC Irvine.) So the women Odysseus meets both in Hades and elsewhere represent a threat to his success—in the epic’s second half, it isn’t Penelope, much as he may test her, who causes the trouble; it’s those strumpets the palace maids, carrying on with the suitors.

413ff: Odysseus’ character and strength are plain to Arete and Alcinous. It seems that Odysseus’ strong character and clarity of mind lend authority to his fine tales. In that way his skill bespeaks or unfolds his heroic character. It isn’t only that he can spin a good story—any crafty beggar can do that, Alcinous implies. Odysseus exudes a sense of the close connection between action and words. Later in Greek history, Aristotle will say that the goal or end of life is action, and that by our actions we are happy or miserable. I suppose Homer would agree with that.

430ff: To drive home this point about action, I should say again that Odysseus sees his tales as steeling himself to grief and containing it within its proper boundaries. Grief should be a spur to action; it should be felt deeply, but it shouldn’t destroy the strong person who suffers its effects. The Sappho poem I quoted earlier is worth reiterating: “Eros seizes and shakes my very soul / Like the wind on the mountain / Shaking ancient oaks.” If the persona is well rooted, it may allow itself to be shaken by passion. Well, the Greeks liked to talk about these experiences, and it makes sense to say that telling and hearing tales of sorrow and hardship are themselves experiences. Engagement with words is experience and action, at least when someone like Odysseus is doing the talking. This way of taking language as experience is something that separates the men from the boys in Homer. It is a way of remaining open to experience. Another way to put this is that a Greek like Odysseus won’t fully separate art (i.e. tale-telling) from the other things that happen in life. Art is life experience; it is, as Kenneth Burke says, “equipment for living.”

431ff: Odysseus recounts Agamemnon’s anger and lamentation; there’s unfinished business in Argos . Where is Orestes? Odysseus doesn’t know. Here we have a shade calling for retribution from Hades. Orestes must avenge his father, whatever the cost in further retribution by the Furies. Agamemnon is angry at women—he starts sounding a bit like Hamlet at one point. But he isn’t saying that Penelope will rebel and join the Bad Girls’ Club. His concern probably is that not maintaining gender boundaries, not keeping genders within their proper sphere, will bring disaster to any kingdom. Gender is a principle that regulates action, it seems. (Consider the modern existentialist version of feminism as we may find it in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, where the author explains that men define themselves as “authentic” and active beings, while they define women as “inessential others” upon whose inessentiality men may prove themselves.) As mentioned earlier, a strong and active woman is admirable to Greek audiences, but she is also an object of fear and may well be subjected to punishment as a transgressor.

553ff: Achilles sets Odysseus right about Hades. It’s a shadowy place, not to be considered a place to rule perpetually with the same happiness and glory as on earth. Earth is the place to be. Achilles longs to hear how his son is doing. A child offers a more satisfying chance at immortality than Hades. Never mind what Satan says in Paradise Lost— it is not “better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.”

617ff: Great Ajax , like the other shades, “takes up an attitude” towards the living. Achilles did that too, in setting Odysseus right about the merits of the afterlife.

648ff: Odysseus’ desire to see more heroes comes to the fore. Heracles honors him with a comparison to himself—so much hard labor, a man of pain. It reminds me of how Dante makes Virgil honor him in Inferno.

End: the realms must remain distinct. Odysseus’ invasive interaction with Hades’ spirits threatens to overwhelm him, making him fear loss of command even in his own proper realm, earth. Interacting with the Powers is necessary and heroic, but it is dangerous, too. The intercommunication between realms does not mean that there’s an easy fit between them or that their respective prerogatives and claims upon us have all been settled to everyone’s satisfaction. Aeschylus will certainly point that out to us. When we get to him, ask yourself, “what is the place of the human in his drama?”

Book 12

Odysseus returns to Circe's island after his visit to Hades. This book separates the men from the boys; the crew is destroyed due to its atasthalia, reckless disregard for the gods. Book 12 is a fulcrum; Odysseus’ negotiating to return home has involved negotiating with actors in all three realms. His crew fails him at the end of the process, eating the Sun’s cattle, and only he has come through the trials.

22ff: The book shows concern for controlling the flow of information, for delineating what is proper to a hero and what constitutes mere recklessness. How to respond to experience? The crew is heedless, but Odysseus’ daring is generally more permeated with presence of mind and, sometimes, even with forethought (a quality he shares with that other great figure, Prometheus).

27ff: Circe’s attitude towards the men. Is she honest with them? The she-goddess treats Odysseus’ crew the way Agamemnon has said women should be treated: she tells them only part of the story, taking Odysseus aside to tell him all about the Sirens and about Scylla and Charybdis.

57ff: Odysseus will be allowed the maximum openness to experience because he is best prepared to “be shaken,” in the manner of the Sappho poem I quoted above. His desire is admirable, even if he must be restrained by his fellows, who are not his equals. Some people’s desires are stronger than others, and those desires will have their way—this is a point in the text where the strength of Odysseus’ desire is truly a mark of his excellence.

62ff: Scylla and Charybdis threaten catastrophe. It’s Odysseus’ choice and responsibility to take the consequences. And it’s a chance to measure up to his father Laertes, one of the Argonauts with Jason. They negotiated their way through the same trial. Odysseus keeps the knowledge of one of the killers to himself.

200ff: Here we meet the Sirens (a female noun, seiren). How much does Odysseus get to hear? More than we do? Or the same? Are they, in fact, saying anything that can be understood? Odysseus seems to be responding to a call, but I don’t believe he gets the actual knowledge, which is most likely forbidden to mortals, try though they may to discern it. These enchantresses take Odysseus to the limits of human endurance by their offer of omniscience. He braves them as a man, but in respect to the gods all is feminized. Even Odysseus can’t hear the whole story; he only hears the call to go beyond his limits.

243ff: Odysseus keeps the knowledge of Scylla to himself; he must restrain his crew from giving in to their weakness. We see a pattern of testing emerge: how much knowledge can a man take? Book 12 is a time of testing limits. And Odysseus’ retelling of this episode (along with everything else he tells them) to the Phaeacians also tests his limits of endurance—he must relive the painful experience of losing his crew to Scylla.

320ff: Eurylochus pleads weakness; the men are unheroic, and Odysseus makes them swear an oath. They are reckless because they don’t keep this oath when supplies run out. The belly is their god. But that’s not the case with Odysseus. The breaking of an oath threatens to confound the relationship between the realms; Helios complains to Zeus and says he will blaze in Hades, so Zeus has to promise he will strike Odysseus’ ship with lightning.

455: The ship is stripped bare (here the clothing/nakedness theme occurs again, as it did in the meeting between Odysseus and Princess Nausicaa at the beginning of Book 6), and it’s on to Ogygia, where Calypso abides. Odysseus says that he wouldn’t care to repeat that tale, which of course concludes with his landing on Phaeacian shores—it has been told, and told well. It’s time for him to make his way to Ithaca , with the aid of his hosts. In the grand sweep of The Odyssey, the hero hasn’t arrived at the end of his troubles and tests, but he will have reached a vital stage since from now until Book 24, his efforts will be made on his own kingdom’s rocky soil, not on the high seas or in exotic foreign lands.

Pindar Notes

Pindarus (circa 522-443 BCE), the Theban poet whose body of work has partly been lost to time (except for the epinikia or “victory odes”) writes not so much private-tending lyric as public, formal verse meant to commemorate events dear to the Greeks’ heart: victories by young aristocrats in sporting competition. For Greek men in particular, sports seem to have functioned as an analog to another key concern—prowess on the battlefield. It instilled self-discipline in young men, but also taught them how to work together to achieve a common goal (depending on the type of competition, of course). Pindar himself was an aristocrat, a member of the fabled Aegidae clan. His poetry is learned stuff, probably not intended for the common folk.

Attitude Pindar adopts towards youth – well, probably similar to that in some modern poems, such as Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young.” There’s some melancholy in these poems—the joy of victory can be connected to the illustrious past of the gods and one’s ancestors (a big part of what gives meaning to individuals’ lives in ancient cultures), and projected into an indefinite-seeming future, but there’s also a strong undercurrent on the uncertainties of life and its impermanence.

Notes on Pindar, Selected Odes

Isthmian 3-4 (56-61)

The third ode begins by stressing the need to avoid personal aggrandizement because of one’s wealth or athletic accomplishments. Pindar is, of course, an aristocrat, so his “don’t overplay it” ethos is especially strong, but loyalty to one’s clan and city seems to be prominent in Greek culture generally: a sense of civic pride and duty pervades it. In the fourth ode, Pindar again emphasizes the “lack of loud-mouthed insolence” of Melissos and his ancestors. They are what we would call “gentlemen,” and their deeds speak for them. But that’s where Pindar comes in since, he, as an artist, also “speaks for” such men as Melissos the excellent chariot-racer and fellow Theban: these “sons of Kleonymos” are aided by special winds or forces amongst the many such winds that “drive all men” ( ἄλλοτε δ' ἀλλοῖος οὖρος / πάντας ἀνθρώπους ἐπαίσσων ἐλαύνει,” which Bowra translates as “Many are the different winds / That rush down and drive all men.”) These special winds are paralleled, it appears, by the breath of men as they praise Melissos and his predecessors. Their accomplishments have significance beyond anything that Melissos aims at, pointing to the highest achievement of which humanity is capable and reinforcing a sense of life’s purposiveness, of the need to test the limits of our strength. Melissos’ family has been reduced by loss in war lately, but the poet invokes the spirit of seasonal rebirth: the man’s victories herald the continued flourishing of his stock. The accomplishments of these men, as sung by previous poets, are the organic soil from which Pindar’s poetry develops, and to this poetry Pindar attributes something of immortality: such speech is “undying” (4.44). For those who strive, even the silence is pregnant; for those who fail to strive, says Pindar, “silences that know them not” (35) will be the only reward. There’s no attempt to exaggerate the build of Melissos, who is described as rather a short, stocky fellow 4.53); instead, his deeds are connected to those of the great Herakles, who now enjoys a blissful afterlife amongst the gods.

Olympian 2 (80-85)

This poem, with its allusions to gods and mythical figures, and to the triumphant overcoming of heavy sorrows by great actions, promotes the ever-potent aristocratic principle. A noble family of long standing, it seems, bears within itself always the seeds of its own renovation. Characteristic of Pindar is his enlistment of the sweeping elements to figure the unpredictability and diversity of human life’s outcomes: “Many are the streams that come to men, / Now with the heart’s delight, and now with sorrow” (35-36). This ode seems to refer to Theron the addressee’s own beliefs that there’s an afterlife with a moral structure – not a notion much emphasized in ancient times. Pindar also has it in for some rival poets who may be praised Theron badly or fulsomely, rather than appropriately as he does.

Nemean 3 (101-05)

This is one of the odes that closely links the composition of songs with the athletic competitions—the best reward a victor can have, says Pindar, is not some monetary prize, it’s the song that crowns his victory. As in this one, that song will generally pay homage to the victor’s family and connect him to the stories of gods and local heroes. It’s easy to see that the Greeks are a rather competitive people: Pindar says there are appropriate trials of strength for nearly every stage of a man’s life, and excellence is to be honored in them all. There is plenty of commercialism in ancient Greece , with its thriving artisans and busy harbor towns, but evidently the games revolve around a different and more spiritual kind of economy: they are about personal, local, and regional honor, not about wealth. I like his comment at 40-41, too—as the notes say, Pindar insists that a trainer (trainers and “coaches” were apparently much in demand even back then) can only teach someone the basics—excellence in trials of strength and skill must come from within. I recall seeing an interview with basketball great Bill Russell, the center who played for the Celtics all through the 1960’s, and in it he insisted that great athletes are never “dumb jocks”—they may or may not be book-learned, but they are almost invariably intelligent people with much foresight and self-discipline, and high expectations of excellence that come from one’s own personal reserves of strength and character. Pindar would surely agree. (Or as Oscar Wilde might say, “Education is a fine thing, but it’s well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.”)

Pythian 2 (146-51)

This is a guardedly expressive poem that doesn’t so much celebrate the victor Syracusan King Hieron’s accomplishment as get in a few under-the-radar digs at him for choosing another poet to craft his victory ode. Apparently there was no small amount of competition amongst poets, and Pindar doesn’t always get the better of his competition. He has a certain noble haughtiness about him, and doesn’t like being upstaged by men he considers inferior.

Olympian 7 (164-69)

Here the poet describes his song as being like a wine-pledge, something that intoxicates and unites, something that knits people together. Much of this poem, as the Penguin editors point out, emphasizes how what seems to be an accident or an error may yet be turned to good account, if we or some benevolent power shape it that way. I like the final line, ἐν δὲ μιᾷ μοίρᾳ χρόνου / ἄλλοτ' ἀλλοῖαι διαιθύσσοισιν αὖραι , which Bowra translates as “In a single moment of time / Many are the winds which blow this way and that.” Pindar uses the winds as a natural, or even supernatural, force that gives energy, purpose, and direction to human life, he treats it as something allied with fate and that action of the gods. Life is shot through with energy, opportunity, and uncertainty, and valor in sport is one way of seizing opportunities and steeling oneself to bear adversity.

Isthmian 7 (224-26)

This is a poignant poem in that, as the Penguin editor says, the victor Strepsiades’ uncle (who shares his name) has been killed in a battle against an Athenian army. Pindar reminds himself to live one day at a time, and not try to peer too far into the ways of the gods.

Week 03, Bible's Genesis, Job

2007-02-13T16:22:00.000-08:00

Notes on Genesis.

Genesis 1-3: The Beginning, the Fall

How powerful the spoken word is in the scriptures! God “speaks” the world into existence, and apparently without any need for raw materials with which to create. His words are acts—no separation between the two, as there is for us. God is somewhat anthropomorphized in Genesis—at times, he sounds like a powerful patriarch who takes issue with the beings he has created. He does not like it when his creatures try to rival him—eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil can only lead to eating from the tree of life, and then Adam and Eve might “be as we are.” God begins to regret that he has made the world at all, so sinful are the human beings he made in his image—this is odd in light of later Christian doctrine that God is omniscient and omnipotent; how could such a perfect and transcendent deity “regret” anything? But the Hebrew Bible writers are dealing with God in a dramatic fashion—they have Milton’s task of making pure transcendence and inscrutability talk to us in ways that we can appreciate. What kind of answers or explanations does Genesis give to the huge questions it raises? Well, they are sometimes provocative, and always majestic. Adam and Eve are told to “be fruitful and multiply” (57), and the creation should contain all that it can—”plenitude” and diversity are two great laws of the universe. But why should that be the case? Why should there be something rather than nothing, light instead of darkness, sound and not silence? There really are no answers to such questions—God has simply bid that it should be so, according to Genesis.

The text says that God has made Adam in his image, and there are two overlapping stories of humanity’s creation, it seems: the fuller one in Genesis 2 (pp. 57-58) explains that God first makes Adam from the dust (the name Adam is derived from the Hebrew word for “red clay,” as scholars point out) by breathing life into him. Then God puts Adam to sleep and creates Eve from one of his ribs, to serve (along with the rest of the creation) as a fitting companion for him. A law of hierarchy, as yet gentle enough, binds all creatures from the beginning. God has made mankind in his image, but since he is perfection itself, anything he creates must be less perfect than he is. Apparently to reinforce this principle for Adam and Eve, God plants the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and next to this tree he plants the Tree of Life. The first couple have dominion over everything around them, but not over these two trees. This is simply an interdiction—God does not explain to Adam and Eve why he has made such an interdiction, except to tell them that they will “die” if they disobey. How are we to gloss this act on God’s part? Perhaps we may extrapolate by supposing that God is something like the greatest of romantic poets: the creation is his perpetual poem, and natural process is his “expression.” He has generously given Adam and Eve a chance to help advance the beauty and dignity of his work—they are to tend his garden and take pleasure in the work they do as a way of worshiping him. If, as seems reasonable, they are to draw nearer to the perfect being who has made them in his image, their ascent must be gradual, not sudden. They must not try to usurp God’s place in the hierarchy of the universe by seeking to attain forbidden knowledge. (Incidentally, the text doesn’t say that God has interdicted them from eating of the Tree of Life, though I think it must be implied based on what he says on page 59.) But the serpent, that slippery character “more subtil than any beast of the field” (58), tempts Eve, convincing her that God’s motive is jealousy and stinginess: eat the fruit of the forbidden tree, he says, and “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods.” This imputation that God is withholding something good from her simply to preserve his own prerogatives, to maintain a distinction between himself and his creation, is very powerful. The text explains that Eve succumbs to the fruit’s apparent deliciousness and its supposed wisdom-giving properties, and completes the Fall by giving Adam some as well. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with innocent curiosity, but that isn’t what Eve shows at the moment of choice: her desire to learn is obviously not accompanied by respect and wonder—it is fundamentally selfish and envious, and flows from what one of my former professors in Renaissance literature calls (in reference to Milton’s retelling of Genesis) a “sense of injured merit” not unlike that of Milton’s Satan himself.

The immediate effect of the fall is described somewhat enigmatically: “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (58). As I understand this passage, what was previously the innocent principle of generation—the means whereby all creatures would “be fruitful and multiply,” has become for Adam and Eve something shameful, something to be covered up. Their pride has caused them, in effect, to take God’s generosity for selfishness, and now they construe sexuality the same way, since their understanding has become deranged and darkened. Their being seems shamefully “carnal” to them now, and spirit is no longer at peace with matter and its principle of physical generation. From this point forwards, as God’s stern pronouncements in Genesis 3 make clear, Adam and Eve’s relationship to each other, to their fellow creatures, to the earth itself, and to God will involve difficulty and sorrow: Adam will labor to bring forth his sustenance from an alien, harsh land, and he will “rule over” Eve, who will give birth in pain. And of course, to borrow a line from Milton, they have brought “death into the world.” No longer will they converse pleasantly with God or labor joyfully in his garden amongst their fellow creatures. The laws of life now (as subsequent books in the Bible show) are fearful obedience, painful effort in the face of necessity, cruelty, dishonesty, envy, and misunderstanding with regard to one’s fellows, and dispersion over the earth’s surface: alienation, distortion, derangement.

Genesis 4: The First Murder.

Adam and Eve are the first sinners, but the pattern of sin, which follows an arc of pride, envy, and selfishness, begins with Cain and Abel, their offspring. God doesn’t accept Cain’s offering, presumably because Cain didn’t make it in the right spirit—it makes sense to suppose he offered his gift to God only because he had to, not because he wanted to. As the Bhagavad-Gita later says, one must “act in the spirit of worship” and not be obsessed with getting something from one’s action. Cain hasn’t acted in this selfless or charitable spirit. Then, envious of his brother’s favor with God, Cain kills him without warning and impudently responds to God’s outraged questioning, “am I my brother’s keeper?” As a consequence of his deed, Cain will feel still more deeply than Adam and Eve a sense of alienation from his fellow beings and from the land: “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth” (60). But as a consolation to Cain, who fears that now he will be marked for death as an outlaw, God preserves his life by declaring that “whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” Apparently, then, one human being may not use the wrongs done by another to justify further wrongdoing. As God’s phrase from Deuteronomy goes, “ To me belongeth vengeance and recompence” (32:35).

Genesis 6-9: The Flood.

Noah earns God’s remembrance because of his goodness, and is spared from general destruction in the Flood. In Genesis 9, God sets his “bow in the cloud,” he says, as a “token of a covenant between me and the earth” (63). The covenant amounts to a promise that God will never again destroy the earth by flood. Why does he make this concession? Well, in Genesis 8 God had accepted Noah’s burnt offerings and decided that since “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (pg. 62), there is no point in destroying such wayward children altogether. To me, it seems as if we are to understand from this declaration that God finds it appropriate to be merciful with human weakness, and to show pity for the world that weakness has deranged—the covenant, after all, is not only for human beings; it is for “every living creature of all flesh” (63). But there is genuine sternness in these chapters of Genesis, too: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God made he man” (62). Then, too, God’s description in Genesis 9 of what “dominion” over the animals means is revealing: “the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth.” Evidently, within the limits prescribed by God, there is to be much harshness, much strict justice between man and man, and men will rule the animal kingdom by fear and brute force.

Genesis 11: The Origin of Languages.

In this chapter, human beings again try to rival God; they obey their own desires and set themselves up as proprietors of a divided or rival empire, as evidenced by the building of the Tower of Babel. Here, God discerns that the best way to punish such impiousness is to “confound” the builders’ speech, making it impossible for them to join easily in such nefarious enterprises as raising a building almost to the heavens. The Tower is the first skyscraper. An already self-limited human capacity for learning and understanding will be further limited by the diversification of signifying systems and by physical dispersal across the earth. As the Bible stresses again and again, human language is a fallen instrument, and, in the language of King James I’s day, human combination is apt to be taken as “murmuring against the king”: society breeds an arrogant presumption of self-sufficiency and autonomy far beyond what simple exercise of free will dictates.

Genesis 22: Abraham and Isaac.

God puts Abraham’s faith to the test in this chapter, requiring him to offering his beloved son Isaac as a sacrifice. On the one hand, Genesis 22 reinforces the painful lesson that after the fall, everything is forfeit to God and man can find security in little or nothing: Abraham must be willing to sacrifice even his own son to prove his faith in the Lord. But again, because Abraham is willing to act—because he acts in the right spirit, however troubling the command is to him—he finds mercy in God’s sight. What has not been withheld will be returned manyfold: God promises Abraham, “I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed…” (64). It’s easy to see why Christian tradition has read this chapter typologically, with Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, his “lamb,” serving as a prefiguration of God’s willingness to send “his only begotten son” to atone for mankind’s sins.

Genesis 25, 27: Jacob and Esau.

It seems that God’s providential design justifies considerable “trickery,” as we might call it, amongst the descendants of Adam and Eve: the human order of things must be rearranged sometimes to suit God’s plan. If God requires it, the youngest son must use deceit to take on the powers of the eldest son. Jacob (his mother Rebekah’s favorite) tricks his elder brother Esau into giving up his birthright for some “red pottage” (65). And what Esau has, as the text puts the case, “despised,” Jacob will now secure by tricking old father Isaac (son of Abraham) into bestowing the blessing of the first-born upon him. The plan comes off well, and the blessing, which involves exercising dominion over brethren and even nations, is duly given. This blessing, once given, cannot be retracted, so we can understand Isaac’s feelings about what has happened. But to Esau, too, Isaac offers comfort: he will serve his younger brother, but the servitude will not last forever. In Genesis, Jacob and Esau are reconciled. Jacob’s twelve sons (Asher, Benjamin, Dan, Gad, Issachar, Joseph, Judah, Levi, Naphtali, Reuben, Simeon, Zebulun) will become the twelve tribes of Israel, while Esau’s descendants are said to be the founders of the Kingdom of Edom, a kingdom with which, later on, Kings Saul and then David will clash. See Wikipedia’s entry on the Twelve Tribes and the Edomites. Jacob himself has much service to do—he ends up serving Laban for fourteen years to gain the hand of Rachel, and six years for his stock of cattle. He is renamed “ Israel” after wrestling with an angel in Genesis 32, and is of course the father of Joseph, hero of our next selection.

Genesis 37, 39-46: The Story of Joseph.

Joseph is Jacob/Israel’s son by Rachel, and is possessed not only of a “coat of many colors” given to him by his now elderly father but also the gift of prophetic dreams and the interpretation thereof. One of those dreams gets him in dire trouble with his brothers, since in it, Joseph says, “the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me” (pg. 67, Genesis 37). Only Reuben’s fearful counsel keeps them from killing him outright, and they sell him to the Ishmaelites, who in turn bring him to Egypt , where Pharaoh’s servant Potiphar buys him. Joseph’s powers of interpretation result in his being rescued from the prison where he was sent thanks to the scheming of Potiphar’s wife (whose sexual advances he refused), and Pharaoh is so impressed with Joseph that he makes him all but a co-ruler. As almost always seems to be the case, a gift that places someone in close contact with the divine comes at great risk and cost: insight must be “paid for,” so to speak. When Joseph’s brethren are sent by their father to seek out some wheat (“corn”) during years of famine, the now powerful dweller in Egypt first pays them back for their cruel treatment of him, but then reconciles with them, showing remarkable generosity and inviting them all, along with the youngest son Benjamin and old Israel (Jacob) to come to Egypt and live there. Israel has been promised by God that his children will constitute “a great nation,” and with this faith he enters Egypt. He will live and die there, and so will Joseph. The departure from Egypt and from the clutches of Pharaoh, of course, will only occur when Moses comes to maturity; the story of Moses is told in Exodus.

Notes on Job.

77-78. From the outset, we are told that Job is a “perfect and upright” man, yet God will use this good man to demonstrate to a scoffing Satan the perfection of his order and the loving obedience of his servants. (Satan is not the devil of the New Testament; rather, he is an accusing or adversarial angel amongst God’s council; see the Wikipedia entry on Satan.) Satan sees a fine chance to show that God is mistaken: “Doth Job fear God for nought?” he asks, meaning evidently that Job only obeys and loves God because as yet he has no reason to do otherwise. He has a good, rich life—what is there to be afraid of? Satan’s claim is that once Job suffers a genuine setback in his fortunes, he will hold God in contempt and curse him to his face. But Job responds eloquently to both the first phase (loss of kindred and goods) and the second phase (loss of bodily soundness) of his trial. Satan has lost his wager, but the text has much more to do than prove Satan’s incorrectness.

79. Job’s wife tempts him to “curse God and die,” and his friends, after keeping a seven-day vigil with him, beset him with additional foolish advice. In essence, their counsel follows from the notion that one’s earthly fortunes can be linked directly to the morality or immorality of one’s conduct. In other words, life is a matter of reward and punishment, and nothing else. How does Job process what has happened to him? He prays for death, the great leveler of men and silencer of troubles. This “death” doesn’t seem to entail an afterlife; Job simply wishes to cease existing altogether, and thereby to find peace. He knows in his heart that he is not guilty of what his accusers say he is: “I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.” He never took his good fortune for granted or puffed himself up with pride on account of it. He is not a self-aggrandizer, a miser, or anything of the sort. So far as he is able to discern, he has been genuinely righteous and has never ceased to praise God for his blessings, and he won’t be so hypocritical as to pretend that he understands why he is suffering now. (The knowledge of God’s wager is denied to him—it is known only to us, the readers. But of course, the notion of a wager that causes such suffering is hardly a sufficient justification by any reasonable human standards. We would not easily pardon another human being if he or she did to us what God has allowed Satan to do to Job.)

80-81. Eliphaz picks up on Job’s refusal to accept the charge of iniquity, and urges him to embrace his troubles as the “correction” necessary to purify him. But Job again prays for death instead, pointing out that Eliphaz’s logic is a “pit” into which he will not fall. There is no correspondence between earthly prosperity and moral rectitude, and his own anguished soul tells him that such explanations are brutally insufficient and cruel.

82-83. Because Job’s “days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope” (82 top), he will not keep silent. He will take this one brief chance to voice his anguish and uncertainty. His complaint is not petty: Job demands to know why an infinitely magnificent and powerful God would bother raining trouble and confusion down on a poor servant like Job. What is the point of such contention between God and man? Contention implies the acknowledgment of a relationship, however unequal. We notice, too, that on these pages Job pleads neither perfection nor the virtue of patience: “If I justify myself, mine own mouth shall condemn me: if I say, I am perfect, it shall also prove me perverse…. If I say, I will forget my complaint … I know that thou wilt not hold me innocent” (83). His one need is that God should enter into a conversation with him, should declare himself and explain why he has done such things to a mere mortal: “I will say unto God, Do not condemn me; shew me wherefore thou contendest with me” (83.10).

84-87. Job insists on attending to the problem of his relationship with a divinity with whom he can find no commensurateness, no manner of accommodation or understanding. This “desire to reason with God” (85.13) does not stem from stupidity or arrogance. To his friends he says, “I have understanding as well as you” (85.12). He understands the basis of their explanation, and he knows that God will do as God wills. But by this point in the text, Job’s conversation is turned away from his friends and towards God, to whom again he addresses questions such as “why do you insist on troubling me? what have I done?” His desire is that God should declare himself and enter into dialog with him. Job’s spiritual turmoil (caused by suffering and by uncertainty about the great question, “Why?”) is intolerable, so the dialog for which he asks is a necessity for him.

88-91. Job searches his heart—has he in fact done something wrong, or even something right in the wrong spirit? No, he is unable to accuse himself honestly. With one further plea that God will “remember” him and speak with him, “The words of Job are ended” (89). He will not accuse God of unrighteousness or curse him, but neither will he condemn himself. At last, God declares himself from what me may presume is the perfect calm within the chaos of a deafening whirlwind, telling Job, “Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me” (89.38). What follows is more a series of clarifying questions than a full conversation. All of the questions God poses declare and demonstrate his own sublimity. It is from such language that William Blake probably borrowed when he wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius; lift up thy head!” Like Krishna in The Bhagavad-Gita, the God of the Hebrews deigns to “put on his terrors” for a time. He made Leviathan (on whose subsequent career see Revelations) and Behemoth, and he is behind the tremendous power of all natural processes on earth and all celestial forces in heaven. This “Unmoved Mover,” as Christian theologians (following Aristotle’s older terminology) will call him, seems annoyed with Job, who “darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge” (89.38).

92-93. Job’s best response is to say, “Therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.” He has seen God, at least to some penultimate degree, and the vision leads him to declare, “I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (92.42). Divine and human understanding are not commensurate: apparently, that is what dialog with God teaches us. But “that” turns out to be enough: Job prays for his misguided friends, and God decides to reward him and restore him to great wealth and status. Job’s soul-searching and then his conversation with God have demonstrated a necessary spiritual process: the man may not have been able to understand God fully, but nobody can do that anyhow. He has at least refrained from presuming or cursing, and his questions are not hypocritical or timid, but honest. It seems that God appreciates Job’s honest questioning. Ultimately, the text seems to identify a need for mystery and wonder, and for prayer, as the essence of religiosity. The system of reward and punishment one can find elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures (Deuteronomy, for example) seems less important than these things. On the whole, Job promotes the principle of a divine order than transcends anything possible to conceive in human terms, not the principle of a divine order that somehow corresponds with human ways of understanding order. The great value of the first-mentioned principle, of course, is that it draws humanity out of itself, and sets it on a course towards greater spiritual effort and understanding; it preaches self-transcendence, and perhaps even something like what in Eastern philosophy (Hinduism and Buddhism in particular) we might call “creative self-annihilation.” There is some difference to be noted, in that Job’s offering up of his old self restores him to an even more rooted sense of personhood, so to speak. With regard to the Eastern texts it might be more correct to suppose that the annihilation of self is meant to rid us permanently of such notions as “personhood” altogether.

Week 02, Gilgamesh, Egyptian Poetry

2007-02-06T16:21:00.000-08:00

Notes on The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Prologue and Part 1 (12-17).

As with the Greeks, a certain kind of wildness or violence is proper to human beings. Early on, Gilgamesh is unrestrained in his violence and does not show proper respect to his people. He doesn’t understand that he is supposed to be a shepherd, not a wolf. Enkidu is “wild” and strong, but I don’t get the sense that he was violent before he became a man after sleeping with the temple prostitute—a violation of the separation between human and animal. He ran and ate grass with the herd animals, the gazelles, and foiled human attempts to kill these peaceful animals. He is also given womanly attributes—the metaphor of a marriage bond between him and Gilgamesh comes into play. When Enkidu sleeps with the temple prostitute, he becomes (like Gilgamesh) a challenger to the state’s orderliness. He becomes estranged from the animals, who reject him. This rejection stems from the animals’ perception of his interest in humans, and from the fact that he now knows “the woman’s art.” As for Gilgamesh’s bond with Enkidu, it’s a case of like taming like. The strong must consort with the strong, or else they will turn upon the weak. To become a man is to become violent, and violence must be both recognized and restrained, limited to proper boundaries. The story demands that human and animal be kept at enmity—Gilgamesh’s pity for the “snared bird” can’t be encouraged—but this may betray equally strong anxiety about the boundaries, which are maintained at great cost. Being human is an exhausting task.

Part 2. The Journey of the Forest (17-24).

Gilgamesh says on page 17 that destiny leads him to stamp his name on bricks. He will raise a monument to the gods after cutting down the evil in the land, Humbaba, who is identified with the wild mountain and woods that Gilgamesh and Enkidu must enter. These mountains and woods are apparently the place where the gods dwell.

Enkidu at times counsels turning back, and at a critical point Gilgamesh weakens. Is he confronting the threat of meaninglessness, something like an ancient sense of nihilism? That would contrast with what one author has called the “ego” as a material force that must be connected with others beyond the individual. He counters Asian philosophy’s tendency to focus on self-annihilation with African rootedness in the material (but not mere materialism).

What is the reward for killing Humbaba? Is this a primal struggle with nature, in which humanity must assert its powers? Is it a confrontation with death? Or with some of the gods—Enlil in particular? We might relate the reward to the fate Enlil has decreed—Gilgamesh belongs to the dying generations of men, but he wields the power of darkness and light. So perhaps going to the forest amounts to confronting the dark side of the gods and of human destiny. Gilgamesh fells the seven sacred cedars and will build with them a temple in Uruk. We might suppose that this journey, aside from asserting the power of human effort, is about reestablishing divine order in the face of a menace—but of course the gods themselves aren’t exactly in agreement. Shamash helps the heroes, but Enlil becomes enraged, even though it seems he’s the one who told them to kill Humbaba.

Part 3. Ishtar and Gilgamesh, and the Death of Enkidu (24-30).

Ishtar becomes enamored of Gilgamesh, but he scorns her and announces his distrust—she’s had a succession of unfortunate lovers, so why should he be added to the list? She unleashes the Bull of Heaven, which Enkidu promptly kills. She then vents her outrage to the other gods, and, in spite of Shamash’s objections, Anu declares that one of the two heroes must die. When Enkidu is stricken with a wasting illness, he reveals to Gilgamesh his dream about the Underworld, presided over by Queen Ereshkigal. The earth’s great kings are mere servants here. Even the greatest of human beings mean little to the gods, it would seem. Ancient literature seems full of such implications—as when, in Indian lore, a self-important Indra is humbled by a vision of infinitely many Indras marching as a long file of insects. The metaphysical layers of the cosmos—its infinity and transcendence of ordinary time—annihilate all human pretensions.

Sometimes even the gods are dwarfed by infinity and cosmic cycles. Well, Enkidu’s vision is a sad one—perhaps the best humans can hope for is this kind of melancholy insight. Is it better to know, or not to know? It’s better to know, if only because failing to take the insight that is given amounts to cowardice: “We must treasure the dream whatever the terror.” Gilgamesh still needs to learn how to take the ultimate knowledge afforded by Enkidu’s dream of the Underworld. He mourns for a space, and then goes searching for life everlasting. He fears death, and will confront his fear. The pattern that emerges from Gilgamesh is that humans will be compelled to ask grand questions to which the answers will always be disturbing rather than comforting. The strength and honesty with which people bear the weight of this gloomy insight goes a long way towards establishing their value.

Part 4. The Search for Everlasting Life (30-35).

Gilgamesh goes to the Scorpion-Guardian of the Mashu Mountains, who opens the mountain gate for him. In the Garden of the Gods, Shamash and then Siduri the winemaking goddess with her golden bowl tell Gilgamesh he’s on a fool’s errand, but the hero declares he will look straight at the sun, and confront death itself. On 32-33, Siduri’s advice is simply to enjoy the “good things that lie at hand” (to borrow a stock phrase from Homer’s Odyssey); to revel in his physical being and in whatever transient pleasures mortal life offers.

Still, Siduri directs Gilgamesh to Utnapishtim’s ferryman Urshanabi, who will convey him across “the waters of death.” Gilgamesh damages the boat’s tackle and destroys the sacred stones, thus sacrificing his own and Urshanabi’s safety. But the journey will be made, and apparently by Urshanabi’s “pole-vaulting” stratagem, Gilgamesh (now alone) reaches Utnapishtim “in Dilmun at the place of the sun’s transit.” This sage is the only man the gods have made immortal. And what does he say? Well, for the moment, only that “there is no permanence.” All human distinctions come to nothing when, at last and never quite certain what is going to happen, we arrive at our end. Well, as Hamlet says, “Alexander dead and turned to clay, would stop a hole to keep the wind away.” Still, these ancient cultures and texts are remarkably concerned with matters of rank. There are a few rulers and high lords, and everybody else is a slave or a commoner. We may be tempted to invoke Freud: isn’t the emphasis on hierarchy an attempt to overcome the primal threat of nothingness, of meaninglessness, ennui, that strong countercurrent to heroic action and civilization-building?

Part 5. The Story of the Flood (35-38).

Utnapishtim agrees to tell Gilgamesh how his immortality came to be granted. It seems that the gods, spurred on by Enlil, decreed the extermination of the teeming, noisy human race. These gods hardly found it acceptable that humanity’s din and activity should set up against them a rival order. The great Flood is not, therefore, a punishment for humanity’s wickedness; instead, Enlil is simply upset about all the noise and files a celestial noise complaint! Ea saves Utnapishtim of Surrupak because of an oath he must keep, and so Utnapishtim rides out the flood on the boat he has built for himself and his fellow citizens, along with many wild and tame animals. As many scholars have noted, the story strongly resembles the one in the Bible about Noah and his Ark. Ishtar the Queen of Heaven relents, and the flood recedes at last. Ishtar gives Utnapishtim a gift of jewels, and Ea rebukes the raging Enlil, who promptly bestows upon Utnapishtim immortality. He and his wife will dwell “at the mouth of the rivers.” So in the end, Utnapishtim rides out the flood, Ishtar repents, and he is granted eternal life. But he’s not a happy man. He has what he and all others have sought, but it doesn’t comfort him, and his wisdom doesn’t comfort us, either.

Parts 6-7. The Return, The Death of Gilgamesh (38-41).

The thing I find most interesting about the Epic of Gilgamesh is its unrelenting rejection of the “happiness principle,” as we post-Utilitarians would call it. Utnapishtim gets the last word—there is nothing permanent for human beings, and that seems to be the wisdom he imparts to Gilgamesh, who has sought him out to learn about death, his greatest fear after the passing of Enkidu. The idea that Gilgamesh actually grasped in his hand not immortality but at least youth, and then lost it, is almost a cruel joke on the part of the narrator’s gods—even this hero (himself partly divine) gets no more than a tantalizing touch of what lies beyond humanity.

At least, that’s the way it is in our version of the story. The destiny decreed by Enlil is cited at the end of the epic: it emphasizes the need to be fair to one’s subjects. Gilgamesh has no cause for despair—he has been given “power to bind and to loose, to be the darkness and the light of mankind.” That is, the partly divine, partly mortal hero has been given a chance to participate in wielding the gods’ ultimate power. His fame will be carved in stone. Perhaps that hardly amounts to what we might demand today—personal immortality, or at least a measure of satisfaction. In a sense, the power granted by the gods is the power to participate against oneself, against one’s own species—after all, the gods may swear that earthly kings should be fair with their inferiors, but they themselves deal as they wish with human beings.

Notes on Egyptian Poetry

Pharaoh Akhenaten’s “Hymn to the Sun.”

I treat these poems in a general, philosophical way since we are dealing with relatively loose translations—it couldn’t be otherwise when the original consists of hieroglyphic writing. The movement and precision of the original surely can’t be rendered into modern English without loss since languages are not mere aggregations of words with dictionary-style meanings, and you can’t always find an exact equivalent in a second language for a word from the first. Cultural practices differ, customs and concepts change over time, words pick up new meanings and lose old ones, and so forth.

In Akhenaten’s monotheistic-tending “Hymn to the Sun,” everything is attuned to sun, given sparkle (eye-light), purpose. The King wants to be like a concentrated beam, to epitomize purposiveness. He is the reflective consciousness of his people, embracing all things of the eye and mind, and is most worthy to rule because he is most cognizant of the order that the Sun God bestows. Throughout the hymn there are metaphors of reflection and light, mirroring, etc. Such metaphors both capture the creation’s diversity and speak to the Pharaoh’s role as described above. Order in the cosmos coincides with great diversity, and there is no contradiction. This poetry celebrates the beauty of the cosmos: Akhenaten affines himself to the Sun God by mentioning as much as he can of what is harmonized in nature under the Sun. As Hopkins’ poem says, “glory be to God for dappled things . . . . He fathers forth whose beauty is past change: praise him.”

Polytheism seems to be based on amplification: if you want to build up a view of how the world is, you look around at natural processes, the sky, the growing of crops, etc., and that’s how you envision what the gods must be like. You construe the divine realm as an amplified imitation of human and natural goings-on. You then relate to this amplified realm and treat is as a cause. This “method” has its virtues in that it can process apparent chaos by doing something other than simply asserting order where there seems to be none. The gods are sometimes crazy, and so is the world. So be it; we can pay homage to the divine without claiming that everything “makes sense.” This attitude probably kept ancient people open to the natural world and to the gods, but at the same time it must have left them open to the disillusionment proper to such an outlook: after all, we are capable of conceiving of a universe that actually makes sense, or one that would make sense. So the real thing is bound to suffer by comparison to the ideal. What I’m asserting is that most likely, there’s always at least (by negation or “hinting”) some sense of a transcendent ideal of order, even in a culture that characterizes the gods as powerful children who do as they please (like the Sumerian/Babylonian gods, or the Olympians). So I may seek a better answer than one my religion gives me, and become alienated and disillusioned.

Monotheism, of the modern sort that posits a distant, inscrutable Jehovah, or an ancient variety like that of Akhenaten’s worship of a sun that blesses us physically with its wonderful beams, posits a higher principle of absolute intelligibility, one towards which we can at least strive. Monotheism tends to draw people beyond themselves and become something more than what they are, to affine themselves with divine excellence. So it’s a vehicle of spiritual progress that may allow people to become capable of things they previously couldn’t have conceived of accomplishing.

The Leiden Hymns .

The Leiden poems are also striking—Horus the Sun-God isn’t the only god, but he’s the source of the other gods and brings order to the pantheon. Interesting here, as the editors suggest, is the way the speakers try to “express the inexpressible” with respect to time, space, and spirit. The Sun is like an unblinking pair of eyes (one eye is the moon, and the other is the sun) that always keeps all things in view, though mortals sleep. That quality seems to be important to the speaker—humans live and die, fading in and out of consciousness, but the great God never sleeps. The poet employs the strategy of incarnation and anthropomorphization without confining himself or the Sun-God to the bodily contours thereby delimited. At some point—and here I would suggest that point is set forth quickly and frankly—religious language must bear witness to its own inadequacy or, perhaps a better phrase, its ultimate incommensurateness with what it tries to express. There’s no discomfort on this score, so far as I can see, in these Egyptian hymns. The Hebrew scriptures portray Yahweh more circumspectly—burning bushes, and so forth. It isn’t as if in the Bible you’re going to get an image of a huge man with one eye as the moon and the other as the sun. The Hebrew God is inscrutable both in shape and, for the most part, in thought. The Leiden Hymns, by contrast, are cheerful in the face of the need to express what can’t be fully visualized or expressed in any medium. “The Mind of God is Perfect Knowing” is a good example of this attitude. All things turn instinctively towards the sun as their source, and the act of turning is proof enough of its powers.

Love Poems.

The love poems are full of appropriate reserve—though not about sex or expression of sexual feelings. This is not a shame culture like Christianity. Rather, the reserve comes from the sense that one might not be accepted or that the lover might not be able to convey his or her passion in the right way. Good lyric poetry never comes across as smug regarding the inherent power of expression; it is never really sure that “conveying emotion” is a simple task or that language is up to it. Even so, the possibility that words may or must fail us at some point doesn’t necessarily enjoin despair—that’s an issue Wordsworth addresses straightforwardly in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” when he points out that even if the romantic poet were to be thought a translator of his or her own feelings and thoughts, the task of poetry is to reawaken the immediate pleasure in us that in turn reminds us of our common humanity. If a “translation” can do that, so be it. The Egyptian poems we are reading, of course, make no such theoretical statements—they simply adopt a frank and sometimes sunny attitude towards the relationship between language and love.

Week 01, Course Intro, Gilgamesh

2007-01-30T16:20:00.000-08:00

Gilgamesh Notes

Prologue and Part 1

As with the Greeks, a certain kind of wildness or violence is proper to men. Early on, Gilgamesh is unrestrained in his violence and does not show proper respect to his people. He doesn’t understand that he is supposed to be a shepherd, not a wolf. Enkidu is “wild” and strong, but I don’t get the sense that he was violent before he became “a man” after sleeping with the temple prostitute -- a violation of the separation between human and animal. He ran and ate grass with the herd animals, the gazelles, and foiled human attempts to kill these peaceful animals. He is also given womanly attributes -- the metaphor of a marriage bond between him and Gilgamesh should come into play. When Enkidu sleeps with the temple prostitute, he becomes like Gilgamesh, a challenger to the state’s orderliness. He becomes estranged from the animals, who reject him. This rejection stems from the animals’ perception of his interest in humans, and from the fact that he now knows “the woman’s art.” As for Gilgamesh’s bond with Enkidu, it’s a case of like taming like. The strong must consort with the strong, or else they will turn on the weak. To become a man is to become violent, and violence must be both recognized and restrained, limited to proper boundaries. The story demands that human and animal be kept at enmity – Gilgamesh’s pity for the “snared bird” can’t be encouraged – but this may betray equally strong anxiety about the boundaries; they are maintained at great cost. Being human is an exhausting task.

Part 2. The Journey of the Forest.

Gilgamesh says on 17 that destiny leads him to stamp his name on bricks; he will raise a monument to the gods after cutting down the evil in the land, Humbaba, who is identified with the wild mountain and woods that Gilgamesh and Enkidu must enter.

Enkidu at times counsels turning back, and at a critical point Gilgamesh weakens. Is he confronting the threat of meaninglessness, something like an ancient sense of nihilism? That would contrast with what one author has called the “ego” as a material force that must be connected with others beyond the individual. He counters Asian philosophy’s tendency to focus on “self-annihilation” with African rootedness in the material (but not mere materialism).

What is the reward for killing Humbaba? Is this a primal struggle with nature, in which humanity must assert its powers? Is it a confrontation with death? Or with some of the gods – Enlil in particular? We might relate the reward to the fate Enlil has decreed – Gilgamesh is of the dying generations of men, but he has the power of darkness and light. So perhaps going to the forest is confronting the dark side of the gods and of human destiny. Gilgamesh fells the seven sacred cedars and will build with them a temple in Uruk. We might suppose that this journey, aside from asserting the power of human effort, is about reestablishing divine order in the face of a menace – but of course the gods themselves aren’t exactly in agreement. Shamash helps the heroes, but Enlil becomes enraged, even though it seems he’s the one who told them to kill Humbaba.