Aeneas the Amoeba

"Are we not
Entitled too, to look for realms abroad?
...But in my dreams my father's troubled ghost
Admonishes and frightens me. Then, too,
Each night thoughts come of young Ascanius,
My dear boy wronged, defrauded of his kingdom,
Hesperians lands of destiny." (The Aeneid, book 4, Virgil, translated by Robert Fitzgerald)

Here is the noble Aeneas, the father of Rome, explaining to a distraught Dido why it is that he must leave Carthage, the city of rest and immortal love. Before I wax unlyrical on the very ignoble Aeneas, I do want to touch upon something that the excellent DHR once said about the Aeneid as a text in general: it is the destruction of Troy that forces the voyage-- in other words, the first home must be destroyed in order for another one to be found. DHR put this in terms of the past being forgotten and overcome in order for these travellers to finally have a future. But why is Carthage not good enough for Aeneas? This, after all, is a land too. It has a queen who can make Aeneas king, future wars can find Ascanius a kingdom of his own-- the possibilities seem limitless. But no, the land that Aeneas searches for are lands of "destiny--" not ones that present themselves to him, yearning for acceptance, for rereading and slight rewriting of the prophecy. I want to talk about a couple of things here: the troubled ghost of Anchises, and, the wronged Ascanius-- past and future as existing in a different space from the one DHR so eloquently interpreted.
Let's take a look at Anchises first-- the guy who in death is so powerful that he dominates Aeneas' quest for selfhood, and for the sight of whom Aeneas undertakes the very torturous voyage to the Underworld. It is not a promise that Aeneas owes Anchises, in fact he owes him nothing. I think Anchises is Aeneas' invention, a clever mnemonic device that allows for Aeneas to exert identity, to have one over Carthage. Don't get me wrong here, this is not a feminist reading or anything near-- I'm just suggesting that the fear of Anchises is not so much a fear of this unghostly ghost but a fear that is entirely manipulated by Aeneas in order to read his prophecy in the way most preferred by the Trojans. I say the Trojans because increasingly I am convinced that Aeneas is not a man but a kind of malleable figure who goes from shore to shore serving the interests and national ego of the Romans. Dido and Aeneas?!! let Cleoparta and Marc, or Romeo and Juliet win that match...
Now for Ascanius. Here's what I think of Ascanius: he's as much an invention of Aeneas' fertile mind as Anchises is, but, he is the future. Kind of like plastics in The Graduate. But Aeneas approaches the future no differently from the way he approaches the past-- as my friend T.S. puts it, "In short, I was afraid." Yes, Aeneas, in short, you are afraid-- of both the past and the future. Ascanius exists in pretty much the same vein as Anchises does-- as a figure who in some way can incite fear of selfhood in Aeneas, and thus cheating this little prince of his Hesperian destiny is something Aeneas, the amoeba, cannot muster up enough strength to do. In other words, it would destroy Aeneas' form to acquire a form.
And where does Aeneas exist in time then? He is far from the immortal father of Rome. I think he exists in the presents of the Trojans as they are in the Aeneid, guiding them from point to point in their journey. His death signals the end of the malleability and vulnerability that he so embodied.

Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant. That's King Caesar to you, Aeneas.

Leviticus, Luke, and Lahore

Leviticus 19: 18: Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself...

Luke 10: 26] He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?
[27] And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.
[28] And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.
[29] But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?

When I thought of this post before the events of the day, I had imagined it would focus on something interesting and random like the Old Testament's ideas on the birth of language, possibly the Garden of Eden, but never something so simple and Samaritan as the figure of the neighbor. But today was one of those days when what is written comes to life in the strangest of settings...
One of my close friends U. and I were driving back from a weekly lunch we have with our group of girlfriends in a part of Lahore that though crammed full with elite homes has for the past few months been suffering from dug up roads and delayed construction projects. I had decided to take a trafficky but sure route home when U. suggested that I follow the road I was parked on to what seemed to be a functioning main street. I agreed without much hesitation, I mean, I've grown up in this city-- all roads lead home. To cut a long story short, the street we had decided to follow to the thoroughfare was one of those horribly broken up ones, and all too soon U., me and the car were in a man-made ditch that because of its sandy bottom basically made it impossible for the car's wheels to be even slightly effective. Great. So I open up my airconditioned windows and beckon a grubby looking cyclist and randomly figure that he'll have the solution. True to our expectations, we'd managed to attract the attention of quite a few of the men working as guards and drivers in the homes around us-- in ten minutes around twelve men were trying to pull this car out of its awful, awful, predicament.
Don't stop reading yet-- the story gets worse. So here are the two of us standing there, me dressed in my usual sleeveless outfits, wearing flashy diamond and amethyst earrings, carrying a fat purse, (U. was coming from work and hence was a little less preposterous), but no, as if that's not enough, I decide to faint, yes, FAINT, in the middle of the street (let's assume it was because the wonderful breezes of Los Angeles and the blizzards of NJ have ruined my stomach for unrelenting Punjabi heat). But I am revived by the trusty U. and am sent to the shade by these kind people and offered a glass of water and what not else. Anyway, eventually, after some 45 minutes, the car was finally lifted out of this horrible ditch and I drove us back to home.
So here we are in a Lahore that is apparently dangerous, full of random bombers, Taliban agents, and all I find is hearts full of nothing but neighbourliness. Did I mention that all the while U. and I were wondering how much cash to slip into a hand, and when the moment came it was politely refused and we were told that this is what we do for one another? (We are planning to visit our friends with tubs full of ice-cream next Saturday though!)
The figure of the neighbour, then, suddenly leapt out at me from nowhere, saved me from Lahore's crazy roads and my own blackout. But back to Leviticus and Luke: two things: what is loving one's neighbour like one loves oneself? and who exactly is a neighbour?
I like to think that you can't really love yourself unless you have loved or love someone else first. While the self is pretty awesome, I think its a hollow, directionless toy boat if it isn't weighed with love for humanity, a human, some humans, God's creation. It is the someone else whose figure lights up the self, allowing it to take a form that is beautiful, approachable, and, holdable by itself. There is nothing really without that reflected light-- kind of like the sun and the moon. This is not necessarily romantic love, of course, in fact, here it's love of a neighbour, of that random stranger who steps into your world when you're defenceless, debilitated, and of no use to him or her, and who then guides you to a safe place. In a terribly literal way.
That's the neighbour-- not the person you necessarily share a wall with, or whose loud music makes you want to scream. But here's where Leviticus makes an interesting distinction: "children of thy people" precedes the figure of the neighbour, and thus for the Israelites it would seem that they are all they have. The one people are neighbours unto themselves. That, of course, is slightly changed. I mean, am I one of the "people" who helped me today? Yeah, we're all Pakistani, but hell, these people spend their day in the blazing sun and I spend it in air-conditioned libraries, lunch places, and pretty cafes. The cost of mending the slight damage to the bumper is probably their month's salary. I shrug it off like it's nothing. My question, then, is this? Do nation and neighbour have a connection? Can there be a neighbour without a class-nation, ethnicity-nation, religious-nation? Yes, and here's where Jesus makes a cool point-- the Samaritan couldn't care less about the Levite if he tightened the definition of neighbour to mean just his people. I'm a big proponent of contemporizing the good Testaments-- so I'm going to read Leviticus as expansive. Thy people are everywhere-- because they're all people. They're the ones who forget themselves when a chance to love their neighbour appears in front of them.
Moses' law, Jesus' law, and Quranic law ("The Women," 36: Do good to parents, kinsfolk, orphans, those in need, neighbours who are near, neighbours who are strangers...) are not laws that are totally logical or make sense-- but yeah, my heart is filled with love for my neighbours whom I am convinced I have encountered in every city, town, and village that I've ever visited.

Achilles' cliched rage

"But you are intractable, Achilles!
Pray god such anger never seizes me, such rage you nurse.
Cursed in your own courage! What good will a man, even one in the next generation get from you, unless you defend the Argives from disaster? You heart of iron!"

As the title indicates, Achilles' rage is one of the more obvious themes of the Iliad-- partly because of the way in which it informs the plot, and partly, because like the rest of the epic, it is grand in its proportions. If it weren't the Iliad we were talking about, I would call it supersize. Like Odysseus' twists and turns, Achilles' rage is what the muse is asked to sing about at the beginning. But this particular utterance regarding Achilles' rage comes from Patroclus, the man who bows before this unending anger, conquering it only by his own death. So there are a couple of things to think about when we look his now somewhat frustrated entreaty to his friend-- the "intractability" of anger and rage, the quality of the courage that Patroclus sees as a curse, and the general lack of goodness, I am inclined to use the word productivity here, that invades the Iliad as a result.
Untractable anger, (and I speak from experience) is a pretty awful thing. But Achilles' nurses this anger, tends to it, allows it to grow rather than allowing for its eventual demise. I am not sure why a Shakespearan character would enter into this dicussion also, but I think of Lear when I think of Achilles. "Come not between the dragon and his wrath," Lear tells Kent when he tries to intervene for Cordelia. In other words, anger, rage, wrath, are precious things that require protection from virtuous intervention.
This anger, however, is horribly picturesque (and I use the word in a somewhat non-Burkian way here). The basic thing about the word picturesque as I use it is that it suggests something can be expressed in a picture, or more generally, in an art form. I understand that there may be other words that might fit the bill, but somehow they're falling short. This idea is tightly contained in Patroclus's vehement hope that "such anger never seizes me," that he, like Achilles, is not transformed by his own paint. In King Lear, however, this idea of one's own anger seen in the form of another is better illustrated when Lear and the Fool walk in a stormy heath:
"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head!"
Indeed, rage is now extant, but Lear understands it completely. What was previously a part of him now speaks to him from beyond himself. The conversation is between old acquintances.
I want to come back to the last thing I wanted to talk about, and it may not be the last, but here goes: the unproductivity of anger. Really, the question here is whether anger drives the aesthetic but subdues and possibly suffocates real human productivity. Patroclus's death is very beautiful in the epic, as are the events and poetry that it spurs-- yet, we ask, is it really worth it? Is our intractability, our inability to see beyond ourselves, our beliefs, our Chryses, our egos, our anger really worth what we lose-- and in tragic cases like this one, is it really worth what is sometimes irretrievable? So is anger just an artistic expression on our parts-- at least, this intractable, unswaying kind? Do we envision ourselves as grander, greater, more beautiful than we really are when we are enflamed and unrelenting? Are we producing a kind of living art even as we let something else die?

Athena's plea.

"Olympian Zeus have you no care for him in your lofty heart? Did he never win your favor with sacrifices burned beside the ships on the broad plain of Troy? Why, Zeus, so dead set against Odysseus?" (The Odyssey, Book 1, translation by Robert Fagles)

(I want to think about Robert Fagles for a brief second here. His translation of the Odyssey was the first book I ever read at Princeton, and it was to his work and ideas that I turned when I finally did a translation piece as thesis work at Princeton. He died a month or two before the thesis was done, but in a strange, possibly self-important way, I always feel like his legacy at Princeton was the reason I was able to do what I did.)

These particular lines in Athena's prayer to Zeus stood out to me this morning because of the sense of desperation that is so perfectly communicated in them. Unlike the rest of her carefully marked and calculated speech to Zeus, her father, these are lines that I imagine would be sobbed, screamed out by a woman tearing her hair, uttered by someone at the complete end of their wits and wisdom. Zeus' heart is care-less for this mortal, its divine height blinds and hardens it. Odysseus, the man's, constant sacrifices to this god of god's go unnoticed. But most importantly, mercy, at this point, appears to be a cheap virtue-- and it is only a god who is "dead set" against a man that does not show pity to a man in suffering.

Of course, we know that there are other powers, Poseidon among them, who plot against Odysseus (who isn't called the man of twists and turns for nothing), and in Zeus's reply to Athena we learn that he is not not into Odysseus but kind of for him... and hence the Odyssey goes. But let's come back to Athena and her cry for mercy.

Athena's is possibly one of the more desperate, least intricate, and thus, in my eye, most artistic of the mercy pleas. Hers are the words that despite existing on the page force the reader to hear them out loud-- they are horribly common, and that's why we can hear them... because we do hear them and at some point, utter them. They follow the all too common sequence of the call to a god, a higher power, the reminders to this supposedly forgetful god of the goodness of the supplicant, and finally, the rock-bottom point of why me, what is it in particular that I have done.

I'm not sure what the answer to this is, but before I even attempt to posit one, I do want to visit another, probably better-known, mercy plea: Portia's in The Merchant of Venice.

PORTIA: The quality of mercy is not strain'd,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:

...But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy...

Now mercy is placed alongside justice-- the first is an attribute of god and godliness, and the second, justice, belongs to man. Justice, according to Portia, can fail. It is a human and thus limited in its abilities to do right by humankind. It is when the human invention fails that we turn to the divine. Thus "mercy seasons justice," and when there is no "salvation" in the "course of justice," we can only "pray for mercy." This is the case of Odysseus also-- indeed, Poseidon's justice for Odysseus is his Odyssey, his endless, relentless wandering. And it is Athena, who unknowing of Zeus's predilection for Odysseus, is forced to the point where the absence of justice forces her to fall for mercy.

But mercy is not a human attribute, Portia learns. It belongs mostly to the gods, who as we see in the Odyssey can only work it in unseen ways. Instead, it is justice that must be clawed at to yield what Portia terms "salvation." In the Merchant of Venice, it is the law that savess Antonio-- a pound of flesh means not a drop of blood-- and in the Odyssey, it is the twists and turns of Odysseus that allow him to make the final journey to Ithaca.

Of course, at this point, we leave this realm of the literary for the ethical, maybe the philosophical:

Mercy: Justice :: God: Man

I'm inclined to think not. Here's my conclusion: It is Portia's and Athena's recognition of what is godly that allows them entry to this select club of humanity. Can Portia and Athena function in a lawful society where Odysseuses must be punished and Antonios be defleshed? I think mercy has ways of negotiating justice, or as Portia says, "mercy seasons justice."

That's it for O. and his troubles. Demain, c'est l'Iliad.

Where the muses sing.

Inspiration for this blog came to me in two separate stages. I am an early morning toilet seat hugger. I sit atop that comfortable plastic seat clutching reading material ranging from Cosmo sexytimes to French grammar books. At home in Los Angeles, I stare at Hindi script letters, (I plan to replace those with Sanskrit and Bengali in the fall), mounted on the wall in front of me. This morning I did the usual in my grandmother's bathroom in my parents' new house. Desperate for anything, I grabbed at the first fat book on the bookshelf in the living room-- Don Quixote. Perfect. Cervantian self-deprecation is common in Pakistan, but I still need to get back in the swing of our speech habits, and so this morning it woke me up-- that smell of esparto grass...
If GoogleChat statuses are an intimate form of twittering than I will Gwitter, Glitter, Gchitterchatter? with the great books and great professors that so changed my approach to learning almost five years ago. My copy of Don Quixote had handwriting from when I still took notes by hand, it also smelled of the desperation with which I was learning about these writers who so desperately tried to make their mark. And the blunders with which the mark was made. My first status change, then, was with the Odyssey. What better book anyway, for the Odyssey is about us, young, still-not-over-college graduates who roam with a purpose and endure this strange hardship that is not quite comprehensible to us or anyone else, but somehow we go on because we believe we'll come out in our own private Ithacas.
But why stop at that, said the Toilet Muse, later in the afternoon. She's right, I think. Why stop at that? So a blog post a day about a couple of lines from the books in the 2004-2005 HUM Sequence. We'll start with Athena's question.

Of course, I may be more erudite now, and less constrained, to say whatever it is I think fits the bill.