Jive Iliad

Courtesy of Gizoogle, this ought to be worth a weekend of fun.  Check out “bootylicious Achilles“, which I’m sure is what Patroclus thought…

‘Lost’ going off the rails

Although I’m still fan of the show Lost, I’ve been a bit upset at the pacing lately. That and the glut of unnecessary peripeties that’s been shoving the plot swiftly into soap opera territory over the past season and a half. Damn networks ruining another show by trying to stretch it out!

Or at least that’s how I’m interpreting it, and I think I’ve got a fair bit of back-up in the voice of Borges. The following point about the requirements of the adventure genre, as opposed to the psychological or realist genres, is from his introduction to Adolfo Bioy Casares’ “La Invención de Morel”, which novel apparently made a cameo appearance in a recent episode:

“La novela de aventuras, en cambio, se propone como una transcripción de la realidad: es un objeto artificial que no sufre ninguna parte injustificada. El temor de incurrir en la mera variedad sucesiva del Asno de Oro, de los siete viajes de Simbad o del Quijote, le impone un riguroso argumento.”

I recall saying several times within the first couple seasons that two of the main reasons I enjoyed Lost were A) that you knew pretty much every detail was going to be important and would eventually be explained in some reasonable manner with reference to accepted “rules” of the “normal” world, and B) it was accordingly character-driven.

My rationale for part A veers a bit off topic into why I don’t consider the show to be proper Science Fiction, time travel and all notwithstanding, so I’m not going to go into that. As for part B, the character psychology in the show functions more in line with Borges’ description of an adventure novel as opposed to a psychological novel. We’re not terribly interested in who the inhabitants of the island are except insofar as it moves us along in the set narrative, since that’s the point of the show. I have a hunch that this is part of why people seem to find Kate’s backstory so flat. It’s not that it’s not an interesting story in and of itself, but rather that it doesn’t [yet] seem to have a bearing on the greater story that’s proportional to the detail we’ve been given. We don’t really want to know Kate’s psychology in depth, or Jack’s or Sawyer’s and the details of that love triangle, since any attempt at making the audience reflect upon the implicit psychological realities of those individuals pulls those characters out of the overarching narrative matrix and jars the fundamental suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy the show as a good adventure. In other words, when we start to think of a few characters as more psychologically “real” than others, that undermines the deterministic basis for a good adventure story, in which all the cogs are supposed to fit together and run smoothly. Moreover, the fact that we’re pretty well aware by this point that we’re watching an artificial “adventure” and not a “psychological romance” totally flattens out any in-depth treatment of any character’s emotions. While we’re willing to tolerate occasional specimens of romantic flatness from an adventure since we know that it has a greater purpose in moving the plot and that we’re not supposed to dwell on it, the more an adventure forces us to endure relatively isolated plot turns, romantic or otherwise, the more the adventure slides into the hack territory of soap opera.

On the Virtues of Academic Lassitude

As the story goes, J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings et al. stems from a  simple sentence (”In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.”) he absent-mindedly jotted down in an exam answer space a student had left blank.

Think about it–if that student had spent more time studying such that he had answered all the questions on that exam, that extra effort might just have deprived us of one of the greatest fantasy series of all time…

Plus Ça Change…

I culled this little gem from a friend’s dissertation that I’m editing.  “Summer Reading” apparently has been dreaded by students ever since its inception:

 ‘there was a terrible day when a holiday book was suggested, in order that our minds should not relapse too much during the long summer holidays.’

-Dorothea Brooks

(Dunning, Dunning (ed.), Graham Street Memories, 1881-1931, Francis Holland Church of England School for Girls, London, 1931, p. 69.  )

Toasty

…is a decent description of me at the moment…but that’s not of importance.  The point of this post is to swing this blog back to interesting literary matters, it having dwelt a little to much lately on inconsequential miscellany and on matters rather close to my heart and therefore somewhat inappropriate for the oh-so-professional tone you readers (all 3 of you, being generous) have come to know and love and mourn the recent departure thereof.

Spiel gespielt, here’s a poem by Philip Larkin that I initially disliked, but have grown to appreciate.  It’s called “High Windows”.

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives–
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

John Derbyshire (a writer I like only very intermittently, but then do extremely like) once labeled Larkin a “conservative” poet.  I picked him up for that reason about two years ago and was somewhat disappointed, not exactly having banked on Derbyshire’s use of the word “conservative” in the more austere English sense.  I’ve since grown to appreciate Larkin much more, and I see this poem as a fundamentally conservative statement of the old saw that the “the grass is greener…”.

But what is quite different from that adage and all it entails is that fact that the poem explicitly eschews quaint verbal formulations and recognizes that life occurs to one with an immediacy beyond the spoken word: “And immediately / Rather than words comes the thought of high windows”.   In other words, there are no words.  Or at least, no ultimately effectual words.  It puts me in the mind of the following from Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” explaining Max Weber:

    No matter what conservatives may think, traditions had a beginning  that was not traditional.  They had a founder who was not a conservative or a traditionalist.  the fundamental values informing that tradition were his creation.  The tradition is the continuing half-life of the charmed moment when a happy few could live on the heights of inspiration with the creator.  Tradition adjusts that inspiration to the ordinary, universal motives of man, such as greed and vanity; it routinizes charisma.

Now, Bloom of course doesn’t buy into Weber wholesale, to say the least; nevertheless, there is a point to Weber’s analysis that’s expressed quite nicely in Thoreau’s maxim that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”, namely, with the idea that there is something more out there to be got and savored.

I get the impression that one of Larkin’s points in this poem is to parody the naive version of that idealism in the rather childish image of the “long slide”.  As though if only you could do A, B, and C, 1, 2, 3, lickity-split, Bob’s your uncle, and there you go, down the long slide to happiness, having chuck out the window all the inhibiting thoughts and habits the former generation crammed down your throat such that it becomes difficult to actualize your every whim.  There’s also something rather base and typical about his description of the young couple having intercourse that jars with the notion that it could be a desired “paradise”, as he terms it, in the deeper sense of that word.   Fixating upon “high windows” looking out at a peaceful oblivion is to ignore the illuminated indoors of one’s actual surroundings, where life actually happens in all its unfair and non-ideal semi-glory.  I believe Larkin recognizes the temptation to consume the lotos, and the nonetheless rejects it.

2 from the East

An otherwise unfortunate series of circumstances has led me to a delightfully increasing acquaintance with Korean poetry. I don’t (yet) know the language, but I do appreciate what I can currently describe only rather vacuously as a sense of being an isolated thought suspended in a gentle breeze, flitting between apprehensiveness and freedom.

The first is one of the oldest extent Korean poems, a hyangga from the Silla period. The author is purportedly one Ch’oyong:

I revel all night long
in the moonlit capital,
come home and discover
four legs in my bed!
Two are mine;
whose are the other two?
Legs once mine, now purloined!
What am I to do?

(trans. from here)

The other is from a modern Korean poet, and curiously enough it reflects the situation that brought me to it. The author is Kim Sowôl:

Long From Now

Long from now, if you should seek me,

I would tell you I have forgotten.

If you should blame me in your heart,

I would say “Missing you so, I have forgotten.”

And if you should still reprove me,

“I couldn’t believe you, so I have forgotten.”

Unable to forget you today, or yesterday,

but long from now “I have forgotten”

It’s not what you say…

…it’s how you say it that counts. Apt advice from the Mediterranean ancients, who left us many examples of the consequences of not speaking correctly…or at least in the manner in which one’s audience would want one to speak.

I’m currently engaged in an intermittent discussion with Orwhalyus over at Works and Days on the origins of the medieval spellings michi and nichil for the classical mihi and nihil, (I’ve remarked on more than one occasion that all the evidence has probably already been compiled and the correct conclusions reached by some some late 19th Century German PhD candidate whose dusty thesis is currently rotting away under the stacks at Tübingen or Heidelberg. But that won’t stop us!) and the most recent exchange brought up Catullus 84 as an example of how you could be hammered in Ancient Rome for incorrect speech. That put me in the mind of one of the more entertaining episodes of early Roman history, namely, the origins of the Pyrrhic War. The following is from the Loeb translation of the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus:

Postumius was sent as ambassador to the Tarentines. As he was making an address to them, the Tarentines, far from paying heed to him or thinking seriously, as men should do who are sensible and are taking counsel for a state which is in peril, watched rather to see if he would make any slip in the finer points of the Greek language, and then laughed, became exasperated at his truculence, which they called barbarous, and finally were ready to drive him out of the theatre. As the Romans were departing, one of the Tarentines standing beside the exit was a man named Philonides, a frivolous fellow who because of his besotted condition in which he passed his whole life was called Demijohn; and this man, being still full of yesterday’s wine, as soon as the ambassadors drew near, pulled up his garment, and assuming a posture most shameful to behold, bespattered the sacred robe of the ambassador with the filth that is indecent even to be uttered.

When laughter burst out from the whole theatre and the most insolent clapped their hands, Postumius, looking at Philonides, said: “We shall accept the omen, you frivolous fellow, in the sense that you Tarentines give us what we do not ask for.” Then he turned to the crowd and showed his defiled robe; but when he found that the laughter of everybody became even greater and heard the cries of some who were exulting over and praising the insult, he said: “Laugh while you may, Tarentines! Laugh! For long will be the time that you will weep hereafter.” When some became embittered at this threat, he added: “And that you may become yet more angry, we say this also to you, that you will wash out this robe with much blood.” The Roman ambassadors, having been insulted in this fashion by the Tarentines both privately and publicly and having uttered the prophetic words which I have reported, sailed away from their city.

As soon as Aemilius, with the cognomen Barbula, had assumed the consulship, Postumius and those who had been sent with him as ambassadors to Tarentum arrived in the city, bringing no answer, to be sure, but relating the insults that had been offered them and exhibiting the robe of Postumius as proof of their story. When great indignation was shown by all, Aemilius and his fellow consul assembled the senate and considered what course they ought to take, remaining in session from early morning until sunset; and this they did for many days. The question was not whether the terms of peace had been violated by the Tarentines, since all were agreed upon that point, but when an army should be sent against them. For there were some who advised against undertaking this war as yet, while the Lucanians, the Bruttians, and the large and warlike race of Samnites were in rebellion and Tyrrhenia, lying at their very doors, was still unconquered, but only after these nations had been subdued, preferably all of them, but if that should not be possible, at least those lying eastward and close to Tarentum. But others thought the opposite course advisable, namely, not to wait for a moment, but to vote for war at once. When it was time for counting the votes, those in the latter group were found to be more numerous than those who advised postponing the war to another time. And the populace ratified the decision of the senate.

(XIX, 5-6)

A Further Point on Modernism

Earlier in this post, I posited a definition for Modernism based on an artist’s relative consciousness of how things in a given culture can be considered “new” or “old”. I was to partially retract that on the grounds that the consciousness and manipulation of such categories was manifestly in full operation in previous eras, particularly in Roman civilization. There’s an excellent article by Hines, I think, and I’ll get the reference here once I dig it out. The gist of the matter is that by the time the Romans came along literarily, Greek poetry had already been established as something of a gold standard for centuries. Once you’ve had a few generations of Latin poets come along and develop their language for poetry, you then get your Golden Age Latin literature (e.g., Horace’s Odes, Virgil’s Aeneid, etc.). Well…what happens to the guys who come next, the so-called Silver Age writers, when Virgil’s already gone and written the Aeneid? In other words, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that any given generation of artists is somehow especially conscious of the fact that it has the weight and authority of previous artistic generations bearing down upon itself. Hines’ article does an excellent job of demonstrating conscious poetic innovation in successive epochs of Latin literature.

But I did say “partially retract”. I’m now thinking that instead of a “new vs. old” consciousness, perhaps Modernism might be best explained by a “part vs. whole” consciousness concurrent with the late 19th and early 20th century upheavals ultimately resulting in the more or less peaceful settlement we now look back upon as “Western Civilization”. In other words, whereas prior to Modernism the prevalent mindset might have been to draw sharp cultural distinctions among, say, French, German, and English art and literature, the Modernist movement marked the beginning of what we now more normally see as closely-linked subgroups of a more general “Western” phenomenon.

As for previous parallels, I repeat a point raised in a lecture on Late Roman Antiquity (ca. 200AD-400AD) that the art and literature of this period owed much to the idea of the Cento or literary patchwork (e.g., consider the Cento Nuptialis of Ausonius, a poem fashioned entirely from lines and half-lines of Virgil. Also, take a look at the Vergilian Cento of Faltonia Betitia Proba, which retells the life of Christ through Virgilian verse [I couldn't find the full text, but here's a helpful page]). If you try to interpret this kind of artistic movement in light of several other Late Antique cultural developments towards a far more inclusive definition of what it meant to be a Roman than had existed under the Republic and the Early Empire, then I think you come up with something that looks a lot like the Modernist movement in early 20th century Europe. Then take into account the fact that what is often considered the first Modern novel, Don Quixote, came from an area of the world that had already been struggling for a long time with the problem of juggling in one coherent work the artistic “vocabularies” from multiple cultural traditions, each in some sense “foreign” to the other–well, take that into account, and it throws the similarities in higher relief.

Either that, or it all becomes an incomprehensible pastiche…which thought, curiously enough, brings to mind the epigraph to “The Wasteland”, quoting the vacuously bombastic Trimalchio, who was so thoroughly (un)cultured that he had 3 libraries(Cf. XLVIII). Either you bring this all together in order to mean something larger and more profound (e.g., Roman Identity, Spanish Identity, Western Identity), or it all ends up consumed by a horrific banality. And thus the Sybil perishes.

Exile

My favorite Spanish poet has to be Rafael Alberti, and my favorite of his poems has to be the following, from his first volume, “Marinero en Tierra”, “Sailor on Land”:

[Untitled]

El mar. La mar.

El mar. ¡Sólo la mar!

 

 

¿Por qué me trajiste, Padre,

A la ciudad?

 

 

¿Por qué me desenterraste

del mar?

 

 

En sueños, la marejada

Me tira del corazón.

Se lo quisiera llevar.

 

 

Padre, ¿por qué me trajiste

acá?

-Rafael Alberti

It’s a rather simple poem, but it’s virtually untranslatable into English on account of the gender manipulation. Generally speaking, the sea is normally masculine in Spanish, but it can also be feminine according to well-established poetic usage. In any event, that’s only one of the reasons I like it, namely, the insight that mere word choice encodes so much. The way we choose to speak is the way we choose to live. Heidegger once wrote, “Language is the house of being”. Now, I certainly can’t claim to understand all of what Heidegger meant by that. But based on what I have read, I’m fairly certain that part of what he mean has to do with the relationship between the shared experience of individuals in common society as reflected by a common tongue. As we still say of people who display an instant mutual comprehesion, “They speak the same language”.

Even beyond that, though, I read the poem partially as a statement on the tension between chosen meaning, imposed meaning, and the difficulty of discerning between them. The sea can normally be either masculine or feminine, but for Alberti it is only feminine, it is only romantic, it is only visionary, it is only poetic because there can be no other way for him.  There is no intermediate ground to language choice.  The spoken word is the ultimate Either/Or.

But then why is it “del mar” in line 6 instead of “de la mar”, which would be metrically equivalent? That strikes me now as an indication that the poetic vision remains intact even when removed from immediate experience. For the sailor on land, the sea remains all it is…and perhaps more by virtue of the distance (cf. Donne, “A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning”).  While he may be removed from the sea (El mar), that is quite a different thing from being removed from the vision encoded by the sea (La mar).

All of that, however, fades into the background of the poem against the direct questions: Why did you bring me to the city? Why did you uproot me from the sea? Why did you bring me here? Why? Why? Why? The tempestuous image of my lover haunts my dreams, beckoning. Why have I been brought here, when I know I am wanted there?…or is it only that I desire to be wanted there…only in my dreams…? What am I doing here? The poem never directly reveals the speaker’s emotions, and I think it’s absolutely crucial that the desire the speaker expresses must be read into it on account of word choice. Does he really want to go back to the sea? Why does he want what he apparently wants, yet not enough to come right out and say it? Does he actually want that? What does he want? Why all this vagueness? The poem begins with a strong laconic statement of vision, of chosen meaning, but then trails off into a series of enjambed uncertain questions.

One of the more powerful moments of self-discovery is when one realizes that much of how has constructed oneself has been dependent upon circumstances. Exile shatters this illusion and forces us into deeper questions of who we are, what we believe, and what we want. But whereas exile is normally construed as expulsion from civilization, this poem turns that paradigm on its head by construing the “city”, the center of civilization and human contact, as the center of exile.

Insofar as the city has anything to do with the sea, though, it is practical, commercial, fungible. And if one’s current obligations are tied to the city, how does one retain a romantic vision of the sea? I’m not talking about the romantic vision of fantasy, which is merely a false escapist construct manufactured from discontent and imputed conceptual oppositions. It is not that because the sailor is a sailor. He has been to sea, he knows what is there, he knows it is difficult, he knows what it is worth. But he is no longer there. And now that he is no longer there…what then?

This type of question about what to do when displaced from what one once thought were one’s natural desires is characteristic of 20th century peninsular Spanish literature.  Another way to say that is that those Spaniards really like to plumb the depths of the fact that the world’s concreteness actually has an impact on us…but what kind of impact?  In a  world that is increasingly driven by ideologies and virtual experiences, how do we continue to be limited, embodied, contingent beings? There’s much more to say, of course, but I’ll save that for a later post on an excerpt of Unamuno or Torrente Ballester. Or Cervantes…it all goes back to him anyway.

Nails on a Blackboard

About five years ago while I was riding in a car to see the Star Wars Episode Two, I recall that there was a discussion going on about Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which book the driver basically called a crock on account of a certain section wherein Campbell outlines his theory of the basic narrative structure of all myths by saying something tautological along the lines of, “at this point the hero does X, or he doesn’t”. Not being a terribly huge fan of hyper-reductive structuralist psychologizing, I’d meant ever since that point to read through the work in order to pinpoint the mentioned section and file it for later use. I only got around to that about a couple weeks ago. But let it suffice to say that I found the book so boring and uncritical that I never bothered to read further than the first score or two of pages, and I never found the section I was looking for. One can take only so much of “Hey, check it out! This one story sounds like this other story! I’m going to cite a whole bunch of people and books that also sound kind of like they’re talking about the same thing, and then claim that they really are!”

Now, that kind of scholarship probably was truly insightful around the 1940s, when the book was first published. But a lot of ground has been covered since then–enough so, I’d say, as to consign Campbell’s book to the realm of History of Scholarship. In other words, while it is an important and influential book, its methodology is too flawed in light of more recent developments as to warrant close study. I might get into that in another post, but for the record I’ll merely mention that the basis for much of his analysis and application to the entire human race stems from a rather uncritical (although understandably so) reading of Freudian psychology as confirmed by such anecdotal sources as an early 20th-Century American newspaper dream analyst. Let’s just say that I’m not surprised at the succeeding scholarly generation’s reaction to Eurocentrism and the like.

But all of that is prelude to the following:

Every so often one runs into such an appalling bastardization of the English language by someone apparently in a position really to know better, that one just can’t help but stare slack-jawed at the words on the page in astonishment that such dreck was ever deemed worthy of publication. The following excerpts come from the flabbergastingly tin-eared and obsequious quasi-introduction by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph. D., to the 2004 “Commemorative Edition” of The Hero with a Thousand Faces (complete with satin bookmark!). Here’s how it begins:

“I am honored to be invited to write this introduction to the work of a soul I have regarded in many ways for so long. The context and substance of Joseph Campbell’s lifework is one of the most recent diamonds on a long, long necklace of other dazzling gemstones that have been mined by humanity–from the depths, and often at great cost–since the beginning of time. There is no doubt that there is strung across the eons–a strong and fiery-wrought chain of lights, and that each glint and ray represents a great work, a great wisdom preserved. The lights on this infinite ligature have been added to, and continue to be added to, link by link.”

[I'm already cringing...]

“Campbell points out that coming through such struggles causes the person to be infused with more vision, and to be strengthened by the spiritual life principle–which, more than anything else, encourages one to take courage to live with effrontery and mettle.”

[I honestly wonder whether this has been run through an online translator...]

“Campbell acted as a lighted fire for many. The mythic matters he resonated to personally also attracted legions of readers and listeners worldwide. In this way, he gathered together a tribe of like-minded individuals, thinkers, and creators. His book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, continues to be one of the major rendezvous sites for those who seek the meridians where ‘what is purely spirit’ and ‘what is purely human’ meet and create a third edition of a finer selfhood.”

[durrrr.....was there even an editor?]

“Certainly, we have hardly ever faced a world in worse shape or in greater need of the lyrical, mystical, and common-sensical. There seem to be large and perpetual pockets where fair and sustaining values are more pale than they should be. But when we consider Plato, Strabbo[sic], and the apostles Paul and John, and many others over the centuries, we see that they also wrote about their times as being likewise devoid of proper ‘management and meaning.’ It appears that ‘culture at edge[sic] of utter corruption’ and ‘world at the edge of utter destruction’ are two of the oldest themes to be found in stories of the human race.”

[...and the finale...]

“Consider this book a time-capsule, then: one in which the words, and the numen behind them, are as fresh as the day the author wrote them.

Reader, turn the page now. Joseph Campbell is waiting for you, and as usual, the professor is in full mythic voice…“

…huh?