Poetry: not as we know it.

"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.

"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.

"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'

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.

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

"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

"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.