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.