Anton's crush.

When I read Narziß und Goldmund for the first time, the book struck me―hardly surprisingly, lonely and sensitive teenager that I was―immediately and obviously as a kind of love story, albeit a love story gone to seed in cerebrality's garden. In fact Hesse's oddly claustrophobic, utterly homosocial novels have always appealed to my basic romantic loneliness; how could these not be the documented yearnings of a gay intellectual? And yet, a lazy glance at his biography reveals nothing of the kind―the man took wives; I hear no google-rumors of male lovers. And yet, as they say, it moves.

As it happens, I'm rereading Das Glasperlenspiel. The first time through I was too young, too basically stupid to take much from it except a hazy feeling of my own superiority; reading it as an adult―well, as whatever I am now―I tripped and fell across a passage in chapter 3 that confirms that homosexual attraction was at least a pixel in his worldview. Knecht is at Mariafels and encounters a novice, Anton, who immediately succumbs to the influence that Knecht has always exerted over younger men:

As time went on, it became evident to Knecht that this young man with the intense eyes under heavy black brows was devoted to him with that enthusiasm and readiness to serve so typical of the boyish adoration he had encountered so often by now. Although every time it happened he felt a desire to fend it off, he had long ago come to recognize it as a vital element in the life of the Castalian order. But in the monastery he decided to be doubly withdrawn; he felt it would be a violation of hospitality to exert any sway over this boy who was still subject to the discipline of religious education. Moreover, he was well aware that strict chastity was the commandment here, and this, it seemed to him, could make a boyish infatuation even more dangerous. In any case, he must avoid any chance of giving offense, and he governed himself accordingly.

This certainly doesn't prove anything about Hesse―although I'll leave the elaborate prophylaxis to Henning Bech and his absent homosexuality―but just in case this is insufficiently explicit, a page later we watch Knecht watching Anton watching Father Jacobus with filial solicitude, which the anonymous pedant explains in unambiguous terms:

Knecht's first reaction was delight; the sight was pleasing in itself, as well as evidence that Anton could so look up to older men without any trace of physical feeling.

Well, I leave this for what it is. There are doubtless subtle articles on the topic, but, bless the Lord, I'm a schoolteacher; why should I do actual research when I can instead attend three-hour classes on administering Formative and/or Summative Assessments? These, by the way, mean "exam" and "final exam" to the initiated, if you are curious.

I take my quotations from the R. & C. Winston translation, one of the very few paperbacks I've bought in recent memory―sometimes you need to possess a book At once!!, as Propertius may well have known.

From the florilegium: Conrad.

I had started to put book darts in my Glass Bead Game when I abruptly ran out. Where were the rest? A search reveals them still tucked into my edition of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which reminded me of the whole peck of quotations I'd never gotten around to copying down. These are they.

Marlowe chats to his friends in terms that remind me very much of my relationship to my boon companion, as was, Heldenberg―

I had then, as you remember, just returned to London after a lot of Indian ocean, Pacific, China seas―a regular dose of the East―six years or so, and I was loafing about, hindering you fellows in your work and invading your homes, just as though I had got a heavenly mission to civilize you.

Near the close of my graduate studies he had begun to refer to me as "hopelessly itinerant"―let me tell you, nobody likes to find himself standing on a doorstep with an Israeli duffel bag on one shoulder and the carefully concealed irritation of his friends at the threshold in front of him.

Conrad has an ear for satire. About his early attempts to get a position that will take him into Africa, he complains that

The men said 'My dear fellow,' and did nothing.

In these straits he throws himself on the ministrations of the women―much to his chagrin―and soon finds himself en route to Brussels to present himself to his new employer:

In a very few hours I arrived in a city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre. Prejudice no doubt.

Ceterum censeo Unionem Europaeam delendam esse. Speaking of wise cynicism in the face of modernity, Marlowe jokes about his interview with the company doctor that

I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.

I watched Berg's Wozzeck recently―as of this writing it's available on Youtube in a fairly nice video production, much to my delight―and am reminded of the doctor in that work as well, also a specimen of that particularly ugly 20th century literary trope, the vile man of reason. Doesn't Alex Ross say that Berg was working out some of his frustrations with Schoenberg in that character? Well, I digress. Do I need to introduce the following? The spooky majesty of Conrad ventriloquizing Marlowe ventriloquizing Kurtz stands on its own. We've all read this before, anyway, so reread, if you like; and if not not.

You should have heard the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying 'My Intended.' You would have perceived directly then how completely she was out of it. And the lofty frontal bone of Mr. Kurtz! They say the hair goes on growing sometimes, but this―ah―specimen, was impressively bald. The wilderness had patted him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball―an ivory ball; it had caressed him, and―lo!―he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite. [...] You should have heard him say, 'My ivory.' Oh yes, I heard him. 'My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my―' everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him―but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible―it was not good for one either―trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat among the devils of the land―I mean literally. You can't understand. how could you?―with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you on or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policemand, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums―how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude―utter solitude without a policeman―by way of silence―utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion?

It is magnificence. More, and famously:

All Europe had contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by-and-by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his―let us say―nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which―as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times―were offered up to him―do you understand?―to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, 'must necessarily appeal to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings―we approach them with the might as of a deity,' and so on, and so on. 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' etc. etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence―of words―of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!'

Retyping this tonight I'm struck by the virtuoso satire of which Conrad was capable and the calculating, even manipulative intelligence hiding beneath his naturalism―it makes me want to fast-forward past the rending of the temple veil, to one of the Faulkner novels I've been saving for the event of intestinal fortitude. Well, hope springs eternal. Meanwhile, Conrad on Marlowe on a particular kind of character type we've been seeing since the dark ages, if not before, perhaps seen critically for the first time:

The glamor of youth enveloped his particolored rags, his destitution, his loneliness, the essential desolation of his futile wanderings. For months―for years―his life hadn't been worth a day's purchase; and there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all appearances indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and his unreflecting audacity. I was seduced into something like admiration―like envy. Glamor urged him on, glamor kept him unscathed. He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe in and to push on through. His need was to exist, and to move onwards at the greatest possible risk, and with the maximum of privation. If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this bepatched youth.

Marlowe is wiser than I am, and as such in his case it's only something like envy, whereas I'm drinking my dissatisfaction neat. Do we have the strength for more concentrated Kurtz? Of course not. Yet:

And, don't you see, the terror of the position was not in being knocked on the head―though I had a very lively sense of that danger, too―but in this, that I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of anything high or low. I had, even like the niggers, to invoke him―himself―in his own exalted and incredible degradation. There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! He had kicked the very earth to pieces. he was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air.

And more. Is this about our century? Was this prophecy?

"Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! it rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now―images of wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas―these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments. The shade of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mold of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinctions, of all the appearances of success and power.

This could have been written in 1949. One last, here in the mouth of Kurtz' Intended:

"Who was not his friend who had heard him speak once?" she was saying. "He drew men towards him by what was best in them."

I am reminded of Heldenberg.

"The same sort of song."

I spent several days laboring over a half-formed essay about a footnote in Gibbon accusing Pope of "improving on Homer's theology" in Iliad 15. Several pages of block quotes in two languages later I decided that my earthshattering exegesis―that Pope's Jove is omnipotent and Homer's is just more potent―couldn't justify the labor, space and mouth noise. If I'm bored with a topic I can only assume that you would be, too. So, for lack of an intelligent thought, something that made me smile instead:

"Horace was one of the least self-deceptive of writers and like many expert craftsmen and artists he found it progressively harder to satisfy his own animum censoris honesti. He had worked his vein very thoroughly and even the most undemanding reader cannot deny that there is a grain of uncomfortable truth in the schoolboy's complaint that 'Horace always seems to be singing the same sort of song to the same sort of tune'." A. T. von S. Bradshaw, 1970. "Horace, Odes 4.1." CQ 20: 142-53. (142)

In any event, all this futility with Pope's pretty poem led me to some material worth sharing: have a look at the labors of a certain Jim Manis of Penn State, an e~lexandrine (forgive me) copious library of PDFs, certainly a κτῆμα ἐς ἀεί for those of us melting our hearts in the blogosphere of the muses. I also ran into this micro-compendium of Greek aphorisms, perhaps worth a look on a rainy day.

Oh,―apropos of nothing―I had been joking lately about Gilgamesh in terms that reminded me of this interesting video, in which a pair of very earnest PBS types play with a reconstructed mesopotamian lyre to the tune of a recitation from tablet 10; you may enjoy it too.

Negative theology.

"Do you believe in G-d?"

I was recently excoriated, as sometimes happens, for describing myself as religious―how could I have fallen into such self-involved mysticism? How could this have happened? Indignation vied with contempt for a few minutes before the subject, and conversation, were dropped. (Unclean, unclean! A whole generation of my peers has codified its very own secular leshon hara.)

The new atheism just isn't designed for confrontation with religious intellectuals. It asks the wrong questions, it's too confined by its own discourse to engage the sacred in meaningful terms; its enthusiasts just aren't equipped―as far as I've experienced―with the literary or contemplative background to approach people like myself, sitting on top of my column here in the dregs of time.

Still, though, the argument put me to thinking about that great conversation-at-midnight question of our century―I wonder how many people would find it strange, if they really thought about it? I mean the question itself as well as its strange relationship to history. Think of it―it began very objectively, almost empirically: "Why did Sarah laugh?" It was a question of power, an old transitional monotheism of the omnipotent struggling to define itself against the warring dominions of heathen cult. I think it's very easy to lose the revolutionary force of Bereshit 18:14 in the smallness of Abraham's concerns: for some time now I've been searching out the point at which G-d first reveals himself to Abraham as more than a personal divinity, and though I don't think this the point at which our ancestor realizes that he must be more than a henotheist―if that ever comes; it may not come at all until Moses―I think HaShem might be intimating exactly that, just in passing, an offhand remark that Abraham accepts in silent perplexity. After all, his god is striding off to destroy a city; under the circumstances you can't judge him too severely for being distracted from novel theological questions. So it begins as something quite different, a question of confidence rather than faith in the 20th century sense: the Jahwist author wonders whether we're confident in this alien presence and his mightiness.

Then of course it changes dramatically: now we have the missionary question put to half-reconstructed pagans, "do you believe in my god, all three of him, though you didn't before?" You hope this is closer to Elijah and his barrels of water than to another misguided species of henotheism―"your gods exist, but they're demons; only this god is omnipotent"―but this is wishful thinking, isn't it? Europe was littered with idols in everything but name until the Reformation.

But now Christianity had covered Europe like a settling snow; we entered an age of religious monoculture, of heterodoxy and heretics in a land where everyone takes the same god as a given stretching onward toward apocalypse. The 20th century question of faith would have been meaningless to these peasants and potentates: the question was never existential but doctrinal, and accusations of atheism were more than a little disingenuous.

Suddenly it occurred to mankind that there might not be a god at all. The rest is a long history of widespread banalities and the secluded palace of the mandarins: we acquired the Enlightenment, and when Gibbon writes of pagan antiquity that

the various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful (ch. 2, p. 22),

I wonder if he isn't speaking rather more of his own age than Trajan's. But yes, by the philosophers indeed: don't think I'm sneering at them. Their tendency was toward the Stoics' almost-monotheism or else the rigorous materialism of their rivals; if you put theology in the hands of intellectuals it almost always seems to tend one way or the other. Small, wonder, though―Kohelet is right; of making many books there is no end, and much study is weariness of the flesh. Over and over again we pile book on top of book in our scramble toward G-d, turn back, see that we've built a ziggurat, and privately despair.

Or at least I do.

But now we've come to the 21st century where the question has become well and truly existential, very much like asking whether someone believes there's life on other planets. I look back over the different ways we've asked that unusual question―first exultant, next suspiciously, then as an inquisitor, finally with caliper in hand―and I wonder whether you can really ask that question of a monotheist, or as a monotheist.

Is it meaningful to ask whether you, such as you are, acknowledge the existence of―can we even call him a being? better to resort to a naked relative pronoun―that which cannot be described except in negative terms, which is so different from us on an ontological level that to use the verb "exists" is to abuse the language? Omnipotence and omnibenevolence: what is all this in the face of a god without qualities? Omniscience and simplicity: these I understand. But you can't wash good or action clean of their human context, or at least clean enough to really apply them to our one G-d; and omnipresence is beyond my ability to question. Perhaps it's a misuse of language, perhaps not―at this instant, at least, I simply don't know.

My negative theology:

I am afraid that I will solve these problems with either mysticism―with a theology of sentiment―or resignation.

I am afraid to find G-d in the logos because this is a philosopher's heresy, a bounding of the incommensurate, idolatry in iconoclasm.

I am unable to believe in the literal truth of scripture because it manifestly isn't, but suspicious of the double-mindedness by which I hold it to be true without being truth: that 20th century willingness to discard the exclusion of the middle makes me queasy.

I am suspicious that I can formulate the thought the study of religion is the study of literature, but the reverse is not true: inevitably the disjunction will fall away; I'll conflate the books I love with the G-d my soul cries out to worship.

There is a god; he is one; and from this nothing follows. The use of language unravels into nonsense; reason is inadequate but feeling is idolatry. Every form of belief is idolatry. But this can't be true―οὐκ ἔστ᾽ ἔτυμος λόγος οὗτος. My spouse accused me of "sublimated, postmodern Judaism" the other day―well, what else can I possibly have? Where can I go from here? I am totally unequipped to wrestle with the angel.

I mentioned Stylite saints in passing and this led me to Tennyson's "St. Simeon Stylites," which you can find here along with a very engaging and humane critical essay by USC's J. R. Kincaid as well as the arresting photograph included above, which I found unattributed on a blog unworthy of mention: I wonder what it is? A reenactment? A 19th century emulator? Very mysterious.

A footnote, with comparandum.

As I think will soon become very irritatingly apparent, I've picked up Gibbon's (divine, says Noel Coward) Decline and Fall after two years of enduring its silent recriminations from my bookshelf. A footnote to his description of Roman siege weaponry ("military engines ... all of which, either in an oblique or horizontal manner, discharged stones and darts with irresistible violence" [!]) caught my eye and reminded me of Minivier Cheevy, whom we all know:

Minivier cursed the commonplace
      And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
      Of iron clothing. (21-24)

The charming annotation in question comes on page 12 of my edition (Heritage 1946), practically meaningless to you since display editions of this work are promulgated with the same metastatic commercial glee as are Gray's Anatomy and Paradise Lost. Woe to display editions and their fate, laudandis, ornandis, tollendisque! In any event, it's footnote 16:

The subject of the ancient machines is treated with great knowledge and ingenuity by the Chevalier Folard. He prefers them in many respects to our modern cannon and mortars. We may observe that the use of them in the field gradually became more prevalent, in proportion as personal valour and military skill declined with the Roman empire. When men were no longer found, their place was supplied by machines. (Emphasis mine.)

In any event, G-d grant Cheevy his iron clothing and Folard his engines with their oblique (or horizontal!) discharge.

A meditation.

Over at City Journal, Claire Berlinski is giving herself a sprain proclaiming in the wilderness about secrets squirreled out of Soviet archives and now freely available to the media, if only anyone gave a damn. Lamentable that she's wasting her breath.

I don't think there's real hope of turning back the steady slouch of things to that earlier politics of the manichee. Yes, it served us well until Vietnam and the New Left—or served, at least; there was a mechanism in place, and though it gave us the House Committee on Un-American Activities it also gave us moral purpose, that supreme fiction so dangerous and ennobling. (But we are deadly afraid of moral purpose; after all, the fascists had moral purpose, and the fascists still have their boot on 20th century thought—we're like those damaged twentysomethings who were harassed as children and now can think of nothing else.)

But of course it's only dangerous, not ennobling—well, at least that's where my mind goes with it, inevitably, but who knows? I grew up in a university.

Athens: not really democratic. (Corollary—Persia: not really so bad!)
Augustus: autocrat. (Maecenas: toady. Vergil: deeply morbid.)
Marcus Aurelius: platitudinous.
Crusades: brutal & unnecessary & genocidal.
Oliver Cromwell: autocrat.
Pilgrims: vicious & genocidal.
Settlers: genocidal.
The Raj: venal & brutal & racist.
Old Dominion: venal & racist & vicious & brutal & unnecessary but not genocidal.
Cold war: propaganda scheme (plus red scare).
President Bush: buffoonish & venal & racist.

Fine, you win, you win. I can't think at this point of a broad moral impetus that didn't go terribly wrong, at least if it wasn't disingenuous to begin with. My heroism, O sages and hierophants, is well broken. Mazal tov. But I don't believe you.

Crying out for the mos maiorum, that ever-receding Good Old Way—it's never really a puritanical exercise, I don't think. I don't buy into the very popular narrative of the power-hungry hypocrite, that famous and imaginary would-be tyrant with his fingers in other people's pastry (from theatrical to reproductive)—anything that easy and that convenient must be false. Reality is dense, and human beings are the densest part of it, swept around like seaweed in the wash of their own logos. After all, the mos maiorum recedes in front of you like Aeneas' Italy, nightmarishly further away the faster you chase it; go back in time and your reverend father's world is crumbling, too, and his father's father's. When a flippant person discovers this truth for himself he'll inevitably snigger about how, ah, clearly it's a question of disposition, or a kind of power-play, or just open delusion, or revanchist moaning: I've heard that enough times, G-d knows it.

But he's right in a sense—it is a question of disposition, but not in his terms. Conservatism, political and cultural, begins in human loneliness. It's not a question of forcing other people into virtue, or really even trying to slow a real civilizational decline; it's the terrible realization that other men are not like you, that your concerns are different, that you are wherever your thoughts are and that is very far indeed from the soul sitting next to you in the lecture hall—no, decline isn't a falling-away from an old gold standard but a declension from yourself, from the fragment of the mind of G-d you hope is in your breast, nominative to vocative: me, of me, apart from me, to me, Ah, O other, o hysterical man.

It's a longing for human companionship, for the impossible Zion of sharing your mind—really sharing it, sacred heart's longing finding answer—with your brothers. Conservatism is the agonized cry for that lost city of G-d where your worldview is not at issue, never part from your fellow man in the knowledge that no amount of argument could bridge the impossible gulf between you—for the city where no man goes out into the world alone.

But all this is true of the progressive mindset, too, only with different aims, different anxieties. The loneliness is the same, and so is the echo-chamber comfort of ideological purity. Think of the repulsiveness of commentators on Jihad Watch with their frog-chorus of agreement: you want that impossible unison with such an agony of wanting that you turn to vicious extremity and the party line, to a deranged ideological monomania that drives all things out of mind. Or think of greenpeace protesters, or raw foodists, or any other fragment of our ruined civilization—fellowship at the cost of penury, inertness, grimace. (But not ruined, I have to remind myself: Always the same, always the old balance, always the same mess. This is the truth, but I don't believe it. Yet, I mutter like Galileo, it declines.)

For a moment in American history we were confronted with such an unimaginable evil that it was possible to form a broad cultural coalition—and of course people were ruined by it, Jews, homosexuals, the innocent idealists of the left who didn't know any better because they loved the Idea and as such sinned in ignorance. But you can't go back, at least not now: no amount of journalism will save it, much to our dismay; the dog won't hunt, brother.

Down into the yellow-peeling onionskin of the dregs of time.

No, at heart we curmudgeons and antiquarians and other misplaced dreamers are waiting for Saul to die in his sin and the coming coronation our David, that cultural climax more beautiful and impossible than Michelangelo could have imagined. We want to see a society, a president, a king after G-d's own heart, and yet at this point in history—this postmodern hysteria, perpetual, nerve-wracking, labyrinthine—we could never acclaim the David of our heart's hunger.

Because we can't stop thinking of the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Philistines—even Amalek.

And it drives us to derangement.

Still yet more Simone Weil hagiography—a florilection.

Pursuant of my comp lit defense—and let me tell you, rarely have I produced something so indefensible—I had the pleasure of reading that extremely famous pamphlet by short-lived and, apparently, saintly communist [!] Simone Weil, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force. Let me say that, although I'm not at all certain I agree with her wholeheartedly, McCarthy's lovely translation left me dazed with pleasure. I have excerpted some quotations, with little comment.

Still more poignant—so painful is the contrast—is the sudden evocation, as quickly rubbed out, of another world: the far-away, precarious, touching world of peace, of the family, the world in which each man counts more than anything else to those about him.

She ordered her bright-haired maids in the palace
To place on the fire a large tripod, preparing
A hot bath for Hector, returning from battle.
Foolish woman! Already he lay, far from hot baths,
Slain by grey-eyed Athena, who guided Achilles' arm.

Far from hot baths was he indeed, poor man. And not he alone. Nearly all the Iliad takes place far from hot baths. Nearly all of human life, then and now, takes place far from hot baths. (4)

By some trick of my neurology, anaphora reduces me to quivering emotional jelly. (Case in point, a completely banal and uninteresting poem of Edna Millay's, "The Bobolink," is the only work of art ever to reduce me to tears—and, if you can believe it, does so reliably, as if by witchcraft. The culprit? The mindnumbing, kitschy refrain "I shall never be sad again, / I shall never be sad again.") But never mind. Another:

Force, in the hands of another, exercises over the soul the same tyranny that extreme hunger does; for it possesses, and in perpetuo, the power of life and death. Its rule, moreover, is as cold and hard as the rule of inert matter. The man who knows himself weaker than another is more alone in the heart of a city than a man lost in the desert. (10)

Weil's pithiness is a world wonder—the whole essay is like this.

A postmodern abecedary.

My recent noise about philological congeries—which, like spring, must inevitably turn a young man's fancy to thoughts of fragmentary material and the means of arbitrarily arranging it—coincided handily with being reminded of the word abecedary. In its basic sense it means an inscription of the alphabet, used especially as a pedagogical tool—try telling your first grader that the two-zone print alphabet above the blackboard is a paper abecedarium, he'll win friends and influence bullies. More interestingly, though, the word applies to texts organized according to an alphabetical scheme.

This of course blew my windy intellect toward Louis Andriessen, who wrote a little suite of songs for the odd 1991 video festschrift M is for Man, Music, Mozart, a sort of euro-PBS celebration of Mozart's tricentennial. The first piece's vocal text was actually written by Peter Greenaway. It is, of course, the postmodern abecedary in question:

A is for Adam and
E is for Eve;
B is for bile, blood, and bones.
C is for conception, chromosomes, and clones.
D is for Devil.
F is for fertility and for Venus’ fur.
G is for germs and growth and genius.
H is for hysteria.
I is for intercourse.
J is for Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue.
K is for kalium, or potassium, if you like.
L is for lust—and lightning, lightning.

Clearly it's a red letter day (Ha! Ha! Good grief, forgive me.) I'll restrain myself, sincewe don't want a rehearsal of my Carson piece any time soon, and be brief. Now, let it be said that this is a vile text—all the little self-satisfactions of our crumbling civilization wrapped into one biologicized parcel; but I have come to bury Greenaway in exegesis, not to praise him. A couple of things are particularly interesting: for instance, the abecedary stops at L. Now there's the archaeology, which teaches us that ancient abecedaria were sometimes left incomplete for ritual or magical purposes; I'm reminded of the folkway of the ouija board that instructs you to stop the planchette if it begins to cycle through the alphabet in order. But putting that aside there's the element of the arbitrary: organizing a fragmentary text according to the alphabet presumes exhaustiveness, doesn't it?

Three women dreaming, part 2.

Let's look at the Apollonius passage again. It's a devil to translate because it's so hypotactic, so many fragmented phrases plastered together with breathless conjunctions, δέ δέ δέ. If there's clarity in Agamemnon's dream, all elements pared down to the apparition head of Nestor and its speech, Medea is dreaming in smeared images only—it's a confused sequence. Is the first passage, the perverse revision of Jason's motives, an imaginary scene in itself or just a kind of background conviction, an underpinning for what follows? I think it's more likely the latter: the dream proper is a mashup of scenes and visions, explicitly experiential, and lines 619-623 stand apart from what follows, only introducing it, coloring and explaining the strange pantomime beginning in 623 with ὀίετο δ’, and she thought she was struggling with the bulls herself, that she wrought the deed—so easily. Apollonius has given us a kind of epistemological mimesis of dreaming when he pictured the rootless convictions that sometimes invade our dreams and drone behind their action like a cantus firmus, but with μάλ’ εὐμαρέως he moves into the peculiar experience of dreaming itself: Medea wrestles with the bulls with timeless rapidity, with the liquid effortlessness of dreamt action conforming to the will; it's not just a literary forward-reference to how her arts will save Jason at the end of the book but something more mimetic, a realism new to the literary dream.

But the scene changes suddenly, her parents are there, a decision has been made: σφωιτέρους δὲ τοκῆας ὑποσχεσίης ἀθερίζειν (625), but her parents scorned their promise. It's not just the fluidity of scene and action at issue here but really the wordlessness of Medea's dream: everything that follows is in indirect discourse, reported from the same remove as was her fantasy on Jason's intentions. I think this has much to do with the relationship to tradition I had mentioned earlier, that Apollonius is reacting to the speech-centered clarity of the Homeric dream. Those divine dreams drove everything but the central word from the dreamer's mind, and it's the word that they wake up pondering; here, though, it's the scene, the strange action, its consequences. That οὕνεκεν of line 626 only emerges from the background of the dream, only intrudes onto the experiential now of the νεῖκος ἀμφήριστον (627) because it explains the scene that actually occupied Medea's dreaming mind—it's only the revision of a waking and recollecting mind that can order the text the way Apollonius gives it to us, with the explanation before the scene, rationalization before experience. That we read this dream as if Medea were narrating it to us is another point of departure from that old Homeric clarity: we should have a text that runs in linear fashion, that a quarrel came to a draw ... because her parents scorned their promise, since it wasn't up to the girl to yoke the bulls, etc., experience before explanation. It's an insoluble narrative problem, though: if 625-627 are only a concomitant understanding or mood that underpins the νεῖκος and judgment, there's nowhere the explanatory passage can go without straining the mimetic organization of the text—Apollonius' ambition is remarkable.

That ἄφνω in line 630 has much to do with the passage as a whole, though, doesn't it? The separate parts—bull-labor, judgment and scream—all blur into one another, changes in circumstance and action piled together with the same hypotactic rapidity as Apollonius' phrases: you see the same thing in receptions of this passage by Ennius (fr. 34ff, Warmington) and Vergil (Aen. 465-69). But what about the end, that syntactically ambiguous scream?

Electric cabinets of unreal curiosities.

Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti recently mentioned his collection of asyndetic privative adjectives, a philological curio cabinet at this point not only marvelously expansive but—apparently—still growing. Bless G-d, said I, a collection, really? On the internet! Well, the whole notion transported me, as Noel Coward sang of the unleashed matron—

hot flushes of delight suffused her,

—changing my whole demeanor. Well, well, well. Here we are in the dregs of time, to be sure, but this is a really charming way to wait for the barbarians, isn't it? I can't explain the charm of this kind of Alexandrian hobbyism, but I spent a happy hour looking through that arbitrary and charming word-cabinet and was glad.

Partially I think it's a symptom of that nameless, quasi-postmodern delight in imaginary collections: I think of the preposterous and lovely books in Prospero's library according to the 1991 Peter Greenaway film or Borges' imaginary compendia. The endless, trackless, authorless noise of Web 2.0 gives us an opportunity to realize little fragments of this ur-fantasy, doesn't it? I mean, imagine.

This is a compendium of all the asyndetic privative adjective-series in Greek, Latin, English and Sanskrit.

This is an anthology of 124 spurious fragments from Ennius' Annales, and arbitrary corruptions of them.

This is a collection of the last lines of verse published by every English poet 1914-1934, hyperlinked to deleted lines in the variorum of Tennyson's Idylls.

This, interpolated into the Homeric hymns, is a hidden cabinet of Theocritean hapax legomena.

This is a gallery of 400 famous images that include a eunuch.

It's only a half-formed thought, but I wonder if this fascination with fantastic pedantry might have something to do with the out-of-control vastness of the 21st century logos. There's so much written, so much available for recension, so much lost both through evanescence and human limitation—I think some of us must come to carry around the fantasy of stumbling over something immeasurably rare and immoderately specialized, some literary cabinet of curiosities that reflects the eternal-lifetime of abstraction we want but can never have.

Ankh ankh, en mitak:
Yewk er heh en heh
Aha en heh.

Live life, thou shalt not die:
Thou shalt exist for millions
of millions of years,
For millions of millions of years.

Well, it's the old longing, from Amenhotep to transhumanism. The text is from one of the best passages in one of Philip Glass' better operas, by the way.

An academic parlor game.

The lengthy essays I've been writing lately put me in a position to learn how to introduce "keep reading" breaks into my main feed, which of course couldn't be called "keep reading »" or "read more »"—no, my friends, I'm chased by this need to be clever as ever was Orpheus chased with snakes and torches. But to the point, my insipid chalkboard humor brought me to think about the doctrine of the lectio difficilior and, predictably, realize that I know nothing at all about textual criticism.

Here though, I have a game you can play while knocking back your gin and water. You'll need at least two people of perverse disposition, a third who's painfully literal-minded—ferret out a philologist, it shouldn't be hard—and at least two copies of a short poem, perhaps twelve lines, the more modernist the better. Give these to your incorrigibles.

The rules: make a glorious mockery of lectio difficilior potior and brevior potior too, if you have enough liquor. Your text should be counterintuitive enough to begin with; exploit that. Make strange words stranger. Strain English syntax with gleeful brutality. Propose lacunae after you've secretly manufactured some of your own. Pervert the allusions, and do it convincingly. But it's an absolute statute that whatever you produce should be probable, even if it's confounding; your heterodox text should crumble, not rot.

Now the fun begins! Destroy the originals utterly. Your poor scribbler of dissertations should be by this point both impatient and curious (in that pedestrian way he has), so hand him the copies—all the better if they're inscrutably handwritten; and lo, the scholars shall say, nay, but there shall be a redactor over us; that we may also be like all the philologists, and that our redactor may judge us, and apply cruxes for us, and edit our texts. (This is part of the rules.) Of course he shouldn't be familiar with the poem, so make sure you've picked something obscure in provenance as well as in the ordinary ways.

For extra fun, offer him gradually diminishing prizes according to his final accuracy in comparison to the ur-Texte. Finally finish the game by subjecting the redacted text to close reading, carried out with utmost moral seriousness, then defend the redacted text against the original: reveal to the historiographer that the "original" has been purposefully and badly mangled just for this exercise and that he is frightfully intelligent to have untangled so much depravity so well; continue dissimulating in this manner until everyone is too sauced for further pretense.

Well! I seem to be expiring from surfeit of leisure, which at any rate has given me the pleasure of celebrating Housman's deathless odium philologicum in the shape of his essay "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism." In seriousness, does anyone know of a good introduction to the subject, especially for English texts?

Three women dreaming, part 1.

Isn't it interesting how dreaming seems to be the special prerogative of women in epic? I don't mean the prophetic, numinous kind—shaggy Hector scowling over Aeneas' bed, Julia appearing to Pompey—but ivory-gate dreams in all the fluidity and fragmentation we expect of them. This passage in book 3 of the Argonautica, for example: the arrow is smoldering deep in Medea's cor carbunculus, but when sleep finally overtakes her she dreams a remarkable dream—

κούρην δ’ ἐξ ἀχέων ἀδινὸς κατελώφεεν ὕπνος
λέκτρῳ ἀνακλινθεῖσαν. ἄφαρ δέ μιν ἠπεροπῆες,
οἷά τ’ ἀκηχεμένην, ὀλοοὶ ἐρέθεσκον ὄνειροι·
τὸν ξεῖνον δ’ ἐδόκησεν ὑφεστάμεναι τὸν ἄεθλον
οὔτι μάλ’ ὁρμαίνοντα δέρος κριοῖο κομίσσαι, (620)
οὐδέ τι τοῖο ἕκητι μετὰ πτόλιν Αἰήταο
ἐλθέμεν, ὄφρα δέ μιν σφέτερον δόμον εἰσαγάγοιτο
κουριδίην παράκοιτιν. ὀίετο δ’ ἀμφὶ βόεσσιν
αὐτὴ ἀεθλεύουσα μάλ’ εὐμαρέως πονέεσθαι·
σφωιτέρους δὲ τοκῆας ὑποσχεσίης ἀθερίζειν, (625)
οὕνεκεν οὐ κούρῃ ζεῦξαι βόας ἀλλά οἱ αὐτῷ
προύθεσαν· ἐκ δ’ ἄρα τοῦ νεῖκος πέλεν ἀμφήριστον
πατρί τε καὶ ξείνοις· αὐτῇ δ’ ἐπιέτρεπον ἄμφω
τὼς ἔμεν ὥς κεν ἑῇσι μετὰ φρεσὶν ἰθύσειεν·
ἡ δ’ ἄφνω τὸν ξεῖνον, ἀφειδήσασα τοκήων, (630)
εἵλετο· τοὺς δ’ ἀμέγαρτον ἄχος λάβεν, ἐκ δ’ ἐβόησαν
χωόμενοι. τὴν δ’ ὕπνος ἅμα κλαγγῇ μεθέηκεν.

But as she lay back on her couch, an overpowering sleep unburdened the girl of her love-pains—but straightaway dreams assailed her, lying, destructive, the same as do troubled women. She thought that the stranger had undertaken the labor, not in fact because he was so eager to carry away the ram's fleece—no, he hadn't come to Aeëtes' palace for that reason at all—but rather to take her home with him, his lawful wife. And she thought she was struggling with the bulls herself, that she wrought the deed—so easily—but that her own parents sneered at their promise because it wasn't up to the girl to yoke the bulls—they had tasked him with it. Oh yes, and there was a quarrel because of that, and it came to a draw between her father and the strangers; and both sides turned it over to her, how it should be, however she wished it in her heart of hearts—and she suddenly was heedless of her parents, chose the stranger: then an agony of grief siezed them, they were enraged, they let out a scream—and amid the shriek sleep released its hold on her.

I think Apollonius is chafing against the literary tradition here—the divine clarity of epic dreams gives us no real precedent for this; the really salient quality of Homer's dreams is their lapidary directness, a narrowing of focus down to the speech that drives all things out of mind—think of Agamemnon's dream in Iliad 2. It's a lying dream, and baneful too—βάσκ᾽ ἴθι, οὖλε ὄνειρε, says Zeus (Il. 2.8); make haste there, evil dream. Yet when it comes to the monarch's bed something amazing happens:

στῆ δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ὑπὲρ κεφαλῆς Νηληΐῳ υἷι ἐοικώς
Νέστορι, τόν ῥα μάλιστα γερόντων τῖ᾽ Ἀγαμέμνων,
τῷ μιν ἐεισάμενος προσεφώνεε θεῖος ὄνειρος:
εὕδεις Ἀτρέος υἱὲ δαΐφρονος ἱπποδάμοιο... (20-23)

Oh yes, it paused there above his head—the very likeness of Nestor, the son of Neleus, indeed the man Agamemnon honored above all his counsellors; in this semblance did the otherworld dream address him: you're sleeping, son of wisehearted horsetaming Atreus...

The dream is chastising him—he's sleeping on the job, it says. But it's a remarkable declaration, isn't it? Εὕδεις—what you're seeing isn't true, I'm only a semblance of Nestor, but what I say is true in the way these dreams are always true because you're sleeping and this is the unreal real of revelation.

Three passages without comment, & an epigram.

.בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ אֶלוֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הַעוֹלָם שֵהֵחְיָנוּ וְקִיְימָנוּ וְהִגִעָנוּ לַזְמַן הַזֶה

I am graduating. The nightmare is over.

1. Timon of Phlius:

πολλοὶ μὲν βόσκονται ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ πολυφύλῳ
βιβλιακοὶ χαρακῖται ἀπείριτα δηριόωντες
Μουσέων ἐν ταλάρῳ. (Supplementum Hellenisticum frag. 786)

Many are pastured in populous Egypt—
Cloistered scholars, disputing endlessly
In the birdcage of the muses.

2. Callimachus, Aetia fr. 1.7-8.

φημὶ δὲ και Τελχῖσιν ἐγὼ τόδε· 'φῦλον ἀκανθές,
μοῦνον ἑὸν τήκειν ἧπαρ ἐπιστάμενον...'

But here's what I say to the Telchines: thornthicket race,
race that knows only how to melt its heart away...

3. Bereshit 41:51 and 48:14.

.וַיִּקְרָא יוֹסֵף אֶת-שֵׁם הַבְּכוֹר, מְנַשֶּׁה: כִּי-נַשַּׁנִי אֱלֹהִים אֶת-כָּל-עֲמָלִי, וְאֵת כָּל-בֵּית אָבִי

And Joseph called the name of the first-born Manasseh: 'for God hath made me forget all my toil, and all my father's house.'

.וַיִּשְׁלַח יִשְׂרָאֵל אֶת-יְמִינוֹ וַיָּשֶׁת עַל-רֹאשׁ אֶפְרַיִם, וְהוּא הַצָּעִיר, וְאֶת-שְׂמֹאלוֹ, עַל-רֹאשׁ מְנַשֶּׁה: שִׂכֵּל, אֶת-יָדָיו, כִּי מְנַשֶּׁה, הַבְּכוֹר

And Israel stretched out his right hand, and laid it upon Ephraim's head, who was the younger, and his left hand upon Manasseh's head, guiding his hands wittingly; for Manasseh was the first-born.

4. Epigram.

πολλοὶ μὲν βόσκονται ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ πολυφύλῳ


A black ship bears me across the isle of Pharos,
Out of the carbon shoals, where our sunken lighthouse
Leans out of silt and old Alexandrian losses—
    From where it washes,
Receive this remnant, Ephraim, honored brother:
I am Manasseh of Carthage, cloistered scholar
Who melted his heart in the birdcage of the muses.

            — Claudius Vandermeer, M.A. 2010.

A crib on Genette.

After railing about uselessness, I've been humbled: I ran across the notes of a Dr. B. Clark of Texas Tech, who seems to have provided a wonderful chapter-by-chapter crib on Narrative Discourse to his Spring 2007 literary theory course. Behold, the loaf.

Genette on Narrative Order
Genette on Narrative Duration
Genette on Narrative Frequency
Genette on Narrative Mood
Genette on Narrative Voice

See also a brief crib on Bakhtin. Oh, my big mouth!

From the florilegium, in re exam season.

May I joke for a moment, just to distract myself from the impending clades omnium rerum balefully signified by the next two days? I was walking home from the library and lamenting that the internet is totally and woefully inadequate for purposes of reviewing for my narrative theory exam when a line from Sallust popped into my head:

corpus patiens inediae algoris vigiliae, supra quam quoiquam credibile est. (Bel. Cat. 5.3)

His body was tolerant of hunger, cold, and sleepless nights? Even more than you'd think was humanly possible? Goodness me, I thought, Catiline should have given up the treason business and become a professional student. This caused me to page through my notebook for a few moments, only to find this:

iam pridem equidem nos vera vocabula rerum amisimus, (52.11)

which, let me tell you, seems too appropriate on a night when I'm trying to keep the distinction between an autodiegetic and a homodiegetic author straight--"we've long since lost track of the correct vocabulary for things," indeed.

And why am I in this position? Because as far as the last term is concerned, Sallust has my number:

sed multi mortales, dediti ventri atque somno, indocti incultique vitam sicuti peregrinantes transigere; quibus profecto contra naturam corpus voluptati, anima oneri fuit: (2.8)

But there are a great many men, interested in nothing but gluttony and sleep, who have gone about their lives disheveled and ignorant--as if they were just passing through; for them, unnatural as it is, the body was a thing to be pampered and the soul a burden.

It may not be totally fair, but ah, a two-inch-high Calvin sits on my heart of hearts, baneful and perceptive taskmaster though he is.

Well, praise the L-rd and pass the ammunition. If I don't pass that History exam I'll be polishing shoes in an airport before I know what's become of me, so I should hit the books; as for this, it was written in praise of Sallust and as a plaything for myself. ("Ha! Ha! I'm Gorgias of Leontini!")

Bucolic Phantasmagoria.

I wonder if there might not be a connection between a passage in Theocritus that's always troubled me, Idylls 1.132-37, and the oddly unsettling final moments of Idyll 7. Daphnis is in his death throes in the Sicilian woods and has just called Pan down from the mountains to receive his pipes; one stanza later he will throw himself into a stream, Hylas-like, and drown.

'νῦν ἴα μὲν φορέοιτε βάτοι, φορέοιτε δ’ ἄκανθαι,
ἁ δὲ καλὰ νάρκισσος ἐπ’ ἀρκεύθοισι κομάσαι,
πάντα δ’ ἄναλλα γένοιτο, καὶ ἁ πίτυς ὄχνας ἐνείκαι,
Δάφνις ἐπεὶ θνάσκει, καὶ τὰς κύνας ὥλαφος ἕλκοι,
κἠξ ὀρέων τοὶ σκῶπες ἀηδόσι γαρύσαιντο.
      λήγετε βουκολικᾶς, Μοῖσαι, ἴτε λήγετ’ ἀοιδᾶς.'
χὢ μὲν τόσσ’ εἰπὼν ἀπεπαύσατο ...

'But now let let the brambles bear violets—let thornbrakes bear them; let the lovely narcissus deck junipers, the pine come to fruit with pears—let everything be changed because Daphnis is dying--let the stag tear hounds apart, from the mountains let owls cry in contest with nightingales. Leave off, ah muses, come leave off the bucolic song.' So much he said, and ended.

We ordinarily take this as a series of ἀδύνατα, impossible disruptions of the natural world unhinged by the death of Daphnis--as though Daphnis thinks of himself and his life as so central to the natural order that his death is just as much an impossibility as fruiting pines or savage stags.

I'm not sure this is the whole story, however. Daphnis doesn't give us any other reason to expect solipsism from him; he doesn't wish for the whole woodland of Sicily to huddle about his agonies with consummate concern, they simply do—it's a function of his beauty and his song. No, if he cries out for the world to burst into alien glory when he breathes his last there must be something else at stake, not narcissism certainly; it's not youthful incredulity in the face of death, either, since this is a voluntary wasting. After all, Priapus can chide him in lines 82-85, saying

                                                  ἁ δέ τυ κώρα
πάσας ἀνὰ κράνας, πάντ’ ἄλσεα ποσσὶ φορεῖται
[...]
ζάτεισ’· ἆ δύσερώς τις ἄγαν καὶ ἀμήχανος ἐσσί.

The girl is roaming on foot among the fountains, through all the groves, in search of you—ah, you are cursed in love, too cursed, and helpless.

This changed world—πάντα ἄναλλα—isn't a world in mourning, either: strange, yes, but indifferent to Daphnis' pain. I do think there's a logic to these ἀδύνατα, though, even if a strange one.

An allusion in Carson's Autobiography of Red.

I've been searching out some of the source material in Carson's Red for some time now, but tripped over this one completely unawares. In the fragmentary propendix "Red Meat"--the very best part of the book, if you ask me (but then again I'm so modernist I'm modernest)--we get this:

    III. Geryon's Parents
If you persist in wearing your mask at the supper table
Well Goodnight Then they said and drove him up
Those hemorrhaging stairs to the hot dry Arms
To the ticking red taxi of the incubus
Don’t want to go want to stay Downstairs and read

Geryon, of course, is about to be tediously molested by his older brother. Turn to The Waste Land, 215ff:

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting ...

Eliot's meaning here is double--he's referring to the idle end of a workday when the body waits out the timeclock while the soul tenanting it fidgets homeward; at the same time he has something more sordid in mind, the vile tryst that follows to line 256 and the semi-automatic lusts that animate it. The image here is of the body on autopilot, soul wandering elsewhere: a psychosomatic helplessness. Now, "ticking" is the vox propria of taxi meters, and Eliot's language is rather different from Carson's; still, I think there's good reason to believe that she was receiving Eliot here. Have a look at some comparanda--In Eliot (235-38), the clerk makes his move at the end of the evening meal:

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired;
Endeavors to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

The parallel to Geryon's situation doesn't need much explanation--we see plenty of his passivity in the opening movements of the verse-novel, and though "unreproved" isn't exactly right the general sense is exact: unwanted after-dinner caresses at the burnt out end of the day. Now I'm not so confident about this one, but compare Eliot 223f,

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins,

with the odd image at the end of Carson's fragment V:

Behind her red right cheek Geryon could see
Coil of the hot plate starting to glow[.]

I'm certain something else is going on--I have to confess that, semi-literate hack that I am, I haven't yet done the brainbreakingly obvious thing and actually compared the fragments of Stesichoros with Carson's text--but I wonder whether this image isn't a bit of subtle signposting to direct us back to Eliot? In fairness, Eliot's kitchen runs on gas and Carson's is electric and--as far as I can tell--these fragments are otherwise unrelated; but I'll take what I can get. One more thing: Geryon's brother is in early puberty when he starts to molest him, so Eliot's epithet for the clerk--"the young man carbuncular" (231)--is appropriate to teenage acne as well. This is fairly weak stuff, of course, but I hope you'll accept it as ancillary for the moment and follow me back to Eliot's taxi. What business does Carson have with a poem so different from hers in ethic and style?

Subtle Heldenberg.

cf. Psalm 18.26-27:
עִם-חָסִיד תִּתְחַסָּד; עִם-גְּבַר תָּמִים, תִּתַּמָּם
עִם-נָבָר תִּתְבָּרָר; וְעִם-עִקֵּשׁ, תִּתְפַּתָּל

With the merciful you are merciful,
With the upright man you are upright;
With the pure you are pure;
And with the perverse--you are subtle.

This translation, stripped of the Thou Shewest Thyselves of the JPS 1917, was Steve Reich's text for the third movement of his Tehillim--by far the better recording of that work, by the way.

Fantasizing.

So spoke righteous Vandermeer, and hefted his sturdy boot
High for a thrust; o yes, and shattered the miscreant.
As, when soon through the fruiting groves will gatherers come,
Greathearted Athenians, rejoicing in bearing baskets,
Yet gentle Onchesmites has been there--shaking the fruit,
Scattering them--and the dark-fleshed olive is crushed
By the wandering hoof of a bull, one lowing mightily:
So on the rigid curb did Constantijn's son
Dispatch the low-born enemy. He checked his strength
And turned to subtle Heldenberg with winged words...

This needs some clarification. I've long had the ugly theory that the intellectual classes have willingly and self-destructively allowed a monopoly on violence to fall into the hands of those who use violence for criminal purposes--exactly to the point of precluding self-defense, much less heroism in the defense of others. We middle-class academics, we poor souls! Of course we get mugged, how not? All we can do is capitulate. The best minds and the best morals are totally incapable of protecting their interests and their values: it's our fault. The emergency response instructions at the library tell us, over and over: wait for trained personnel. Do not attempt to intervene. Do nothing. Does it trouble anyone else, I wonder? Doesn't the idea of not running back into the smoke fill other men with a self-loathing?

But it's my fault, too--I share in that willing incapacity. What could I do in a crisis? I'm physically and morally weak. I couldn't defend the ones I love--I'm not even athletic enough to flee. No, this is unacceptable, this is out of keeping with my humanism. Now is the best time, the most obvious time, to break the hothouse glass and eat vitality hot and dark--why should I worry about putting myself in danger? My life means virtually nothing to me, not in itself. Nihil est mors a nos, nec pertinet hilum!

I'm putting on my street clothes and going downtown. This summer: krav maga if it kills me--praise the L-rd and pass the ammunition.

On preservation.

A few books on the Alhambra recently crossed my desk at the library and I had occasion to page though them for a few hours. My initial pleasure was short-lived, though--I was almost immediately struck by the emptiness of this structure. I mean, physical emptiness: not just cleared of tourists for the sake of the photo shoot, but the simple vacancy of the rooms. This sprawling palace complex, probably the most noble thing ever produced by an autocrat's wealth, is now populated only by the same mass-replicated curule chair. Even the gardens are empty: there aren't any myrtles in the Court of the Myrtles, the only thing left in the Court of the Lions is a solitary shrub; the garden complexes themselves are that unfortunate in-between state of unloveliness that seems to go hand-in-hand with historic preservation, neither left barren nor really cultivated--half ramshackle, half sterile.

Placeholders. That damn chair for the extinguished bustle of a cultural center, one piece of furniture standing in for all the beauty and squalor of inhabited space; boxhedges for myrtles, gardens filled with shrubs and halfhearted perennials, any plant will do because nothing will really do, will it? Meanwhile the golden glory stretches upward into arcaded filigree and yes, the walls are beautiful, yes, the palace is preserved in honey for us to wonder at--but this emptiness, this condition of being a vacant shell, it rankles at me.

Recently I was in Wales with my spouse and had occasion to tour Cardiff castle. Different sky, same story--the library was filled with bound bureaucratic transactions, "Aristotle" and "Bacon" painted in roundels over shelves stuffed with Transactions of the Cardiff Planning Commission. There was an open-air garden in one of the towers with a tiled basin in the middle; under the plastic-sheeted compluvium were three empty bronze flower pots and a dry fountain.

But why put real volumes in a library no one will use? Why endanger the architecture with a troop of gardeners and their watering cans? Why crowd the backpackers touring the Alhambra with roped-in pillows and ersatz orientalism? At least emptiness is honest, points you to the . See or shut your eyes, said reason peevishly.

There's no wrong here, no failure, just the same old unending futility of things.

Cf. "Childe Roland," XI; Kohelet 1 (As always, much nobler in the KJV).

δῆλον ὅτ’ ἐν τᾷ γᾷ κἠγών τις φαίνομαι ἦμεν!

Shoreside, apparently even I seem to be somebody. The same day my department regretted to inform me &c. (it's all right), I found out that the Institute for Humane Studies accepted me to one of its summer seminars--"The Tradition of Liberty," at Bryn Mawr this July. Sadly this won't be as useful on my CV as my first choice, the seminar on secondary education, but I'm honored and looking forward to it.

I've always preached about how classical liberalism needs to move closer to the humanities and vice versa, so it's a little daunting to find myself about to put my person where my mouth was. Bless G-d, though! I'm so tired of human unsuccess--grad school broke my preposterous arrogance, so it's hardly a question of having my Huge Genius recognized for a change; I'm just relieved to have an institution extend me the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I can claw some opportunity out of this unexpected and grateful windfall.

The Greek is Theocritus, Idylls 11.78.

A realization.

I have spent years feeling old around undergraduates. Tonight I realized with a shock: these are people utterly untouched by Greek or Hebrew civilization.

No perspective or proportion; no abstraction and no holy terror. And coupled with intelligence? There's nothing worse.

Pompée dans le Temple de Jérusalem.

Jean Fouquet, born at Tours in 1420, was a painter and illustrator responsible in part for bringing Renaissance technique to the French. Probably in 1465 he was commissioned by the Duke of Armagnac to illustrate a vernacular edition of Flavius Josephus, the single work of Greek historiography available (through Latin translation) until the renaissance and in extraordinarily extensive circulation--even through the Enlightenment one would frequently find Jewish Antiquities and the Bellum Judaicum shelved next to the Bible in educated households, since it was used as a supplement for the historical lacuna between Torah and the new testament. I ran across this illumination by chance when I happened to be reading about Solomonic columns on Wikipedia, and I've been thinking about it for a few months now.


Pompée dans le Temple de Jérusalem. For sake of comparison, have a look at Josephus, Bellum Judaicum 7.4ff, conveniently available online in a very nice facing edition. (The illumination treats the desecration itself--Bel. Jud. 7.6.)

Medieval views of antiquity are a sure bet if you want to put your day off-center with a nudge from the uncanny. There are a couple of things about this image that I find enormously striking--Fouquet managed to get the strangeness of the kodesh haKodashim exactly right; the human tumult is so out of place beneath that gold-on-indigo monotony, all those bodies fenced in by undulating static space. Fouquet had previously drawn the facade of the temple as though it were a Gothic cathedral, but here you can see him struggling against the contemporary and toward the alien--the altar area is familiar from Christian worship, but from the candlesticks upward he sweeps into an inhuman and frightening holiness.

I thrill a little when artists recognize the deeply alien voice of the Torah. It's too easy to humanize G-d and archaeologize Jewish antiquity--I like to say that Abraham invented the abstract, but the uncanniness of that G-d is more iridescent and enigmatic than logos. It only gets stranger by Sinai--think of Jacob's hip or Zipporah at the crossroads! Whatever spoke to Moses out of the bush is not a humanist divinity.

I identify with Pompey. That curiosity of his (was it burning, or only indifferently analytical?) brought him over the bodies of the dead into the inviolate sanctuary, and here we have him unwilling to touch the sacred treasury--not so much because he was overawed by the enormity of his crime but out of a misplaced and very Roman pietas; fas and nefas can't even begin to explain the suicidal horror of the Jews when the temple was desecrated. It's revealing that his attention was diverted to the temple treasure instead of the Ark. He was a good man and a great Roman, but the endless centuries of power and paganism can only take you so far. It's pointless to say he should have been flat on his face--too much understanding can take a man apart.

He looks so small.

Sometimes you encounter a piece of artwork that strikes you as a kind of spiritual portrait of yourself, floating out in the logos waiting to reattach itself to you--vehicle waiting for a tenor. But believe me, the position of a gentile come into sudden contact with the terror and majesty of haShem is an unenviable one; I can't judge Pompey too severely, particularly not here--I understand him too well.

Cf. Tacitus, Historiae 5.9; Shemot 4.24-26; B. Britten, Canticle 2: "Abraham and Isaac" (The Ian Bostridge version is monumentally good). More from Fouquet can be found here and here.

Beyond genre.

I ran into a flash of perspicuity while reading Oswyn Murray's "Symposium and Genre in the Poetry of Horace," (1985, JRS 75: 39-50) a prefatory note to his thoughts on Roman reception of Greek sympotic verse--after all, it's a radical translation; imagine a hipster learning the tea ceremony. Murray writes,

Thus the genre is born of historical circumstances as they transform human needs; literature can be seen from this point of view as a form of ritual, a response to the human desire for regularities and for the communication of shared experience. As an expression of the mentality of a particular society the genre is therefore of fundamental importance to the cultural historian. But literature as ritual is a conservative force; whether by feat of oral memory or through the permanence of the written word, it becomes difficult to forget what has been created; most societies live in a universe of discarded mental forms. So alongside the living genre we must expect to find the dead genre, surviving as artistic form without context, as memory pattern. (40)

When classicists talk about genre they tend to have in mind a system of classification so stupendously exacting that I'm surprised the Germans didn't invent it first, and forty years after Cairns genre criticism has taken a fairly firm hold in the profession--although, bless G-d, not entirely without dissent. In my MA program this sort of thing was particularly admired, and trying to play to those expectations led me into some real absurdities--I think I once caused myself to discuss a couplet in the Heroides per the generic reference of its hexameter and pentameter, respectively. (I know, I know. They weren't impressed either.)

"A universe of discarded mental forms," though, really? It made me thrill. I like the concept of culture as accreted language, networks of concepts united by allusion and buried collocation--invisible hyperlinks.

What's the difference between a living genre and a dead one? Think of the pastoral--as far as we can tell, Theocritus practically invented it; three centuries later, Vergil write his Eclogues. Was it a living genre for him? What about for Milton? Is imitation, I mean self-conscious revival, the same thing as inhabitation? I'm thinking of Borges' story about the man rewriting Don Quixote word by word--my intuition says no, but my intuition also can't brush aside genre or the enormous, insurmountable, pestering ontological problems that hang onto it if we keep it around.

What's really remarkable is that the great genres of ancient literature seem to have been flashes in the pan--epic definitely died with Homer as an unselfconscious thing, Greek lyric seems to have been largely sui generis and seems even more so when you look at its lurchingly uncomfortable Roman revival--quodsi me lyricis vatibus inseres, indeed. Tragedy had a pretty sorry time between Aeschylus and Shakespeare and it's absurd to even talk about unselfconsciousness in pastoral. All of Roman literature is mediated by the gleeful preciosity of Alexandria, and it took Don Quixote to give Europe a literary form independent from antiquity.

It's remarkable too that Western culture has produced exactly three viable epics, the last two being explosions of angelic genius that blew an exhausted genre up to new elevations and burnt all further possibility of development to a crisp--8th century to 19 BC is quite a wait, but it took us til 1667 to end epic forever with an apple and a snake. (We'll see about Kazantzakis. Indications are not good--Ἐχθαίρω τὸ ποίημα τὸ κυκλικόν). At the same time, we've managed about a hundred really deathless novels in the last two hundred years; that's definitely a genre. Poetry, though--I wouldn't want to be the guy writing that dissertation.

Dr. Behrenboim:

My name is Meriwell Topher, and I would like to express interest in your adjunct position. I am 49 years old and ABD. Please refer to the contents of the enclosed semitruck, where you will find my unfinished dissertation Anglophone Verse Genre in the 20th Century, its Origins, Typology and Limits.

Please consider my unique talents and experience. I have not eaten in four days.

Sincerely,
M. Topher, M. A. (1982)

Do you feel elucidated? I don't. On my reading list--

E. Auerbach, Mimesis
G. Williams, Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry;
G. Williams again, Change and Decline

Postscriptum 4 April. In my enthusiasm--and on reflection--I callously passed over the Divine Comedy in my sneer about viable epics. Although I'm not sure we can call it an epic--it's certainly epic length, and certainly masterful, but I think the subject material and handling are all wrong--how about this: if you want to count it as an epic, let's agree that I said "four." If not, not.

Four aphorisms.

By the end of the year an old friend of mine will be wandering Indochina with a business card that reads "Joachim Heldenberg: Adjustments." He's the kind of man I want at the cultural keel--mercurial, daring, a little heroic, a man who could nudge our society when it isn't looking. If blogging has anything to do with really disseminating real ideas, let me be honest--he should be writing here, not me.

Ah, well. We'll say that Shams writes the poem. So--four words from a friend I love:

1. Metaphysics is creative.
2. Metaphysics is not a discovery; it is an invention.
3. Metaphysics is aesthetics run through rhetoric.
4. It is permissible to engage in metaphysics with a teleological goal fashioned a priori.

How small a thought.

I've been reading a lot of Auden lately. His "Epigoni" runs through my mind as I drive between my university and DC; it treats the late Latin scholars on the eve of systemic collapse, their cultural diversions, their anxiety at the end of empire in the West. He speaks to my condition as an academic and the fragility too near to my vocation to be relinquished or ignore:

No point pretending
One didn't foresee the probable ending (10)
As dog-food, or landless, submerged, a slave;
Meanwhile, how should a cultured gentleman behave?

It's my dilemma, the dangerous poles of my life, the mandarin and the political animal--how should I behave? How can I? It's an impossible dichotomy. My life is divided between UVA and the capital, the classics and realpolitik, between a fading discipline and a power in decline. This tension, this double consciousness, has defined my self-concept and my anxiety throughout my adult life. Do I become a cultural conservative--that loud and bloody-minded creature--and lose my culture? Or do I live in mandarin quietism, tending Auden's garden of rhopalics and anacyclic acrostics, and plead nolo condendere as the republic degrades into something huge, shapeless and vile? Is it possible to be both cultivated and politically relevant?

My disposition is modernist; that feeling of hopeless fragmentation and irrecoverable loss probably prefigures my tastes rather than proceeds from them. I'm not even convinced that cultural relevance is still possible, not anymore, not in the postmodern period--but maybe it doesn't have to be like that. Maybe the treason of the clerisy can be mitigated, and maybe--in part--by me. Tyrtaeus writes that a man is unwelcome in his poems if he has every excellence except a fighting spirit; I understand this. I talk about uncertainty, but at the end of history I can't accept the hard alternative, can't concede the city of G-d in the name of graceful quietism. The answer is neither Roger Kimball nor the glass bead game: whatever my acceptance is worth, I accepted a moral stake in that answer when I entered the academy.

We came in our benched ships, carrying English common law and the humanists' genius for the misuse of classical antiquity; we spun wildly off course as our intellectuals turned the 20th century into an abattoir. Now, at the end of the postmodern period, we've run aground on the edge of a dark continent and have bought an oxhide with the murdered Jews of Europe. So monoculture is over; that was the cost of the Shoah, of empire, of the European civil war 1914-1989. So we--if that "we" means anything, now--we who loved liberty as an abstract and now must enact it in the marketplace of ideas, first as practice and only then as virtue ethics, we who have inherited the barbarous efficiency of Rome and self-immolating democracy of Athens, the mixed constitution of the American polity and the terrible abstract G-d of the second temple (Ark absent, kodesh haKodashim blown open, and Titus on his column)--we, whatever we are, whatever I am, are a faction, a small faction among many others, in possession of an oxhide on which to found a city. Well, the Carthaginian trick is old. We have knives unrusted in our keeping. I'm here to cut a strip of my own, if able.

I like using the byrsa as a metaphor because I think the project of liberalism in the 21st century will be one of roping-around and roping-in, a process of coalition-building in a disintegrated culture. I come from a double background, Classics and English literature: I'm a hybrid, not really a reception-studies classicist and not really a philological critic, either--so my sympathies are ecumenical. The humanities need a course-correction from economics and history; classically liberal policy, and policymakers, will be better able to achieve their goals in partnership with the legitimating voice of literary humanism.

The contemporary Republican party is a frustrating example of economic liberalism become illiberal and neurotic in separation from humanist convictions, its other systemic flaws and irrationalities only irritated by populism and the religious right; meanwhile, huge swaths of the academy fester in its long-standing romance with philosopher-kingship, casting a schizophrenic eye over the 20th century as they radicalize in toxic secession. I study classics in order to rope-in the modernism I love, to retie the frayed cords of continuity in the western literary tradition and claim it, or reclaim it, and in so doing reclaim them both; I do that because I love it, and because I believe that a free society begins in the republic of letters as much as in equal laws. Isonomia begins in the constitution--eunomia, the contemplative soul.

.שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָד

How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.