Montaigne's dreams

Please:

2010-08-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,
I know many of you are friends and many of you are strangers. Some of you visit my blog because of me, but many because it is useful and possibly helps you think more about some of the works and authors. Before you read about the past, please take a minute for the future of Pakistan's flood victims.

The link below lists a number of possible organizations you can send your money to. These ones are not corrupt or fake or anything else, but have been doing real work in Pakistan for years now--

http://www.chowrangi.com/donation-links-and-relief-resources-for-pakistan-flood-victims.html

Thank you.

Original Son.

2010-02-07T17:05:00.000-08:00

DEDICATION

"... The souls for whom I sang my early songs
will never hear the songs that follow;
those many friends are all dispersed,
their first response, alas! is long since muted.
My tragic song will now be heard by strangers
whose very praise must cause my heart misgivings,
and those to whom my song gave pleasure,
if they still live, roam scattered everywhere.
I feel the spell of long-forgotten yearning
for that serene and solemn spirit realm,
and like an aeolian harp my murmuring song
lets its uncertain tones float through the air.
I feel a sense of dread, tear after tear is falling,
my rigid heart is tenderly unmanned--
what I possess seems something far away
and what had disappeared proves real."

This is the second half of the dedicatory poem that opens Goethe's Faust. I find it particularly beautiful because I understand the yearnings of a solitary figure to be one of the more powerful precursors to an art form. But this is a broad generalization, so perhaps I should come down to my more specific, and slightly strange reading of these lines. My reading is concerned with the first-person figure in this poem. Possibly still in the shadow of my previous post, or in the the light of Goethe's stage, I am convinced that this is a poem that embodies both the divine and satanic figures of the play. In other words, what I want to argue is that the "I" of this poem is a struggle between God and Mephistopheles. They are the solitary figure, they are the abandoned lovers, they are the singers whose songs now go unheard: God alone in Heaven, and M. constantly seeking to reunite on earth. If they weep, it is not for figures like Faust and Job, but for the figure who has led them to battle-- Adam. If he went uncared for in Paradise Lost, in Faust, he is the reason why God and Mephistopheles flirt with the figure of Faust. He and others like him are the rebound. The lost son is their first, irreplaceable love.

The reason why I think this reading is a plausible one is because God, Satan, and the Fall have for too long been the subject in modern literature: Marlowe, Milton and now Goethe. By the time Goethe does Faust, they have become too human. So human that before the narrative of Faust, the casualty, starts, God desires the "serene" and rejects the "very praise" of the new. What I'm arguing here, then, is that by the time we get to Faust in this sequence of plays, God is one of us. We have written him again and again, and he has played among us too many times. Adam, his "first" son, and Eve, his first daughter, have long since left the world he had created for them. What is in the play that Goethe writes is the play of a convenient union between God and man, a tired marriage with occasional tests for excitement. God, the passionate lover, is the figure of the dedication-- the figure who dreads, the figure whose existence now is unreal, the figure who is left with everything but what he wants.

If this is God, then it is the same for M. He too weeps, he too has lost his original prize in this new world where he wanders hungrily, praying for repetition but finding no satisfaction. The response to his song is now "muted," so far from the perpetual excitement of the Fall. It is now mundane no matter which it is-- always the same, not a chase, just a chore.

These two very dialectical figures, I would say, then, are becoming one. The original son, the symbol of their difference is lost, and in this tragic ordinariness, God and Satan speak the same lines.

(Image: Le Damnation de Faust, Metropolitan Opera 2008-09/ Text: Faust I and II, translated by Stuart Atkins, Princeton University Press.)

Paradise, ever?

2010-01-08T22:50:00.000-08:00

"Much pleasure we have lost, while we abstained
From this delightful fruit, nor known till now
True relish, tasting; if such pleasure be
In things to us forbidden, it might be wished,
For this one tree had been forbidden ten.
But come, so well refreshed, now let us play,
As meet is, after such delicious fare;
For never did thy beauty since the day
I saw thee first and wedded thee, adorned
With all perfections, so inflame my sense
With ardour to enjoy thee, fairer now
Than ever, bounty of this virtuous tree."
John Milton, Paradise Lost (Book IX).

For the next few posts, I want to try and focus a little bit on texts that straddle the Renaissance/Enlightenment boundary and try to trace the coming of a new consciousness and and retelling of older narratives in its light. This passage is from Book IX of Paradise Lost: Adam, in Eve's wake, has finished eating his share of the forbidden fruit and now for the first time is experiencing something for which he has no name. This is where Milton tells his version of a question that has remained unanswered for so many lifetimes: what did Adam feel for Eve before he felt lust? In this case, what is he feeling at this exact moment when Eve's beauty inflames his senses and disarms his experience? Though the Doré image accompanying the text is from a few moments later, I am deeply interested in this too short moment that is the bountiful pleasure of sin. In these seconds, these moments before knowledge is forced upon Adam and Eve, what we see is innocence intact and the body altered. If Adam and Eve never know what it is they are experiencing then is lust, lust? Is Eve the Original Sinner or does a cohabitation of the figures of God and Satan give birth to Original Sin?

I want to answer these questions through the idea of a subject's unwavering gaze shifting from his maker to another. In other words, when Adam obeys Eve and takes the fruit, and then more literally undergoes a change in the way he sees her, he has essentially shifted his loyalties from both God and Satan, and transferred them to the figure of Eve. It's ironic that Eve gets the title of "daughter of God," but Adam is not the Son. It is Christ who will be crowned Son, and who will pronounce the Almighty's judgment. The crucial players of Heaven, the son and the daughter, stand at opposite ends.

But I digress. To come back to the questions at hand-- I think the answer may have several layers: Adam and Eve are not the same. Adam gazes upon God, while Eve's gaze is free, to go to Adam, God, the serpent, the fruit. Adam's changed focus also implies a change in God's position at the top of the foodchain, even if in a temporary way. It is in the seconds where loyalty shifts, where capital becomes competitive, where the subject is enticed by a kinder master, that the divine must generate what the goddess cannot. Sin. The temporarily disturbed supremacy is intact again, and the daughter, the goddess of a second, is sent off to her husband's home. Milton's Trinity, then, is barely harmonious-- Father, Daughter and the Unholy Gaze.

Thucydian Reflection.

2009-12-26T01:46:00.000-08:00

"Nevertheless anyone accepting the broad facts of my account on the arguments I have adduced will not go wrong. He will put less faith in the glorified tales of the poets and the compilations of the prose chroniclers, whose stories are written more to please the ear than to serve the truth, are incapable of proof, and for the most part, given the lapse of time, have passed into the unreliable realms of romance. He will conclude that my research, using the clearest evidence available, provides a sufficiently accurate account considering the antiquity of the events...
Of the various speeches made either when war was imminent or in the course of the war itself, it has been hard to reproduce the exact words used either when I heard them myself or when they were reported to me by other sources. My method in this book has been to make each speaker say broadly what I supposed would have been needed on any given occasion, while keeping closely as I could to the overall intent of what was actually said..."
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War. Book I. Translated by Martin Hammond.

My blog turns sixth months old today and it's the end of a decade, so something commemorative seemed appropriate. When I think about a historian like Thucydides, I can't help but think about Professor Ted Rabb in the fall of '04 telling a fresh class of HUM Sequence students how to read what they were about to read. "What does the text tell us about the people it talks about?" That's what it comes down to even now, I think: finding the people that drove the text into becoming. Thucydides, of course, is one of history's earliest historians; he documents the 5th century BC War between Athens and Sparta, and his "History" constitutes arguably one of the last great sighs of Ancient Greece.

In a way Thucydides' march against poets and ear-pleasers would be a march against the figures who populate this blog, against characters that run ungoverned into windmills and underworlds, against words that force voice, and against the most human of histories. The reason I've chosen to write about him in my last post of the year is because I see his voice as bringing perspective to a series of posts that are deeply concerned with interpretation and the meaning of one individual's voice for another. What I want to do here is to question whether Thucydides' way of representing the human, by occupying his circumstances, is different from the way I try to understand a representation, by occupying the common imagination of a writer and his character. In a sense, Thucydides and I and the struggling reader of any literary text are not dissimilar-- each one of us is somehow trying to belong in a conversation of which we were not part. These conversations, be they between Athens and Sparta, or Cervantes and DQ, were not exclusive because they wished it, but exclusive because their language became available only after it was written. In other words, just as Thucydides as a historian gives voice to war-generals by becoming them, as readers we give voice by reading a character as speaking, and his creator as trying to speak. Don Quixote is not without a Cervantian struggle, and Thucydides the Historian is not without Thucydides the General. For Thucydides to write a history was for his first half to see himself in history and not in his own lifetime.
I also want to think briefly about whether there's an explicit contrast between circumstance and imagination i.e. whether to understand a situation through its circumstances is significantly different from understanding a situation by throwing oneself into the minds of the persons who play it. Here's how I see it: in the first case, what is understood is understood through the creation of a language that then recreates circumstance. In the second, understanding takes place through the consistent learning of not one, but a number of languages. It is by learning that poet's language that the poem becomes an unlie, the romance becomes real, and the earpleaser becomes a disturbance.

This is one of those tricky concepts that I'm never going to be sure about having grasped myself or talked about coherently, but it's always worth a shot. Next post in 2010-- and some movement towards modernity! Thanks to everyone who gets on my blog and keeps me writing: Merry C. and a Happy New Year.

Temptation, encore.

2009-12-05T00:45:00.000-08:00

As some of you may know, last weekend I went to Paris with my mother for a brief but wonderfully refreshing trip. I knew before I even left that this post would be about one of the many paintings I would see at the Louvre. Technically, this version of St. Anthony isn't owned by the museum-- it's on loan for the unbelievably rich exhibition, Titian, Tintoret, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, from the Caen Museum of Beaux-Arts.

Apart from the fact that I couldn't stop looking at this painting when I saw it, I wanted to write about it in contrast to a post I did about Michaelangelo's Torment of St. Anthony some three months ago. To contextualize a little, this one is Paolo Caliari Veronese's Temptation of St. Anthony (1553), and St. Anthony, of course, is the central figure with his two demons above him in human form. In this post I don't want to talk about torment, or Michaelangelo (though he has definitely influenced the male body in this image), as much as I want to talk about how St. Anthony himself is a temptation for the artist in this image. What does it mean to immortalize the human moment in the figure of someone who has, in a sense, transcended himself? Is this truly a temptation or is this a figure so reduced in this moment that he prays not to his god, but pleads to his tempters? And lastly, is there a symmetry of some kind between the three figures, i.e. is it temptation and man that make a whole?

Not to digress, but a while back I read Borges' Conjectural Poem and in a conversation about it I came up with the notion that Heaven is, in a sense, a place where the good, vanquished from the battle on earth, go after they are defeated by earthly demons. And though I had forgotten about this reading of Heaven, I think this image of St. Anthony is brings it back. His body is right now that battlefield where the two demons are wrestling with their invisible enemies, faith and conscience. In each moment, with every blow it receives from the male demon, it also (if allowed) takes pleasure in the breast that hangs above it. The body of St. Anthony, then, receives each blow and is the conquered territory-- in a way it's all we have of the human saint, a body-battlefield, a body-torn, a body-in-agony.

Where is St. Anthony himself?

I want to answer this question in conjunction with one of my initial questions: is there a symmetry in the figures? Yes, there is a symmetry, a very curious one at that-- if we look carefully at the image, we'll see that there is a fourth human form in the painting, one that is made whole by parts of the three bodies of both the demons and St. Anthony. The female demon's breast, follows the exposed crotch of the male demon, which is then followed by St. Anthony's extended leg. There we have it, the human form from top to bottom. And in this whole human form we have St. Anthony, torn between gender, torn between body and soul, bible and breast. He is two-headed in order that he be tempted, while his third head exposes the agony of the body-battlefield.

This is Veronese's temptation: to represent the man who has transcended himself. But how does one represent St. Anthony's particular brand of transcendence? There is sainthood, but this is a sainthood that splits itself amongst demons, and other earthly things. This is a sainthood that is saintly because while it pleads for resistance, it wants to know what it is that it resists, it touches the breast, it takes the blow, and in the same instant, it clutches the book.

For YL: Lecture notes, partie deux

2009-11-24T23:45:00.000-08:00

Here is the second installment of lecture notes for the two lectures I gave for EK's Dante in English class. Delivering these lectures was one of the hardest but most rewarding things I have done in graduate school yet. I think I'm finally done with D, though I still have a draft with the last few lines of Paradiso-- and they're telling me that I know they're among the most beautiful lines of poetry ever written.

VITA NUOVA, PART II

•    Start with where we ended last time, and the figure of the old.
•    Love= misery, nosos, Cavalcantian view, there was no allegory in love.
•    Love in this way was non-transcendant. Today, we’re going to look at how it becomes T.
•    What didn’t get across last time: Love, no matter which one, still has a premise in physical beauty. Idea that dates back to Plato. How this physical beauty is processed is then dependent on the kind of love. If Beatrice= Medusa, this love, not happening. What enters for Dante is the essence of beauty, through Beatrice, and what enters for C. is love itself.
•    Purgatory XXX, pg. 368 and Beatrice’s reprimand. Fits in perfectly with this idea of Dante mistaking B in VN—Dante had a chance to benefit from her physical beauty and turn it into a spiritual love, but instead the D of the VN doesn’t understand and falls under the spell of Love and not B.
•    Purpose of lecture today: Arrival. We embarked from the old. By the end of the lecture we should be able to look back at the old from the view of the new. Dante arrives at the figure of Beatrice and love. To say the same thing in terms of the self: we’re journeying back to the pre-Lapsarian moment, after recognizing how we exist in the post-Lapsarian. To do this:
•    Vita Nuova, death of Beatrice, entrance of another feminine figure, look briefly at the Convivio, and then form an idea of Beatrice.
•    We’re going to do this in the following way:
1.    The presence of dreams and visions as suggestive of Prof. C’s idea that D had always been aware of the nature of B, and the love she represents—he just needed to understand it.
2.    Dante’s Boethian moment—and think of this as the moment of movement from his despair to salvation. Love can become transcendant. This is briefly visted in VN, so we’re going to talk a little bit about Convivio—interim work, not about B.
3.    And then arrive at the figure of B, and try to make a decisive statement. B as a secular figure. If there is time, we’ll take a quick look at how D was received by his peer, GC.
•    DREAMS: Beatrice’s death and the final VISIONS: (SHOW IMAGE). Try to form a hypothesis about how they relate to D’s greater idea of love.
•    Three dreams, conveniently to fit in with 3s that encompass B. B and Love, eating the heart; the dream in which love instructs him to clear up his priorities and decide who it is he really loves; and the dream of Beatrice’s death.
•    Dream takes precedence over actual narration of he event. Prophetic nature of the dream. Often seen as religiously significant. Dream is prophetic, but its form becomes a means to express the literal, the non-allegorical love. This Love has a figure in the dream—D and L can communicate—interesting to think about how this old figure of Love has a space only in an unreal space—but what’s more interesting—how the nature of the dream changes in Purgatory, becomes prophetic, but also instructive.
•    The dream of Beatrice’s death stands in utter contrast of the Purgatory dreams. Whereas they address the nature of the self, this one has a sense of the self obliterated, D is ruled by love, and on Pg. 623, wants to join B in death, in the bodily death, not realizing what he can do with the legacy she leaves him.
•    If the dream isn’t transformative, than what is? The vision. D borrows this from Boethius who in C of P has a vision of being visited by Lady Philosophy, and St. Augustine who in Confessions is moved to read the Bible when a mysterious voice speaks to him.
•    Two visions. The first, pg 645, in which D is reminded of HER, as opposed to of LOVE. Element of this vision, SHAME, the first stage in a conversion. First step towards being saved. Also first inkling that D is writing love poetry to a dead woman, something that Cav is not going to like. This is the vision in which D understands the utter disconnect he has, but because he feels shame, he can transform.
•    Second vision, pg 649, where we don’t know what he sees. But it goes along nicely with this idea of not knowing how to write either. In other words, only when he can see inside himself, will he be able to write about B.
•    Difference between a dream and a vision in VN: dream is prophetic, tool of the artist, means of representation. Vision completely rocks the text, and the world. It makes people take U-turns. Augustine. D on the road of love, feeding his body, makes a U-turn and heads back to the pre-lapsarian.
•    ON THE WAY to the pre-Lapsarian, there has to be something that will make love transcendent. Something that will make him understand the true nature of love. Comes in Section 35, pg. 640, The “gracious lady” or the “donna gentile,” who “has seen into the nature of my darkened life.” Crucial line. She had seen, and she makes him see. She makes three appearances and D doesn’t get it. Who is this woman?
•    Her story older than D’s and she is a reconfiguarion of Lady P. We’ve already seen Boethius in the Sphere of the Sun, along with St. Thomas Aquinas. B, 5th century Roman, charged with treason, finally executed, but during imprisonment wrote a work called Consolation of Philosophy. Last influence on Christian ethics. Lady P visits him moaning and groaning in prison. Over a series of sonnets and lectures, Lady P leads B back to himself and to God.
•    How Boethius mapped out existence? Four levels of existence, sensation, imagination, reason and divine. Humans on the level of reason. One that what is in this world is material good. Often this material good isn’t controlled or reflective of our actions. But FREE WILL can help reach for a divine good, and go from the human level of reason to the divine. It is through the here and now that we can eventually be divine.
•    D’s Lady P—appears in moment of distress. Though her role is undeveloped in VN, D will devote an entire work to her—Convivio. Beatrice mentioned only once in C, because he still hasn’t found the words. Focuses on the “donna gentile” philosophy instead.
•    What is the gist of it? For one, it apologizes for the VN, calling it “fervid and passionate” and tells us that Convivio will be “tempered and mature.”
•    He also declares that it is inspired by Boethius because it is a desire to defend himself, he was in exile. And by Augustine, because he desires to spread virtue.
•    In the C, D tells us to love Philosophy, which in itself is a love of wisdom. When a human being loves wisdom, he is being the best earthly being he can be. And because this love of wisdom is an infinite process, once you have become the best earthly being, you transcend into harmony with the divine. Partially derives this idea from St. Thomas
•    Now this idea of being in dialogue with a divine creator isn’t purely Christian, it’s actually pretty flexible. St. Thomas—reconciled pagan philosophy with Christian ethics. Aristotle with the Christian world. Suggested that the two look for the same end, and can complement each other. Philosophy and theology are basically different starting points of getting to the same end, he argued, God. The nature of a human being, or the idea of goodness, can be explained both through religion, and through logic.
•    Other important St. Thomas idea, that allows us to read the Comedy as a book about the here and now, human soul is separate from the human body. Not to say that two have nothing to do with each other, but the soul is what makes the body a human body. When the body dies, the soul goes on living possibly. That’s how figures like Cunizza can make it to Paradise—because despite enjoying their sensuality, they don’t lose grip of their soul. She never loses her soul to Love, the independent figure. She is able to forgive herself, ie she knows she’s sinned and is willing to pay for it.
•    And now, finally, after these travels, we can arrive. WHO IS BEATRICE?

(Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Blessed Damozel")

•    Here’s the argument we’re going to make: She is constructed as a figure of Catholic salvation, but in truth, she’s deeply secular.
•    From the VN on, we’ve seen her surrounded by 9s and 3s. Explained in terms of the trinity. 9, prime number. There is the image of a pilgrim pg. 649.
•    Pg. 625, he has compared her to Christ. READ this Joan derives from John the Baptist, he who comes first, and she is Christ. This, to footnote, is still before he actually realized her meaning.
•    She is what we call a figure Christi or a Christ Figure. She dies for his salvation. She is not a saint, but she has come into her role of beatifier.
•    What makes her secular with all this theology? She is Dante’s personal savior. Her numbers occur in relation to Dante—for example, she meets him at nine and then after nine years. She changes as he changes. Her narrative does not exist without his,
•    Later on, she chooses to take him through the three stages of the Comedy. Why Dante? Because in a way, she would not be Beatrice the beatifier without him, for she can only save the figure who loves her, not just anyone.
•    In other words, there is a Beatrice for everyone, if they are willing to find her. It isn’t necessary that she be the exact same as Dante is, just as Paradise is not the exact same as Dante imagines it to be. Beatrice’s nature as imagined, I think, more and more highlights the idea of Paradise as characterized by how each person in it sees it. In this life, the here and now, our actions must signify the desire to move up this path, to be looking for a connection with the divine, whether we do it by embracing our sensuality or whether we do it by defending the principles we stand for.
•    At this point of arrival, we have more symmetry, VN, Convivio, Comedy together also form a kind of trinity—the individual’s journey to his end goal.
•    LASTLY: If we float down to earth. Yes, in the VN, we have the new Dante writing in the old, the new converted Augustine calling the old Augustine a sinner, we have a confession which leaves the old D behind, but what does the Old think of the New?

• Cavalcanti’s response: Sonnet XXIII
To Dante rebuking him for his way of life after the death of Beatrice
I DAILY come to thee uncounting times
And find thee ever thinking over vilely
Much doth it grieve me that thy noble mind
And virtue's plenitude are stripped from thee
Thou wast so careless in thy fine offending
Who from the rabble always held apart
And spoke of me so straightly from the heart
That I gave welcome to thine every rime
And now I care not sith thy life is baseness
To give the sign that thy speech pleaseth me
Nor come I to thee in guise visible
Yet if thou It read this sonnet many a time
That malign spirit which so hunteth thee
Will sound forloyn and spare thy affrighted soul

For YL: Lecture notes, partie une.

2009-11-24T23:33:00.000-08:00

One of my close friends, and earliest and most devoted readers of my blog told me that if I wasn't writings posts these last couple of weeks, I could at least put up the lecture notes for the lectures I was delivering on Dante's Vita Nuova. I didn't take him seriously at first, but here you are Yukes, I think it's kind of a neat idea. They may not make much sense, but they're a wonderful memory.

VITA NUOVA

•   Moving back in Dante’s oeuvre, Vita Nuova is one of his early works, produced around 1293-94. This is twenty years before the Inferno, which 1314, and three years after the death of Beatrice Portinari.
•   Generally speaking, the Vita Nuova is a series of poems from Dante’s youth that he started writing for Beatrice nine years after he met her, and that are presented with prose explanation to us in the Vita Nuova. The poems, however, were written much earlier than the prose that accompanies them. When we read Vita Nuova then, this is something that needs to be kept in mind.
•   The Vita Nuova is also the only apparently biographical material we have on Dante’s life.
•   Over the next two lectures our goal is going to be to try and understand who exactly Beatrice is. Is she Beatrice Portinari, the actual woman who in Dante’s lifetime was married to someone else? Is she the muse of reason and philosophy inspired from earlier works such as Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy? Or is she a figure created specifically in the tradition of medieval love poetry, who eventually becomes a central figure of Dante’s masterpiece, the Comedy?
•   The answer to these questions, I’m going to suggest in this lecture and next, lies in forming a conception of Love—and love as it is seen by Dante the poet. In other words, what we’re going to try and do is trace the process by which Beatrice becomes synonymous with love. It’s a process by which Beatrice transforms from Beatrice Portinari to the essence of what it means to be Beatrice, or one who can bless, and love transforms from the Lapsarian moment, professor C identified in his lecture to the pre-Lapsarian conception of love that Dante finally, finally achieves in Paradise.
•   In today’s lecture, we’re going to begin the journey towards the realization of Beatrice’s nature in the first three stages:
First is to have an understanding of what it means to have a Vita Nuova in the first place? How is the Vita Nuova, a new life? And in how many different ways can it be read as a new life? Of course, in order to have a complete understanding of the new, we have to be able to recognize what is it that has become old, what have we left behind, what are we rejecting? And thirdly, what is it that has happened that has caused for this rejection to take place? What is the seminal moment that causes the rejection of the old?

Some basic ideas to keep in mind:
•   VITA NUOVA: poems from early in D’s career. Cavalcanti’s influence. Tradition of medieval love—secrecy, married lady, a lover who could also be married, Lancelot. Prose after B’s death. VN is pre-1290 and post-1290 text.
•   Phrase, Vita Nuova, never occurs in the text. Vita =Life. Nuova derives from the Latin novus, which can mean new, youthful, young, marvelous etc. D tells us he finds it in his “Book of Memory” which he intends to rewrite in the text we have today. Think about this?
•   But is this the New Life or the New New Life? 1. Beatrice 2. Understanding who Beatrice is. Love to Love as Salvation New life= Being a poet. New New Life= being a poet who reinvents poetry.
•   We will always be able to see VN as both New Life and New New Life, depending on the angle. If we take Dante the narrator’s than it’s just the New Life. If we take, Dante the man’s, from what we know historically, than it is the New New Life.
•   Also think of it as the “young life” for this is how the phrase appears in Purgatory XXX, line 116 (pg 368), Beatrice reprimanding Dante about wasting his Vita N. His “youthful life” or his “new life--” which seems to be a direct reference to the moment at which he sees her in the mortal world. And now it can mean yet another new life, where B because she has realized her role as a “Beatrice” or a blesser, can try to save him through her love.
•   One other way to think about—if we think in terms of the lecture on Tuesday—it is a book of return. In which case wouldn’t the title be an inversion? This last question we’re going to readdress in detail next Tuesday by thinking about it in terms of similar genres and works such as Boethius’ Consolation of Phil and Augustine’s Confessions.
•   We’ll get to these and Beatrice’s role of blesser in the next lecture. In this lecture what I suggest we do is establish a way to get to the new. What does it mean to have something new? What do we need to possess in order to have a new?
•   PAUSE
•   Need an old. An obsolete. That can no longer suffice. Old view of love, and old figure of Beatrice. What is the old view? Guido Cavalcanti. (SHOW IMAGE)

(Dante Gabriel Rossetti," Giotto Paints Dante's Portrait")
• GC: Love= misery, loss of self, disaster, tears, an occupation of the rational part of the soul. The “beloved” mostly unimportant, just the medium that inspires love.

• Donna me prega, ,
I
“Because a lady bids me I would speak/
Of an insubstantial thing that is so fierce
And powerful it bears the name Love...
II
...Love is given shape by a darkness born of Mars
---it takes a sensate name/
It enters when an object caught by sight/
Takes up in the potential intellect.

•   What is this poem saying? He has been inspired by a woman. Love and sight, physical desire, the senses. This is literally what he means. No allegory in his poems.
•   Who have we already met as Cavalcantian lovers? F and P. Love enters through their eyes. And it takes over their minds.
•   But what F and P do in Canto V, D also does to a degree in his poetry.
•   Character called love= first poem, 592. (LOVE IMAGE)
•   597, imitating love
•   598, love begins to fuse with him
•   Here is perhaps the reason Dante faints when he meets them. His love too is physical.
WITH THIS IN MIND, we can ask the question, WHO IS BEATRICE THAN?
•   There are a number of ideas on this. Erich Auerbach has suggested she probably didn’t exist. She could have been the typical Florentine lady. Or she could have been what D made her out to be. But given historical circumstances like different marriages, his exile, her early death etc. probably more made up than anything else.
•   Let’s see what he tells us in the biographical information: they meet when they are nine, he falls in love with her, (GARDEN IMAGE) nine years later, she acknowledges him one day, he sees this as a reason to go on, but then, given that he tries to protect her virtue by going after other women, she is offended and refuses to acknowledge him. And then she dies.

(Henry Holiday, "Dante and Beatrice" 1883)
•   And what does he tell us in his poems?
•   Well actually very little. Most of his pre-B death poetry is about love, not her so much.
•   Pg 606, B as the typical coquettish mistress (her rejection, show WEDDING IMAGE)
•   Pg 615, physical being that she is
•   Pg 616, back to the gaze, the eyes, the love transformation of Cavalcanti
•   And that’s all really.
•   We’re back at the question, WHO IS BEATRICE?
•   Here’s my answer: The earthly Beatrice is no one significant, in fact, I want to argue that she is a symbol left in by Dante to serve as a comparison to the true Beatrice. She is just the representative of Cavalcante and Guinizelli and Dante’s predecessor poets and their tradition.
•   When we read Beatrice like that, the VN is very much both a text of inversion, and of reinvention. It is the text in which D starts the trend for a return to the pre-Lapsarian moment, the old moment, one won’t be completed till the end of Paradise. But it is also very very new, because in this we have the Dante of old, arriving at the juncture of the New Dante—Boethius, and St. Augustine.

(All page numbers correspond to Mark Musa's A Portable Dante, Penguin, 2003)

Pagans and Monsters and Epics! Oh my!

2009-11-09T01:03:00.000-08:00

"So Grendel waged his lonely war,

inflicting constant cruelties on the people,

atrocious hurt. He took over Heorot,

haunted the glittering hall after dark,

but the throne itself, the treasure-seat,

he was kept from approaching; he was the Lord.

These were hard times, heart-breaking

for the prince of the Shieldings; powerful counsellors,

the highest in the land, would lend advice,

plotting how best the bold defenders

might resist and beat off sudden attacks.

Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed

offering to idols, swore oaths

that the killer of souls might come to their aid

and save the people. That was their way,

their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts

they remembered hell. The Almighty Judge

... was unknown to them."

I've changed gears from Homer to another great "epic" poet, the anonymous composer of Beowulf. I was debating trying my hands at Boethius earlier tonight, but somehow the reason and passion just weren't cutting it for me. So here's a piece that is without both-- it exemplifies what it means to be without rationality, and, in a sense, without passion as well. I want to say a couple of things to contextualize the passage and then come back to some of the ideas I may have about it: the poet, it seems, belongs and identifies with a Christian world, but places his narrative in a pre-Christian land. At the same time, because his meter is not without ideas of salvation and divine justice, I see it as essentially layered with both the pagan and Christian tradition.

To come back to the passage at hand though-- we're still early in the poem, Grendel the monster who will eventually be destroyed by Beowulf is at large, and the Danes, a pagan people, are existing in a kind of a reflex, begging for salvation in the face of destruction. There seem to be a number of things going on here, but I want to focus on this idea of a "lonely war." Indeed, what does it mean for Grendel to be alone? But what does it mean for the "Shieldings" or the people of the epic to be alone? If Grendel ravages alone because of his ancestor Cain, who are the Danes at this particular moment, a people who are deeply alone because of their singular disconnect with the narrator? It's a slightly complex thought, but this is how I see this passage as exemplifying the Danes as a more lonely people than a monster like Grendel: Grendel has an ancestry that connects him to Cain, the biblical figure who murdered his brother and became the father, at least according to our poet, of giants, elves, and other evil phantoms. The Danes, on the other hand, are not given this genealogy. Without doubt, they are under the watchful eye of the poet's god who watches over them and keeps Grendel from the throne, but they have other gods, idols to whom they pray and sacrifice, but not the god of Grendel and the poet. In other words, the question this passage raises is what does it mean to be saved by a god who is not your own? What does it mean for a people to be a narrated by a poet who dismisses "their way, their heathenish hope."

If the Danes are a people who do not know their creator, does Grendel know his? Is Grendel, through a clear ancestry, somehow closer to the narrator's God than the Danes, the people who will be saved, are? Of course, the whole poem can be read as a Christian allegory, but what's at stake here is at the level of narrative. Grendel's loneliness surely lies in his evil, but the lonely battle fought by the Danes is explained by the disconnect of their being from the narrative itself. I don't usually like to bring the theoretical into this blog, but I want to quickly mention Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian theorist, who sees the epic as separate from the novel in the way that it has only one view of the world. The poet and his people are one, as Homer was one with the warriors and the travellers, and as Virgil was one with Aeneas and his people. In this passage, there are two voices, maybe three. There is the voice of Grendel, branched off from God's creation through Cain, there is the voice of the narrator, convinced of the presence of the Christian god, and there is finally, the voice of the Danes, broken but still speaking of what it knows to be familiar, what it thinks can save these beleaguered people.

I want to end with coming back to the first stanza. Grendel is being kept from the throne by "the Lord." The battle, and I don't want to do a Christian reading here, is being fought between a creator and a descendant of the figure who threatened creation. What is keeping Grendel from the throne is indeed an invisible force, but this force, I think, occupies the level of the narrative as well. It's possible because the narrator is, in a way, closer to Grendel than he is to the Danes. Grendel is not a pagan outside of Christian discourse all together, in fact he is very much a part of it. Perhaps, then, I should take back my argument about three world views and shear it down to just two. Grendel and the narrator vs. the Danes.

(Beowulf, translated from the Old English by Seamus Heaney. Image: the first page of the original Beowulf manuscript, courtesy The British Library)

Penelope: twisting and turning.

2009-11-02T00:08:00.000-08:00

"...Her very words,
And despite our passion and pride, we believed her.
So by day she'd weave at her great and growing web--
by night, by the light of the torches set beside her,
she would unravel all she'd done. Three whole years,
she deceived us blind, seduced us with this scheme...
Then when the wheeling seasons brought the fourth year on
and the months waned and the long days came round once more,
one of the women in on the queen's secret told the truth
and we caught her in the act-- unweaving her gorgeous web."

(Homer: The Odyssey, Book 2, translated by Robert Fagles.)

This is that one point in the Odyssey where I often wonder whether it's an epic about the travels of the man of "twists and turns" or whether it rests on the moment when Penelope becomes a force that drives the narrative. Not Neptune, not the wily Odysseus, but Penelope. In other words, can we read the Odyssey as the story of a going, not a coming? Is it the story of Odysseus coming home or is it story of Penelope whose last stronghold has collapsed and who must, therefore, venture forth in order to save herself?
Here Penelope does not speak, but is spoken about-- by the suitors who have collected in the palace and who wait impatiently for her to finish weaving Laertes' burial shroud. They have been kept at bay, circling, waiting, until this tapestry that will never end is ended, and the husband she waits for is no longer awaited, and until her faith is unfaithful. This is the information that will launch Telemachus's ship and lead, in a way, to Odysseus's successful return to Ithaca. Penelope, then, inspires both speech and action in the Odyssey--something that is almost directly opposite of Chryses in the Iliad, whose presence brings silence and destruction and of Dido in the Aeneid, whose realm is a point of departure, not of arrival.
Yet, for the suitors, Penelope is none of these things-- in fact, she's almost a kind of Circe, who also weaves for the sake of deception. She doesn't turn the suitors into pigs, but in a way, the tapestry is more human for her than these unwelcome visitors are. So what do we make of her, this woman who weaves desperately to prolong her state of being and belonging? She is very much the wife of Odysseus, twisting and turning even as the "gorgeous web" takes form. But she is also the figure of self-preservation in the epic whose lie is for herself, her son, and her husband. Does she lie really, or does she just never bring herself to a point of speech? Or does she do something more complex than anyone else in the narrative by using an art form to speak for her? I think what Penelope does then should be read as a form of preserving being not only in the sense of her bond with Odysseus and Telemachus, but also as a form of preserving her bond with herself-- she transfers her narrative to the art form, something that can never be interpreted definitively.
The image up there is Joseph Wright of Derby's "Penelope Unravelling her Web," (1784). I've chosen it because of how perfectly it makes the case-- Odysseus in the background, Telemachus in the front-- her past and her future, and her ball of wool in her hand as a kind of weapon of preservation, as something that can both encapsulate what has happened, and prolong what is to be until it can be the way it should be. Until then, she will weave her own version of time.

See through my eyes.

2009-10-25T23:26:00.000-07:00

"He also told Don Quixote that in his castle there wasn't any chapel where he could keep the vigil of arms, because it had been demolished to build a new one, but he knew that in case of need, vigil might be kept anywhere and Don Quixote could do so that night in a courtyard in the castle..."
"... Don Quixote promised to do exactly as he'd been told and then was given orders to keep the vigil of arms in a large yard on one side of the inn; and he gathered his armour together and placed it on a water-trough next to a well, and taking up his leather shield and seizing his lance, he began with a stately bearing, to pace back and forth in front of the trough; and as his pacing began night was beginning to fall." --- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (Book 1, Chapter 3, translated by John Rutherford)

(Gustave Doré, Don Quixote Guards his Armour)

I've chosen this passage from Don Quixote, not because it ever stood out for me in my readings, but because I fell deeply in love with Doré's rendition of the scene. We have a lonely old man, and his makeshift sword pointing upwards towards the moon, upwards as it always does, a full moon up above, and an armour sitting atop a stage that serves beasts by day. What struck me in the image was the exquisite loneliness that is embodied in Don Quixote's person-- a loneliness that is so beautifully portrayed by the artist who understands how thin the old man must be, yet how regally he holds his probably aching back, and how graceful his poise remains as he extends his lance to threaten any and all who come for his armour and his honor.
In the text, of course, Don Quixote is performing the vigil that is the final task he must fulfill before being knighted by the innkeeper, yet, when I see this image, I wonder to myself whether that is exactly what he's doing. So what I'd like to do in this post is to somehow try to envision vision-- what Don Quixote's sees within and outside himself, and how the reader-artist sees his figure. Don Quixote, I would think, is an artist in himself, only the images and sounds he is able to produce remain within his mind and are enunciated in his speech and actions. In other words, what Don Quixote sees and does is directly a response to a reimagining that takes place in his mind. As a character in the text, he behaves in accordance with his own narration rather than that of a narrator's. Windmills, then, become giants taken almost directly out of the Inferno. A humble inn becomes a castle. Friars become enchanters abducting a princess. In an earlier post, I called Don Quixote, "the reader;" in this one, I'd like to call him "the writer." His figure is of the artist who having read everything turns to produce his own art-- an art that comes to us in what his friends and neighbours see as madness.

But if Don Quixote's art is visible in only in his performance, or possibly in his knowledge that he is being written, what does Doré's image tell us about our own limits. I think it tests our limits in all kinds of ways, actually. For one, I was reminded more than anything else of Pygmalion praying that his statue come to life. I had all kinds of ideas floating in my head about the armour as a kind of ghostly lover that accompanies Don Quixote throughout his travels. More importantly, though, I think Doré's image puts forward a fascinating match between madness and the right not be mad. The full moon represents so much more so Don Quixote's mental infirmity in the real world, but the lance that extends outward almost threatening the moon is the madness that knows itself.
As I see this post, it says two almost oppositional things in the same vein-- there is the idea that Don Quixote is essentially a lonely figure whose incredible belief in his self renders him the subject of an image so potent. And then we can read him as a figure on par with Cervantes, guiding the text through an eye that reenvisions what it sees; and as a figure who, particularly, in the image dares for there to be a greater insanity than his own.
Cervantes has never been one of my strengths when it comes to reading, so if this post comes of as somewhat incoherent, it's because I had a conversation with my friend AR earlier today where she told me that this text makes her want to be better at Spanish-- and that inspired me to give Cervantes another shot. I don't think there's any higher compliment one can pay a writer, so here's to hoping I've done some justice to C, to DQ... and to A.

Now show me something pretty.

2009-10-18T23:17:00.000-07:00

"... they saw that dawn had already come to the east, with the beauty and color of a rose, and all the stars had been scattered, save only the lovely mistress of Heaven, Venus, who guards the confines of night and day. From there, there seemed to come a delicate breeze, filling the air with biting cold, and among the murmuring woods on nearby hills wakening the birds into joyous song." -- The Book of the Courtier, Baldassar Castiglione (translated by George Bull).

"And first of all Aristophanes dropped off, then, when the day was already dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to sleep, rose to depart; Aristodemus, as his manner was, following him. At the Lyceum he took a bath, and passed the day as usual. In the evening he retired to rest at his own home.
Symposium, Plato (translated by Alexander Nehamas).

Tonight, I'm going to blog about sunrise. Given the intense nature of my last post, I think this week is for things-that-are-not-infernal (though I might break my pledge about not doing more D). The first excerpt is from the ending of a famous Italian Renaissance text called the Book of the Courtier-- a group of courtiers, men and women both, sit with their Duchess and discuss what form and practice the ideal courtier should take. The second excerpt is from the Symposium, a text by Plato, in which a group of men, attended to by women, sit, drink, and discuss the ideal forms of love. There are various similarities between the two texts, but the one that interests me most, and that stood out for me even as a college freshman is the use of sunrise, dawn, a new day to mark conclusion. A month or two after reading The Courtier, I was to read Madame Bovary (all in the much-beloved HUM Sequence at Princeton), and this time I would see sunrise on the occasion of Emma's funeral, and once again, it would hit me-- why a new beginning at the point of ending?
As a freshman, I had various theories about this, dawn as a metaphor for gender reversals, dawn as a device for peripeteia in texts that wish to either imitate or parody the classical tradition etc. Right now, I want to put forward a simpler reading: something has gone horribly awry in these texts right before the moment at which they are meant to end; something that when written has become problematic. The richness of dawn and possibilities of a new today, then, are devices meant to soothe not only the reader, but also this very perturbed text. True enough, in the Book of the Courtier, an argument on the abilities of women to love had just begun, in the face of the court's duchess. In the Symposium, Socrates has just rejected the advances of his friend Alicibiades whose speech on love only confirmed and elaborated upon his own. I don't want to write too much about Madame B. just yet, but indeed, her death, though coming, is both disturbed and disturbing.
Sunrise, I am inclined to think at this moment, would not be a necessary element of the text if it had progressed without rupturing so close to its conclusion. This idea of a text's rift with itself, of course, gives birth to a thousand other questions--why would an author not be careful? why should he lack divine control over his creation etc.? There are several answers to this one-- the text could be based in reality (as has been argued in the case of the Symposium), or the text wants to have a kind of reality and is still not mature enough to handle it, or that the author himself craves dissonance the size of a tiny tragedy-- too small to be noticed, small enough to be painted over with shades of daybreak.
Of course, we have two completely different kinds of text-soothers here. The Renaissance sunrise is highly stylized, and deeply sensual. Socrates' sunrise, on the other hand, lasts only a second. But it marks his decision to normalize, to spend a day in the baths, in his home, in the lap of the ordinary rather than a night orchestrating the battle between eros and philos. They are both equally relevant here, however, because they both give rise to the idea that light, new days, baths, and breezes can somehow fix the mistakes of the night before. A day spent in the intense beauty of the ordinary is somehow required for the mortal who has stumbled briefly while testing his limits. In other words, the bodily and the earthly are very much a part of the spiritual and the ethereal. And sunrise, as often as we sing, paint, write and dance about it, is deeply ordinary, the beautifully ordinary.

P.S. I couldn't resist an image for a post about something so often painted. Up there is Aurora Taking Leave of Tithonus (Franceso Solimena, 1704, Getty Museum)-- in other words, the dawn goddess taking leave of her Trojan lover. I am not quite sure how it informs the argument I've just made, but it's something worth thinking about.

Dante's low moment.

2009-10-11T17:30:00.000-07:00

"See how Mahomet is deformed and torn!
In front of me and weeping, Ali walks,
his face cleft from the chin up to the crown.

The souls that you see passing in this ditch
were all sowers of scandal and schism in life,
and so in death you see them torn asunder."

(Inferno, Canto XXVIII)

This is probably the last post I will do on Dante in while, simply because I think that there is too much of him on this blog--this is an important post though, because it seeks to address one of the most troubling and (in our world) possibly unbeautiful set of verses in the poem. I also want to add that the crucial idea in this post belongs to EK one of the more erudite and exceptional teachers I have had in the past few years. EK's understanding of characters in the Inferno is based on the premise that it is not the largesse of the sin that causes Dante to place them in the Hell or Purgatory, but rather that in the act of sinning, a character has betrayed his or her own self. They go not against God or Church but against their own nature and thus are sent to a place where they radiate from their bodies, what it was that they did to harm their whole.
For the longest time, there was one figure who I failed to fit into this larger theory and that was Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. In the Inferno, he is doomed to one of the lower and hence worse circles of Hell, accompanied by his own nephew and early convert, Ali. The question kept coming up-- how has a figure like him betrayed his self? It is not the later Islamic conquests that Dante evokes, but the early figure of Islam himself.
I communicated this anxiety to EK who also reads this as an ugly moment in Dante's writing, but who did provide the following important fact about Dante's world: Dante did not see the Prophet Muhammad as living in a pagan world, but rather as a Christian who actively broke with the Church to found a new religion against Christianity rather than one in conjunction with it. In the medieval imagination, everyone was Christian. There was very little sense of geography and culture. Rather there was the Christian world and there was not. Muhammad came into the former category and is then a figure who causes "schism" and "sows scandal." We have seen a similar approach to Islam in Le Chanson de Roland-the twelfth century French poem-- and it will continue till the Renaissance when the Western world begins to better understand what is outside of itself.
This explanation, as I hope my readers already know, is not a way of excusing or diminishing the gravity of accusation and portrayal. It is, however, an attempt to help [many of] us to continue accessing a text that has inspired vision and voice; and that has preserved the sinner and transported the virtuous. It doesn't make Dante's medieval anger okay but if it brings us closer to his figure as he wrote the Commedia (the image of a medieval Florentine coffee-shop is amusing), and if it helps us just a little bit to understand his art, then I think this would be a good place for me to stop dwelling on the Inferno, and maybe institute a move to the humanists we haven't got enough of.

From Dear Reader to Why I Write.

2009-10-10T12:25:00.000-07:00

I'm fast-forwarding to the twentieth-century just for this post-- my intent behind this, however, comes from a tradition that took sway in the medieval period and continues to recur today, albeit in a more creative form: Dear Reader. Dante speaks to his readers in the Commedia, Augustine in the Confessions, later in the Renaissance, Montaigne is obssessed with his readers as is Cervantes. What they have in common with each other is their urge to somehow explain themselves and their writing to their readers. To speak to the reader means to address the inexpressable expression-- the poem, the confession, the endless adventure, and to tie it back to the author's self, a very private, hidden, often mangled self. In other words, it can be read as the author's desire to coyly say what George Orwell said so unashamedly, "Why I Write."
I've always enjoyed the guy-- in fact, I think my first attempts at close reading in high school were based on passages from Animal Farm and Romeo and Juliet, so I would even say I owe him a special debt. There are a couple of things I want to borrow from his famous, aforementioned essay in order to say everything that I want to say about why I am writing this blog. Indeed, as Orwell says, I write this blog out of sheer egoism-- I do wish to be remembered in some way or the other (but not necessarily after I die-- I think memory is sometimes overrated), and I probably do wish to get back at others. But I like his second reason better: aesthetic enthusiasm. Aesthetic enthusiasm is not just having a "perception of beauty in the outside world," but having one that you wish to share because it has pierced you. Though Orwell goes on to detail two more driving factors of the writer, I want to go on from here.
I started writing this blog on sheer whim-- it was a way to exercise my mind during a painful, but good summer. I had decided that I would blog about the same books I read in Princeton's humanities bootcamp, the HUM Sequence. I began taking it more and more seriously with each post, I'd say I even got close to it. But for the longest time, this blog was essentially for me. It was at once an exercise in memory and forgetfulness-- I wanted to remember things that lodged in my mind unnoticed, and to forget some of the other roads the HUM sequence had led me too. At the same time, my blog was a way to find answers from a different world. Over the past couple of months, some of these motives may have changed, and I know certainly that my readership has grown from more than the three to four intially obliging friends who read my posts and gchatted with me about my ideas-- and this makes me want to write more, and write even when I'm bleary-eyed and tired, and even when the more pressing concerns of graduate school are calling. Like the rest of my posts, this one reeks of rambling also, so I'll try to sum it up-- I wanted to try and explain why I wrote and continue to write this blog. And I want to try an acknowledge the authors of the texts I write about, their words and their characters, but also the people who taught me how read, reread, write, and rewrite, and the friends and strangers who read me as very much a part of this blog. But back to Orwell for a brief second-- because I think he hits the spot (as my friend AH says) in terms of what brings us ALL together: vive la beauté and the way we perceive it.

Reigning in Hell

2009-10-04T11:58:00.001-07:00

"Is this the region, this the soil, the clime
Said the lost Archangel, this the seat
That we must change for Heaven; this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since he
Who now is Sovereign, can dispose and bid
What shall be right; furtherest from him is best,
Whom reason hath equal'd, force hath made supreme
Above his equals. Farewell happy fields,
Where joy forever dwells! Hail horrors! hail,
Infernal world! And thou, profoundest Hell,
receive thy new possessor! one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
A mind in its own place and in itself
can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."
(Paradise Lost, Book 1-- John Milton)

To continue the English trend, here is Milton's Satan right before he utters his famous mantra, "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." The above excerpt is one of the many views we get into Satan's mind-- in the case of this particular one, it is a view into the mind of a fallen angel as he finds a new space in which to exist. While Satan's moral outlook, his approach towards the supremacy as established by God, and his quest to be more than just a being has been discussed enough times, I want to use this post to briefly examine what it means to establish another space, and whether Hell is truly a place that can exist free of Heaven.
Satan very clearly hesitates upon arriving in this new geography-- one that clearly lacks the elements that we now use to define God--light being the foremost among them. Where he is now is lightless and therefore God-less. Yet, it is the space where all who dwell shall be equal, and share equally in what is "infernal" and "joyless." At the same time, this new Hell is given a changeability that depends not upon its maker but upon its occupier. Whosoever happens to be in Hell can imagine it as a Heaven in itself-- for Satan's Heaven is a changing place, it is also a place that is inconstant for it is Heaven at the very same moment that it is Hell.
While Dante, Homer, and Virgil have all given their Underworlds a powerful sense of nationality by their use of geography and identity-- Milton's Satan comes of as the ruler of a homeless people with no particular promised land in mind. Hell is where God isn't. It is a place that can be Heavenly if seen that way. It questions what constant is-- is it the God who refuses to share his divinity with one of his creation, or is it a Satanic mind so persistent that it impoverishes the body in order for its desires to be satisfied? In other words, does Hell really exist outside of the mind? To take this notion a little further-- does being in Hell mean having only one's mind as a supreme figure, as solace, as a friend, a space, a family?

What Satan wants, then, is to define himself against God-- he really wants to become an "other." Perhaps one could argue that the very figure of the divine insists on others, yet the divine can also be read as being the anti-other or the embracer. If we stick with the latter, then Satan is possibly trying to achieve the impossible: define himself and his kingdom against a figure that constantly absorbs and grows and thus resists the possibility of having an other to itself.

Inversion.

2009-09-26T22:29:00.000-07:00

"The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark"

SCENE I. Elsinore. A platform before the castle.

FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO

BERNARDO

Who's there?

FRANCISCO

Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.

BERNARDO

Long live the king!

FRANCISCO

Bernardo?

BERNARDO

He.

FRANCISCO

You come most carefully upon your hour.

BERNARDO

'Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.

FRANCISCO For this relief much thanks: 'tis bitter cold,
And I am sick at heart.

Across the continent and on the island for the first time: here's one from the Bard. But first, I want to quickly explain why I've chosen this particular passage for tonight: events in and around my life have curiously enough reflected a conversation I had with one of my professors this last Thursday. During coffee and Dante-housekeeping, he suddenly referenced the opening of Hamlet and noted that there is something terribly awry in the scene that presents itself. As an opening scene it does much to reflect the disorder that will follow in the play for at this point, it is not the guard who asks "who's there" but the apparent passer-by. Yet, while thinking about this scene right now, I am thinking of sheer uselessness of prophecy and warning-- do we ever read the signs to begin with?
This question sequence is a fascinating one though; "Who's there" says Bernardo who has just entered upon Francisco's guard. Francisco's reply "nay, answer me," however, is uncanny-- suggesting almost as if an exchange unknown to audience or reader has taken place already. This, of course, is yet another reflection of the events to follow-- there will be events and conversations that take place without Hamlet's knowledge. This exclusion of his figure from the events of the play make him resemble, strangely enough, us, the readers or audience who watch and read, but emerge finally without much knowledge of what has occurred.
I wonder if inversion comes hand-in-hand with a loss of the self. Bernardo's self-identification is his loyalty to the King of Denmark, and by his attachment to the hour of midnight. He is not Bernardo, but rather the King's servant and the midnight guard. He begins after the day ends. In other words, he is someone who is not himself-- in fact, perhaps we can say that he hails the spirit of inversion and chaos that not only characterizes Hamlet, but is also seen in other Shakespearan tragedies, Romeo and Juliet and King Lear (I just cannot forget the scene of Cordelia carrying her aged father) being among them.

Now to come back to the question I asked at first, what does it mean to have a sign in the first place? Is the sign or the prophecy just a privilege of the author, and a trick that is played upon the reader? There are several things at play here I think-- yes, the sign is most likely something the author wants to show off with, but it may well be also something that is completely unimportant. What I mean to say here is that the sign enters at the very beginning of many Shakespearan and sometimes even Greek plays, precisely because the beginning is the point that no one cares about, that audiences fail to hear, and that readers tend to dismiss. Who cares whether Benvolio and Tybalt fight at the beginning-- this is a supposed to be a play about lovers? Who care whether the guards are babbling nonsense on a cold night-- isn't this play about a royal family? The unimportant place of the sign is then, I think, an awful reflection on human nature itself, on its optimism, its perseverance, and its inability to admit defeat until the benign sign is suddenly the unleashed beast.

Et tu, Dante?

2009-09-19T14:30:00.000-07:00

"As pilgrims wrapped in meditation pass
someone they do not know along the road
and turn to stare and then go quickly on,

so, from behind us, move swiftly, came
and passed us by with a quick look of doubt,
a band of spirits, silent and devout,

their eyes dark-shadowed, sunken in their heads,
their faces pale, their bodies worn so thin
that every bone was molded to their skin."
Purgatory, Canto XXIII.
Two repeats today: Gustav Dore and Dante Alighieri. On reading Purgatory and Paradiso, I realized that these canticas are far more complex and spread out than the Inferno. Whereas those damned to eternal punishment exist in structure those half forgiven and those rewarded seem to occupy (naturally) a far more sprawling and meandering route to Empyrean. But T. S. Eliot has summed up Dante in one very powerful sentence, "Dante's is a visual imagination." One way of understanding Dante, specially if one exists outside of his historical and political loop is through images that resulted from artists' immediete understanding of Dante's elaborate word.
The Gluttons are amongst the groups that roam the higher echelons of the Mountain of Purgatory-- their sin is one of excess, but interestingly enough is told through the element that will later dominate completely the journey through Paradise, i.e. love. Purgatory, then, is the place of imbalanced love and the gluttons are amongst those who had an excess of it. Directly after introducing this group, Dante characterizes them through Ovid's King Erysichthon who out of starvation ate first his daughter and then his own flesh, and Josephus's Miriam who during the seige of Jerusalem ate her infant son. It is this likening, this establishment of relationship that interests me the most here. Even though Dante encounters a literary colleague Forese Donati as one of the group, his first instinct as a narrator is to remove this group from "the journey of our life." Of course, the Divine Comedy is rife with this trend, but when it comes to the gluttons Dante is deeply torn. They are at one point a group who is devout, and penitent, and yet their punishment, and their state of starvation is worse than that of the man who ate his own flesh. So the question that comes up here how can a character at once be so damned and so close to redemption? Or if we shift this to the level of the narrative, how is it that Dante achieves this peculiar neutrality in his telling of the gluttons' state?
I want to read this moment in Purgatory through the figure of Dante himself. I read Dante as succumbing to the sin at this point in the narrative as he pesters Donati for information. Donati's presence is an additional reminder of Dante's own earthly misdemeanours (see Robert Hollander's commentary on this episode). I want to think of Dante no longer as a special guest, but as one of the many characters he encounters throughout his journey. Also of note at this point is that Dante walks with not just Virgil, but also Statius, an early A.D era poet who forms a kind of bridge between Virgil's paganism, the pre-Christian moment, and Dante's own desire for a Christian salvation. In other words, Dante's own figure is failing at this point. His guides are not guides, but companions.
I would answer my own question then by thinking about the figure of a narrator as it becomes engrossed in its own narration. It would also be of interest to think back to other figures in the Comedy who were somehow related with food-- Ugolino comes to mind. How does Dante's figure change with respect to Ugolino? Similarly, does Paulo and Francesca's earthly love somehow attract Dante in the earthly moment of the Inferno?
I haven't said much about Dore, except for using him as a means to understanding the layout and words that run in the Divine Comedy. I'll leave this image up-- it suggests a complete opposition to what I've just argued.

The man himself.

2009-09-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

"This great world which some do yet multiply as several species under one genus, is the mirror wherein we are to behold ourselves, to be able to know ourselves as we ought to do in the true bias. In short, I would have this to be the book my young gentleman should study with the most attention. So many humors, so many sects, so many judgments, opinions, laws and customs, teach us to judge aright of our own, and inform our understanding to discover its imperfection and natural infirmity, which is no trivial speculation. So many mutations of states and kingdoms, and so many turns and revolutions of public fortune, will make us wise enough to make no great wonder of our own. So many great names, so many famous victories and conquests drowned and swallowed in oblivion, render our hopes ridiculous of eternizing our names by the taking of half-a-score of light horse, or a henroost, which only derives its memory from its ruin... Pythagoras was wont to say, that our life resembles the great and populous assembly of the Olympic games, wherein some exercise the body, that they may carry away the glory of the prize; others bring merchandise to sell for profit; there are, also, some (and those none of the worst sort) who pursue no other advantage than only to look on, and consider how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the lives of other men, thereby the better to judge of and regulate their own." From "Essais," by Michel de Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton.

Last Sunday, a now very repentant friend stood me up for brunch by mistake. Too far from the townhouse on the UES where I'm spending my last few weeks of summer, I decided to do something I haven't done or been in a while-- hang out solo until my next scheduled rendezvous. Chelsea Market is my new favorite Manhattan spot so I took myself there, bought myself a New Yorker and sat down at Ronybrook Farm's Milk Bar (again) for a lovely breakfast involving raisin-walnut bread, cinnamon butter, and a mysterious egg-in-a-hole, and of course, quelques tasses du cafe. I could have bought Vanity Fair or Harper's but the New Yorker took my breath away with the fact that there was an article on Michel de Montaigne hiding within. What better date for a quiet morning with oneself than the man who invented the very concept?
In her article Jane Kramer picked up on the very best of Montaigne-- his struggle to know himself and how exactly this plays out in his essays. In this post though, I want to move away from that and examine an excerpt where Montaigne engages briefly with the route to selfhood: it's from "Of the Education of Children," and M talks at length about the schooling of a young boy. This passage is kind of special for me because it's one of the rare moments in the Canon where a writer speaks without judgment, censure, or bias. Maybe I've had too much of Dante and Hell and Heaven and Purgatory, but Montaigne is and always has been a breath of fresh air. The best education cannot be got from an ecole or seminary, but from being a citizen of the world. This is now an old and cliched idea, but it remains unappreciated for not enough of us walk the map. To know ourselves in a "true bias," says Montaigne, we must know not the other, but others. It is this philosophical effort at people-watching that might free us from the shackles that we're placed in by what is familiar to us in our immediate lives.
We're far from the Divine Comedy where Dante loves to assign his fellow Italians, his literary heroes, and figures in history to the infernal, the purgative, and the heavenly. Instead, Montainge gives us the power to judge ourselves and not in terms of virtue or vice, but in terms of who we are in relation to those around us. I'm reminded of the age-old parent to child line: "It doesn't matter what your friends do or think, so long as you're a good person."
Is Montaigne then suggesting a new way of being a "good" or as I would take it, contributing citizen of the world? Is virtue important only insofar as it is able to relate to the rest of the human race. Does it derive from what it means to be human, or what it means to be a human in the face of God? Montaigne was not exactly the most devout Catholic, several members of his family went over to Luther without causing a schism. When Montaigne chalks out this program for education, does he somehow see himself as a prophet of the world we live in today-- a world where to try and know only what is familiar is almost a sin?
The other for Montaigne is very different for what other will become just a couple of centuries later. For someone whose intent is to "essai" or try to know himself, Montaigne is surprisingly permeable. I wonder then, at the end of the Essais, is it just Montaigne the mayor, father, squire, or is it the man who has discovered the larger, happier secret of what it means to have a self?

The reader.

2009-09-05T12:27:00.000-07:00

"In short, our hidalgo was soon so absorbed in these books that his nights were spent reading from dusk till dawn, and his days from dawn till dusk, until the lack of sleep and the excess of reading withered his brain, and he went mad. Everything he read in his books took possession of his imagination: enchantments, fights, battles, challenges, wounds, sweet nothings, love affairs, storms, and impossible absurdities. The idea that this whole fabric of famous fabrications was real so established itself in his mind that no history in the world was truer for him." Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by John Rutherford.

I could have delved deeper into the History of Don Quixote de la Mancha when searching for a piece of text to read, but of late I've become interested in looking at artists' renditions of literary scenes and characters. So here we have Cervantes' description of Don Quixote's descent into madness, but we also have Gustav Dore´'s (1832-83) rendition of Quixote going mad from his books. What struck me about both the image and the corresponding textual description is their sheer richness. Cervantes wants us to be in touch with the body as much as the mind. We must feel the relationship of what is physically within us to what is somehow contained despite of our physicality. What is written is somehow able to transform and possess the body of one who succumbs to it. This is a cause that writers early in the modern period took up and that in some ways defined many of the great books that were to emerge between 1500 and 1900. My other favorite for this, of course, is Emma Bovary.
It seems what I'm saying then is that this richness of image and text comes from the relationship that writer and artist establish between what is body and what is not. In Dore´'s strikingly detailed image we have the object i.e. books lying untended on the ground, and Quixote, this regal looking old man, sits in his chair attempting to stave of the "disorderly notions" that crowd around him. The key word here is "attempt"-- if we look at the image again, we'll see that the sword points in a direction almost opposite to where the monsters, princesses, and angels surround the hero. Clearly, Don Quixote likes to play.
We never really know how tongue-in-cheek Cervantes was being when he addressed Don Quixote's problem for surely he was aware that the adventures of this crazy would be analyzed forever. Similarly, when Flaubert said, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi," there was a tacit admittance that the problems of the character were his as well. What I want to say here is how do we judge ourselves or characters such as Emma or DQ for living a life that is imagined through the help of objects, words, and images. Or should we perhaps do the opposite-- judge ourselves against them? I mean, Emma was a bitch to her husband and Don Quixote couldn't have cared less whether Sancho Panza lived or died-- yet, these people obsess us because of their naked presence and because we see them digesting what they read and see.
Yesterday my cousin A. and I had a conversation about writers who make their readers physically react through their words. My favorite example for this feeling is TSE and his Love Song. Emma and DQ experience something similar-- except that unlike us, they let themselves try to make it real.

La tentation

2009-08-30T17:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, a few friends and I visited the Met in New York and got a look at Michaelangelo's first painting. This was completed around 1488, oil and tempura on wood, by Michaelangelo of the Sistine Chapel and of the beautiful naked men in marble. The artist must have been in his early teens at the time, and I found it interesting that he produced a painting so rife with the idea of "torment," or of being cast from a space of comfort to a space of liminality where the loss of what defines the self suddenly is equivalent to being eaten by wild beasts.
While I was quite captivated by elements of the painting-- the metamorphosis that is in proces--, the fantastically shaped beasts seem to be acquiring fish-like characteristics; the contrast between the earth below and the point where Anthony is in torment; the lack of a heaven above Anthony etc. more and more it made me think about the idea of torment. What "torments" us? And why does torment have a space of its own? Why is it that our torment tears us from what we have and what we know?
Torment, as we know it, comes from the good old Romance languages, and implies immedietely torture, and the infliction of suffering. I've been reading a lot of Dante recently, and I would argue that torment is not so much a problem of the characters in the Inferno who suffer the same punishment over and over again, but one of those in Purgatory. The sufferer is not one who is physically gnawing the same skull over and over again, but the figure who in Dante the poet's mind, has an ounce of repentance in him. I want to say that the figures in Inferno, those who rejected or did not know Christ do not suffer the same way as those who did, those who are in Purgatory. Purgatory implies waiting, it also implies the liminal space that St. Anthony is occupying in this painting. In both cases, there is a recognition of the possibility of something to come, but no promises. I think the idea of torture in torment comes from the knowledge that there is another possible state of being-- This is not a former state, rather this is an unknown, for someone once tormented can never return to what was. Instead, the possible state of being is now one that is unfamiliar, and almost threatening in the sense that it may never come.
Flaubert, a literary beloved of mine, loves torment. His most favored approach towards torment is through the idea of temptation-- his St. Anthony work is called La Tentation de Saint Antoine. But Emma Bovary and Frederic Moreau are closer to us in the way that they enter states of torment inspired mainly by temptation. After Emma's desire for Paris, and Frederic's for Madame Arnoux-- these characters no longer exist in their original spaces. Rather they now occupy liminal, unreal spaces of desire. Emma "would live and die equally for Paris" and in this desire separates herself from the physical space of Rouen. Frederic too, in his love for Mme. Arnoux detaches and casts himself into a space of torment that is never quite satisified till perhaps the very silent end.
I've rambled on from early Renaissance to the modern period-- and so I think it's time to stop. But I think there is something to be thought about-- do we actively seek torment when there is nothing else? Or is it temptation that we lean towards, that eventually deserts us and leaves us to the mercies of torment, a veritable Calypso from whom only the Odysseuses of life can escape?

The infernal

2009-07-19T06:56:00.000-07:00

THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST.
JUSTICE URGED ON MY HIGH ARTIFICER;
MY MAKER WAS DIVINE AUTHORITY,
THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND PRIMAL LOVE.
BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS
WERE MADE, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY.
ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE.

(Inferno, Canto III)

There are a couple of things that jump out immediately from this inscription on the Gates to Hell in the Inferno: the first is that the gate demands to be read, it does not speak to those standing before it, neither is the visitor prescient. The second thing that strikes me is this idea of a self-narration, the story of oneself as told by the self-- what is this story? why is it that the story of the self often the most untrue? and why, most importantly, does the self tell a story? The gate, then, is an active agent of telling and narration whose unchanging act suggests that it somehow remains consistently engaged with the rest of the telling in the Inferno. In other words, the gate and its story of hell is one that is echoed and altered with each sub-narrated story-- eternal pain, the way of the lost, the abandonment of hope? Are these all really themes of the Inferno, or can we perhaps argue that these are themes it wishes it has, yet ones that it is fearful of embracing?

Curiously enough, the inscription of the gate is a memory of the future-- it is meant to remind us of what is to come. We haven't met the characters populating the Inferno, but the gate is not a prophecy of them, it is an altered memory of their state of being, and thus an element of the narrative that creates an important distinction between the narrative of a memory by a self and the narrative of a present. Either way, the characters are narrated by another figure. The narration of the gate, however, is unique in the way that it anticipates the narrative, telling it already but without us as the readers yet knowing it.

These are just a few ideas I've thrown out there about how to possibly approach the gate as a kind of ante-narrative or ante-Inferno, a parallel but brief vision of hell that stands at the point at which we enter. There is something else that calls out to the reader, and that is the last line of the inscription: Abandon every hope, who enter here. It might just be the translation but this one line reminds me of modern poetry, and Eliot's poems in particular. Somehow the gate seems to want to read hell as the landscape that the modernists would obsess about later on. It is a kind of wasteland where the living and breathing rot over and over again. The wasteland, of course, would be on earth for the modernists. Eliot's rotting souls utter the same words again and again: hurryup hurryup as if to somehow accelerate their torture. Yet, I would think that they are numb, feelingless compared to the characters of the Inferno who seem almost to savor this torture, to live in the future and memory of the full lives they lived. Hell is the consequence of the lives of Odysseus, Paolo, and Ugolino. Hell on earth, Eliot's Wasteland, is the consequence of a life that possibly never was, that cannot care for torture because it still cannot feel the pain.

Ugolino, II

2009-07-15T07:34:00.001-07:00

"But after we had reached the fourth day, Gaddo,

throwing himself outstretched, down at my feet,

implored me: "Father, why do you not help me?"

And there he died; and just as you see me,

I saw the other three fall one by one

between the fifth day and the sixth; at which,

now blind, I started groping over each..."

(Inferno, Canto XXXIII)

We're back with Ugolino and the penultimate events that led up to his punishment in the Inferno. But here is a man who is already punished, and I want to try an understand whether this earthly punishment of seeing each child starve and die before his eyes is somehow worse than the eternal ordeal of gnawing helplessly on the bones of the man whose betrayal led him to the death and dying acts that he had. The most arresting part of this brief excerpt is Ugolino's blindness coming directly after the deaths of his children. In other words, his punishment is to see, and to a lesser extent, to hear, the excruciating deaths of his children. There have been other blind fathers before Ugolino and there will be some after him-- Oedipus comes to mind in the former category and Lear in the latter. Their blindness, however, is a kind of gift. Lear carries Cordelia's dead body without seeing his daughter actually die. The blind Oedipus is led by Antigone whose death comes after his. Ugolino, however, must see each child die before blindness sets in. The role of the auditory is equally interesting here: what is heard cannot be responded to. Gaddo's plea for help, for some kind of rescue or relief from not death, but the pain of dying, paralyses his father, who only after the death of his son, possibly does what he was asking him to do in the first place.

It is to touch and taste that Ugolino must turn in the last few moments of his own life-- senses that incidentally are closely associated with sin-- lust and gluttony. In Hell, Ugolino is the glutton who is never satiated, gnawing and chewing but never, ever will his hunger end. But let's come back to my original issue with this passage: is the earthly punishment somehow worse than the eternal? I think, yes, for the eternal is a kind of reprieve from what Ugolino hesitated to do on earth. In hell, Ugolino is a saintly figure, who saves even the dead from their fate. On earth, he was suffering towards this sainthood, tested for the spiritual by the deeply physical.

Ugolino, I

2009-07-12T03:51:00.001-07:00

"As soon as a thin ray had made its way

into that sorry prison, and I saw,

reflected in four faces, my own gaze,

out of my grief, I bit at both my hands;

and they, who thought I'd done that out of hunger,

immediately rose and told me: "Father,

it would be far less painful for us if

you ate of us...""

(Inferno, Canto XXXIII, Dante, translated by Allen Mandelbaum)

I've decided the Inferno and its slightly less infernal siblings should get more posts than some of the other books I've talked about. Two reasons: 1. c'est Dante, and 2. I'm teaching a course on Dante next quarter, never hurts to have some thoughts about the guy. We're coming towards the end of the Inferno here, and maybe in other posts, I'll go back to do the famous P and F scene as well as the scene of Dante's induction as an officially great poet of Western civilization.

This is, of course, one of the most heart-rending scenes of the Inferno, Count Ugolino is seen uncontrollably gnawing on a skull-- supposedly that of one of his sons who sacrificed themselves to their father's hunger and to their own misery by allowing their imprisoned flesh to become sustenance for the Count. Allen Mandelbaum asserts that it is not quite clear in either the Italian or in his translation whether Ugolino actually consumed his children or not, and I'm not going to be the one to decide. What I do want to talk about here is the effeminized figure of the father, and idea of the sacrificial flesh of sons. I don't want to make this into a discussion based off of Christian theology though I will talk about it briefly. Right now I want to think about the figure of Medea in comparison to Ugolino-- the mother who destroys her children in order to save them from a father's second marriage and to avenge herself upon an unfaithful husband, and then, the figure of a father who dying of starvation with his children thinks to appease his sons' misery by consuming their flesh. In Euripides' immortalizing play, Medea knifes her children to death and then flees to Athens where King Aegeus has promised her refuge. Here, Ugolino cannot escape the remnants of the bodies which begged his aid in their destruction. What stands out, when we place these two figures side by side, is the way each takes on characteristics of the opposite sex. In other words, these unnatural parents are unnatural also in that they evade the binds of their own gender. Medea physically kills her children, but more importantly, promises fertility to Aegeus, i.e. she takes on the male association of abundant seed. Ugolino, on the other hand, regressed to femininity attempts destruction of his own body before taking that of his children. His punishment, however, seals this gender transformation through the body: Ugolino's body will forever hold those of his children, a perverse spin on the image of pregnancy.

While I do want to briefly mention the reflection of the Christian idea of the son's sacrifice of his flesh in order to preserve, in a sense, the father or the image of the father, that idea isn't given much credence here. For this is not a divine father, but a very human one who instead of immortalizing the flesh takes it for his own private survival. The other transformation that goes on here, of course, is of the young dying before the old. It is the children who offer, (and succeed horribly) in giving their father posterity. It is on their name that he lives instead of perpetuating the generations by offering his body to his name-bearing sons.

I'm going to stop here with this passage now. On thinking more as I wrote, I've decided to do a second post about the Ugolino's continued narrative.

Orpheus and the Afterlife

2009-07-12T03:51:00.000-07:00

"Reweave, I implore, the fate unwound too fast
Of my Eurydice. To you are owed ourselves and all creation; A brief while
We linger; and then we hasten late or soon, to one abode...
... The favor that I ask is but to enjoy her love and if the Fates
Will not reprieve her, my resolve is clear
Not to return: may two deaths give you cheer."
(Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book X, translated by A. D. Melville)

Yesterday I dissed Aeneas for not being among the great lovers of literature. I mentioned Romeo and Juliet, and Cleopatra and Marc Antony, but my all-time favorite has always been Orpheus, the lute-player who will go to the Underworld to find his dead bride, and if that fails, will please the gods with his own death. It's a seemingly win-win situation. What charms me about Orpheus is that he unlike all the others I've spoken about so far, allows for love to transform him and affect him-- his figure makes the suggestion that other love forms are not really love but a kind of ownership, pleasure boat ride, social contract etc. Odysseus was faithful to Penelope, but she was not the compass that led him to Ithaca. Aeneas chilled with Dido while it served the interests of him and his people. Romeo was too chicken to go on living without Juliet-- and didn't even wait to see what his options were. Orpheus, on the other hand, has it all figured out. I don't want to make this blog post about how I wish there were more of this guy around, what I do want to talk about though is his concept of destiny, particularly hell, and then maybe add a few reflections of my own, given recent events in my life.
The first thing to understand about pre-Christian Greek and Roman narratives is that there was only a kind of hell that they could aspire to after death-- they didn't have the chances monotheistic faiths give us. It was death, and then the realm of Pluto, the god of the Underworld, cold and uncaring, who plundered the living earth at will, taking figures like Proserpina and Eurydice with him. For Orpheus to contemplate death for Eurydice then, was to contemplate what in Christianity is a kind of eternal damnation. Later on in the Inferno, there will be more such figures-- people who for the sake of another we willing to face this eternal damnation, Paulo and Francesca being my particular favorites.
But there is also an opposite case where romantic love and the after-life instead of being one and the same, are battle-axes pointed at each other, one waiting to destroy and interrupt the existence of the other. In our times, then, it seems that we often end up choosing between faith and love, rather than trying to mediate both. Is it the fear of Hell that keeps us from allowing both or is it the desire for Heaven? Orpheus didn't have a choice about where to go to search for Eurydice, so he floated into hell. Paulo and Francesca were joined by the hip, but are seemingly unregretful about their stolen kiss. What I want to say here is that many of the greatest lovers in Western literature do not see hell as abominable-- possibly because it is a hell of virtue, nobility, and love, rather than a hell of low actions, murder, and avarice.
While the Greeks and Romans didn't really have a concept of the Underworld as Hell, Dante certainly did. I'm going to write about Dante later, but I do quickly want to mention that it is the most noble figures of the Western imagination that end up in the Inferno-- these are people of great virtue and perseverance, and thus whose presence makes hell a better place. This is a great line to end with, this idea of making hell a better place, but I want to go a little further and think about the forces Orpheus has to wrestle with: Death, and destiny (or, the Fates). It is to the Fates that he turns first, believing that the fabric can somehow be unwoven and the nightmare of separation ended. Unable to have Eurydice in life, Orpheus chooses to have her in death. And this doesn't work out either, as the story goes. So my last question then is this: is life one big speed-dating event? Do figures like Orpheus waste their time trying to be the living among the dead, trying to unwind the fabric that has suffocated their love? Or is the struggle to make a love clear among the darknesses of Hell and Heaven perhaps a duty that such figures undertake, to make the world a better place through the eternity of their pain?

Poetry: not as we know it.

2009-07-08T23:04:00.000-07:00

"To One Who Loved Not Poetry"
Thou liest dead, and there will be no memory left behind
Of thee or thine in all the earth, for never didst thou bind
The roses of Pierian streams upon thy brow; thy doom
Is now to flit with unknown ghosts in cold and nameless gloom.

(Sappho, translated by Edwin Arnold, 1893)

I love poetry, but I've never been particularly good at writing or explicating about it. What draws me to it is the sharpness of its brevity and the peculiar disconnect it creates between the living world and itself. I've jumped back a few hundred centuries to the Greeks again-- the reason for this is simple, I don't want to write about Dante until I can do him full justice. The Inferno will come. But here is Sappho-- who is a literary vixen in her own right--and its a tough task to do her justice too.

This is a particularly relevant poem though, for it attempts to encapsulate the meaning of poetry to not just the human soul but also to human existence. But I don't think "poetry" here and in Sappho's mind is suggestive of simple verse. And this may be a very simple interpretation and a completely pointless post, but I want to talk about this idea of living poetry, and of binding roses from Pierian streams upon our brows. In other words, why do we read literary works that suggest something beyond the ordinary to us-- in the case of this blog, why does each one of these books call out to me, and so many of my friends, begging for a rereading but also asking from us to immortalize them in the lives that we lead?

Here's slightly different aspect of death: this is the fear that death will scratch the memory of a being from this earth, damning him to an eternal existence with the unknowns, or what I read to be as more like-mindeds. In a sense, the death of a figure who shuns a moderate version of Quixote's life is a figure who shuns the possibilities told to him by his ancestors. It's interesting that I have this thought because earlier I was playing around with the prologue of the Arabian Nights, where the crucial suggestion is that the past is indeed a place from which to gain knowledge and seek admonition. Here, the literary past in particular is a place through which to somehow evade death's darkest punishment: erasure.

If what we fear most about death or distance or disappearance from the lives of others is the erasure of our being's presence and the memories we sought to create in our lifetime, I wonder then, whether Sappho's solution is the antidote? When we intoxicate, decorate, and even consecrate ourselves, are we seeking to make an eternal memory? I guess what I'm struggling with here is how do we make a memory so powerful that even in our death, it continues to live on? Sappho had the Pierian stream, its intoxicating water and its lush roses to sate her desire with-- in this world, are our facebook pages, our blogs, our emails, our diaries, our academic essays a way of immortal preservation? Or is it our deeds, our immense love for others, our friendships, our relationships, our families that preserve us? Is it in the latter that we must seek Pierian roses or the former?

I wonder too, if what Sappho suggests is yet another concept of hell. Fire and brimstone over and over again, can it just be that hell is a place where all we encounter is sameness, where each person has committed the sin of being unexceptional, or of living a life in which a lack of imagination and an absence of empathy informed his ill-deeds? Heaven, by this standard, would be a place where those who learnt and taught the virtues of possbility and perseverance landed up. And in a sense, it's true I think-- Heaven is a place of eternal possibility, or at least that's what they told me when I was a kid. I remember planning to eat a couple of hundred burgers and lots and lots of apple-pie when I finally got there.

Roland's unmindfulness.

2009-07-06T22:17:00.000-07:00

"Count Roland lay down beneath a pine tree

He has turned his face towards Spain.

Many things began to pass through his mind:

All the lands which he conquered as a warrior,

The fair land of France, the men of his lineage,

Charlemagne, his lord, who raised him.

He cannot help weeping and heaving great sighs

But he does not wish to be unmindful of himself."

(The Song of Roland, translated by Glyn Sheridan Burgess, Penguin Classics)

It's a long jump from Augustine to a world where there is suddenly a concept of France and Spain-- the first signs of Europe as we know it start showing in the Song of Roland. Technically speaking, I shouldn't be a big fan of this 12th century French poem-- it's all about Muslims and Christians bashing each other, God knows I'm not a fan of that. But I still love it-- I love it because even though it's madly macho and full of hate, it has these amazing moments where the human in these warriors shines through, and the power of this transformation is what reminds me that underneath our tough skins, we're all the same.

Here, Roland, Charlemagne's nephew and a brave fighter, lies dying on the battlefield. This is without doubt one of the greatest deaths in literature (for a full appreciation of it, I'd suggest reading the whole scene). But I want to read this death as just Roland's death, the death of an individual who even as he feels life leaving him, "does not wish to be unmindful of himself." I want to try and understand what it means not to be unmindful and what is the self that guides us towards rejecting this state of abandon-- even when the sustaining force of narrative is about to depart. In other words, is their any virtue to the narrative of death and dying?

In the moments before he is arrested by this thought of unmindfulness, we entertain the idea that Roland is allowing himself to be human, to engage in the luxuries that memory allows, and most importantly, to allow these thoughts to capture his being in such a way that it is no longer existing in the present, but rather attempting to see the future through the eye of the past. In other words, when we die, it is the past that informs our emotion not the present moment.

So what is the role of the present moment, then? That's where unmindfulness seems to play a role-- Roland's arrest of his unmindfulness moment is to attend to the present of death. Unmindfulness, essentially, lures the dying man away from the urgency of the present, towards the possibilities silhouetted by the past. It reduces, rather than gives agency. Roland's snatch for the present is a kind of "Death be not proud" moment, insisting on his sense of living each moment as it comes rather than taking death's kind anesthesia of memory.

On the other hand, it is the "weeping and heaving of great sighs," that make him human-- and thus immortal in a sense of the word, for it is the ability to feel that continues on in the species, undisturbed. Does he weep, then, in the present or for a past that tells him of the future that's been closed to him? Is his weeping possibly for the utter lack of a present he experiences-- the extreme distance of all things close and beloved? Or is Roland more alive than we can imagine in the way that his wishes still inform his actions? I would think in death, Roland is perhaps the strongest he can be because of the way all three spaces of time are suddenly captured in his form-- and experienced so powerfully in his mind. If we can be three places at once, no matter, the pain, are we not superhuman for just that small moment in time? But we don't live to tell it, and I think maybe that adds an extra element of the super.

Augustinian angst.

2009-07-04T20:09:00.000-07:00

"For what can be more wretched than a wretch who has no pity upon himself, who sheds tears over Dido, dead for love of Aeneas, but who sheds no tears for his own death in not loving thee, O God, light of my heart, and bread of the inner mouth of my soul, O power that links together my mind with my inmost thoughts? I did not love thee and thus committed fornication against thee..."
(Confessions, Book 1, St. Augustine, translated by Albert Outer)

If Montaigne is the person whose lonely thoughts constantly make me want to comfort him, than St. Augustine is the person whose constant struggle with ideas of love simultaneously attracts and repulses me-- only to keep me circling in his struggling orbit. Here Augustine is bemoaning the shallow emotion of empathy for it seems to have dulled and interrupted the greater emotion that later enters his soul-- love of God. If he cried for Dido upon learning of her bereavement than surely this was a kind of infidelity to his later and eternal master. But this is Augustine's reading of himself-- in this post I want to make yet another an attempt to reconcile his conflict: are his free-flowing tears for Dido one step towards loving God, or are they in fact, the expression of a fully-blossomed love of God already? In other words, can Augustine's immense pity for a weeping queen be read as a kind of human godliness?
If I went into theological definitions of Augustine's concept of God and other such scientific things, maybe this blog post would be more concise and perfect. But I want to explore the idea of God on a more basic level, as I always do, and try to make clear on this other level, the connection that DHR once made-- Augustine is very much like Aeneas, a wanderer with a cause. A simple description of Augustine's pre-conversion state of mind would be this: he loved God without knowing. I say this because I read Augustine's movable state, his ability to weep for an unloved one, as one that encapsulates all of the characteristics of God that we turn to-- modified for the human form, of course. If the form of God is able to show mercy that is powerful enough to change circumstance, than the most divine of human forms is able to weep in the face of another's misfortune.
A wretch who has no pity on himself may be wretched indeed, but isn't that perhaps the most godly of all human beings--God, as I see him, is a figure whose entire self is devoted to the care and love of a creation that is so much less than him. The human being can't really make that assumption but don't we all nevertheless, aspire to the image of God? In Islamic thought, there can be no real love of God, unless there is a love for his creation. The whole let's-leave-the-material-world-behind train of thought sometimes strikes me as people getting ahead of themselves--it's not original sin that brought us here but rather our own connection with each other and the things around us, God's creation. I'm not sure whether we've been sent to this world to make up for that one mistake in the Garden of Eden, but rather, I think we've been sent to learn how to love each other for aren't we all, in our various guises of religions, just God's creation?

You've lost that lovin' feelin'

2009-07-02T22:56:00.000-07:00

AGAVE: Father, I shall be parted from thee and exiled. 

CADMUS: Alas! my child, why fling thy arms around me, as a snowy cygnet
folds its wings about the frail old swan? 

AGAVE: Whither can I turn, an exile from my country? 

CADMUS: I know not, my daughter; small help is thy father now. 

(Euripides, The Bacchae)

The Bacchae is one of my favorite plays-- I wrote a paper called "Technicolor Tiresias" on the figure of the soothsayer for the HUM Sequence. That was then. In the past couple of years, of course, The Bacchae has changed from being just a Greek tragedy to a delineation of the system that helped define the concept of the ubermensch-- oh Nietzsche. I don't want to go into the overdone ideas of Dionysian and Apollonian in this post. Let's concentrate on this scene instead: Agave has just discovered that the hunter's prize she carries so proudly in her arms is the head of her son Pentheus, and Cadmus has been sentenced to the form of a serpent by a merciless Dionysus. In the breakdown of a family and kingdom, what speaks to me most is the shattered but nevertheless still completely precious relationship of parent to child. Agave is to be exiled, and Cadmus will no longer retain his human form, let alone the kingdom. Yet Agave, a parent who has just destroyed her own child, clings to her father somehow believing that a solution can be found in his figure.
A couple of days ago, a friend and I were discussing how great the Greeks are to write about because they just feel so much. Part of the reason why they feel is because they are placed in situations of intense suffering-- situations that I think are of the worst possible kind because they stem from innocent ignorance and inherent lack of control for the destiny of the self. In such situations, feelings of regret and the desire to somehow turn back the pages humbles characters like Agave and Cadmus so entirely that it is hard to try and logically unravel why what happens happens in the play. (It's funny that I have this thought-- I just recalled that one of the discussion questions given to us in our precept sheet required that we trace "stages" of Pentheus's transformation.)
The image of a young cygnet folding its wings around a frail, old swan is perhaps what captured the scene for me-- even more so than the Lear-like reduction of a father to nothing in the line that follows. It doesn't strike ironic or weird despite the fact that Cadmus and his wife are soon to assume the shape of beasts. It just says something incredibly simple, and then rejects its own simplicity (but that's just the Greeks doing their thing). I am convinced that what Agave seeks is comfort, not solutions. There is no solution or reversal to be had-- and of this Agave is well-aware for she has already begun to refer to herself as an exile. It is not destiny or irony that happens in a tragedy like this, but rather a kind of paralysis of the passions that guide life. More than death that is the tragedy-- the shrunken father who is of "small help" to his distraught.
Somehow, these days, so much leads me back to the simplistic question: Is all this worth it? In his last moments as a human, is it not Cadmus' burden to be a human, and so to extend his humanity forth to Agave's broken figure? Is the Greek tragedy, then, somehow mocking at the figure of the human even as it reduces it to a puppet of circumstance? In other words, we must ask whether humanity is a failed function all along whose only vestige available in the tragedy is the intense feeling that emanates when the human form and function are about to snatched from the accursed?

Parabolic.

2009-07-01T19:47:00.000-07:00

Matthew 13
10: And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables?
11: He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.
12: For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.
13: Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.
(The New Testament, King James Version)

Earlier today I read that out of all the great works of Western civilization, the Bible is the hardest to interpret. In this particular excerpt from the Gospel of Matthew, we have the problem or the key to this difficulty raised by the disciples themselves-- why is the parable the choice form of discourse, particularly in the New Testament? The speaking figure of Jesus suggests that the parable separates the men from the boys-- the disciples from the masses that have come to receive his message. I want to try and argue a kind of an opposite case, that the parable is not really created because the listeners are those who don't see while seeing, and don't understand while listening, but that the parable is in itself a kind of mystery whose seemingly opaque form ensures its longevity. In other words, the parable is a classic means of extending Jesus' message over centuries of time, rather than allowing it to possibly wilt at the mercy of a few disciples.
If Jesus initially disseminated through the parable, then this same parable flowered over twenty or so centuries, using its interpretable form to speak with changing and inconstant generations.
The figure of the disciple has due importance, but in the long term, it is the multitude whose simple memories of the parables will populate the New Testament and thus even though they're intelligence in the moment is limited, it is their continuity that colors the future of the Christian faith.
While the disciple has been "given" the mysteries of the heavens, the multitude must struggle to crack the nut. It is the continuous cracking of the nut, then, that keeps the faith going, not the one time transfer of Jesus' idea to his immediate right-hand men. This, of course, touches briefly upon the idea of religion as a living, growing entity that must constantly be reinterpreted in order to sustain its marriage with this world. Does the parable of the sower operate differently in a world where people have never sown a seed, than in the world where it's all they did? Do our generations struggle to establish that basic relationship between what is sown and what flies away? But what remains important here is that the parable has carried through for various reasons: its simplicity, its deep connection to the figure of the human, and most interestingly-- the connection of this human to the earth. The parable, then, is a very earthly thing, and about earthly people. I wonder, in ending, why the earthly is such a bad thing.

Oedipus the Meek

2009-07-01T05:13:00.000-07:00

"Am I not evil? Am I not utterly unclean
Now I must be banished, and when I go
I may not see my family, nor set my foot
Into my country...
...Do not, do not You sovereign holy Gods
Let me see this day; But let me vanish from the mortal world
Before a stain like this pollutes my life!"

(Oedipus the King, Sophocles, Wordsworth Editions)

This is Oedipus the King speaking or rather letting the words drop from his lips at what can best be called a moment of threshold. This is before Jocasta's messenger confirms his heritage and thus, his guilt, and after Tiresias has uttered his dark prophecy. I don't want to talk about Oedipus as the big figure that he is in both literature and critical theory, but rather as Oedipus, the man, very much in the space between what is fate and what is past. It is Oedipus's prayer that interests me the most--his desire to disappear from the world before his history, his footprint, is stained with the sins of incest and patricide.
We're in a moment then, that seems to not want to recognize the possibility of redemption and forgiveness, but also is unable to conceive of the existence of a sinner. In other words, there is no option for Oedipus, in the case of his sin being confirmed, but to disappear and somehow also erase the memory of his actions on earth. Once again, this is a moment of pre-Heaven and Hell, and pre-redemption days--- but is this also a moment of pre-forgiveness? Oedipus does not pray to the gods for this very wonderful thing, but rather prays for a turn in his fate that would save him from the fate that seems so inevitable at this moment. So in a sense, Oedipus is at a point where death and its permanence are the only escape. As we know, this death does not come for a while and instead, Oedipus wanders around the countryside for sometime, blinded and helpless.
He gets neither the change in the fate he prays for, nor the forgiveness from among those his unconscious sin affected-- I would say that makes him the most damned of all characters I've encountered. I'm still curious though, why Oedipus doesn't pray for forgiveness-- it is undoubtedly a pre-Christian attribute, and is often (and rightly) addressed to the offended in pre-Christian narrative. Is there something inadequate about it? Is there something that forgiveness can't do?
I think there is-- and I think that's reversal. Orpheus asked for a reweaving, and Oedipus asks the same thing. Neither asks for the nightmare to be ended, for things to resume as if darkness had never descended upon them. Why is reversal not a possibility in the desperate minds of these two figures? Why cannot the move forward be one that takes in its arms what is past and reconciles it with what is to come? Is there something inherently wrong with us as human beings that makes the element of forgiveness into one that necessarily must be futuristic and thus incomplete and inadequate. Forgiveness, the way we do it, does not carry the past forward cleaned of its wounds. It inherently assumes that repentance on the part of the sinner is an acceptance and a healing on the part of the person sinned against. Yes, the person. We sin against a divine law, but more intimately, we sin against each other. And that is where forgiveness falls short.

Aeneas the Amoeba

2009-06-28T18:55:00.000-07:00

"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

2009-06-27T09:22:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-26T19:12:00.001-07:00

"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.

2009-06-26T00:48:00.000-07:00

"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.

2009-06-26T00:31:00.000-07:00

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.