csuf cplt324 world literature to 1650 fall 09

Home Page for CPLT 324

2009-08-16T19:37:00.000-07:00

Welcome to CPLT 324, World Literature to 1650
Fall 2009 at California State University, Fullerton

This blog will offer posts on all of the authors on our syllabus. I will post two kinds of notes: general and page-by-page. Both kinds are optional reading, but I encourage you to read the entries as your time permits. While they are not exactly the same as what I may choose to say during class sessions (i.e. these are not usually exact copies of my lecture notes), they should prove helpful in your engagement with the authors and in arriving at paper topics and studying for the exam. Unless otherwise noted, the edition used for our selections is

Lawall, Sarah, ed. The Norton Anthology of World Literature. 2nd. ed. Vols. ABC: Beginnings to 1650. New York: Norton, 2003. Package 1: ISBN 0-393-92453-X.

A dedicated menu at my wiki site contains the necessary information for students enrolled in this course; when the semester has ended, this blog will remain online, and a copy of the syllabus will remain in the Archive menu.

Week 16, Shakespeare (Hamlet)

2009-08-16T19:36:00.000-07:00

General Notes on Hamlet

Theology. I n Christian terms, revenge amounts to usurpation of God’s providential prerogatives. But this interpretation of revenge clashes with a more ancient that’s easily seen at work in Classical literature: in The Oresteia, for instance, Orestes would be wrong not to take vengeance on his father Agamemnon’s killer. How could Orestes not kill Clytemnestra? He and we know that such an act will bring the Furies down upon his head, but it must be done in spite of the penalty incurred. The Elizabethans love a good Senecan-style revenge tragedy, as the popularity of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy shows, but Shakespeare, who revels in the form just as much as anyone else (Titus Andronicus, anyone?) seems to face most squarely the theological dilemma it entails.

Skepticism. There is something to the idea that Hamlet is a man out of his time, someone not quite fit to be a tragic hero. That’s true even if his problem isn’t really “delay,” although he accuses himself of it. He makes his share of false assumptions and rash mistakes. I say only half in jest that the Prince’s problem may be that he has read Montaigne’s Essays and soaked in some of their epistemological skepticism. The play’s proddings towards revenge don’t seem solid to Hamlet: there is only a ghost who tells him what he wants to hear: Claudius is stealing his mother’s attention and his kingdom, so the man must be paid back.

Recognition. At what point in the play does Hamlet attain clarity about the nature of his actions? He must have come round to the idea that he needs to let things shape up as they may. But exactly how he has come that far isn’t entirely clear. Perhaps his realization is due to a number of experiences (facing the shock of Ophelia’s death, meditating on that army going to its death “even for an eggshell,” bantering with the Gravedigger and encountering Yorick’s skull as an object of meditation, escaping from the ship that was taking him to his death in England, being ransomed by pirates at sea, his conflicted feelings about Ophelia and his mother, etc.)

In The Poetics, Aristotle says that well-crafted tragedies turn upon the hero’s arriving at some fundamental insight (anagnorisis, recognition, “un-unknowing”) about the mistake he or she has made. Characterize Hamlet’s insight into his situation – what is the insight, and what has led him to it? Connect this question to the gravedigger scene.

What finally makes the play’s resolution possible – is it that Hamlet has been unable to act and something now makes him able to act? (Oedipus Rex, for example, combines recognition with “reversal” – expecting good news from a messenger, Oedipus instead learns that the guilt lies squarely on his own shoulders.)

Scene-by-Scene Notes on Hamlet.

Act 1, Scene 1.

The watchmen and Horatio offer some surmises; at line 69, Horatio suspects that the ghost’s appearance “bodes some strange eruption to our state.” They’re on watch because young Fortinbras is planning to take back the territory his father had lost to Hamlet Sr. Barnardo, too, supposes the same thing when he says, “Well may it sort that this portentous figure / Comes armed through our watch so like the King / That was and is the question of these wars” (109-11). They feel foreboding, a sickness at heart; but they have only general knowledge, and Horatio’s idea at 171 is to seek out Hamlet and have him interact with the ghost; it seems logical to him that the young Prince will be able to attain particular, intimate knowledge of the spirit’s purpose.

Act 1, Scene 2.

Hamlet’s grief seems unpolitic, self-indulgent, even prideful—at least to Claudius, who must govern. But Claudius’ rhetoric betrays a “schizoid” sense of his own conduct. He sees with “an auspicious, and a dropping eye” (11), which is of course unnatural and nearly impossible even to imagine. The new King’s grief over his brother’s death is pushed aside by his evil ambition to retain the crown he has unfairly won, and his scoffing at young Fortinbras’ supposition that Denmark is “disjoint and out of frame” (20) is ironic since, as we later find out, there’s nothing but disorder in Claudius’ realm. At this point, however, if we are a first-time audience, we don’t yet know that Claudius is a murderer, i.e. that the ghost’s story is true, so to some extent the new king is entitled to be annoyed with the excessive grief and surliness of Prince Hamlet. As Claudius points out at line 15, he has the backing of the citizenry, and Gertrude’s advice to her son is not without wisdom: “Thou know’st it is common, all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity. / … Why seems it so particular with thee?” (72-73, 75)

Soon thereafter, Hamlet speaks his first soliloquy, lamenting that “the Everlasting had not fix’d / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter” (131-32), reproaching the general run of females in the person of Gertrude—”Frailty, thy name is woman!” (145)—and profoundly disparaging Claudius in comparison with Hamlet, Sr. The latter was, says the Prince, “Hyperion” to Claudius’ “satyr” (140), which makes Gertrude’s choice to remarry all the more contemptible. Hamlet’s imagination at this point, even before he hears the ghost’s damning information, seems morbid: he sees the whole world as “an unweeded garden / That grows to seed” (135-36), one inhabited entirely by “things rank and gross in nature” (136). Hamlet seems to play with the amount of time that has passed between the old king’s death and Gertrude’s marriage, and that she was apparently in genuine sorrow for her first husband only makes her subsequent conduct more unacceptable. Hamlet is already obsessed with the dark intimation that people are not what they seem: Gertrude is not the loyal wife she seemed, and Claudius is not the rightful successor the court and the people apparently believe he is. But Hamlet also knows that he must repress this obsession in public: “But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue” (159). Privately, things are different: he already seems to suspect that “some foul play” (255) was involved in his father’s death or that “foul play” is now afoot, even though his questioning of Horatio about the ghost’s appearance indicates genuine uncertainty about its provenance and mission. The stage is set for Hamlet’s moral mission, if we call “revenge” a moral mission. Indeed, the question will trouble Hamlet as the play proceeds. But for now we hear the sententia, “[Foul] deeds will rise, / Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes” (256-57). To me, this line indicates that the “deeds” to which Hamlet refers have already been committed, in his estimation. There is an ambiguity in this last passage of Act 1, Scene 2, a bit of shuffling between matters of state (“My father’s spirit—in arms!” at 254) and essentially private thoughts about the suspicious loss of a dear father.

Act 1, Scene 3.

Laertes has evidently been taught well in the arts of windbaggery by his father Polonius since he lectures Ophelia sententiously about the dangers of giving in to the importunate suit of a lustful young man far above her station. This advice is sound enough as such things go—Hamlet is, after all, a Prince, so he is not free to love as he wishes without thought of Denmark; but as Gertrude later admits when Ophelia is dead, she had hoped the two lovers would in fact marry. But in any case, Ophelia holds her own, showing that while circumstances may constrain her, she is not lacking in understanding or the courage to speak her own mind. Polonius soon comes onto the scene and offers similar advice, accusing Ophelia of naivety about Hamlet’s intentions and showing that he reads the character of others as a function of stereotypes: Hamlet is a young, lusty bachelor, and is therefore not to be trusted, quite aside from his status as a prince.

Act 1, Scene 4.
At the beginning of Scene 4, Hamlet discusses the Court of Denmark’s fondness for alcohol, declaring that his country is “traduc’d and tax’d of other nations” (18) for this weakness. In his 1948 film adaptation of the play, Laurence Olivier chooses to quote directly from this passage and apply the words to the Prince himself, who by implication suffers from “a vicious mole of nature” (24) in that he simply cannot “make up his mind” (Olivier’s voiceover). But this is an overstatement, perhaps, since there is good reason to doubt the purposes of a ghost such as the one Hamlet sees here for the first time: “What may this mean, / That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel / Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon . . . ?” (51-53)

Act 1, Scene 5.

The Ghost then recounts in bloodcurdling detail exactly what happened to him and who is responsible for it, eliciting an excited “O my prophetic soul!” (40) from the Prince, as if he had suspected all along that Claudius had killed his father. The terms the Ghost uses to describe both Claudius and Gertrude are strongly reminiscent of the very ones Hamlet had used shortly before. I think we may be certain that the Ghost “actually exists,” but at the same time, it’s almost as if Prince Hamlet is talking to himself. He is utterly convinced at this point, begging the Ghost that he will, “Haste me to know’t, that I with wings as swift / As meditation, or the thoughts of love, / May sweep to my revenge” (29-31).

There is a problem with the Ghost’s demand for vengeance, however: God says in Deuteronomy, “To me belongeth vengeance and recompense” (32:35). Why, then, should a soul in purgatory (a Catholic concept, by the way) be fixated on revenge? Revenge is an ancient pagan demand, and it seems petty. But Hamlet Sr. was a warrior king, so perhaps his demand that his son should punish Claudius seems reasonable in that context: the latter is a “traitor to his lord” and a dishonorable wretch who has corrupted the state. The Ghost insists that “the royal bed of Denmark ” (82) be redeemed from its current status as “A couch for luxury and damned incest” (83), but his call still seems mostly a private affair. It strains the “fatherly king” framework, and would require the son to set himself against the current order of the State, most likely at the cost of his own life. The Ghost has laid upon the Prince an extremely difficult set of demands—not only must he kill the new king without damning himself, but he must deal with Gertrude in such as way as not to damn her: “Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught” (85-86). How is the young man to do these things? He was already “tainted” in his mind before he ever saw the Ghost, we might say, and what’s more, since the Ghost deals in the ancient imperative of revenge, it makes sense to remind ourselves that even the most righteous acts of revenge in ancient literature entailed pollution that had to be atoned for afterwards. One thinks of Odysseus purifying his great hall after the slaughter of those mannerless suitors who have beset Penelope, or the dreadful punishment incurred by Clytemnestra when she killed Agamemnon, or the penalty threatened against Orestes by the Erinyes after he in turn killed Clytemnestra. In either the pagan or the Christian context, to take revenge is to pollute oneself in the doing. Had Shakespeare written a mindlessly celebratory “revenge tragedy,” we wouldn’t need to think any of these things, but there seems to be a metageneric dimension in Hamlet that positively demands such consideration.

One might take the Ghost’s appearance as a general protest against Denmark ’s rotten condition, but the Prince doesn’t seem certain of much yet, as we can see from his words and actions after the Ghost bids him farewell. On the one hand, we hear that Hamlet is determined to take revenge: “Yea, from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / . . . And thy commandement all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain” (98-99, 102-03). His wax-writing-tablet metaphor seems sincere, although it’s perhaps slightly comic in that Hamlet, a young man who has (accurately or otherwise) become a byword for deferral and delay, speaks of writing at the very instant when he’s most certain of his desire to act: “make a note to myself, take revenge,” so to speak. His indecisiveness or resentment at the task to which he has been called shows much more strongly, of course, in his concluding words during this scene: “The time is out of joint—O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!” (188-89). That abrupt remark suggests anything but a determination to proceed “with wings as swift / As meditation” to a “sweep[ing]” revenge, the precise manner of which has been left to his own devising. One other useful thing to draw from Hamlet at this point is his remark to Horatio and the Watchmen that he may, at some points, “think meet / To put an antic disposition on” (171-72). He has already hit upon the strategy of feigning something like lunacy to accomplish his great task. It may be difficult to tell at some points just how much control Hamlet has over his speech and his actions, but here, at least, we see that he puts his wildness down to strategy.

Act 2, Scene 1.

Polonius is both an endearing character, full of well-intentioned, if comically delivered, advice to his children (and the royal couple) and a meddling intelligencer who deals with those same children in a sneaky, underhanded way. He sets spies on Laertes to find out if the young fellow is behaving, and, after having commanded Ophelia to stay away from Hamlet, he tethers her near him like a sacrificial goat to find out what’s eating him and inform Claudius and Gertrude of it. But at this point, Polonius’ assumption that the Prince’s distraction is “the very ecstasy of love” (99) seems reasonable, based upon what Ophelia has told him about Hamlet’s bizarre sighing and strange state of undress.

Act 2, Scene 2.

Everybody’s favorite nobodies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern make their first appearance in the play, and Voltemand brings what seems to be good news about that troublesome issue of young Fortinbras “sharking up” an army of ruffians to take back what his father lost to the Danes—now the young blade wants only to use Denmark’s territory as a marching ground on his way to Poland, where he has other fighting to do. Polonius’ insistence that he has “found / The very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy” (48-49) excites Claudius, who says, “O, speak of that, that do I long to hear” (50). Together these remarks suggest that Hamlet has been putting on a good show, taking up his “antic disposition” early in the game since “lunacy” would not be the right term with which to describe he initial surliness and melancholia in Act 1. The Prince must, we presume, act in such a manner as to draw Claudius beyond his semi-comfortable geniality towards Hamlet, and into the active agent’s circle of consequence and blood revenge. Polonius is certainly moved to act: he declares to the King and Queen, “I’ll loose my daughter to [Hamlet]. / Be you and I behind an arras then, / Mark the encounter. . .” (162-63). This determination is made stronger still when Hamlet wanders into the scene and Polonius engages him (sans Ophelia as yet) in a strange conversation that is afterwards carried on with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern after Polonius exits. Not realizing the irony of his formalistic amazement at Hamlet’s “pregnant replies,” Polonius admiringly says, “Though this be madness, yet there is / method in’t” (205-06).

Hamlet kindly receives his old friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and he deftly, but rather gently, unmasks their dishonesty preparatory to his later, much harsher dealings with them. After the pair admit that they were indeed “sent for” (292), Hamlet suggests that the King and Queen are worried about his mopishness, nothing more, and he immediately utters one of the most famous invocations of Renaissance humanism and aliveness to the beauty of a world people were beginning to see afresh after centuries of otherworldliness (well, that’s the stereotype, anyway—the Middle Ages weren’t as drab as we like to suppose). “What a piece of work is a / man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in / form and moving, how express and admirable in / action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a / god!” (303-07) He says all this only to bring the whole “majestical roof” (301) down on our heads, reminding us that we are but the most refined dust in the cosmos, a “quintessence of dust” (308). The letdown is deepened by Rosencrantz’s dirty-minded interpretation of Hamlet’s words, and the whole thing leads directly to the announcement that a troupe of actors (“players”) is on the way to Elsinore .

Hamlet comments briefly on the state of late Elizabethan theater, saying that the mannerisms of child actors (he refers to the current craze for plays put on by children) have become an object of mockery—there’s too much affectation, too much pandering to the crowd, too much willingness to break the dramatic illusion. Denmark is disturbed as well; things aren’t what they seem, and the stage “chronicles” the age. Hamlet listens with rapt interest to the player’s interpretation of the tragic ending of the Trojan War. In The Aeneid, Book 2 (lines 675ff, Fagles translation) Achilles’ son Pyrrhus (called Neoptolemus in The Iliad and The Odyssey) has the simple task of revenging his father, and he proceeds with all swiftness to his bloody deed. (Odysseus’ brief account of the young man’s career in The Odyssey at 11.575ff has Neoptolemus behaving with great forthrightness throughout the War, too.) It is the Trojan Prince Aeneas who is filled with horror at the sight of his king Priam’s corpse because it puts him in mind of his wife Creusa and his father Anchises. Aeneas’ rage flows at once to perfidious Helen, and is only cooled by a vision of his mother Venus, who tells him to look to his family in their time of need. As for Hecuba’s grief at the murder of her husband, the player makes it seem so natural that even he gets worked up imitating it. Hamlet beholds the real article—he has a murdered father to avenge—so why doesn’t he act at once? Things are so much simpler in fiction; a noble lie or mere representation may allow us to perpetuate our highest ideals, but real life is weighed down with epistemological uncertainties, Machiavellian considerations, and “vicious mole[s] of nature” such as indecisiveness. Hamlet’s revenge imperative is hindered by Christian scruples and by doubts about the Ghost’s purpose and provenance, as his soliloquy from line 550 onwards shows: “The spirit that I have seen / May be a [dev’l], and the [dev’l] hath power / T’ assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps, / Out of my weakness and my melancholy, / . . . Abuses me to damn me” (598-603). Basing his plan on the literary gossip that “guilty creatures sitting at a play / Have by the very cunning of the scene / . . . proclaim’d their malefactions” (589-92), he invests much hope in his augmentations to The Murder of Gonzago as a means of discovering certainty in the guilty visage of one King Claudius. This plan does not give us license to despise fiction as the mere opposite of “real life”—in this instance, the public, political realm, the world of cold, hard reality and necessity, is exactly what allows Claudius to keep his murderous nature hidden from everyone but himself.

Act 3, Scene 1.

The King tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to encourage this new business of the players’ coming to Elsinore . Perhaps it will draw out the reason for Hamlet’s eccentric behavior. He and Polonius will conceal themselves to hear Hamlet talk with Ophelia. Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy, the main point of which is to state that our ignorance of what comes after death keeps us from acting on our resolutions in this life. Hamlet’s wild words to Ophelia concern mainly the impossibility of virtue maintaining itself in a corrupt world: “get thee to a nunnery” probably means just that—remove yourself from this wicked world, and seek shelter from the “arrant knaves” who go about in it. At 118, Hamlet denies that he ever established any relationship with Ophelia, that he ever made any promises. At line 129, Hamlet asks Ophelia where her father is, a line usually taken to indicate that he knows he’s being overheard. At line 142, Hamlet seems to lose his composure in a way that is not entirely “scripted,” and at 148 he utters the words that frighten Claudius: “I say we shall have no moe marriages, etc.” Claudius derives from this outburst the thought that Hamlet’s disturbed state of mind is “not like madness” (164), and so he must be watched even more closely. The Prince’s “melancholy,” says Claudius (whose guilt had already been spurred by Polonius’ unwitting words at 46-48 about “sugar[ing] o’er” the most damnable deeds with piousness), “sits on brood” (165) over something still darker, and that is what he finds most troubling about the young man’s hostility towards him.

Act 3, Scene 2.

Hamlet admonishes the players about their craft: his key bits of advice are that they “o’erstep not the modesty of nature” (20) and make certain “to / hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue / her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (21-24). In part, this is a moral statement akin to what we may find in Samuel Johnson much later—actors should display virtue as it is, and force vice to confront itself head on. Hamlet means to do just that by means of his spectacle: simply showing and then speaking Claudius’ sin should make that sin’s effects register on his countenance. No embellishment is necessary for such a hideous sin as his. Hamlet’s words strike home when he tells the offended Claudius, “No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest—no offense i’ th’ world” (234-35). The King has consistently failed to take the measure of the consequences entailed by his evil conduct; his stability of mind depends on repressing consciousness of that conduct. Hamlet is cruelly merry with Ophelia in this scene—he seems to be baiting her, blaming her for the sins of his mother. The dumb show soon follows—it is an eerie scene that shows Claudius what he has done, no more, no less. But the dialogue also plays up the absolutely binding quality of the oath that Gertrude has violated, in Hamlet’s view: “Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife, / If once a widow, ever I be wife!” (222-23). That sort of language equates Gertrude with a villainess such as Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Forced to watch “himself” commit the same dark sin twice, Claudius howls out, “Give me some light. Away!” (269) With the King out of the scene, Hamlet’s anger turns first towards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom he disabuses of any hope that they may “play upon” him like a musical instrument (364), and then to Gertrude, who is perhaps the main target of the whole scene, so savage is the representation of her role in the bloody affair. The Prince’s rejection of “instrumentality” is interesting in its own right—what Hamlet seems to need most of all, at this point, is to take control of events, and we will see that he must let go of this desire to control what happens around him before his revenge can be effected. But with respect to Gertrude, Hamlet’s words are even harsher than were those in The Murder of Gonzago; he says, “Now could I drink hot blood, / And do such [bitter business as the] day / Would quake to look on” (390-91). Perhaps this violent thought is directed towards Claudius only, but it’s hard to avoid supposing from what follows that it also applies to Gertrude: “Let me be cruel, not unnatural; / I will speak [daggers] to her, but use none” (395-96).

Act 3, Scene 3.

The King has decided in his anger that Hamlet must be off to England, and Rosencrantz speaks more truly than he knows when he says to Claudius, “The cess of majesty / Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw / What’s near it with it” (15-16). These two flatter the King that what he does is necessary to protect the welfare of the state and the people: “Most holy and religious fear it is / To keep those many bodies safe / That live and feed upon your Majesty” (8-10). The political realm is like an exoskeleton protecting Claudius from the ravages of introspection, and even from the guilt that comes when one knows one is putting off such inward-tending thoughts. This is the same sort of “tyrant’s plea” that accounts for the magnificent hollowness of Satan’s rhetoric in Paradise Lost. Confronting Adam and Eve in Book 4, Satan says, “. . . Melt, as I doe, yet public reason just, / Honour and Empire with revenge enlarg'd, / By conquering this new World, compels me now / To do what else though damnd I should abhorre.” At line 36 and following, Claudius tries to confront “the visage of offense” (47), but he cannot because he won’t give up the crown, the effects of his sin. It’s doubtful if we are to understand this attempt at repentance as sincere—doesn’t it seem as if Claudius isn’t so much sorry for killing the king as determined to indulge himself in remorse? Is he just “feeling sorry for himself”? Most likely, to judge from the results of his kneeling prayer: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; / Words without thoughts nev er to heaven go” (97-98). Hamlet looks almost as much the villain as the King at this point, when he reveals his earnestly un-Christian desire that Claudius’ soul at death “may be as damn’d and black / As hell, whereto it goes” (94-95). But just at this point, the King relieves Hamlet of the need to contrive such an outcome by showing that he is completely unable to repent for his mortal sin, or even to take the first necessary steps that would reclaim his chance at salvation.

Act 3, Scene 4.

After himself slaughtering the hidden Polonius, Hamlet goes so far as to accuse Gertrude of taking part in Claudius’ plot to murder Hamlet, Sr. when he blurts out, “A bloody deed! Almost as bad, good mother, / As kill a king, and marry with his brother” (28-29). She seems genuinely shocked at the suggestion. Hamlet has little time now for “wretched, rash, intruding fool[s]” (31) like Polonius, a man everyone else held in high regard and with whom they showed considerable patience, and he drives onward to make Gertrude confront her sinfulness as directly as he made Claudius behold his during the “Gonzago” scene. Hamlet suggests that Gertrude’s lust is not even excusable by reference to the heat of youth; at her age, he insists, “The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble, / And waits upon the judgment” (69-70). His efforts succeed without too much trouble since Gertrude cries, “Thou turn’st my [eyes into my very] soul” (89). At this point, Ernest Jones’ “Oedipal reading” of the play comes into its own, if it hadn’t already: Hamlet can scarcely stand to imagine—and yet can’t help but imagine—his mother in bed with Claudius, where they spend their time “honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty!” (93-94) The obsession is so deep that the Ghost must step in to admonish Hamlet about his “almost blunted purpose” (111) of taking revenge against Claudius.

As for Polonius, to the thought of whom Hamlet now returns, there is some remorse, but it’s quickly smoothed over with philosophizing: “For this same lord, / I do repent; but heaven hath pleas’d it so / To punish me with this, and this with me, / That I must be their scourge and minister” (172-75). Hamlet tells Gertrude not to let on that he’s not exactly insane, and he confides in her, at least to a degree, what he has in mind. Knowing he cannot trust Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he says nonetheless, “Let it work, / For ‘tis the sport to have the enginer / Hoist with his own petar, an’t shall go hard / But I will delve one yard below their mines, / And blow them at the moon” (205-09). This is an odd exclamation since Hamlet knows only that he’s being “marshal[ed] to knavery” (205) of some sort; he can’t know the precise plan, but speaks with almost military precision, promising to delve “one yard below their mines” and turn their evil back upon them.

Act 4, Scene 1.

The King is by now “full of discord and dismay” (45) at the turn of events; he knows Hamlet’s sword was meant for him.

Act 4, Scene 2.

Hamlet calls Rosencrantz a “sponge” (12) who “soaks up the King’s countenance, his rewards, his authorities” (15-16). As for Claudius, he is “a thing,” says Hamlet, “of nothing” (28, 30). His odd remark that “The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body” (27-28) most obviously refers to Polonius’ corpse, but I suppose it might be interpreted along the lines of the longstanding political doctrine that the king has both a civil or corporate body (imperishable) and a natural, mortal one. In this sense, perhaps Hamlet is making an oblique threat against Claudius.

Act 4, Scene 3.

Claudius realizes the desperate state in which he stands: “Diseases desperate grown / By desperate appliance are reliev’d, / Or not at all” (9-11). Then follows Hamlet’s quizzical “fishing” conversation with the King, which culminates with the fine demonstration that “a king may go / a progress through the guts of a beggar” (30-31). The adornment and aggrandizing of this decaying body, so easily inducted into the dark processiveness of nature, is what Claudius has traded his soul for, so in this respect he truly is “a thing . . . nothing.” At line 49, Hamlet calls Claudius “dear mother,” a slip-up that seems sincere since he has had trouble keeping the two apart in his mind. Claudius is increasingly disturbed by Hamlet’s presence, and even by his very existence: requesting “The present death of Hamlet” (65), Claudius says, “Do it, England , / For like the hectic in my blood he rages, / And thou must cure me” (65-67). But what the King seeks most of all is security: “Till I know ‘tis done, / Howe’er my haps, my joys [were] ne’er [begun]” (68-69).

Act 4, Scene 4.

Young Fortinbras seeks conveyance through Denmark on his way to Poland , and the Captain Hamlet speaks to doesn’t think much of his assignment: “We go to gain a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name” (18-19). Hamlet takes the point to heart, making yet another resolution that his mind will contain only thoughts of vengeance from now on: “O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” (65-66) But this one is no more permanent than the ones he made earlier in the play—this is fundamentally not Hamlet’s “nature,” if we may endow a literary character with such a thing. Part of the interest in Hamlet is, of course, that not only is the time “out of joint,” but the hero himself is “out of joint,” not immediately adapted to the dreadful role he must play. In this way, I think the romantic reading of the tragedy, in which Hamlet is too aloof and philosophical to carry out such a task as revenging a murdered father briskly, is worthy of respect.

Act 4, Scenes 5-7.

Ophelia brings dismay to the Court when she shows clear signs of madness. Perhaps her condition should not be much of a surprise since she has been used as an agent against Hamlet, dangled before him like a piece of meat. A love match has been perverted by the general condition of Denmark , as embodied in the selfish behavior of Polonius and the King. As for Ophelia’s references to flowers, well, flowers are natural beauties, things we use to express a whole range of human experience and sentiment. Ophelia’s mind is disordered, and she registers the corruption all around her, trying pathetically to beautify it with floral symbolism and songs. She has lost her father, and Gertrude will wear her “rue with a difference” (183) because she has lost her son to England . Ophelia is the blighted “flower” of the kingdom, the beauty and innocence that has been sacrificed for the sake of its ambition and lust. Her demise shows the consequences of Denmark ’s degeneracy even more clearly, perhaps, than all the play’s violence. Even Claudius seems genuinely stricken at this latest step in the march of events: “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, / But in battalions” (78-79), he laments to Gertrude, and no sooner has he said it than Laertes bursts in with the common folk at his back, shouting him up for the new king. His main function is, of course, to present an obvious contrast with Hamlet—Laertes will, unlike the Prince, “sweep to his revenge” without much delay; he has no scruples about the concept. Claudius speaks with amazing irony when he promises Gertrude that Laertes will not harm him: “There’s such divinity doth hedge a king / That treason can but peep to what it would, / Acts little of his will” (124-26). Clearly, this truism afforded Hamlet, Sr. no protection from Claudius. In the sixth scene, sailors give a letter from Hamlet to Horatio, explaining how he managed to board a pirate ship that attacked the vessel bound for England . In Scene 7, the King explains to Laertes that so far, he has had to avoid confronting Hamlet because Gertrude and the people are fond of him. Hamlet’s letter to the King is ominous: “High and mighty, You shall know I am set / naked on your kingdom” (43-44). This tone is no less alarming for the promise Hamlet tenders to explain how he has returned.

The King has come to see in Laertes his earthly salvation; the young hothead promises that he would do no less to Hamlet than “cut his throat ‘i th’ church” (127), and Claudius lays out the plot he has partly contrived, only to find that Polonius is able to add a master stroke with the introduction of “an unction” (141) he bought from some itinerant medical charlatan, which he will use to envenom the tip of his rapier. As surety, Claudius will offer Hamlet a poisoned chalice during the fencing match.

The scene concludes with the news that Ophelia has drowned. Gertrude’s beautiful, ekphrastic description of Ophelia’s death from 166-83 honors her loss, but doesn’t redeem the faults that caused it. The death isn’t described as suicide, really; it seems that Ophelia simply stops resisting and is dragged down by her water-logged clothing. Another function of this episode is that it gives Hamlet space for the recognition that he must attain.

Act 5, Scene 1.

The Gravedigger scene works as comic relief, but it also gives us and Hamlet a broader perspective on events up to this point. The Gravedigger calmly goes about his business in the face of death, and even makes jests about it—jests that, as the Riverside editors inform us, refer to an actual law case, that of Hale v. Petit. (The Shakespeare Law Library’s account of that case is worth reading.) We will get no maudlin speeches or meditative musings over Yorick-skulls from him; he’s full of riddles about the sturdiness of the “houses” that gravediggers build. Hamlet appreciates by means of his experiences in this act (and in the fourth act) that the earthly prize of a kingdom, of reputation, of a patch of land, is a joke: “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away” (213-14). If the sought-for revenge is to be accomplished, it can only happen when Hamlet’s mind isn’t tainted by pride or earthly attachment, so his meditation on Yorick the Jester’s skull from 182-95 is vital. Why, indeed, should we cling to life? the skull seems to ask the Prince, who promptly aims this intuition at womankind: “Now get you / to my lady’s [chamber], and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come; make her laugh at that” (192-94). Soon follows the funeral procession of Ophelia, the quibbling of the Churchmen over what rites to accord a possible suicide, and the preposterous one-upmanship between Laertes and Hamlet in and on Ophelia’s uncovered grave. This is obviously not the way Hamlet had meant to reveal himself to the King, but events have gotten the better of him for the moment, and he vents his grief. It almost goes without saying that the two men have ruined Ophelia’s funeral altogether. It’s just one final, if unintended, insult to this long-suffering character.

Act 5, Scene 2.

Killing Polonius got Hamlet shipped off to England to face execution, but now he recounts to Horatio how on the ship he learned an important lesson: “Rashly-- / And prais’d be rashness for it—let us know / Our indiscretion sometime serves us well / When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us / There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will . . .” (6-11). It seems that this speech refers to Hamlet’s insomnia-induced impatience to know the contents of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s letter. What exactly, he wants to know, is their “grand commission” (18)? This known, he forges a new commission purporting that his old pals R & G should be executed on the spot, once they make it to the English King’s presence. His justification of this rather harsh turnabout is simply, “[Why, man, they did make love to this employment,] / They are not near my conscience. . . . / ‘Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes / Between the pass and fell incensed points / Of mighty opposites” (57-62). Perhaps this as an injustice on Hamlet’s part, an act of disproportionate violence against men who know nothing of the evil Claudius has done, but it’s hard to feel much sympathy for them; perhaps our minds are too thoroughly poisoned by listening to Hamlet for that to be possible. They serve the interests of the King against their friend, they are “sponges” just looking for preferment, and to Hamlet they are utterly insignificant pawns in the deadly game of chess between himself and Claudius. Well, if they’ll just be patient for about four centuries, Tom Stoppard will make it up to them by writing that witty play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, so “all’s well that ends well,” right?

At line 65, Hamlet brings up a new motive (though in speaking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he had already hinted at it when he said, “I lack advancement”): he says that “He that hath kill’d my king and whor’d my mother” has also “Popp’d in between th’ election and my hopes” (64-65). In other words, Claudius’ hasty marriage with the Queen has deprived him for now of the succession. The Oedipal significance of this remark is not difficult to see. (On the theme of “inheritance,” see Anthony Burton’s “Further Aspects of Inheritance Law in Hamlet.”)

When the foppish Osric enters bearing the King and Laertes’ challenge, Hamlet calmly accepts it, overriding Laertes’ misgivings with the grand statement, “[W]e defy augury. There is special / providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be [now], / ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if / it be not now, yet it [will] come—the readiness is all” (219-22). This match is not of his making, but whatever happens, Hamlet accepts the outcome. This may be the insight or right attitude he has needed all along; he must become an instrument of God’s vengeance, which will turn the schemes of Claudius and Laertes against them. We might recall that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, although all too willing to prostitute themselves to the designs of earthly rulers, nonetheless go to their deaths as instruments of forces larger than they can imagine, so in this sense they show Hamlet the way. Well, in the end, Claudius’ plan is frustrated, and his union with Gertrude nullified without issue (i.e. children). As so often in Shakespeare, there’s a Christian lesson to be drawn: the wicked will ultimately will find a way to destroy themselves; they are remarkably consistent in the patterns of their evil. Hamlet gains no earthly reward but death. Young Fortinbras enters the kingdom almost by accident, in the wake of the old order’s self-destruction: he and other onlookers will hear from Horatio of “purposes mistook, / Fall’n on the inventors’ heads” (384-85). There’s really no question of Fortinbras’ being a better ruler than his predecessors, though Hamlet’s final thoughts commend him. He is simply an opportunist in the right time at the right place. This hardly amounts to a strong purification of the State, though it’s fair to say that that was never really the play’s emphasis anyhow.

To return to the dearly departed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, some critics see them as loose ends that Shakespeare has deliberately left hanging at the play’s conclusion—have they really deserved their harsh fate, considering that they are only minor players in a grand tragedy? Does their taking-off mean that God’s providential design is a bit “rough-hewn,” or at least that his justice is not self-evidently “just” to us? Perhaps, but in my view, this messy fact (along with Ophelia’s lamentable and unfair demise) doesn’t necessarily destroy the “providential” reading to which I have generally subscribed. At the least, Hamlet is a curious revenge play in that it ultimately denies agency to the very character who is most responsible for ensuring that the play’s villain gets what he deserves, and yet the revenge “gets itself accomplished” nonetheless, in the most hideously appropriate manner, as if Shakespeare’s God has much the same sense of “poetic justice” as Dante’s did.

Week 15, Lope de Vega, Florentine Codex, etc.

2009-08-16T19:35:00.000-07:00

Notes on Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna

In the first act, the peasants treat the audience to a “Philosophy 101” roundtable not unlike the discussion between Pietro Bembo and the courtiers in Castiglione concerning the merits of earthly and heavenly love. Mengo “stands up for bastards”—for the selfish and the lustful—while Frondoso and Laurencia are more polite towards the polite discourse of the city.

Still, I think they see through the game-like aspect “respectability,” and they treat love playfully, favoring neither priggishness nor repression, but also not sanctioning complete license. In the second act, we will see the Comendador’s viciously serious attitude towards this game: he sees women as objects, and supposes that “lower-class women have no honor.” For him, that is, honor is purely a matter of rank.

It seems that the bet placed by three characters on whether or not love exists is important. The Comendador and Frondoso display different ways of expressing “love.” The former is selfish and rapacious, while the latter shows much more courtesy even though he is a peasant. The Comendador takes advantage of his martial status—he treats civil life as if it were a war.

The Comendador, having been defeated by the kings of Aragon , turns his tyranny back upon Fuente Ovejuna, spoiling the wedding of Frondoso and Laurencia. The Comendador has lost everyone’s respect because of what he did to Laurencia already; he asserts the ancient chivalric values in a perverted way—rank above everything, with military glory covering for any number of offenses. His values are fundamentally confused—honor has become an empty word for him. The community of Fuente Ovejuna is tightly knit, and everyone asks everyone else’s blessings.

There is a contrast between the two peasants Frondoso and Mengo, but either way the whole community will have to stick together if they are to overcome the Comendador’s violent arrogance. We notice that the kings of Aragon are unifying Spain and asserting central royal authority over ancient feudal prerogative. In the view of Lope de Vega, it is the kings of Aragon who will show respect for Spain’s ordinary people, whereas feudalists like the Comendador obey only their own selfish whims.

The marriage quickly turns into a funeral-like spectacle, with Frondoso and Laurencia carried off to prison. Then there’s a renewal of male honor, spurred on by women’s insults—if the men “act like women,” the women will have to take the place of the men, becoming Amazons or even Bacchantes. That change, says Laurencia, will astound the world—a revolution. The men respond. We then see what Bakhtin might call a “carnivalesque” overturning of the local order, with the Comendador and his henchmen being barbarously, if somewhat comically and suggestively, slain. The women take part in the whole thing—there’s a community barbecue of those who represent unjust feudal authority, and a symbolic emasculation of men like Guzman who use chivalric language and expectations to further their selfish desires. But Lope de Vega isn’t interested in “permanent revolution”—the rioting takes place in the name of adherence to Ferdinand and Isabella, not just local honor (though that’s part of it). It takes place, in other words, in favor of establishing Spain as a centrally controlled, unified kingdom. The law must therefore be invoked to adjudicate the disorder in Fuente Ovejuna. But the community sticks together—the only way they can survive since otherwise there would have to be a sacrificial peasant to offer up to the principle of rank and authority. The peasants respond with humor to the tortures that Ferdinand’s Judge visits on them. Their willingness to suffer actively may remind us of Christ’s active suffering in the Gospel narratives. Ferdinand wisely decides not to destroy the whole town, but rather to pardon them all since they are loyal, and he takes paternal responsibility for them. The townspeople have rejected an oppressive and petty order in favor of a gracious royal couple, Ferdinand and Isabella, who with their marriage united Castile and Aragon and who understand that centralized state power must go hand in hand with acknowledgment of the common people’s dignity.

Notes on The Florentine Codex

The mother is represented in these poems as a kind of warrior and goddess; her pain and self-sacrifice are equated with valor on the battlefield. Even though mothers are given credit for embodying the principle of generation, they are warned by the poet not to take personal pride in their sacrifice or their status. The collectivity is honored, not the individual.

Notes on Cantares Mexicanos

The songs seem to be inspired by earth and by the gods directly. They appear to be composed in an exuberant state, and their effect on the hearer is described in terms of intoxication. The poems are like psychedelic flowers growing from sky, soil, and water; they put the hearers in touch with the divine, with life’s highest purposes. Moreover, the songs should lead naturally to action.

The power of transformation is very direct and strong in them—the hesitant warrior is addressed with transfiguring metaphors; the point of these metaphors is sacred. It isn’t just to explain the unfamiliar by means of the familiar; it is to engraft the hearer into the entire religious system. That’s different from explaining and comforting. It means that the action to take place differs from whatever the hearer may be hesitating to do. And in the fourth song, the power of words is sensuous, physical—identified with the intoxicating scent of flowers. The singer describes nature as a life-world that has the power to take us beyond our ordinary ourselves, and he ascribes the same power to his words. That reminds me a bit of the Symbolists with their incantatory, sacred-word theories about poetry.

Notes on The Popol Vuh

The Mayan Quiché kingdom is post-classical in that the Classical Period runs from 300-900 AD. It seems that the Popol Vuh or Council Book is much older that that, at least in its earliest form. The Norton editors say that the book was said to have been derived from a pilgrimage to the edge of the Atlantic Ocean and that it was used as a visionary instrument in governing the kingdom. The current authors are post-1520’s conquest-era, after Pedro de Alvarado’s invasion in 1524. So the Council Book must be brought to light anew. What we have is a hybrid text, therefore: the stories seem to be partly an act of defiance by an author or authors confronted with the claims of Christian Spaniards to superiority. It is partly a protest work, and partly performance art—with the Ancient Word as the thing to be performed. Christian iconography and narrative have entered the picture. There are plenty of echoes of Genesis—the creation story with its emphasis on the ex nihilo aspect of creation, the idea that men were created to praise God, Eve plucking the forbidden fruit, the idea that the creation must be as full as possible etc. But the outcome isn’t the same, and the gods (the Sun God being supreme lord) don’t hold the same attitude towards earth and humanity. Not only that, there is more than one attempt at creation. Yahweh doesn’t “worry” about creating anything, but these gods do; they worry about how the cosmos will be perpetuated, how order may be maintained and light perpetuated.

In the account of the time before humanity, evil anarch-gods or celestial jokers hold sway, but these darkness-loving, deceitful, vain gods are rightly defeated by divine heroes who, with their craftiness and ingenuity, are more than a match for the jokers’ excessive bloodlust and arrogance. The underdogs combat the underworld lords by means of asymmetrical warfare, so that order, light, and respect may emerge. The human order that later comes into being seems to share some of the anarchs’ tendencies.

The gods worry that their creatures will rival them in “distance vision,” so they make humans become narrow, limited, and literally short-sighted. The Quiché account states this anxiety very bluntly, and with no moral justification to back it up. Yahweh’s concern in the Bible is similar, but he makes his case majestically and with reference to the moral transgression of Adam and Eve. As for the creation itself, humanity is close to the earth, close to and even created from the earthly things that sustain it: corn or maize would have been the Quiché people’s staple crop.

Week 13, Michel de Montaigne

2009-08-16T19:34:00.000-07:00

Notes on Michel de Montaigne’s Essais

“To the Reader”

2636. Montaigne is as always slippery—he says he wants to present himself in a natural way without artifice, but a few lines later, he makes a backdoor concession to artifice: “Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature’s first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.” Montaigne’s imaginary reader is his recently departed friend Etienne. Donald Frame makes the point well—even though Rousseau criticized him for not being candid enough, Montaigne is not really writing confessions. The best way to ruin a friendship is constantly to talk about yourself and your own problems. A certain distance from oneself is necessary to the maintenance of friendship, and Montaigne’s reader is best understood as a friend. The other point I would like to make by way of introduction has to do with Kierkegaard’s idea about the incommunicable nature of serious reflection—those who think they are communicating directly about matters of the self or even deep philosophical issues are most deceived. Here is the introduction in French, with Renaissance orthography preserved:

C’est icy un livre de bonne foy, lecteur. Il t’advertit dés l’entree, que je ne m’y suis proposé aucune fin, que domestique et privee: je n’y ay eu nulle consideration de ton service, ny de ma gloire: mes forces ne sont pas capables d’un tel dessein. Je l’ay voüé à la commodité particuliere de mes parens et amis: à ce que m’ayans perdu (ce qu’ils ont à faire bien tost) ils y puissent retrouver aucuns traicts de mes conditions et humeurs, et que par ce moyen ils nourrissent plus entiere et plus vifve, la connoissance qu’ils ont eu de moy. Si c’eust esté pour rechercher la faveur du monde, je me fusse paré de beautez empruntees. Je veux qu’on m’y voye en ma façon simple, naturelle et ordinaire, sans estude et artifice : car c’est moy que je peins. Mes defauts s’y liront au vif, mes imperfections et ma forme naïfve, autant que la reverence publique me l’a permis. Que si j’eusse esté parmy ces nations qu’on dit vivre encore souz la douce liberté des premieres loix de nature, je t’asseure que je m’y fusse tres-volontiers peint tout entier, Et tout nud. Ainsi, Lecteur, je suis moy-mesme la matiere de mon livre: ce n’est pas raison que tu employes ton loisir en un subject si frivole et si vain. A Dieu donq. De Montaigne, ce 12 de juin 1580. Montaigne’s Essays.

“Of the Power of the Imagination”

2636-38. Montaigne begins the essay with the proposition that “A strong imagination creates the event” (2636). The rest of the essay partly confirms this proposition, but not in all cases or completely. He mixes with his own experience the experience of others and the authority of classical examples and folk wisdom, which he sometimes treats almost the same as his own experience. The very first example is illustrative: Montaigne recounts how an excellent doctor, Simon Thomas, told someone suffering from consumption (TB) that gazing upon the healthy Montaigne would make him feel better; but Montaigne suggests that a worsening of his own condition at the same time is entirely possible. Why shouldn’t the consumptive’s good fortune be Montaigne’s bad luck, if imagination is so strong a power in the curing and bringing-on of illness? He mentions also some strange cases: the Roman orator Gallus Vibius, who drove himself mad thinking about madness; the ancient King Cippus, who got so enthusiastic at a bullfight that he grew horns, and the story of “Marie Germain,” who supposedly changed sexes. On the whole, Montaigne gives most of the credit for “miracles, visions, enchantments,” and other such things to the workings of strong imagination. (2638).

2638-41. Montaigne soon steers the subject towards sexual relations—this was not really the initial theme or subject of the essay. So why does he move towards intimacy? He offers a rather comical example in which he colluded with an elderly female relative of some count or other to help the man overcome a bout of impotence. As it turns out, the hocus-pocus routine they develop seems to do the trick. Montaigne draws us towards the idea that we are not fully masters of our will or physiology—many things we think we control happen to us; we don’t make them happen. His main exhibit so happens to be the male sex organ, but he quickly indicts the body in its entirety: “I ask you to think whether there is a single one of the parts of our body that does not often refuse its function to our will and exercise it against our will” (2340).

2641-42. Montaigne also addresses psychosomatic phenomena of the sort we now call “the placebo effect”—tell me you are giving me medicine, and I may be cured even if it is only colored water or a sugar pill. I like the example on 2641 of the woman who thinks she has swallowed a pin—it reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where George Costanza thinks he has swallowed a fly with his soup, and becomes hysterical, jumping up and asking everyone in the diner “What can happen?”

2643-44. Now that Montaigne is getting around to explaining his methodology as a writer, we find that George Costanza’s question is exactly what he wants to write about—“What can happen?” As he writes, “So in the study that I am making of our behavior and motives, fabulous testimonies, provided they are possible, serve like true ones. Whether they have happened or no, in Paris or Rome, to John or Peter, they exemplify, at all events, some human potentiality, and thus their telling imparts useful information to me” (2643). He exercises the power of reason and reflection on other people’s tall tales and his own experiences alike. The idea isn’t to arrive at historical or scientific truth; it is instead to bring out the difficulty of pinning down human experience to a codified body of knowledge. This is not the same thing as pessimism. Montaigne seems (even in his early phase as a writer) to have combined skepticism with curiosity. On the whole, he is far too curious ever to be a true stoic—no wonder he more or less rejects that philosophy in its purest form. I suppose that he operates rather like a psychologist, except that his aim is philosophical investigation rather than arriving at a cure for “the human condition.”

On these pages, Montaigne also says he writes about the past for a number of reasons, mostly having to do with his own defects—he declares himself “a sworn enemy of obligation, assiduity, perseverance” and will have nothing to do with “extended narration” (2643). But his main idea seems to be that when you write about the present, you encounter all sorts of obligations towards others—what you write or say is immediately consequential: “I consider it less hazardous to write of things past than present,” he says, “inasmuch as the writer has only to give an account of a borrowed truth” (2643). I return to Kierkegaard’s idea about the duplicity involved in treating difficult ideas as if they were capable of being rendered transparent and communicated with others. Montaigne says his old stories are not like medical drugs or present issues—they pose no immediate danger either to the reader or the writer. (2344) This statement may be a way of defending the author’s right to indirection and subtlety—a declaration on Montaigne’s part that he is not communicating anything directly, not teaching anything to anyone. This is a strikingly modern idea worthy of Kierkegaard or Heidegger or Oscar Wilde, the latter of whom said “nothing of the smallest importance ever actually occurs.” And if Oscar didn’t invert Hamlet’s sentence about great enterprises being blasted by “the pale cast of thought,” he should have.

Really what Montaigne has done is discuss a lot of foolish examples and lead us in circles respecting the true subject of his essay; finally, he comes around to making a cogent philosophical point—not a dogmatic statement, but a number of very sharp observations about the complexities involved in human behavior and reflection about human behavior. I suppose Ralph Waldo Emerson might as well have derived his motto—“whim” from Montaigne. ( “I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the doorpost, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company.” Self-Reliance, 1841.) To be whimsical is not to be worthless—in fact, I suspect that the most serious people sometimes turn out to be the biggest fools and the most dangerous agents in the world. They have too little capacity to reflect upon their thoughts and actions, and insufficient humility to laugh at themselves. As for Montaigne’s role in French politics—in a time of extremism and violence, he promoted tolerance and reason, which probably seemed like pure whimsy to others engaged in their deadly earnest political pursuits and religious campaigns. The fact that reason seldom prevails is no excuse for abandoning it.

“Of Cannibals”

2644-45. Montaigne opens with a good observation about so-called civilized people: “I am afraid we have eyes bigger than our stomachs, and more curiosity than capacity. We embrace everything, but we clasp only wind” (2644). At base, we have learned to covet, which makes us miserable, and instead of living in the here and now, we are always “somewhere else.” All of this comes down to saying that desire and cleverness get the better of us, and that is what we call “civilization.” Montaigne praises simple folk over their sharper fellows: “clever people observe more things and more curiously, but they interpret them” (2645), and interpretation means falsification to some degree.

2646. Montaigne says that we shouldn’t honor artifice over nature, and insists that the opposition between barbarous and civilized is a trick of language perpetrated by biased sensibilities: “each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.” As for our attempts to transform nature in our horticultural practices, he writes that “it is those [fruits] that we have changed artificially and led astray from the common order, that we should rather call wild.” As with plants, so with manners. We alter what is natural to suit our corrupted tastes, and then declare natural things and manners “savage,” a term connoting extreme disapproval.

Montaigne’s own bemused stance towards the native Brazilians contrasts markedly with this attitude. It seems clear that he privileges nature in the sense of “the natural environment”: “All our efforts cannot even succeed in reproducing the nest of the tiniest little bird,” he says—nature is not simple but wonderfully complex; creatures live in perfect accord with their environments, and show something like collective creativity in doing it, too, as his reference to the bird’s nest and spider’s web suggest. (Why should instinct, as we would call it today, be dispraised by comparison with eccentric individuality?)

2647. With respect to human beings, Montaigne says the term “barbarous” is appropriate if by it we mean only that a given group of people may be “fashioned very little by the human mind, and . . . still very close to their original naturalness.” Such people, he insists, live in a manner that surpasses even the highest ideals of the philosophers; they are better than the inhabitants of Plato’s Republic or “Polity.” Of course, that’s a radical redefinition of the term “barbarous,” which Montaigne is happy to offer. We may well question whether or not human beings were ever in precisely the state of animal-like “naturalness” Montaigne attributes to them, of course.

But perhaps we need not suppose he’s equating human naturalness with animal naturalness: the phrase “fashioned very little by the human mind” might suggest instead that native peoples are highly intelligent but not fiendishly self-conscious, not bent upon constantly transforming and inflecting their already impressive and even sophisticated ways of thinking and acting. It is Europeans and other “civilized” groups, by implication, who are constantly revolutionizing their own humanity and the understanding of that humanity. We might insist that this “permanent revolution” outlook is essential, that man is the self-transforming animal, and so forth—but I think Montaigne would just tell us it’s possible to take such an outlook too far and that matters as they stand in his own sixteenth-century Europe (or our twenty-first century America, for that matter) are a pretty good indication of why that isn’t a good thing to do. But as the rest of the essay indicates, Montaigne really isn’t much interested in making a passionate case for primitivism, either—it just isn’t his way with an argument. He’s writing skeptical, even at times proto-deconstructive, essais, not “position papers.”

2648-49. What exactly do the Brazilians believe? Well, says Montaigne, they praise courage in war and “love for their wives” (2648). They believe in an immortal soul and in the power of prophesy, though they suffer no failures to practice that occupation. (Prophets are sort of like artists as Horace describes them in Ars Poetica: nobody has any patience with a second-rate poet, though a second-rate doctor or lawyer may prove useful enough.) They practice cannibalism after a battle and collect the heads of enemy warriors, which they display right outside their own doors. Why do they roast and eat their enemies’ flesh? Not for the sake of the meal, reports Montaigne. Instead, they do it “to betoken an extreme revenge” (2649). That doesn’t sound so favorable, admits the author, who isn’t set on completely overturning or dismissing the hierarchy between savage and civilized. What he’s doing is exposing the fact that we wield this hierarchical set of terms as a kind of ruse: “I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of such acts, but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling . . . (and what is worse, on the pretext of piety and religion), than in roasting and eating him after he is dead” (2649). The contrast here is between straightforward, no-apologies-or-excuses-necessary revenge and fiendish torments palmed off as holy acts or “justice.” The uncivilized may do some unpleasant things, but it’s civilized people who make a fine art of barbarity and disregard the arbitrations of reason. On the whole, this business of cannibalism, and Montaigne’s treatment of it, suggests an awareness that it’s more difficult to privilege “the natural man” absolutely than it is to suggest that “Mother Nature” is superior to any of us.

2650-53. With respect to warfare, Montaigne says, the Brazilian natives make it “as excusable and beautiful as this human disease can be; its only basis among them is their rivalry in valor. They are not fighting for the conquest of new lands . . .” (2650). The idea here is that it’s “natural” to want no more land or goods than you can actually use; the desire for more is corrupt, and fighting over other people’s property is vicious. Of course, sometimes it’s said of modern humanity that we fight “even for an eggshell” (a phrase Shakespeare gives Hamlet) rather than for material possessions and power. But most likely Montaigne would say modern humans are just confusing lust for material gain and the pursuit of political power with genuine honor and appreciation of courage. The natives really fight for valor’s sake; we just say that’s what we are doing. Montaigne writes, “The role of true victory is in fighting, not in coming off safely; and the honor of valor consists in combating, not in beating” (2651). It’s the process that matters, not the outcome. As for the courage of prisoners facing sacrifice, says the author, they are reported to spit in the faces of those who mean to kill them. This behavior differs greatly from the European manner of surrender, ransom, and so forth: “Truly here are real savages by our standards; for either they must be thoroughly so, or we must be; there is an amazing distance between their character and ours” (2651).

2652-53. Montaigne notes that the Brazilian natives practice polygamy (allegedly without demur on the women’s part), and that their language rivals Greek for its beauty. He notes that three natives traveled to Rouen, France during Charles IX’s reign (1560-74), and that they thought it strange to see so many grown people obeying such a young child (Charles’ reign began when he was about ten years old). Similarly, they were incredulous that the very poor simply accepted their lot rather than just taking what they needed to survive. Montaigne supposes that those natives will someday pay a heavy price “in loss of repose and happiness” (2652) because of their trip to Europe. He notes with admiration what he heard (through the thick veil of translation, apparently) directly from one of the men about the advantages of rank being simply “to march foremost in war.” But his final remark returns us to the complex stance of the piece as a whole: “All this is not too bad—but what’s the use? They don’t wear breeches” (2652). Perhaps Montaigne implies here that the value of communication between two very different peoples lies in mutual recognition of strangeness, in acknowledging the alien quality of other cultures, not in adopting others’ ways. Montaigne seems to me to be suggesting that civilization is at least partly a cover story for cruelty, lust, and greed. That’s a dreadful realization, but all the same, we are more or less stuck with being “civilized” and can’t return to or fully appropriate the manners of our “savage” fellow humans, uncorrupted of heart and will though they may be. The natives wear no breeches. They won’t conform, so most of us aren’t going to accept their ways or their best insights: everything comes down to taste and fashion with us; essence and truth aren’t worth much to those so taken with the show of things.

“Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions”

2653-56. In this brilliant foray into the vagaries of human conduct, Montaigne begins with the observation that “Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light” (2653). We are creatures of contradiction, and for sheer inscrutability, Montaigne says, we should praise the great Augustus Caesar, victor at Actium over Antony and Cleopatra and subsequent first emperor of Rome. Nobody has ever been able to figure him out—his whole life was a long series of actions that don’t add up to anything like a consistent, much less unified, character. (This inconsistency has made for entertaining variety in the artistic portrayal of the Emperor: Shakespeare casts him as ruthless and businesslike, a true Machiavel, as does the recent British series Rome, though the latter adds a twist of sadism and extreme iciness, while Robert Graves’ novel I, Claudius characterizes Augustus as a good-natured, generous fellow. My guess is that he was probably all of those things, at different times and to different people.) And in truth, writes Montaigne, we are all somewhat like Augustus in our less exalted way: our vices stem from no grand Faustus-compact with the devil but are instead only the unstable product of “unruliness and lack of moderation” (2654). Similarly, our virtues fluctuate with circumstance and desire: yesterday’s virtuous woman is today’s shameless “wench,” and the courageous man of a recent battle or fight is just as likely to turn coward next time around (2655-56). In sum, “We float between different states of mind; we wish nothing freely, nothing absolutely, nothing constantly” (2654).

2657-58. The inner self is composite, writes Montaigne: “I have nothing to say about myself absolutely, simply, and solidly, without confusion and without mixture, or in one word. Distinguo is the most universal member of my logic” (2656). The self is always shifting, and there seems to be no bedrock or core to it. What methodology does Montaigne offer those who insist upon plumbing the depths of human desire and conduct? Well, certainly no consistent path seems available. What seems like solid advice dissipates soon enough. At first we are told that “to judge a man, we must follow his traces long and carefully” (2657). But this is not a matter of observing external actions over a long period since “No one makes a definite plan of his life; we think about it only piecemeal,” and in any case, as the essay’s own examples suggest, even if we had a plan we couldn’t stick to it for two minutes running. “We are all patchwork,” writes Montaigne, “and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others” (2657), a point he derives from Seneca. All that’s left is to “probe the inside and discover what springs set men in motion” (2658). But that’s obviously a great deal easier said than done, as Montaigne goes on to admit by way of conclusion: “since this is an arduous and hazardous undertaking, I wish fewer people would meddle with it” (2658). True to his own epistemological skepticism, Montaigne hasn’t so much been trying to prove anything positive as to demonstrate the sheer difficulty of knowing human beings, of rendering them intelligible, either with regard to what they do, or what they say, or what they think and desire within themselves.

“Of Coaches”

2658-71. Since this entry is already rather detailed, I will just offer a brief observation about this essay: “Of Coaches” is typical of Montaigne in that the piece isn’t exactly about coaches, except for a few passages. It is about princely pomp and excess, the cruelty of the Spaniards when they conquered parts of the New World, and other things. I’ve read that the increased use of coaches might well serve as a symbol of excessive luxury and corruption, so in that sense the concept “coach” loosely associates the various topics with one another. Montaigne notes near the outset that he can’t bear to travel in coaches and prefers to ride on horseback, while various ancient and modern warriors and rulers have done some really remarkable things with coaches and chariots, some employing them for usefulness, others for ostentation (2660). There is no unitary cultural significance for coaches, or litters, or the various kinds of transport—that’s probably one point Montaigne is making in this whimsical essay. At the end the author returns to coaches, pointing out that the Peruvians’ last king rode in a litter, and the men vied around him for the honor of dying for him as litter-bearers. The implication seems to be that the last Peruvian king and his people showed kind of uncorrupted magnificence that modern Europeans can hardly hope to match.

Week 11, Francis Petrarch, Niccolo Machiavelli, B. Castiglione

2009-08-16T19:33:00.000-07:00

Notes on Francis Petrarch’s “Letter to Dionisio de Borgo San Sepolcro” and “Sonnets”

2480-85. Petrarch lived from 1304-1374, during a time when there was a struggle for the seat of the papacy between France and Italy. Petrarch’s father, a lawyer, was exiled from Florence around the same time Dante was exiled, and he settled in Arezzo. Petrarch himself subsequently moved to Avignon. He chose not to practice law and did not go into the church, but devoted his life to literature and humanistic inquiry—he was a Renaissance man just before the Renaissance. Much of his work was done in Latin rather than Italian, so he partially rejected Dante’s bold venture into vernacular literature. The “Letter to Dionisio” chronicles not simply his attempt to scale Mount Ventoux, France in 1336 but instead (at least in its finished, literary form) a turning from material pursuits towards contemplation of heavenly things and the state of his own spiritual health. The letter takes on an Augustinian cast when Petrarch reads in the Confessions the sentence, “And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea . . . but themselves they consider not” (2484). As in so many religious narratives (Augustine’s Confessions themselves being perhaps the most illustrious example), this textual moment has a profound influence on the speaker since the words seem to be aimed directly at him, here and now. He has not paid sufficient attention to what is going on in his own soul, and now realizes that the one thing necessary is to “trample beneath us those appetites which spring from earthy impulses” (2485). The thought is conventional, but as any Renaissance intellectual would add, that isn’t necessarily a problem: what makes the letter worthwhile is the fineness of the allegory and the personal application Petrarch makes of the biblical and Augustinian imperative to “look within” rather than seeking answers and comforts from the material realm around us. In sum, Petrarch offers a spiritualized reading of a secular event. His thoughts turn towards a key parallel text, namely Augustine’s Confessions. Our editors say that Petrarch’s path heavenwards is full of introspection, confusion, and self-doubt. Augustine’s self-overcoming is a model Petrarch would like to follow with respect to his own responsiveness to inward events, but he finds it hard going since clarity and self-transcendence are the goal, and the letter ends with a prayer for assistance in his quest.

2485-90. Who was Laura? It is not certain, but most scholars identify Laura as Laurette de Noves, who was already married two years when Petrarch met her on April 6, 1327 (Good Friday), in the church of St. Clare in Avignon. Thomas Bergin says that Petrarch describes four Lauras. The first one stands for Petrarch’s pursuit of the poet’s Laurel crown. The second one is like Dante’s Beatrice, a guide to heaven. The third is beauty itself, a potential distraction from the poet’s Christian hopes for salvation. The fourth Laura is simply the young woman herself, without all the metaphoric and allusive baggage. But most important in Petrarch’s poems is his own attitudes: he is “nostalgic, melancholy, passionate and yet always curiously removed from life, an observer rather than a participant.” Introspection is the hallmark of these poems at their best, and although “Petrarchanism” (I mean the poetry written after the fashion of Petrarch, not so much Petrarch’s own work) may seem ridiculous in its extremes, it captures something true about the experience of love—that is, people tend to stylize their deepest emotions, as if we need a certain distance from them. Similarly, Robert Frost the American poet tends to make his ordinary characters speak in a very conventional, almost stilted way when they are undergoing the strain of difficult experiences or agonizing emotions, and the “burning and freezing” tenor of some Petrarchan sonnets captures the highs and lows of romantic love. Petrarch is a man of extremes, and that is the way he casts Laura: her inapproachability only makes him desire her more intensely. While Beatrice was a remote angel of light for Petrarch’s predecessor Dante and as such too distant for him to entertain hopes of reunion, Laura’s inapproachability endows her with a lasting erotic charge that spurs on Petrarch in his literary and spiritual quest.

Here is one of Francis Petrarch’s more typical sonnets, “Number 134,” as translated by Anthony Mortimer (keep in mind that Petrarch was a sophisticated poet—-not all of his sonnets are so programmatically oxymoronic):

I find no peace, and have no arms for war,
and fear and hope, and burn and yet I freeze,
and fly to heaven, lying on earth’s floor,
and nothing hold, and all the world I seize.

My jailer opens not, nor locks the door,
nor binds me to hear, nor will loose my ties;
Love kills me not, nor breaks the chains I wear,
nor wants me living, nor will grant me ease.

I have no tongue, and shout; eyeless, I see;
I long to perish, and I beg for aid;
I love another, and myself I hate.

Weeping I laugh, I feed on misery,
by death and life so equally dismayed:
for you, my lady, am I in this state.

The sonnet below is a memorial poem to “Laura,” the woman Petrarch (or “Francesco Petrarca”) loved “hopelessly and from afar” (Wilkie 1586) until her death in 1348. Though some of the 366 poems in the Canzoniere are not concerned with Laura, many of them deal with her in life or in memory. Central to Petrarch’s sequence is “the range of moods of the speaker, a range that includes every emotion from spiritual ecstasy to agonized self-laceration and melancholy resignation, every mood associated with love, perhaps, except the joy of physical consummation” (Wilkie 1586). “Laura” means many things in Petrarch’s poetry—she is the “laurel” of the poet’s ambitions, but she is also his spiritual guide, much like Dante’s beloved, Beatrice, and simply a beautiful young female of whom Petrarch was enamored. But most important, Wilkie points out, is the fact that all of Petrarch’s sonnets are concerned not so much with Laura herself as with the poet and his task; they are “metapoetic.” Here is “Sonnet 292” from the Canzoniere, as translated by Anthony Mortimer:

The eyes I spoke of once in words that burn,
the arms and hands and feet and lovely face
that took me from myself for such a space
of time and marked me out from other men;

the waving hair of unmixed gold that shone,
the smile that flashed with the angelic rays
that used to make this earth a paradise,
are now a little dust, all feeling gone;

and yet I live, grief and disdain to me,
left where the light I cherished never shows,
in fragile bark on the tempestuous sea.

Here let my loving song come to a close;
the vein of my accustomed art is dry,
and this, my lyre, turned at last to tears.

Sonnets and background information were taken from Literature of the Western World, Volume One. Eds. Brian Wilkie and James Hurt. New York: Macmillan, 1984. 1586-87, 1593-94.

The Petrarchan sonnet, at least in its Italian-language form, generally follows a set rhyme scheme, which runs as follows: abba abba cdc dcd. The first eight lines, or “octave,” do not often deviate from the “abba abba” pattern, but the last six lines, or “sestet,” frequently follow a different pattern, such as “cde cde,” “cde ced,” or “cdc dee.” See Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, by Paul Fussell. New York: Random, 1979. Chapter 7. In addition, it’s good to know that in 2008, as I write this addition to an old guide, you can easily find information on most rhyme schemes simply by typing them in your Google or other search bar: Google “abba abba cdc dcd” and you’ll be surprised how many good guides to poetic form are available on the net.

Notes on Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince

2521-23. In his chapter “Cesare Borgia,” Machiavelli argues that Cesare or “Duke Valentino” combined the cunning of the fox and the martial audacity of the lion; he played the cards Fortune dealt him, and played them well. He weakened the Orsini and Colonnesi factions in Rome and called on the French to help him put down the rebellions that arose. More broadly, he managed to scatter such factions by appealing to men of rank and rewarding them without reference to which party they served. He took Romagna, shrewdly employing the cruel Remirro de Orco, who, we are told, “in a short time rendered the province peaceful and united, gaining enormous prestige” (1523). He then ordered that henchman to be cut in half and displayed in the public square, lest the people’s hatred flow towards him rather than towards the now-powerful de Orco. He assuaged public feeling against him, that is, not with kindness but rather with a well-directed act of violence—a political “holistic remedy,” with cruelty curing outrage over cruelty. But in the end, illness and bad fortune got the better of Cesare, something that can happen even to the best of Machiavellian princes. Cesare made the most of his opportunities, and that is the best anyone can do.

2524-26. In his chapter, “On the Things for Which Men, and Especially Princes, Are Praised Or Censured,” Machiavelli says pointedly that “if a prince wishes to maintain himself, he must learn how to be not good, and to use that ability or not as is required” (2524). A vital question is, how can the prince use both his virtues and his vices to get and retain power? There are virtues that weaken a prince’s grasp, and vices that strengthen it. To be overly generous is a mistake, says Machiavelli in his chapter “On Liberality and Parsimony,” because generosity commits the prince to a ruinous economic policy based on unfair taxation. Liberality is not a renewable resource. It makes people like you at first, but then they keep asking for more until you have nothing left to give, and then they will begin to despise you.

2526-28. In his chapter “On Cruelty and Pity,” Machiavelli says that cruelty is sometimes necessary on the principle of sacrificing one person for the greater good of the many. He argues further that men are generally “ungrateful, mutable, pretenders and dissemblers, prone to avoid danger, thirsty for gain” (2527). In a word, people are selfish. Love establishes obligations that are easily abandoned, but fear induces the dread of punishment—a far more consistent motivator. Still, the prince must not become the object of hatred, which means that he must respect the property rights of his subjects and take care not to provoke the nobles or the populace beyond necessity. In military matters, cruelty may be excused on the grounds of immediate necessity. It is in the prince’s power to make people afraid, but love is something they have in their own power—the prince cannot control it. And control is the name of the game in politics: you don’t want to be defined by others, and you don’t want to be forced to act in ways that harm your interests or those of your subjects. Aristotle said that politics was the art of helping others achieve the good life and that as such it was among the most honorable of pursuits. Machiavelli’s view is not without idealism, but his understanding is that humans are flawed and selfish by nature and that this badness in us will come out under the pressure of circumstances. It takes craft and “art” to harness the subjects’ desires and make them useful. What’s needed as well is an honest assessment of one’s own powers, virtues, and limitations: if a ruler is of a generous and forgiving nature, he or she had better know how those qualities can affect the ability to govern. How are others likely to respond and in what circumstances?

2528-29. Should the prince keep his promises? In his chapter on that subject, “In What Way Faith Should be Kept by Princes,” Machiavelli says that promises are contingent upon circumstances. Others will break their promises whenever it suits them, so the prince has the right to do the same. It is his prerogative to behave like an animal—specifically, now like the audacious lion and now like the cunning fox. This is an amoral, bold application of the Renaissance idea that man is a microcosm containing within himself all elements of God’s creation. On 2529, Machiavelli says people often act like simpletons thanks to their selfishness and shortsightedness, so it will always be easy to find some way of deceiving them. Pope Alexander VI, Machiavelli points out, always deceived people, and never seemed to run out of eager dupes. It is only necessary to seem virtuous, to keep up an appearance of virtuousness, since doing so establishes cover for the times when it is, unfortunately, necessary not to be good. It’s interesting to speculate on what Machiavelli would say to President Lincoln’s democratic-spirited dictum, “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” He might sympathize with this notion to some extent: after all, Machiavelli favored republican rule in Florence, so he believed the people should govern themselves without the aid of princes. And a prince who behaves with notorious wickedness and faithlessness might eventually make himself hated and so lose his grip on power.

Still, while Machiavelli is at his core idealistic as our editors say, there’s no denying the realist edge in his political theory—he says in this chapter that “the crowd is always caught by appearance and by the outcome of events, and the crowd is all there is in the world. . .” (2529). There’s little hope in such a sentence that “the crowd” is ever going to break out of its cage of illusion and see people and events for what they really are, so how much danger is the artfully deceptive prince really in here? The suggestion is that people want to be deceived, especially when the deception is pleasant and seems to offer them advantages and all the good things in life. The world turns on appearances, not truth. And as for those few who are able to see the deceitful, sometimes immoral or amoral prince for what he really is, “there is no place for the few when the many have room enough.” That idea is as old at least as Herodotus—I recall the example of the King who explains to his subordinate his principle of ruling. He points to a field of waving grass or flowers and suggests that the tallest ones must be cut down because they stand out too much. The intellectuals, the prideful and self-sufficient, the ones who see the truth too clearly, are dangerous. The notion that people judge only by success or failure gives us a whole theory of history—if you start a war, for example, you will be judged on the basis of success on the battlefield. If you lose, almost everyone will say that your cause was unjust and you should be punished; if you win, those who think such things will mostly keep quiet, and will be little heeded if they choose to speak out against you. In sum and in keeping with the “situational morality” Machiavelli has been positing, then, we are led back to the insistence the prince need only seem “compassionate, trustworthy, humane, honest, and religious” (1529). Above all, religious because when people believe you’re pious, they will credit you with all the other good qualities Machiavelli names.

2530-32. In his chapter, “Fortune Is a Woman,” Machiavelli’s remark, “la Fortuna ed una donna” implies aggression, true enough, but it also alludes to the capacities of a canny suitor. Boldness may imply humility, it may that one subject oneself to the storms of Lady Fortune. Stand up, keep up your half of the bargain by exercising free will, the field for which is open and subject to negotiation. The bold, even violent, prince gets the reward, while the passive are sheep to be directed and mobilized. Machiavelli insists that the prince must attend to circumstances, and not be a creature of habit. As Pater says, “failure is to form habits.” Flexibility is needed, and so is aggression when warranted. Fortune favors energy and youth, and sometimes smiles upon those who know better than to expect consistency from her, those who are willing to stand up, assert themselves, and fight, taking charge of circumstances to the extent possible. Life is full of uncertainties, and passion must go forth to meet them. But this audacity must be backed up with intelligence and talent: I suppose the assertively superior “blond boy” in Golding’s Lord of the Flies would not overly impress Machiavelli because he lacks the cunning of, say, a true Machiavellian like Cesare Borgia. (That doesn’t keep me from thinking of the kid when I see certain prominent politicians from time to time—after all, it takes a lot of arrogance to suppose you have the talent and the right to “rule the earth,” and then expect others just to fall in line behind you.)

2532-34. In his chapter, “The Roman Dream,” Machiavelli answers the question, “is there an ethics in this text?” in the affirmative. The ethical dimension has to do with the liberation of Italy from Spanish (and French) influence and its unification. Viva Italia! This goal, we are to understand, justifies the sometimes unpleasant means Machiavelli advocates, and the realization of the dream will require both looking back to the ancient Roman virtues and a strong man to gather and deploy great power in the present. At heart, Machiavelli is an admirer of republican virtues and of pan-Italian sovereignty, and it seems unfair to use his name as a byword for the cynical, selfish pursuit of “power for power’s sake” we sometimes ascribe to him.

Finally, there is probably no way out of the dilemma that The Prince as a whole raises: amoral or even immoral means can sometimes achieve worthy goals, but aren’t they a shaky foundation for perpetuating such goals? And if we try to lie and kill our way to the good society, aren’t we likely to lose sight of the end-point, instead getting lost in the wicked pursuit and worship of power itself? That said, Machiavellian analysis is still useful because politics is played as a game and staged as a spectacle. You and I wouldn’t want our friends applying Machiavelli to their own conduct and deceiving us because we had granted them our trust, and we wouldn’t care to be always acting in a purely Machiavellian “princely” fashion, doing good or ill to suit the circumstances and make gains in reputation and wealth. But it makes sense to bear in mind that not everyone is so idealistic—many are perfectly willing to behave that way. Unfortunately, in grand matters of state, entities usually behave that way, pursuing their own advantage at the expense of others and by means of duplicity. There’s much to be said in favor of Machiavelli’s attempt to balance genuine regard for political and moral ideals with a hard-edged capacity to see things as they are and to acknowledge the consequences of that disposition. Machiavelli’s analysis of princely authority, whatever its actual aims, should teach us to bear in mind that what politicians (even ones in democratic countries) give out as the “reasons” for their actions may not be—and often aren’t—the ones that actually motivate them. Machiavelli, in offering his vision of how the mind of a capable ruler works, is useful to anyone who doesn’t want to be treated like a simpleton or a child in matters of politics. It’s true that unbounded cynicism is shallow and self-defeating—it’s one of the easiest attitudes to adopt and it makes us seem “hip,” perhaps; but automatic acceptance of everything the government says at face value is stupid and ultimately disastrous to a people’s liberty. A government that repeatedly lies to and otherwise abuses its citizens without fear of being stripped of power will eventually lose all respect for them and stop maintaining even the sham appearance of “self-government.” Machiavelli sought to hold on to at least some degree of idealism while not giving in to naïve passiveness in the face of power. At least, that’s one positive way to read The Prince, for our own benefit.

Notes on Baldesar Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier

2552-53. Duke Federico of Urbino is praised as an example of the perfect Renaissance prince: courageous, generous, and prudent. He is also said to have been the possessor of a fine palace and a collector of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew manuscripts. His son Guidobaldo (or Guido for short) succeeded him, but has been kept from living an active life due to his frail health. His excellence consists in not being “overcome by Fortune.” That is, he bears up under the strain of many difficulties. He also values the excellence of his courtiers, which speaks well of him.

2554. The Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga is the center of the courtly circle, serving more or less in the place of the ailing Duke. Everyone looks to her as the model of perfect conduct and aristocratic excellence. This is not to say that she is intimidating or rigid; quite the contrary. The narrator says that there was no one “who did not esteem it the greatest pleasure in the world to please her and the greatest grief to displease her. For which reason most decorous customs were there joined with the greatest liberty, and games and laughter in her presence were seasoned not only with witty jests but with a gracious and sober dignity….” she combines a free spirit with an intuitive understanding of propriety, and the result is a graceful social circle in which everyone is encouraged to be honest and to strive towards perfection. Those around her take part in pleasurable conversations that don’t sacrifice the Renaissance goal of constantly improving on one’s capacities and cultivating one’s faculties.

2555-57. Count Ludovico argues in favor of nobility as the first requirement for a proper courtier. His reasoning is that “noble birth is like a bright lamp that makes manifest and visible deeds both good and bad, kindling and spurring on to virtue as much for fear of dishonor as for hope of praise.” People of ordinary birth, he believes, do not have this incentive but will be satisfied to live in the manner of their parents and grandparents. He argues explicitly that nobility is innate: “nature has implanted in everything that hidden seed which gives a certain force and quality of its own essence to all that springs from it, making it like itself…” (2555).

Nonetheless, he advises, effort can largely make up in a nobleman for the lack of certain qualities he really ought to have: “those who are not so perfectly endowed by nature can, with care and effort, polish and in great part fix their natural defects.” What is needed, he says, is “that certain grace which we call an ‘air’” (2555). It is perhaps worth quoting the Italian here: the courtier should have “una certa grazia e, come si dice, un sangue, che lo faccia al primo aspetto a chiunque lo vede grato ed amabile.” (See the Biblioteca Italiana online edition of Il Libro del cortegiano, Book 1.) If he has this sangue or air, everyone will find him likable and pleasant to be around. And to his friendly opponent’s argument that noble birth is really not so important after all, Ludovico replies without hesitation, “I deem it necessary to have him be of noble birth… because of that public opinion which immediately sides with nobility” (2556). It is a matter of popular bias, we might say—the nobleman or noblewoman makes the best “first impression” (2557).

2557-58. Ludovico continues his list of requirements with the thought that “true profession of the Courtier must be that of arms,” and he must be loyal “to whomever he serves” (2557). But this military capability must not be taken too far—it is appropriate only on the field of battle, and not in polite social situations, as the anecdote told about the soldier Berto who prided himself on his fierceness suggests.

2558-59. Should a courtier praise himself? Well, he should have qualities worth praising, but he must not trumpet his own virtues directly. There is an art to speaking well of oneself without sounding conceited. As Dante had long ago pointed out, when you praise yourself, no one wants to believe you, but when you speak ill of yourself, almost everyone wants to believe you. The key thing is to do more than you claim you can do, and moderate your speech.

2559-61. A courtier’s physical appearance is also very important, and Ludovico insists that he must avoid appearing overly feminine in bearing or speech, as was sometimes fashionable at court. We may recall that Shakespeare’s plays often make fun of such courtly effeminacy—Osric in Hamlet is a good example, as is Oswald in King Lear. And the French come in for a good deal of mockery on that account, as in Henry V. The courtier must also be well versed in the handling of dueling weapons and an excellent horseman as well as a hunter, among other exercises. In sum, he should be expert in everything he does without being ostentatious.

2562-64. The Count is asked how exactly a person might come by this “grace” he talks about, but he professes not to be interested in that question. He will offer illustrations of “what a perfect Courtier ought to be” (2562), and that is all. The only hint he will offer is that one who seeks “to acquire grace in bodily exercises” should “begin early and learn the principles from the best of teachers” (2563). Above all, staying clear of pomposity or affectation is necessary. Coining a term, the Count says we must “practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it” (2563). Again, the Italian may be worth quoting: “usar in ogni cosa una certa sprezzatura, che nasconda l’arte e dimostri ciò che si fa e dice venir fatto senza fatica e quasi senza pensarvi.” If we can do this, considerable “grace” will attend our person and actions: “Da questo credo io che derivi assai la grazia.” The only genuine art, apparently, is “art which does not seem to be art” (2564): “arte che non pare esser arte.” We can readily appreciate this notion in our modern consumer culture since so much involving fashion, after all, is about seeming artless while actually taking care to get just the right look and make just the right “statement” in public. (How many person-hours have been spent trying to achieve that “disheveled” look with regard to hairstyle?) Ludovico’s promotion of sprezzatura, like most of the other things he says, amounts to an admission that courtly life revolves around spectacle.

And it would not be advantageous if the spectacle began to seem unnatural, forced, or “practiced.” Who is the “audience” here? The Duke’s subjects in general, other rulers’ subjects when they have dealings with the Duke, and, of course, the courtiers and courtly ladies themselves. A courtier’s role is to embody, and to body forth, the goodness and grace of the sovereign. Outward appearances, as any good Neo-Platonist would say, mirror the inward goodness of a person’s soul, and the courtier is the ruler’s outward appearance, somewhat as Christ is God’s “Word made flesh.” This frame seems appropriate since Castiglione is writing in a materialistic, competitive age that still convincingly speaks the language of a profoundly Christian ethical and symbolic universe. In the end, I’m not sure we can separate the courtly spectacle from the “reality” of political power at court: courtiers are essential mediators between the ideal aims of power and its actual deployment in a complicated, compromised world.

Notes on Baldesar Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier

2552-53. Duke Federico of Urbino is praised as an example of the perfect Renaissance prince: courageous, generous, and prudent. He is also said to have been the possessor of a fine palace and a collector of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew manuscripts. His son Guidobaldo (or Guido for short) succeeded him, but has been kept from living an active life due to his frail health. His excellence consists in not being “overcome by Fortune.” That is, he bears up under the strain of many difficulties. He also values the excellence of his courtiers, which speaks well of him.

2554. The Duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga is the center of the courtly circle, serving more or less in the place of the ailing Duke. Everyone looks to her as the model of perfect conduct and aristocratic excellence. This is not to say that she is intimidating or rigid; quite the contrary. The narrator says that there was no one “who did not esteem it the greatest pleasure in the world to please her and the greatest grief to displease her. For which reason most decorous customs were there joined with the greatest liberty, and games and laughter in her presence were seasoned not only with witty jests but with a gracious and sober dignity….” she combines a free spirit with an intuitive understanding of propriety, and the result is a graceful social circle in which everyone is encouraged to be honest and to strive towards perfection. Those around her take part in pleasurable conversations that don’t sacrifice the Renaissance goal of constantly improving on one’s capacities and cultivating one’s faculties.

2555-57. Count Ludovico argues in favor of nobility as the first requirement for a proper courtier. His reasoning is that “noble birth is like a bright lamp that makes manifest and visible deeds both good and bad, kindling and spurring on to virtue as much for fear of dishonor as for hope of praise.” People of ordinary birth, he believes, do not have this incentive but will be satisfied to live in the manner of their parents and grandparents. He argues explicitly that nobility is innate: “nature has implanted in everything that hidden seed which gives a certain force and quality of its own essence to all that springs from it, making it like itself…” (2555).

Nonetheless, he advises, effort can largely make up in a nobleman for the lack of certain qualities he really ought to have: “those who are not so perfectly endowed by nature can, with care and effort, polish and in great part fix their natural defects.” What is needed, he says, is “that certain grace which we call an ‘air’” (2555). It is perhaps worth quoting the Italian here: the courtier should have “una certa grazia e, come si dice, un sangue, che lo faccia al primo aspetto a chiunque lo vede grato ed amabile.” (See the Biblioteca Italiana online edition of Il Libro del cortegiano, Book 1.) If he has this sangue or air, everyone will find him likable and pleasant to be around. And to his friendly opponent’s argument that noble birth is really not so important after all, Ludovico replies without hesitation, “I deem it necessary to have him be of noble birth… because of that public opinion which immediately sides with nobility” (2556). It is a matter of popular bias, we might say—the nobleman or noblewoman makes the best “first impression” (2557).

2557-58. Ludovico continues his list of requirements with the thought that “true profession of the Courtier must be that of arms,” and he must be loyal “to whomever he serves” (2557). But this military capability must not be taken too far—it is appropriate only on the field of battle, and not in polite social situations, as the anecdote told about the soldier Berto who prided himself on his fierceness suggests.

2558-59. Should a courtier praise himself? Well, he should have qualities worth praising, but he must not trumpet his own virtues directly. There is an art to speaking well of oneself without sounding conceited. As Dante had long ago pointed out, when you praise yourself, no one wants to believe you, but when you speak ill of yourself, almost everyone wants to believe you. The key thing is to do more than you claim you can do, and moderate your speech.

2559-61. A courtier’s physical appearance is also very important, and Ludovico insists that he must avoid appearing overly feminine in bearing or speech, as was sometimes fashionable at court. We may recall that Shakespeare’s plays often make fun of such courtly effeminacy—Osric in Hamlet is a good example, as is Oswald in King Lear. And the French come in for a good deal of mockery on that account, as in Henry V. The courtier must also be well versed in the handling of dueling weapons and an excellent horseman as well as a hunter, among other exercises. In sum, he should be expert in everything he does without being ostentatious.

2562-64. The Count is asked how exactly a person might come by this “grace” he talks about, but he professes not to be interested in that question. He will offer illustrations of “what a perfect Courtier ought to be” (2562), and that is all. The only hint he will offer is that one who seeks “to acquire grace in bodily exercises” should “begin early and learn the principles from the best of teachers” (2563). Above all, staying clear of pomposity or affectation is necessary. Coining a term, the Count says we must “practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it” (2563). Again, the Italian may be worth quoting: “usar in ogni cosa una certa sprezzatura, che nasconda l’arte e dimostri ciò che si fa e dice venir fatto senza fatica e quasi senza pensarvi.” If we can do this, considerable “grace” will attend our person and actions: “Da questo credo io che derivi assai la grazia.” The only genuine art, apparently, is “art which does not seem to be art” (2564): “arte che non pare esser arte.” We can readily appreciate this notion in our modern consumer culture since so much involving fashion, after all, is about seeming artless while actually taking care to get just the right look and make just the right “statement” in public. (How many person-hours have been spent trying to achieve that “disheveled” look with regard to hairstyle?) Ludovico’s promotion of sprezzatura, like most of the other things he says, amounts to an admission that courtly life revolves around spectacle.

And it would not be advantageous if the spectacle began to seem unnatural, forced, or “practiced.” Who is the “audience” here? The Duke’s subjects in general, other rulers’ subjects when they have dealings with the Duke, and, of course, the courtiers and courtly ladies themselves. A courtier’s role is to embody, and to body forth, the goodness and grace of the sovereign. Outward appearances, as any good Neo-Platonist would say, mirror the inward goodness of a person’s soul, and the courtier is the ruler’s outward appearance, somewhat as Christ is God’s “Word made flesh.” This frame seems appropriate since Castiglione is writing in a materialistic, competitive age that still convincingly speaks the language of a profoundly Christian ethical and symbolic universe. In the end, I’m not sure we can separate the courtly spectacle from the “reality” of political power at court: courtiers are essential mediators between the ideal aims of power and its actual deployment in a complicated, compromised world.

Week 10, Sei Shonagon, Yoshida Kenko, Zeami Motokiyo

2009-08-16T19:32:00.000-07:00

Page-by-Page Notes on Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book.

2273. Shonagon notices not only activity in nature but also stillness; mixed in with this appreciation are the author’s impressions of various human activities. She can appreciate ordinary things, but seems most taken with people when they go beyond the ordinary, when they are wearing their best clothing and so forth. But again, it is not only finery that catches her eye—she is interested in those moments when circumstances expose the reality underneath the fine appearance. She likes ceremony and formality in general, but also searches out authenticity—it seems that both are necessary, and one must try to achieve a balance.

2275. I like the tableau Shonagon sets up on this page—the scene suggests a kind of eternity for the Japanese monarchy. It is an ideal moment, and she wishes it could extend for a thousand years. She describes the scene as if it were a painting, with everyone and everything appropriately placed.

2278. Shonagon brings up a number of stories of excellence—in this case, the story or model concerns a young woman during the time of Emperor Murakami. She knew her classical poetry faultlessly, and it would be difficult to surpass her graceful performance under pressure. There’s a sense of unreality about the palace, or rather the palace seems to be its own reality—Emperor Murakami does something purely for fun, and everyone takes it seriously. The current Emperor looks back upon this story with wonder. He considers it evidence of a golden age.

2279. Shonagon has little respect for women who do not come to know the world as she does—they do not take advantage of their high birth. Serving in the palace has its advantages, and she is quick to point them out. The palace provides respect ever after, and makes one well-versed in life’s necessary formalities, adding a touch of elegance.

2280-82. Shonagon identifies as depressing a collection of events involving frustrated expectation, failure to communicate with others, disappointed ambitions, and a sense of mediocrity. Moreover, there must be transitional phases in life, but there is sadness when they occur as well as when they go on too long.

2282-86. As we would expect, Shonagon finds hateful anyone who goes beyond his or her station in life. Above all, inconsiderate and pushy behavior earns her anger. As for conversation, I imagine the so-called “California like” would give her conniption fits. It’s like, too casual, dude. She has no regard whatsoever for people who want to be considered elegant and civil when in fact they are not. Decorum is not just finery and fluff—clearly, good manners in speech and action embody the rightness of the imperial order. Shonagon has a strong sense of privacy, but also a strong sense that sometimes it is obligatory to share one’s impressions. This is why she dislikes the gentleman who will not share his impressions with younger men. People who overstay their welcome are hateful to her. Whatever the time and occasion, there is a right way and a wrong way to do things. For example, she says that a woman loves a man partly for the way he takes his leave of her.

2286-87. Shonagon likes things that produce a striking, memorable impression. A lot of her life revolves around registering her own impressions and perhaps comparing them to other people’s impressions. As Oscar Wilde says, “nothing that actually happens is of the smallest importance.”

2286-88. In the part about Buddhist priests in the temple, Shonagon begins with her own observation but then quickly moves on to other people’s observations and behavior. In particular, the behavior of retired officials and fashionable young gentlemen. People seem to have all sorts of motives for attending the temple—most of them having nothing to do with religion. They go there to pass the time, to see and to be seen. Shonagon makes a show of moral indignation, but really she admits she is fascinated with the goings-on. She is only indirectly a moralist, but much more directly a close observer of her own time who seems to have a lot of knowledge about people’s behavior in former times. It is always an interesting question as to what people do when they have nothing to do—in a Western context, education takes as one important purpose inculcating the ability to enjoy leisure time wisely. Sometimes Shonagon reminds me of Charles Lamb in the essay where he writes about getting early retirement and wondering what he will do with himself, even though he is delighted at having so much free time.

2288. How does Shonagon conceptualize nature, how does she relate to it and describe it? I think she describes nature as if it were a work of art; we only have selections, but I find that she concentrates mostly on still-life tableaux, and not so much on natural process or activity, though of course that is always implied in any sensitive description of nature. Nature is presented to her as a series of distinct but related objects, aesthetic objects. She seldom speaks harshly about nature, but instead finds something good to say about most natural objects. She is not always so generous about human beings within the court system or outside of it. But that doesn’t bother me—people can take care of themselves; we should be indulgent with nature. Shonagon is very conscious of nature’s presence in literary tradition, both Japanese and Chinese, and she mixes in this awareness with her naturalistic descriptions. In the example of the pear blossom, it is Chinese literature that leads her to make a close examination of the blossom itself. She does not hesitate, either, to mingle observation of nature with comments about human affairs like coming home from a festival. She is not, in other words, a purist who must block out all things human to talk about nature—that is probably more a product of modern necessity. In Japan , as I’ve read, people once lived very close to nature, and then when the island became crowded, they had to work hard to recreate a sense of the natural, by means of artifice. Zen gardens epitomize this kind of artifice—they are at once natural and artificial, we might say.

2290-91. Unsuitable things—this part the editors find unflattering. Shonagon says snow on common houses is unsuitable, perhaps because the beauty is wasted on people who don’t appreciate it. The idea is that beauty is only for the select, only for her and those who can appreciate her fine observational powers. She sounds a bit stingy with the pleasures of aesthetic appreciation, at least to our democratic sensibilities. We usually insist that art should be held in common, as something that unites people, that appeals to universal faculties or sensibilities (as in Kant it lets him demonstrate the universality of the faculty psychology he advocates as the basis for his epistemology). That’s hardly the case with Sei Shonagon, whose sensibilities are aristocratic. People from different ranks, though they may share many traits, are in the last analysis fundamentally different—at least the best amongst them are. Sometimes her observations seem singular, as when she says the old man with a black beard who’s playing with children is unsuitable. So how many times does one see such a sight? Just once? Her observation about how the person you stop loving seems like someone else is brilliant—here she is at her most honest and best. The point is that how we define others has a lot to do with our own needs and frame of mind. This is important because it coincides in a sophisticated way with Shonagon’s insistence on close observation of nature and human conduct.

2292-93. Here there’s a combination of sentiments: Shonagon appreciates perfection in various things, but perfection in the sense of artificial design isn’t always appropriate—ponds are best left wild.

2294-95. Shonagon is critical of men’s behavior towards women—too often, she says, they dissemble their feelings and leave women in the dark. Or they refuse to accept the consequences of their actions. There are also some excellent “imagist” observations here, like the one about “the play of the light on water” being poured from a vessel. And she mentions again how social situations can go wrong—expecting someone and then having to entertain another person. Deception is sometimes necessary in these circumstances, but it’s distasteful.

2296-97. Shonagon betrays an aristocratic sense for beauty—I don’t think she simply identifies physical attractiveness with morality, but in any event an ugly person is unacceptable to her. Attractive people should consort with attractive people. That’s similar to the Greek attitude about “the beautiful people.”

2298-99. It’s worth considering the difference between how Shonagon treats human beauty and natural beauty or the beauty of an art object—her comment about a beautiful face is valuable in this regard. Human beauty is endlessly interesting, she says, while a painting soon loses its capacity to hold our attention. She also enjoys being singled out by those who are themselves distinctive and important.

2299-2300. Why did Shonagon write The Pillow Book? I don’t know if her regrets over publication are conventional, like Chaucer’s retraction of The Canterbury Tales. Most likely her comments in this regard are partly sincere, partly image-management. She’s an aristocrat, not a tradeswoman or hack writer, if indeed there were “hack writers” in her milieu. It would be pushy to promote one’s own talents as a writer. I find an interesting mix of wanting to guard her privacy and claiming that she has “set everything down,” both feelings and observations. Kierkegaard makes a relevant point when he says that good philosophical writing always involves indirection—writing of Shonagon’s sort is at base philosophical; it can’t succeed it she assumes that we really understand her directly and simply. The point isn’t transparent communication. The effect is instead that of overhearing somebody’s private reflections—some of the meaning is available to us, but not all of it, and that’s probably just the way Shonagon wants things to be.

Notes on Yoshida Kenko’s Essays in Idleness.

Kenko is concerned to reflect on strategies for surviving with one’s spirit more or less intact in difficult times—the world is full of lies, so what’s the best way to act, given such an unfortunate fact? By no means to fight against the lies brazenly, but rather to let the world go on thinking as it does, and keep your reflections to yourself, for private occasions. Simply maintaining the ability to reflect on things is worth something when so few people are given to reflection about anything at all. Kenko’s way of dealing with profound subjects is to set forth a principle such as “all things must pass,” but then not to take it too seriously, lest it become in itself an attachment, an obsession. I think this is typical of Buddhism—we shouldn’t become too attached even to our own wisdom. Themes to be found in Kenko: the value of uncertainty, the meaning of death, the problem of desire, the virtues of imperfection, the need to concentrate one’s energies to achieve something worthwhile, and to eliminate whatever is unnecessary; the relative potential and dangers of youth and age.

2328. Kenko accords a certain significance and elegance to the higher nobility, but those below that exalted rank come in for some criticism: people who have achieved some distinction within their middling rank, he says, “are apt to wear looks of self-satisfaction,” but in truth they don’t matter as much as they think they do. And as for priests who try to throw their weight around, their inappropriate attitude makes them appear ridiculous. Kenko writes also, “It is desirable that a man’s face and figure be of excelling beauty. I could sit forever with a man, provided that what he said did not grate on my ears, that he had charm, and that he did not talk very much. What an unpleasant experience it is when someone you have supposed to be quite distinguished reveals his true, inferior nature.” Appearances are of some importance to him, and it is jarring when an elegant person’s character doesn’t match his or her fine looks: people really ought to be what they seem to be. Kenko’s description of excellence is delightfully whimsical: “he writes easily in an acceptable hand, sings agreeable and in tune, and . . . is not a teetotaler.” I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s quip, “In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.” Of course, that might be going a bit too far to suit Yoshida Kenko.

2329-31. Kenko favors uncertainty: “If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty” (1229). Uncertainty, he explains, leaves room for worthy aspiration and for concentration on what really matters. Kenko points out that if we live too long, our “preoccupation with worldly things grows ever deeper, and gradually . . . [we lose] all sensitivity to the beauty of things” (2329). I think he is implying that as we age, we begin to attach our hopes for permanence to seemingly solid and finished things, rather than accepting that all things are transient and appreciating them all the more for that very reason. Buddhism emphasizes self-discipline, concentration, and clarity of perception. So the suggestive, bare thing is better than the gilded one. Kenko writes, “People seem to agree that autumn is the best season to appreciate the beauty of things. That may well be true, but the sights of spring are even more exhilarating” (1231).

2332-33. “In all things I yearn for the past. Modern fashions seem to keep on growing more and more debased.” Included in this observation is the customs surrounding death. Kenko misses “The custom of paying homage to the dead, in the belief that they return that night.” We go to great lengths to ceremonialize the passing of the dead, but then we forget them ruthlessly. Life seems to depend heavily on forgetting of this sort: “During the forty-nine days of mourning the family, having moved to a temple in the mountains or some such place, forgathers in large numbers in inconvenient, cramped quarters, and frantically occupies itself with the motions of mourning for the dead. The days pass unbelievably fast. On the final day, all civility gone, no one has a word for anybody else . . .” (2333). With the end of the ceremony, the living are impatient to get back to their own concerns, and the dead become ever more distant in memory, until at last “the old grave is plowed up and turned into rice land.” I’m reminded of Tolstoy’s painful exploration of our intolerance for the dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in which a dying man increasingly notices the hurry those around him seem to be in to abandon him—they wish he would just get on with the business of dying, and leave them to enjoy their own vitality.

2334. Kenko’s mention of how the living forget the dead is not exactly nostalgic or outraged, however: he says here that “It does no good whatsoever to have one’s name survive.” To seek fame in this life or long remembrance after death, he suggests, is foolish. That attitude differs remarkably from the ancient western notion that a person ought to live in such a way as to be remembered long afterwards by his or her descendants. Kenko sees all desire to rise above one’s station, all desire for notoriety or fame, as the mark of an empty and vain person. On this page, he writes in accord with Chuang Chou that “True knowledge is not what one hears from others or acquires through study,” and even quotes Chou directly: “The truly enlightened man has no learning, no virtue, no accomplishments, no fame.” We might think that’s so because enlightened people don’t draw attention to themselves: the mark of vanity, crass commercialism, or some other equally unattractive tendency. But as Kenko explains, “It is not that he conceals his virtue or pretends to be stupid; it is because from the outset he is above distinctions between wise and foolish, between profit and loss.” Anything to do with the world is void: “All is unreality. Nothing is worth discussing, worth desiring.”

2335-36. Kenko says that we should neither “accept popular superstitions uncritically” (2335) nor dismiss them because of their improbability. We should instead remain even-minded about such things, and not take up the habit of scoffing at the beliefs of the ignorant. Kenko also says that he has no problem believing in “the miracles of the gods and buddhas, or in the lives of the incarnations.” I am moved by this to note with some disdain the current fashion for atheist scoffing. Not that I’m religious in the traditional sense (going to church, accepting a set of metaphysical doctrines or a creed, etc.). But all the same, I find the today’s bustling advocates of Reason misguided: they seem to have little appreciation for the sustaining power of eloquence, or the need for anything beyond some set of facts by which to live. To assume that Reason is all-sufficient seems to me as preposterous a gesture today as August Comte’s (1798-1857) attempt to found a “religion of humanity” a century-and-a-half ago. Furthermore, the French Revolution’s exaltation of Reason ought to be warning enough about the dangers of setting up our own qualities as self-sustaining replacements for “a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused / whose dwelling is the light of setting suns” (Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”). Failing to project something beyond ourselves (whatever one may construe it as being) to which we can at least then try to connect may well strip us of our potential for transcending our limitations and lead us to withdraw into our stagnating selves. That isn’t Kenko’s point exactly, but I think it’s worth making. On 2335 bottom, bottom Kenko writes that “A man should avoid displaying deep familiarity with any subject.” It’s a good thing this gloomy monk didn’t have to attend academic conferences: erudition on display for the purpose of impressing others is something he just can’t stand. In fact, Kenko disdains ostentation of any kind: “Possessions should look old, not overly elaborate; they need not cost much, but their quality should be good” (2336).

2337. “Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless?” asks Kenko. The cherry tree before or after it is in full bloom, or the moon when partially clouded over, he suggests, is best because we appreciate most what is transitory; we give it our respectful attention. Things we consider permanent are apt to be taken for granted and reduced to what today we might call “post-card status.” Kenko writes, “In all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting,” and he said on 2336 that “uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting.” Perfection isn’t the goal when it comes to choosing the objects of our perception. Beauty, yes, but the kind of beauty we must really look for; it shouldn’t just be given to us. On the whole, Kenko shows a refined sense of how a person ought to enjoy life: “The man of breeding never appears to abandon himself completely to his pleasures; even his manner of enjoyment is detached.” In an almost Kantian passage, Kenko writes of the unrefined that, “No matter what the sight, they are never content merely with looking at it.” Kant would perhaps nod in agreement, based on what he writes in his Critique of Judgment about the necessity of “disinterestedness” in making properly aesthetic judgments about beautiful things: if we desire the object’s existence or expect to get some use from it, we can’t sustain the kind of “dry liking” Kant thinks appropriate to aesthetic experience.

2338-39. One of Kenko’s most haunting descriptions of the emptiness of life is his passage about going to a festival, and getting caught up with all the sights on the crowded street. Then the festival ends, the props and so forth are hauled away, and the entire scene is empty, as if nothing had happened and no one had ever been there: “Before you know it, hardly a soul is left . . . . Then they start removing the blinds and matting from the stands, and the place, even as you watch, begins to look desolate. You realize with a pang of grief that life is like this. If you have seen the avenues of the city, you have seen the festival” (2338). The sense of meaningfulness we lend life is transitory, and soon gives way to utter desolation, a deep feeling of absence and emptiness. One doesn’t usually realize this except upon reflection, standing in the empty street, but perhaps some understand it even while the festival is under way. The street pageant is the main event; there is nothing at the core of events, and in fact, suggests Kenko, there is no core. Denying this fact leads to self-delusion, and Kenko’s meditations most likely allow him to register personally the “nothingness” to which his writing attests. Kenko then discusses that frequent theme of his, the inevitability of death: he points out that at such festivals, he often recognizes many of the people—his is a small world, so to speak, and he is led to reflect that soon the lot of his friends and acquaintances will be gone, as will he: “the hour of death comes sooner than you expect,” and there’s no way to avoid it. As he writes on 2339, “When you confront death, no matter where it may be, it is the same as charging into battle.”

2339-41. Kenko discusses the relative merits of youth and age: “Youth is the time when a man ruins himself. // An old man’s spirit grows feeble; he is indifferent and slow to respond, unmoved by everything” (2339). But all the same, “The old are as superior to the young in wisdom as the young are superior to the old in looks” (2440). Meditation is like “a little death,” lending us a perspective that lets us register the nothingness of ourselves and of life. On the whole, Kenko’s comments on age and wisdom are somewhat paradoxical: he asserts something like the idea that the preacher of Ecclesiastes keeps coming back to: “all is vanity.” Add to this his point that aging tends to muddy our understanding; we are beset by a materialism that is founded on the fear of death. To cling to the things of this world is to cling to life. But at the same time, he puts some stock in the attainment of “wisdom” and even says that “we should be impatient to discover the sources of enlightenment” (2341). With respect to learning, Kenko has a keen sense of what economists would call the “opportunity cost” of any such endeavor: those who mean to learn something allow themselves to be distracted, and end up dispersing valuable energy. “In the end,” we says, “they neither become proficient in their profession, nor do they gain the eminence they anticipated” (2340). What is the solution to this problem? The following: “we must carefully compare in our minds all the different things in life we might hope to make our principal work, and decide which is of the greatest value; this decided, we should renounce our other interests and devote ourselves to that one thing only” (2340). Sound advice, of course—but then there’s always Shelley’s equally true observation: “We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon,” and often not capable of the sort of intense, perpetual concentration Kenko is suggesting we must maintain to accomplish some great feat of learning.

A personal reflection: I take Kenko’s ideas about learning to heart since I’ve always considered myself rather more like Shelley’s drifting cloud-consciousness or the wind lyre “To whose frail frame no second motion brings / One mood or modulation like the last” than like the model scholar. But as I’ve grown older, I have learned how to turn this inconstancy into more of a strength than a weakness, or at least to bring out the reserve of strength in the weakness: I’ve read very broadly and reflected a great deal, if not always in a sustained way; so I am able to make many connections that may not be available to those whose path of study has been more single-minded, more persistent, more constant. I am not so much trying to “amass information” in one or two fields as I am trying to achieve some degree of wisdom, and perhaps even to arrive at that elusive state Milton calls “calm of mind, all passion spent.” For me, that’s the value of literature, criticism, and literary theory. Younger scholars who want to make progress would do well to reflect on why they want to learn (insofar as that understanding is accessible to them), how they proceed, the limits of their attention and desire, and so forth.

While Kenko says, “A great enterprise is unlikely to be achieved except at the expense of everything else” (2341), it’s fair to suggest that very young people might find it best not to focus too narrowly on any one subject: the time of life to do that is somewhat later, as one approaches middle age, and time becomes more obviously a factor: there are some things I’d like to learn thoroughly, but I know that there just isn’t enough sand left in my hourglass, so I might as well concentrate my activities somewhat and accomplish something in what I’ve already found worthwhile.

2342. The concluding paragraph of our selection shows genuine humility: at eight years old, says Kenko, he asked his father about Buddha, and his father gave one of those answers parents give when they don’t know quite what to say. You become a Buddha by following the teachings of Buddha, says father. So who, asked little Yoshida, taught him to teach? And all the father can say is, “I suppose he fell from the sky or else he sprang up out of the earth.” Ultimately, Kenko’s whole approach as a mature thinker suggests, there aren’t any answers to the profound questions that people begin asking even in childhood—or at least there aren’t any final answers or answers that will please everyone.

Finally, to compare Kenko with Sei Shonagon, I’d say that while the latter is mostly serene and upbeat (except when she is criticizing those who fail to come up to the mark in some capacity or other), Kenko is rather “Eeyorish” in his outlook. While Shonagon writes in a quirky first-person mode dedicated to excellent impressionistic descriptions, Kenko’s style tends to lean on philosophical abstractions and a rather impersonal “we.” But both are for the most part admirably non-systemic in their way of perceiving and judging things, and they show some affinity in the loose, almost episodic quality of their writings.

General Notes on Zeami Motokiyo’s Atsumori.

Atsumori, the slain warrior who now wanders as a ghost, must let go of his murderous obsession, and it seems that his old foe Kamagai (a member of the Genji or Minamoto clan), disguised as the priest Rensei, must do the same with regard to the remorse he feels over having killed this virtuous member of the Heike in 1185. Behind the play is the earth-shaking history of the fall of a powerful clan that had once controlled half of Japan. The play’s action seems to consist in the “letting-go” on Atsumori’s part of his desire for vengeance. But Kamagai’s Buddha-like gentleness and prayer surely helps set Atsumori free. Motokiyo’s drama relies upon ec
onomy of expression and restraint in all things; it’s highly symbolic and not at all mimetic in the sense that many western plays are. A good website for further study: Traditional Theater in Japan.

Week 08, Koran, Ibn Ishaq, Jalaloddin Rumi

2009-08-16T19:31:00.000-07:00

Notes on The Koran

1433. “Believers, when you rise to pray wash your faces and your hands . . . . But if you are sick or travelling . . . take some clean sand and rub your hands and faces with it. God does not wish to burden you . . . .” Forms are important, but the faith that animates them is much more so. If you can’t find some sand in Arabia when water isn’t available, you’re not looking very hard.

1433. The Koran says to “deal justly” and “bear with” Israelites and Christians, those other “People of the Book.” For the most part—at least arguably—harsh treatment of non-Muslims is put off to the Day of Resurrection. It’s said of the Israelites that “You will ever find them deceitful, except for a few of them. But pardon them and bear with them.” Similar words are spoken of Christians, who are charged with forgetting the covenant God made with them. And on 1434, the text calls those who insist that “God is the Messiah, the son of Mary” unbelievers.

1435. As with the Hebrew Scriptures, there is undeniably some strict legal sanctioning in The Koran: “As for the man or woman who is guilty of theft, cut off their hands.”

1436. Here the text says that “People of the Book” should “vie with each other in good works” and in the end differences will be resolved.

1436-37. Jesus is described as a prophet, but not as an equal of God. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is the sticking point. See 1437: how can one be a Christian without believing that Jesus is God’s “only begotten Son”? If a Christian gives up this belief, he or she is not Christian, right? So a key source of tension between these two religions is apparent from such passages. The text sometimes counsels patience and offers hope, but it is also often blunt: “do not seek the friendship of the infidels and those who were given the Book before you, who have made of your religion a jest and a pastime” (1436).

1440. Jesus is here made to disavow any claim to divinity. God gave him miracles, and he is a genuine apostle of God, but not, according to the Koran, more than that: “Jesus, son of Mary, did you ever say to mankind: ‘Worship me and my mother as gods beside God?’ // ‘Glory to You,’ he will answer, ‘how could I ever say that to which I have no right?’” The apostles warn us and undergo testing, whereby they set an example of steadfastness. God favors them with his messages, and every nation gets its apostle (1443).

1442. It seems that one cannot have a “pick-and-choose” Koran, to adapt a phrase from Pope John Paul II. The Koran’s status is claimed to be even more infallible than that of the Bible, but I’m no expert in such matters. The Christian tradition has included intense and prolonged argument over the precise textual contours of the Bible; the Church Fathers had to act as literary critics to establish which books were to be considered canonical, and which should be described as apocryphal. But I think that Islam has also built up a vast body of extra-Koranic literature in the area of social conduct and law—the Imams are supposed to be experts in all aspects of the written tradition.

1443. The Idols here are eerily personified and made to attest to their own falsity: “It was not us that you worshipped, God is our all-sufficient witness. Nor were we aware of your worship.”

1446-52. Joseph is treated as a prophet and is “universalized”; he isn’t so much a national leader as an example of patience and wise use of power. In other respects, the story seems similar to the one in the Bible.

1452. Allah speaks directly to Muhammad, distancing the Messenger from the message. There is plenty of room for drama in that kind of relationship between God and the Messenger. But the relationship in the Gospels between Jesus and God seems to me more intimate and more enigmatic.

1453. Here the text makes the father of Jesus “a special messenger”—not “god himself.” Jesus’ blessedness and purity are conveyed, but not any equation of status to God.

Notes on Ibn Ishaq

“How Salman Became a Muslim”

1463-67. Salman is an earnest fellow who seeks the truth. He starts out as a Zoroastrian, and then becomes attracted to the doctrines of Christianity and wants to find an honest embodiment of those doctrines. His father fears this change and actually puts him in fetters, which Salman manages to cast off, whereupon he’s off to Syria and thence to what would now be Mosul, Iraq, whose Bishop he reveres, and afterwards to Nasibin, Turkey, and on to Ammuriya, Turkey. In Ammuriya Salman is told about a prophet who will bring a new dispensation of the Religion of Abraham, and is given a few signs by which he may be known. On 1466, the apostle devises a way for Salman to free himself from his current master, and even helps him carry out the plan: he assists Salman in planting the palm trees promised to the master. Then comes the oddest part of the story. Salman has been told by his master to “go to a certain place in Syria where there was a man who lived between two thickets” (1466). There he meets none other (according to the apostle’s belief) than Jesus, who, when Salman comes upon him, points him towards the apostle. Jesus keeps turning up in the Koran as a wondrous, misunderstood figure.

“The Beginning of the Sending Down of the Quran”

467. The text says that “Prophecy is a troublesome burden—only strong, resolute messengers can bear it by God’s help and grace, because of the opposition which they meet from men . . . .” Muhammad’s message was uncongenial to the people amongst whom he was born (the Quraysh); they were polytheistic animists, and his new dispensation is monotheistic. It isn’t that monotheism was inconceivable to them (Hebrews and Christians were hardly unknown to the Arabian peninsula), but they remained unwilling to change their older religion.

“Khadija, Daughter of Khuwaylid, Accepts Islam”

1467-68. Khadija seems to have been a practical woman of the merchant class, and she became Muhammad’s first convert. The text says that she was of great assistance to him, providing material and moral support as his revelations flowed and ceased.

From “The Prescription of Prayer”

1468-69. Muslims are supposed to pray five times daily if at all possible. This part of the text explains the significance of prayer: at first it was Allah’s commandment to Muhammad that he should pray, and the number of prostrations during prayer gradually increased. The angel Gabriel then visited with the prophet and prayed at the five prescribed times with him, and made apparent the importance of ritual ablution before prayer. But the statement “prayer is in what is between your prayer today and your prayer yesterday” gets to the heart of the matter. Islam itself signifies “submission to God’s will,” and apparently, life itself is to be lived as a perpetual prayer. Therefore, Muslim prayer isn’t something a believer does at the proper times as a formal requirement and then sets aside; it is a constant attitude of devotion. The traditional call to prayer sung at mosques, by the way, is:

God is most great. God is most great.
Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.
God is most great. God is most great.
Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.
I testify that there is no God except God.
Ash-hadu an la ilaha ill-Allah.
I testify that there is no God except God.
Ash-hadu an la ilaha ill-Allah.
I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God.
Ash-hadu anna Muhammad-ar-Rasoolullah.
I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God.
Ash-hadu anna Muhammad-ar-Rasoolullah.
Come to prayer! Come to prayer!
Hayya 'alas-Salah. Hayya 'alas-Salah.
Come to success! Come to success!
Hayya 'alal-falah. Hayya 'alal-falah.
God is most great. God is most great.
Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.
There is none worthy of worship except God.
La ilaha ill-Allah.

Belief.net Call to Prayer.

Another illustrative site is Muslim Canada.org, which contains (as do many other sites) some audio files of the Call to Prayer. The following version in Quicktime format is beautifully done and you can follow the Arabic lines easily: Audio File of Call to Prayer.

From “Ali ibn Abu Talib, the First Male to Accept Islam”

Ali is Muhammad’s first male convert, and when Abu Talib discovers them praying together, he won’t convert but promises his support. The prophet begins to pick up more converts, including Abu Bakhr, who later became the first caliph.

From “The Apostle’s Public Preaching and the Response”

1470-73. Muhammad was getting along with the tribe of the Quraysh, it seems, until he began to speak less than positively about their gods, after which time his faithful uncle Abu Talib did his best to protect him from the machinations and warlike attacks of the Quraysh. But he is beginning to make converts, too, and gathers those loyal to him to his side.

From “Al-Walid ibn Al-Mughira” and “How the Apostle Was Treated by His Own People”

1473-75. Muhammad continues to speak forthrightly, and is accused of being a sorcerer, and so forth. Others defend him fervently, and at one point his own behavior is striking: walking three times around the ancient Qa’aba stone and hearing harsh words spoken against him, he says, “Will you listen to me O Quraysh? By him who holds my life in His hand I bring you slaughter” (1474). This statement makes quite an impression, and his accusers back down for a time.

“Hamza Accepts Islam”

1474. “Islam” means “submission,” and different people achieve it differently. It so happens that Hamza’s way is to beat a man named Abu Jahl for insulting the prophet. This act has a good effect on Hamza and even, to some extent, on Abu Jahl, who regrets his bad behavior.

“The Burial Preparations”

Muhammad passes away, supposedly with the last injunction “Let not two religions be left in the Arabian peninsula” (1475). See Wikipedia on Muslim History for an overview of the historical events that follow the death of the prophet in June 632. Albert Hourani’s A History of the Arab Peoples is excellent, as is Karen Armstrong’s Muhammad: a Biography of the Prophet.

Notes on the Poetry of Jalâloddin Rumi

“Listen, if you can stand to” and “What I most want”

The robai is a rhymed Persian quatrain, and the content of these two poems speak of the need to get beyond the constrictions of personality, of the ego. In this, Sufism is a lot like, say, Buddhism or Hinduism, both of which counsel forms of constructive self-annihilation. The second poem is noteworthy in its hope that the person who has escaped personality may be able to “sit apart” a while and not just leap right into some other trap that only leads back to the body and desire. The first robai mentions the possibility of a language that will subsist “inside seeing” rather than taking up an oppositional or distorting relationship to insight.

“Don’t come to us without bringing music” and “Sometimes visible, sometimes not, sometimes”

Spiritual insight is described in the first poem as a kind of intoxication (wine is forbidden to Muslims), while the second poem probably alludes to some of those passages in The Koran in which it’s said that Allah will eventually reconcile all people of good will; for now, the “different shapes” or religious faiths prevail.

Robais 25, 82, 158

In Robai 25, the Friend is of course Allah, and the poem simply asks why God is not visible as well as nature. Robai 82 suggests that the essence of ritual is intention; it’s devotion that sanctifies the physical act. 158 mentions a place literally “beyond good and evil,” beyond the rigid conceptions people adhere to about ethical categories and sanctions. Sufism seems to delight in positing this sort of realm, which is also beyond language and self-identity. This strategy seems designed to open up the believer’s mind rather than focus it on some petty set of “rules and regulations.” In other words, the enemy of any religion is the tendency of believers to settle into comfortable, empty ritual practices and to adhere childishly to some code of do’s and don’ts. But that’s not spirituality, it’s herd-think that demands authoritarianism.

Ghazals

“An Empty Garlic” and “Dissolver of Sugar”

The first poem deals with shortsightedness in matters of spirit: “You miss the garden, / because you want a small fig from a random tree.” Introspection and silence are the counsel: “Let yourself be silently drawn / by the stronger pull of what you really love.” The speaker suggests, if I understand him rightly, that spiritual understanding is like a beautiful woman we can’t see because we allow our attention to be taken up with the material world as “an old crone” that flatters us with her attentions and her talk. Spiritual enthusiasm is its own kind of understanding. In the second poem, what is the “dissolver of sugar”? Well, the main thing that dissolves sugar is water. It seems to me that God is figured as being like a lover whose touch melts the beloved. The speaker says he wants to be ready for death, and he welcomes the presence of God as something that can “dissolve” his ordinary self into a greater reality. The very distance between lover and beloved only compels the speaker towards unification.

From Spiritual Couplets

“A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot”

As an admirer of Indian cooking, I like this poem and would advise any wayward chickpea just the same. The chickpea gets a lesson, that is, in its value as a natural thing to the human beings who are about to consume it: “Remember when you drank rain in the garden. / That was for this. . . . / Grace first. Sexual pleasure, / then a boiling new life begins.”

“Why Wine is Forbidden”

Well, as the Romans say, in vino veritas. The speaker suggests that most people are more likely to become belligerent than mellow when drunk. His view of human nature is somewhat distrustful, and he’s probably right: most people do become jerks when they drink too much. The Prophet understood this, and therefore prohibited the consumption of alcohol. At best, alcohol only helps people cheat their way to ecstasy, and apparently our Sufi mystic thinks it’s necessary to put some real effort into the attempt.

“The Question”

The speaker presents us with a choice: God’s presence will appear to us as a fire on our left, and water on our right. Which will we choose? If we choose the soft-seeming, flowing water, we choose wrongly. Sometimes—and almost always in matters of spirit—the easy choice, the “rational thing to do”—isn’t the right choice. Water partly represents the material world, which can be soft, pleasant, seductive. Fire is the element of purification and transformation: that is what we should choose. As it turns out, “If you are a friend of god, fire is your water.” The poet isn’t condemning water; he is suggesting only that “Fire is what of God is world-consuming. / Water, world-protecting.” As spiritual beings, I think he is saying, we should not fall in love with the things of this world. Our proper home is fire, spirit, not earthly comforts. We find the same choice put more starkly in the Gospels: Jesus says, “whosoever will save his life shall lose it” (Matthew 16:25). Former student Kathleen Olem describes the assumptions underlying this poem very well. She writes, “ Rumi suggests that what we believe to be true when we rely on reason, and our senses, is nothing more than an illusion he likens to magician’s tricks. In the realm of spirit, reason can be misleading; what appears to be death by fire is really spiritual transformation, what mystics refer to as "piercing the veil of illusion" revealing an eternal reality that will sustain us. Water, on the other hand, represents the physical world, and all its pleasures, which we mistakenly believe will sustain us, but, by its very nature, cannot. Rumi is pointing out that, on the mystical path to spiritual enlightenment, the truth may, in fact, contradict what we have always held to be true.”

From Birdsong: “Lovers in their brief delight”

The speaker emphasizes the cost of both erotic and spiritual passion, describing it in terms of sacrifice: “A thousand half-loves / must be forsaken to take one whole heart home.”

From The Glance: “Silkworms”

This poem quietly revels in paradox: embrace hurt and it will “change” into joy. It figures the life-process as the spinning of a cocoon whose purpose is transformation from the material to spiritual, from earth to flight. Particularly fine is the conclusion: “When I stop / speaking, this poem will close, / and open its silent wings . . . .” The poet’s words have as their purpose something beyond his intention or interpretation; the poem is to take flight and go where it will.

Week 07, Buddha, Jataka, Bhagavad-Gita

2009-08-16T19:30:00.000-07:00

Notes on Buddha’s Three Cardinal Discourses and the Buddhist Jataka.

The Three Cardinal Discourses are entitled “Setting Rolling the Wheel of Truth,” “The Not-Self Characteristic,” and “The Fire Sermon.” One thing is obvious about Gautama Buddha, as accounts of his personality have come down to us: he is unencumbered by desire or ambition, and has disinvested himself of all stock in the body. Unlike George Costanza’s nutty father on Seinfeld, he doesn’t have to shout “serenity now!” out of desperation, but is truly free. Why, then, does he bother talking to others about spiritual matters? His reason for taking up the role of teacher and prophet is compassion for those who (to varying degrees) don't yet know what they need to know, and therefore do not live as they should. The ignorance and suffering of others, it seems, calls for a response on the part of those who have become enlightened, so liberation isn’t the same thing as irresponsibility.

How easy or how difficult does he make attainment of serenity sound for others, and what style does he adopt to convey his message? Much in Buddhism comes down to promoting acts of constructive self-annihilation and renunciation of materialism. The Four Noble Truths are that life is suffering, that suffering is a product of attachment or desire, that it’s possible to let go of such attachments, and finally, that there’s a specifiable path to follow towards liberation. That is a very simple, straightforward message: misdirected desire makes us unhappy, but right conduct and attitude can bring us peace. On the whole, Buddha counsels reorientation of one’s sensibilities and attentions away from the self and towards the community, though not in an ostentatious way. Buddhism is often called “the middle way” because it doesn’t preach extreme asceticism, but at the same time the concept of self-sacrifice for others’ welfare seems to be very important to this philosophy, which differs markedly from western outlooks that emphasize the primacy of the individual and the satisfactions of material accumulation. I will leave the specifics to the notes available online along with the sermons themselves, but basically, the Eightfold Path, as the first sermon sets them forth, consists in right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. (The BigView.com offers lucid explications of these categories, but you can find them all over the Internet. See, for example, The Buddhist Reading Room, which provides a wealth of materials and links).

What is especially noteworthy about Buddha’s views on attachment is that he applies them to everything: attachment to anything whatsoever—our thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and so forth—and consequent appropriation of them as mine, belonging to me, leads to delusion and misery. Fundamentally, it seems, the self is a delusion. That is a point we can also find in the Baghavad-Gita, beautifully enunciated by the god Krishna. Buddhism differs in a number of significant ways from Hinduism (see Brian's Syllabus), but in some respects it is consonant with it, and the point I just made is a key area of agreement: the small-s “self” or autonomous ego is a function of our greedy and anxious desire for security and gain. To put the case lightly, Buddhism and Hinduism both seem to be on to our “control freak” tendencies and possessiveness.

As for stylistics, Buddha surely doesn’t construe knowledge in an Aristotelian or Baconian fashion: patient inductive research and the gradual building up of knowledge into theories are not his method or goal. He has already achieved serenity, and that isn’t something we can capture in fourfold or eightfold divisions, or classify in the usual western way. Nonetheless, even though we are talking about something language can't really express—absolute peace and an intuitive sense of truth, Buddha characterizes enlightenment's stages as attainable in degrees, with each degree of attainment giving us a kind of satisfaction, though not of the sort that comes from object-relations. The sermons’ divisions are heuristic (teaching) devices: they help Buddha convey his main point that suffering is a product of desire—we covet objects, we covet security, we turn people into objects, and so forth—and that it is eminently possible to overcome such tendencies. He conveys in a constructively paradoxical style a message about acts of letting-go and letting-happen, not making-happen. This distinction seems to be common to several eastern philosophies and religions: while the west is often about spiritual struggle, or “making-happen,” eastern wisdom has to do with the letting-go of delusions and the letting-happen of intuition and wisdom. That’s an overstatement, of course, but I think it’s worthwhile as an initial distinction.

With regard to The Jataka, its stories are about Buddha’s incarnations, so they teach us about Buddhist ethics. Purification is important, and so is a strong sense of community. Buddhism preaches respect for all creatures and rejects emphasis on human rank or caste (important considerations in Hinduism) and instead promotes egalitarianism and community. Buddhism privileges the spirit of self-sacrifice. The hare, for example, sacrifices its life in the flames, giving its body as alms, and this is described as a constructive, purifying act of self-annihilation, one that forces others to confront their own selfishness. In another of the tales, a selfish king sees the error of his ways when he is confronted with the courage of a monkey who gives his life to save his comrades; the monkey’s broken body becomes a bridge whereby they pass to safety and escape the king. Of course, there are always those who take kindness for weakness, but Buddha is offering an uplifting code of conduct that will inspire as many as possible: devotion to the welfare of others is the way. Buddhism is “worldly” in the best sense: it makes us think through how we treat others and consider the consequences of our behavior in that respect. The stories in The Jataka sometimes entail punishment, but that really isn’t what they are about. Punishing those who do wrong is undeniably satisfying for a while, but it’s almost certain to make them withdraw into their own ego-shell and “forget” or deny that they have done wrong—not exactly a recipe for spiritual enlightenment. The punishments suffered by the selfish characters in The Jataka (like the greedy merchant in the first tale) seem designed to enlighten, not simply to cause pain and distress.

Finally, a good question would be, “to what extent can we take Buddhist ethics seriously in a western market society, one based on the desires of consumers for many more “things” than they need?” Capitalism thrives not on the buying and selling of basic foodstuffs and other necessities but rather on the producing, selling, and buying of all that which goes beyond need. Capitalism thrives on the production not only of goods but, more importantly, of people’s desire for an endless series of goods above and beyond what they need. The market sells us buying and selling, consumption, as a lifestyle, a world view: it takes advantage of the fact that we are creatures of excess and extravagance. (No wonder King Lear gets so upset when his daughters take away his hundred knights: “O, reason not the need!” he exclaims, “Our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous.”) So how can we accept Buddha’s antimaterialism and “not-self-ism”? Can we at least use those ideas as a hedge against confusing our love for commodified objects with an appreciation of genuine value? Buddha offers a perspective outside the system. (Differences aside, the same is true of Jesus, who rejected materialism and said, “Take no care for the morrow” and “My kingdom is not of this world.”) A modern, semi-Buddhist ethos might say something like, “well, if you’re going to be consumers, at least live lightly in the presence of the object-system; don’t get attached to the objects you buy and consume or take buying and consuming as the purpose of your lives.” To the contrary, the capitalist order’s proponents would surely prefer that we be chained to a process of serial obsession and consumption, and unable to think outside the commercial box in any way that threatens to restrict the flow of our desire for objects and the satisfactions they bring. Buddha himself was high-born and could have taken full advantage of wealth and position, but he rejected those things, and chose to help others. It is possible, after all, so perhaps enlightenment is to some degree attainable by anyone who understands that it is a worthy goal and who wants to achieve it. Of course, wisdom itself is commodifiable—we can turn anything into a “product,” and thereby neutralize the transformative potential it may otherwise have had. But why not end on a positive note? This will do:

The greatest achievement is selflessness.
The greatest worth is self-mastery.
The greatest quality is seeking to serve others.
The greatest precept is continual awareness.
The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.
The greatest action is not conforming with the world’s ways.
The greatest magic is transmuting the passions.
The greatest generosity is non-attachment.
The greatest goodness is a peaceful mind.
The greatest patience is humility.
The greatest effort is not concerned with results.
The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go.
The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.

Atisha, an 11 th-century Tibetan Buddhist master.
(http://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/)

General Notes on The Bhagavad-Gita.

The Individual or “Self”: We tend to think of the individual person as a fully self-contained, autonomous agent. “I” am not “you,” and you and I are not “them.” Everybody, we like to say in our post-romantic fashion, is in at least some sense unique, and by this we seem to mean that something in us precedes any possible determination or shaping influence by outside forces like the society into which we have been born, the political order that subjects us to its imperatives, the expectations of our parents, the linguistic order, and so forth. We sometimes acknowledge that forces beyond ourselves are partly responsible for what we become, but that sort of acknowledgement usually makes us uncomfortable. Freud, Marx, Foucault and others have in their various ways insisted to our discomfiture that the forces that produce “us” as individuals are powerful and relatively autonomous—how does one combat the Unconscious, international capital, Ideological State Apparatuses, or Power? But how does The Bhagavad-Gita deal with the concept of the self? What constitutes it? It seems that the Gita author or authors would accept neither the idea of the self as an autonomous, unique agent nor the idea that forces such as “society” straightforwardly determine who we are as individuals. The Gita insistently claims that the self is a delusion stemming from ignorance and entirely dependent upon a strong desire to find security and permanence in our relationships with objects and with other people in their narrow selfhood. Ultimately, this desire boils down to fear of death. The only security an individual can truly hope to attain, counsels the Gita, is to be found in the knowledge that the small-s self has its source in the ultimate Self, Krishna. When a person realizes this truth, the fear of death recedes and a whole new world opens up. This is a key point in the Gita—when we no longer see the world “through selfish eyes,” so to speak, we see it in an entirely different, liberated manner. As William Blake says in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “a fool sees not the same tree as a wise man sees.”

Why is the self a delusion? Well, it’s just another concept that doesn’t explain anything. Nietzsche makes a fine point when he says that the expression “lightning flashes” may be useful, but it’s also a lie. We perceive a “flashing” in the sky, and then we invent a noun (lightning) to account for the instrumental cause of that flashing. But “lightning” is just a word, an empty concept, an abstraction. To say “lightning flashes” is at best shorthand for “go see what I’m talking about: flashing,” but it doesn’t explain the flashing activity that we see. No, it makes us think we do, which in turn makes us arrogant because (supposedly) now we know so much. As country folk say, “it’s not what you don’t know that gets you in trouble, it’s what you think you know.” Try substituting for “lightning flashes” the phrase “I do” or “self performs action,” and you can easily understand the Hindu and Buddhist notion of why the individual ego is a delusion: the noun “self” is an ex post facto construction we use to explain things and relationships that we really don’t understand. Arjuna says to Krishna something like, “I am the doer of my deeds, and am deeply attached to and responsible for their results,” and the latter entirely disagrees with that assessment. You only covet the fruit of your actions if you cling to the notion of self as an entity that covets, that tries to extend itself by means of things and deeds that in fact limit and attenuate, that hinder the path to enlightenment.

Consequentiality of Actions: Based on our delusory notion of the autonomous self, w e generally make a close connection between what we are and what we do. We like to say that as individuals with free will, we are responsible for what we have done and are doing. Deeds entail consequences and (supposedly) reveal the essence of a person. Existentialism, one of the most popular western philosophies, encourages such notions by means of its Sartrean dictum, “essence follows existence.” We might even say that we treat the deed like a thing, a commodity, with which our identity gets caught up to the point of identification: you are your car, you are your deed! This is a powerful tendency in modern western societies, with their strong emphasis on competition for the right to accumulate material goods, the achievement of carefully specified goals often tied to or allied with economic production and consumption, and the eventual accountability of all “evildoers” at the bar of justice. What does this book say about such a viewpoint? It counsels action, to be sure, but action in a peculiarly detached manner: action in what the text calls “the spirit of worship.” Can you act in such a way that you don’t expect to own or control the results of your actions? If so, you’re acting in the way the Gita suggests you should. If you act on the basis of some kind of “reward/punishment” or “success/failure” scheme, if you expect recognition and admiration for what you do, then the Gita would suggest that you’re not acting in the right spirit. This sort of selfish action is somewhat like that of a mediocre actor who “plays to the crowd” rather than just trying to be true to the part.

The Path to Enlightenment: On the surface, this seems simple— Krishna says all you really need to do is appreciate him, listen to his wisdom, and concentrate on him. If you do that, you’ll escape the seemingly endless cycle of death and rebirth. Too much spiritual storm and stress may turn a person into a fanatic who can’t act in the detached manner that Krishna advocates. I don’t think the Gita’s idea of “devotion” (which is the best path, in the text’s view) amounts to anything like zealotry—if salvation is pursued anxiously and obsessively, the seeker will move farther and farther away from enlightenment and liberation. Perhaps that is where some westerners go astray when they make contact with eastern philosophy: they become fanatics determined to cast off immediately everything they ever knew or did. Inevitably, I suspect, this fanaticism leads to disillusionment. Hindu religion involves devotion, but wisdom seems to be more a matter of “letting things happen” than of anxiously trying to make them happen. Of course, it makes paradoxical sense to point out that it takes a lot of work before a person can just “let truth happen.”

Structure: the book is dialogic, a conversation between the charioteer-god Krishna and Arjuna the warrior. As Krishna unfolds his truths, Arjuna plays the practical man and asks, “yes, but we are restless, how can we live up to all this advice?” Which question elicits variations and alternatives from Krishna . We move towards a penultimate vision of Krishna as both Destroyer and Preserver. He is life and death, beautiful and mild, terrible as the lion killing its prey. This vision is too much for Arjuna—be careful what you wish for! So Krishna becomes mild again, and conversational. The text returns to the theme of wisdom and the right path, and before it ends we are given something of a jeremiad against the losers who don’t get the idea. But the book doesn’t end on such a sour note, returning instead to the necessity of renunciation and the achievement of right attitude and understanding.

Text’s Status: How does this book compare to The Bible with regard to the status posited for the text? Well, the latter work makes more claims for itself as necessary for salvation. But the Gita sets itself forth as a husk you can work through to get at the kernel of truth, so that you won’t need the printed words anymore. The Four Gospels deal heavily in winnowing the wheat from the chaff; they are consequential, linear, black and white in their morality. Forgiveness is possible and there’s much magnificence of gesture, but individual sinners are closely bound to their actions. One might see Jesus as a transgressive figure, a revolutionary who breaks the law to fulfill it—but the strict law of observance reigns and is turned inward, as when Jesus says that even to think of adultery is already to have committed it.

Chapter-by- Chapter Notes on The Bhagavad-Gita.

Edition: The Bhagavad-Gita. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York : Three Rivers Press, 2000. ISBN 0—609-81034-0. Page numbers do not apply to the Norton Anthology of World Literature selections, but the commentary is compatible.

Chapter 1. Arjuna’s Despair.

41-45. Dhritarashtra, father of the Kaurava warriors, sits beyond the story’s frame, requesting from the poet Sanjaya that he relate what happened in the fateful days of the Battle of Kurukshetra. He, too, will have a chance to derive enlightenment from the story. As Sanjaya recounts things, Arjuna asks Krishna to drive his chariot to a commanding place where he may view the entire field of battle. Time seems to stand still, opening a space for sustained reflection. Arjuna is not yet enlightened, and needs to know the precise relationship between himself and the actions he is about to perform. At this point, he is overwhelmed, and grieves over the imminent loss of his kindred in the battle, and the confusion and disorder he believes will necessarily result.

Chapter 2. The Practice of Yoga.

46-53. To clear away the thicket of Arjuna’s illusions, Krishna must first help him redefine what is meant by the term “self” and what is meant by “action.” He tells him to let go of his grief, which stems from attachment to his kindred in their perishable, mortal form. The truth is that such a connection is selfish—Arjuna is thinking more of himself than of the others whose loss he fears. Krishna seems to counsel that while family and caste are important, they are not to be fetishized for their own sake, or for the comfort and advantage they bring to oneself. The general comments I made above about “the self” apply well to this chapter. The Self transcends ego or personhood and cannot die; it is as imperishable as modern physics says matter is indestructible. Some of the language in this chapter may remind us of Jesus in The Gospels. For example, Mark 3.31-35: 3:31 There came then his brethren and his mother, and, standing without, sent unto him, calling him. 3:32 And the multitude sat about him, and they said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee. 3:33 And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brethren? 3:34 And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! 3:35 For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.

Saint Augustine follows this lead in The Confessions, too, in the way he deals with the passing of his mother Monica—he treats her with great regard, but at the same time he does not cling to the mortal element in her, saying that it would be selfish and an insult to God to behave that way. Krishna doesn’t preach stoicism; what he suggests is that Arjuna should act with detachment and that he should treat whatever feelings or sensations that come to him with indifference. He should do his duty as a Kshatriya warrior, and not worry about the so-called death of his relatives. At 52, Krishna speaks to Arjuna in terms he can understand: not to do your caste-based duty is shameful, it constitutes failure and disgrace.

53-60. What is the wisdom of yoga? All of the yoga types— of action, wisdom, devotion, and meditation, as they’re usually described—counsel that whatever a person does or thinks, it should be done or thought in “the spirit of worship,” and not for the sake of the results. Taking unwise account of the results to be attained from actions leads only to enslavement to desire and ambition, whether one’s own desires and ambitions or those of others. Reading the Hindu scriptures with some ulterior motive in mind, it seems, would be just as misguided as acting for personal gain. Regarding religion in this way only leads to empty ritualism and, in the end, disillusionment. The text is very clear on these points at page 54: “Act for action’s sake,” it says, and “unnecessary are all scriptures to someone who has seen the truth.” From 56-60, Krishna explains that the essence of yoga is rest, meditation, detachment. He calls for a reorientation of purpose when a person acts: the one who acts should be centered not in him- or herself, but rather in Krishna , the all-encompassing Self.

Chapter 3. The Yoga of Action (Karma Yoga).

61-63. Arjuna does not yet understand Krishna’s message, it seems, since he sees only paradox in the command to act: action is necessary, but action, he thinks, must be bad because it enslaves the doer. So on 62-63, Krishna varies the message, saying that action is necessary, but that so long as a person acts in the spirit of worship, it will not have the results Arjuna fears.

65-66. Krishna suggests that those who know about yoga do not try to impose enlightenment, but inspire by example.

66-70. Krishna himself keeps the cosmos going by means of action, as he says at 66, so inaction is not the aim. Human beings must act, but they must not covet the results or outcomes; they must not attach their desires to their deeds, and try to control what happens after they have acted. Krishna posits a reciprocal relationship between gods and human beings: “by worship you will nourish the gods / and the gods will nourish you in return” (63). What is the cause of “action”? The three gunas or qualities that arise from nature: sattva (spiritual, having to do with purity and spirituality), rajas (worldly, having to do with action and process) and tamas (unholy, having to do with inertia). It is not the ego that we should consider the performer of actions, but the gunas, which, if I understand correctly, exist in all things and bind the body to the spirit; as Krishna says on pg. 158, they “bind to the mortal body / the deathless embodied Self.” (This is an important consideration in Indian dietary practice, by the way—a healthy diet reinforces the balance between mind and body, while an unhealthy one destroys that balance. See, for example, the clear explication about yoga, the gunas and cooking at Sivananda.org.

Towards the end of the chapter, Krishna explains why a certain withdrawal from the senses is advisable—he says that desire strikes us first through our senses, so people must learn to control their reactions to sensory experience. Again, stoicism or simply “not feeling anything” doesn’t seem to be what is counseled here. Rather, the key thing is how a person responds to sensory experience, feelings and desires. Embedded in this text is a hierarchical notion of the mind being more valuable than the body.

Chapter 4. The Yoga of Wisdom (Jñana Yoga).

73. Krishna’s method entails variation and elaboration, the partial unfolding of truths to which the text returns repeatedly. Here he explains that all honest action leads to him. Indeed, a person rooted in wisdom is already “there,” so the book’s employment of location-words is more a device than an actuality; the “path” described is circular, not linear.

75. Here Krishna thoroughly redefines the concept “action.” Action isn’t simply “doing things”; this kind of busy-action may amount to doing nothing at all. In fact, says Krishna , in this sense the wise do nothing at all since wisdom consumes the content of their actions. As an American Secretary of State once said, “don’t just do something—stand there!”

76-77. The various “offerings”—sacrifice, the objects of the senses, action, etc.—almost don’t matter; what matters is how you do what you do. Right-spirited action is worship. What Krishna advises here resembles the preaching of Buddhists: a constructive, gentle form of self-annihilation. Experience itself can be considered an offering to Krishna if it’s approached rightly. Those who act honestly are, he says, “freed of themselves” (77).

78-79. Krishna says that the seeker should find a teacher. How to learn? Well, first the person who wants to learn must know that learning consists not in the accumulation of facts and so forth, but rather in the clearing away of deeply rooted illusions that stem from self and society. A person teaches not so much by imparting truth but rather by modeling how to learn. Oscar Wilde’s quip is relevant: “Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” (“A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated.” The Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Isobel Murray. Oxford : Oxford UP, 1989. 570. ISBN-10: 019281978-X.)

Chapter 5. The Yoga of Renunciation.

81-87. This chapter furthers the transition away from what we would call narrowly construed Cartesian dualism (cogito, ergo sum or “I think; therefore, I am” being the key precept). It seems that the errors of connecting doers with actions, being attached to one’s desires, and being attached to the results of actions, are symptoms of this primal intellectual mistake. In my view, the text values the things of the mind and spirit over the body, but I also think it warns us against deriving from this hierarchy a narrow, ego-centered conception of the self as something purely intrapersonal. The point isn’t to dismiss one’s embodied existence altogether so as to exalt Reason or anything of that sort; it’s to understand how the mind and body work together and how the individual is related to constructions that go well beyond the narrow confines of the “little-s” self. The chapter’s central statement occurs on page 83: when a person offers his actions to Krishna , the text says, “sin / rolls off him, as drops of water / roll off a lotus leaf.” Such a person has shed the illusion of self and thereby connected to the cosmic Self that is Krishna , and purification is a natural result of the transformation. I suppose someone determined to deconstruct the text’s metaphysics would suggest that this Self is the ultimate “center that is not the center,” i.e. that it’s the metaphysical concept set beyond investigation so as to ground everything else Krishna says. That would be a fair point, but I find it more interesting to attend to the manner in which the text’s representational and dialogic strategies try to slip away from this difficulty and to produce genuine enlightenment. The representation of infinity and absolutes in religious texts may be mostly intended to instill a certain perspective on things, a way of living in the world without losing hope, not to deliver something that really cannot be conveyed in language or by means of images. The point is to keep the mind and spirit open, not to shut it down. The vastness of the Gita’s time frames swamps teleological thinking—its cycles seem run in billions of years, a frame too great for the mind to comprehend. In Job, the protagonist is instilled with such a perspective after God recounts his sublimities: Job says simply that God has spoken “things too wonderful” for a mortal to understand, and that silence is the only appropriate response.

Chapter 6. The Yoga of Meditation (Dhyana Yoga).

88-98. It seems as if the yoga of action is to be pursued only so that one can reach a level of maturity sufficient to practice the yoga of meditation, which yields serenity. Reigning in the mind is necessary since it’s natural for it to wander during meditation. If possible, one is supposed to reach a temporary state of silence wherein the flow of language and emotion stops. A person who has ever attended to this incessant internal chatter for long will know how difficult it is to make it stop or even to slow it down, even for a moment. As the Shakers say, “‘tis a gift to be simple, ‘tis a gift to be free.” Western people seem addicted to self-consciousness. The romantic poets analyze and sing well regarding the potentially infinite and maddening regression of acts of self-consciousness: “I am thinking about myself thinking about myself thinking about myself . . . .” Where does that attempt to gain complete mastery over the psyche lead but to despair? How is it supposed to engraft a person into a state of wisdom, or rather (to be more accurate) into a process of thinking that yields wisdom? No wonder poets like Shelley pine because they can’t become like a skylark or a nightingale, even for an instant—see his excellent poem “To a Sky-lark.” It isn’t too difficult to think of analogies for the meditative transformation Krishna describes: Heidegger’s wonderful line about that need to refine one’s thinking to the point where one can perceive “a single star shining in the sky” (like Krishna’s “single object” on page 90) bracketing out all else, captures something of the transformation. More generally, how many people have ever really seen the night sky, free of interference and diminution by city lights, human language, and anything else that might get in the way? To do so is to be liberated from oneself, at least for a time; the stars have power to draw us beyond the confines of ourselves: self-annihilation, so to speak. A need for serenity and silence need not be construed as a flight into mysticism and irrationalism: instead, opening up a space for contemplation involves the bracketing-out of quotidian things like language, ordinary eventuality, and polluted sensory perception; where this cannot be accomplished, it involves knowing how to deal with what cannot be avoided so as not to be bound to it and determined by it. Finally, the chapter makes a broad offer of what in western terms might be called salvation: Krishna says that nobody is ever utterly lost; even the one who wanders may “cleanse himself” of sin “through many lifetimes” (97), and thereby reach the goal of liberation.

Chapter 7. Wisdom and Realization.

99-101. This chapter begins with mention of the rarity of seeking, and the even greater rarity of attaining, a true understanding of Krishna . At 101, the god explains that he is the excellence in all things, though he is not himself bounded by such excellence: “I am the taste in water,” he says. Desire is sanctioned so long as it is in accordance with duty. Apparently, one can find Krishna in anything excellent—”I am the arc of the ball as it flies through the air; I am the sound of the ball as it drops through the hoop / without touching the rim.” How’s that for a basketball analogy? Or perhaps Krishna is the best thought one has while reading a text, the one that comes and goes as quick as lightning—illustrating Moses Maimonides’ conception of learning as taking place through a series of illuminations, of “flashings” that come and then leave one in the dark again.

102-05. Krishna describes the sage as one who has sought the truth and who is now at rest. Page 104 is central to this chapter since Krishna declares himself “beyond all knowing”—a fact obscured to “fools” who, tied to the cycles of their own desire and aversion, believe he can be reduced or reified to a limited form: something, that is, that they can wrap their narrow minds around.

Chapter 8. Absolute Freedom.

106-112. Freedom is described on 107 at “union with the deathless” Self of Krishna, which can be realized only by a kind of devotion not reducible to mere ritual. At 110, we again see the vastness of the text’s time frames and the shifting or ever-expanding quality of its conceptual frameworks: Krishna says that “one single night of Brahma / lasts more than four billion years” and that “beyond this unmanifest nature / is another unmanifest state, / a primal existence that is not / destroyed when all things dissolve.” This kind of successive revelation of Krishna’s dimensionality I sometimes try to represent by drawing a series of concentric circles—every time the last dimension of reality seems to have been revealed, you have to draw another circle. Or picture yourself sitting somewhere, and then “situate” that scene in a much larger one encompassing your surroundings, and then the still larger one that would encompass that, and so forth, ad infinitum. The chapter ends with the thought that a wise person, dying, “reaches / the supreme, primordial place” (112). I suppose that the Gita author would agree with William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that birth is a kind of “fall” into the realm of materiality, and that “if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

Chapter 9. The Secret of Life.

113-20. This chapter prepares the way for Krishna’s subsequent self-descriptions and manifestations. The “secret” that Krishna promises to unveil is that he pervades all things, is the source of all things. On 118-19, he makes the startlingly broad claim that “all those who worship / other gods, with deep faith, / are really worshiping me, / even if they don’t know it,” and concludes by saying that “no one who truly / loves me will ever be lost.”

Chapter 10. Divine Manifestations.

121-30. This chapter is partly about how Arjuna may visualize Krishna , and again, it prepares us for the “cosmic vision” of the eleventh chapter. Krishna offers many beautiful and exalting images—the lion, the flower, the wind, the river Ganges ; he also employs more ineffable language such as “time” (127), “death that devours all things” (128), and “the wisdom of the wise” (129). He ends the chapter with the words, “I support the whole universe / with a single fragment of myself” (130). On the whole, the chapter offers a series of intuitions, not one coherent image or description of Krishna , because the point we are to understand is that he is ultimately not representable in any finite shape, either in images or in language. Krishna also explains that he is both Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer, the two gods Shelley invokes in his “Ode to the West Wind”: “ Wild Spirit, which art moving every where; / Destroyer and preserver; hear, O, hear!”

Chapter 11. The Cosmic Vision.

When Arjuna asks to see Krishna as he really is, the latter endows him with special eyes with which to view this celestial wonder. Arjuna gets infinitely more than he bargained for since Krishna shows his divine aspects as the embodiment of the Hindu Trinity of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. We are told that Arjuna “saw the whole universe enfolded” (134). This sight is properly infinite, so the text’s descriptive language seems designed more to instill wonder at the sublimity of Krishna’s true nature than actually to body it forth. Only Arjuna, with his temporarily adequate eyes, can see what is described to us. The sight does not bring comfort to Arjuna; it brings terror at Krishna’s “billion-fanged mouths” that “blaze like the fires of doomsday” (136). When Arjuna asks for a spoken description, Krishna declares, “I am death, shatterer of worlds, / annihilating all things” (138) and drives home to Arjuna the imperative to act, to do his duty as a member of the Kshatriya caste, a warrior: indeed, explains Krishna, he himself has already acted, and the battle has already taken place: all the warriors will die, and Arjuna the limited being is not truly the doer of the deeds that “will occur.” This “dazzling, infinite, primal” (141) form of Krishna cannot be endured long, so at Arjuna’s request he returns to his milder dimensions, and explains that only through devotion—not by “study or rites / or alms or ascetic practice” (143)—can he be known as he is.

Chapter 12. The Yoga of Devotion (Bhakti Yoga).

Krishna privileges devotion—centeredness on him, offering up one’s actions to him—as the best way to achieve mokhsha or liberation and escape the cycle of death and rebirth. Mystical worship of “the unmanifest” is more arduous for embodied beings like humans; the devotion to which Krishna refers seems to consist in devotion to him “as if” he were himself an embodied being, the way one human being might be devoted to another to the point of never allowing other imperatives to get in the way. The spirit of “surrender” is greater, Krishna explains, than practice, meditation, or knowledge (146)—such spiritual efforts are worthwhile techniques, not the thing itself. But ultimately, Krishna says with great generosity, all spiritual roads lead to him, though some may require longer and more difficult journeys than others. The supreme contentment he describes is, he says, beyond any human feeling—beyond even what we call “joy.”

Chapter 13. The Field and Its Knower.

The field is the body, with its ten senses. This is the main idea of the chapter—knowledge and its object are interrelated, it seems. Desire and aversion are included in the field; they are the two main things to watch out for because they have harmful effects on a person’s capacity for devotion to Krishna .

The ten senses or indriyas: Swami Jnaneshvara Bharati says that a human being is “like a building with ten doors”: the five exit doors or karmendriyas are eliminating, reproducing, moving, grasping, and speaking. The five entrance doors or jnanendriyas are the cognitive senses of smelling, tasting, touching, seeing, and hearing. The point is that one has to become aware of all these in order to become detached from them, to turn inward (pratyahara) by means of meditation. Simple denial of sensory experience isn’t good—rather, one gradually understands that the senses, though necessary, are ultimately unreliable and don’t give the only kind of knowledge. We are more than the body.

This chapter again says that the self is not the cause of actions; actions arise from Nature. Here is how the text explains this point: “Nature gives rise / to changes in the field and to gunas. // Nature is the cause of any / activity in the body; / the Self is the cause of any / feelings of pleasure or pain” (153). A bit later, the Gita says that it is Nature, and not the self, that causes actions (155). Again, unitary notions about the ego, some abstract self that makes things happen, are delusory; an act is the coming together and parting of many forces in motion. The terms “Self” and “self” are important to distinguish in this book: the capital-letter Self is a cosmic entity and is not to be reduced to Nature or the gunas (which are best explained in the next book); it is that eternal part of us that transcends ego and personhood and temporality, the part that is pervaded by Krishna . It is not the limited, bounded ego.

Chapter 14. The Three Gunas.

The three gunas are the three prime qualities of nature—sattva (spiritual), rajas (worldly) and tamas (unholy), which constitute all life (158). They “bind” the body to the deathless Self. The point is that the little-s self is too narrow a conception—the capital-s Self is a trans-subjective reality; we are all part of a vast cosmic Self. I think the idea is that the gunas, the prime qualities of nature, are the “doers” of actions. This is not the same thing as fatalism or determinism—there has to be something that is aware of itself to make such a determination as “I am not the doer of the deed.” It is sometimes said that karma is all about action. That’s what the word means, but I believe we are not to take it as a western-style cause/effect or “sin” model of transgression and punishment. The yoga of devotion can take us beyond concern with action. Pure devotion leads us to become unattached to action, realizing that your “little-s self” is not the center of the universe. We come to look upon the realm of action in a serene, detached manner. So Arjuna the warrior should participate in war, and yet, in the highest possible sense, not be “doing” anything at all. This is to redefine the concept of action in a profound way.

Chapter 15. The Ultimate Person.

Visualization technique becomes important again here: the Gita pictures the upside-down world tree, “this world of sorrow.” Krishna is said to be the supreme Person, beyond eternity. The author isn’t satisfied with even the grandest, most capacious concept because concepts, by their very nature and function, must contain, limit, and narrow things down to a level of specificity and simplicity at which we think we understand them. This is a useful function—we tame and comprehend the world by abstraction, but it is not an end in itself. Krishna says he is beyond beyond. “How utterly utter,” as the C19 aesthete would say, making fun of superlative language. Whoever understands this philosophical maneuver and representational strategy, it seems, knows Krishna and is devoted to him.

Chapter 16. Divine Traits and Demonic Traits.

This chapter seems almost condemnatory, though that’s understandable: desire, anger, and greed are the three main gates to hell. They all result, I presume, in attachment to the material realm in a narrow and selfish way. The demonic are people who do attach themselves to their desires and their aversions, seeing themselves as the doers and the center of all things. If they understood, I think, they would not behave the way they do: the fundamental problem is one of misunderstanding, not knowing the true nature and cause of action.

Chapter 17. Three Kinds of Faith.

Everything in the realm of Nature can be divided into sattvic, rajasic, and tamasic: food, worship, etc.

Chapter 18. Freedom Through Renunciation.

Relinquishing is a more important distinction than renunciation because beyond the issue of renouncing desire, one is still confronted with orienting oneself with any action whatsoever—even, for example, worship. An embodied being can’t give up action altogether; such a being can only relinquish the results of the action. You worship for worship’s sake, not because you hope to get something from it or want to feel upright, etc.

A final thought: it’s tempting, with our western vocabulary, to say that this Hindu text advocates self-overcoming. That’s one way of looking at it, but it doesn’t quite capture what I think Krishna is saying. Self-overcoming sounds like struggle—the Germanic idea that life is always striving to be other (Leben ist andersstreben.) But isn’t that to say that desire is the essence of life?—that we are never satisfied with who we are, always want something more, and so forth? It makes us sound like country folk who yearn to visit the big city, like those characters in the musical Oklahoma . That doesn’t sound Krishna-like to me. I think he’s saying the necessary adjustment isn’t so much to struggle as to let go and become free. Think of the common Buddhist example of how understanding happens: you concentrate and concentrate on one of those funny-looking dual-images, and all of a sudden, you just see it properly; you understand or become unconfused. Your delusions have slipped away and have been forgotten, and understanding comes peacefully. It isn’t a matter of arduous “getting of knowledge,” as when we stock our minds with facts; it is a matter of letting understanding happen. Eastern philosophy and religion sometimes call for intense self-discipline in meditation, yoga, etc., but the emphasis is on the fact that these practices allow immediate and intuitive understanding. Not building, but clearing away and opening up, is the aim.

211-21. Mohandas Gandhi’s essay “The Message of the Gita” interprets the Gita as non-violent. I believe this approach stems from Gandhi’s decision to read the text in light of present-day needs, in a time when consciousness has moved beyond the conservative, caste-based system within which the Gita was created. It’s obvious that Krishna counsels Arjuna to do his duty as a member of the warrior caste, but Gandhi’s point is that on the whole the text teaches us about “perfection” (212) and “self-realization” (213). At 218, Gandhi further says that acting without desire to control the outcome of one’s actions, as the Gita surely does, leads a person to reject violence and untruth as principles of action. Both involve an attempt to force or deceive others into getting them to do what you want them to do. He concludes with the thought that “Like man, the meaning of great writings undergoes evolution.”

Week 06, Classic of Poetry, Confucius, Chuang Chou

2009-08-16T19:29:00.000-07:00

Notes on The Classic of Poetry.

“Fishhawk.” Who is the speaker? It seems that the speaker is collective, not individual. This poem isn’t a direct love lyric, but rather a communal lyric that asserts a harmony between the processes of nature and human emotions. The girl the speakers sing about is no doubt a maiden favored by the prince.

“Plums are Falling.” This is similar to the combined action/thought pattern in “he loves me, he loves me not” while plucking a flower. I find that it conveys a sense of how the mind turns even sharp observation of material acts and things to its own account. The woman in this poem is just picking fruit, but she’s thinking of something else. Marriages at this time would surely have been arranged, as they were in most ancient cultures, but the woman here suggests that she can assert at least an opinion, a kind of general desire for happiness and a “fine” husband. I’ve read that plum blossoms are symbols of courage and hope, heralds of the new year.

“Dead Roe Deer.” The situation here is in one way obvious, in another enigmatic. The maiden has been “led astray,” but how should we interpret her response to the situation? The dead deer perhaps symbolizes the girl’s loss of innocence. I’ve read that if one came across a dead deer, it was considered auspicious and proper to cover it as described in this poem, i.e. by wrapping it in white rushes.

“Boat of Cypress.” The poem is probably best understood as being about the speaker’s sense of betrayal at the hands of a lover. So how does the poem show the speaker dealing with her discontent? How is the leading image, the boat of cypress, related to the theme? Well, this image often (according to Arthur Waley) symbolizes the back-and-forth motion of a person’s intentions. The Odes, as Confucius will later say, help one compose oneself in such situations.

“Gentle Girl.” The poem is interesting in the sense that the girl is placed beyond all objects of the senses; she’s the very source of beauty. But at the same time the speaker, in the girl’s momentary (?) absence, concentrates on the material objects with which she is associated.

“Quince.” The exchanges aren’t equal materially—only the color of the gifts seems to make a rough match. But the love match is what matters. The man redefines objects for their symbolic value, and so a precious object can serve as proper “return” for an ordinary one, and vice versa. The Norton editors mention this poem to highlight the sense of egalitarianism that runs through these poems; as they put it, the gods don’t “play favorites,” and the Chou dynasty rulers seem to have respected the common people they ruled.

“Chung-Tzu, Please.” As the editors say, the poem is an offering of sorts to an overly excited lover. His behavior is a bit wild, and it’s a violation of decorum—the girl is becoming embarrassed about what her family and people in general might say about this manner of courtship. Reticence reigns even in revelation—the girl is enamored of Chung-Tzu, and the poem admits as much. She’s redefining his role as a lover, telling him how he must behave if he is to keep her affection and prosper in his suit. The material boundaries he crosses, the damage he does to the garden, violates her sense of belonging, her security. In ancient cultures generally, the individual’s sense of self is defined largely in relation to a communal order; a person’s “sense of self,” as we would say, is from the outset informed by the voices and opinions of respected others in the community. This way of understanding “personality” differs markedly from modern, post-romantic Western insistence on the uniqueness and radical autonomy of the individual. I would not care to overstate this argument since it’s foolish to suppose “people didn’t use to have a self way back when” (there’s truly “nothing new under the sun,” and the ancients could no doubt teach us a thing or two), but there’s a difference in emphasis to be reckoned on between ancient Chou culture and our own.

“I Went Along the Broad Road.” This short poem is apparently about a momentary meeting in the road between (in the first stanza) two old friends, and in the second, two former lovers. The speaker is concerned that no friendship or affair should ever be completely forgotten.

“Rooster Crows.” This poem is related to the traditional “dawn song,” as we would call it in western literature. Here, though, the point isn’t to curse the dawn for breaking the lovers’ idyllic time together; instead, the female speaker spurs the man on to go and do some work before he returns. I get the sense that these are courtly lovers, not peasants—the speaker has jewels to give, and they both will live the good life, replete with attendant harpers, fine wine and excellent food.

“Willows by the Eastern Gate.” Seems like an assignation had been set, but one partner didn’t keep it. The other’s mind remains fixed upon the place, wistfully or obsessively. The place knows nothing of the proposed meeting, but it is associated with the meeting in the speaker’s mind.

“She Bore the Folk.” Chiang or Jiang seems to have been one of those mortals who bears divine children to a god, in this case to the Jade Emperor, co-ruler of Heaven along with Jade Pure or Yuan-Shi-Tian-Zong. (See http://www.godchecker.com/ on Chinese Gods.) Lord Millet is her first-born of this god, and the boy grows up in a natural realm that both nourishes and abandons him. In turn, he establishes a close, productive relationship between ordinary mortals and the land that sustains them; Chou culture is agrarian, and this poem seems to be about the foundations of their society and political system. Lord Millet established the rites that the people still carry on with in the present time of the poem; their agricultural labor itself seems to be part of what is meant by “the rites.”

General Notes on the Analects of Confucius.

The complexity of the moral system in this text may stem from political necessity. As Lau says in his introduction to the complete translation, even before Confucius’ time, observing human behavior was considered an important way to gain some control over current and future events. People are unpredictable, and if you want to derive some sense of regularity from them, you have to study carefully how they behave. Confucius held some political offices connected to the Chou dynasty court, and he is concerned about this matter, too—he treats his disciples in accordance with their respective understandings.

Benevolence. The main quality of a gentleman is benevolence. It seems that in keeping with his flexible way of defining things, Confucius doesn’t offer any single statement, but makes us work at piecing together a sense of what the gentleman is, and how he must behave. First of all, the term seems partly connected with social class, as it sometimes is even today—i.e. to be a gentleman is to be well born, of a certain social standing and not exactly a member of the seething masses. Ancient societies had no problem maintaining strong distinctions between the lower orders and the higher-ups. But it also isn’t only a class-based term; the gentleman may be judged in terms of his character and his conduct, too. Lau explains clearly what “benevolence” entails:

1) Don’t make others do things you wouldn’t want to do yourself. This sounds a lot like the golden rule.

2) Love your fellow men. The family comes first here, but the affection extends in ever-lessening degrees to much more distant groupings. Confucius writes in support of a dynasty based on the clan-inheritance system, but we can see an impulse towards universalism here; he is capable of saying “love your fellow men,” even if he may not mean precisely the same thing as we might mean.

3) Do your best, do your duty—for the sake of doing so since Confucian ethics doesn’t really depend on concern over punishment in the afterlife. This seems similar to the idea set forth in the Gita: act in the spirit of worship, not self-aggrandizement.

4) Benevolence entails self-overcoming and observance of the rites, or, more broadly, religious and social custom. These are received wisdom, and, along with music and philosophy, they help to bring a sense of order to life, especially given the generally unpredictable and unruly character of people. Lau reminds us that self-interest is something Confucius understood to be a powerful chaos-maker in society and politics. Maybe this constant interest in “the rites” is annoying to modern westerners—American culture values rebelliousness (think “Boston Tea Party”) and individualism in that modern, post-romantic way. But many ancient cultures think of the self as more of a public construct. Confucius isn’t a Spartan advocating the life of the mess hall and the military camp, but the point is that a gentleman grows up respecting the rites, developing and learning in accordance with them. There is room for a notion of individualism, of personal integrity and reflectiveness—but the self is given a priori the pattern of the customs and traditions, and learns the value of moving along such a path towards wisdom and maturity. It would be arrogant, I think, to put this down as “conformism,” even if Confucianism is often used by Westerners like Ezra Pound to mean something like “strict order, respect for rank,” and so forth.

Other related virtues—they complement one another—are courage and reliability or living up to one’s word so long as that doesn’t mean being stupidly rigid. Then there are reverence in religious matters, and respectfulness in outward manner and in accordance with the station of the people around you.

Education. I think it’s true that the courtly notion of education was strict and labyrinthine—we’ve all heard the term “Mandarin” applied to mean something like “an erudite person who is remote from ordinary people.” But it’s silly to generalize like that—Confucius evidently doesn’t see education as merely the passing on of facts; it is lifelong and process, part of a perpetual formation of character. Notice that he doesn’t call himself a sage, and insists that he’s never even met one. The sage is an ideal, not a reality easily achieved. Maybe even that is going too far, since as we said, the point of Confucian morality isn’t to strive for recognition—it is to do one’s duty and treat others generously but according to their status and merit.

General View of Social Order. It’s not so difficult to see that Confucius’ society emphasizes order and harmony. Most likely, such an emphasis counteracts powerful real-life tendencies. There was plenty of political violence and probably a good deal of social unrest at times. Plato’s Republic was written in the aftermath of Athenian democracy’s self-inflicted implosion and defeat at the hands of Sparta—it is something of a wish-fulfillment. I don’t know that Confucius is in quite that position, but evidently, he had no illusions about his ideas being broadly applied as principles of government and social harmony. He has to settle for influencing his disciples, who will try to broaden the influence of his example to as many people as possible. This is a philosophy about how to develop sound individual character.

Another thing to consider with regard to Confucius’ vision of social order is his insistence on the way the common people—for whose good the whole political order is ultimately arranged, we are told—are influenced by the good (or bad) example of the nobility and ruling elite. Confucius claims that the common folk are like grass, and the nobility’s actions and words are like the wind that blows over the grass, bending it. The people take their “set,” so to speak, from their betters. What is American government founded on but a healthy distrust of government, coupled with an insistence that those whom we elect not tell us what to do in any area of life where it isn’t absolutely necessary? I’ve noticed that a certain slice of the electorate conflates leadership with moral example—there’s no harm in rulers behaving themselves (it’s embarrassing when they don’t, and can be dangerous if it touches upon matters of state), but a lot of us have trouble with the idea that we’re paying elected officials to set a moral example for us because such notions tend towards authoritarianism. In a sense, I’m paying the pols to carry out the public’s business, not to tell me how I should behave in my private affairs. Some of our presidents would probably never have been elected had we scrutinized their moral fabric or even their mental stability the way we do today—Jefferson was a complex and moody man to say the least, and Lincoln was subject to profound depressions.

Confucius’ sayings are at times rather cryptic and paradoxical, but they sound like the authoritative words of a master. They have come down to us at second-hand, as things said in response to questions asked by disciples of varying degrees of wisdom. I think this fits Confucius’ outlook well—he responds in particular ways to particular people at particular times. He isn’t preaching from the mountaintop; he’s talking about practical things in the here and now, and trying to explain to others why they ought to respect themselves and the relative dignity of other people, whatever their rank.

Page-by-Page Notes on the Analects of Confucius.

823. Confucius says that at seventy years old, a person’s understanding frees up development in accordance with the Way. The ruler is urged to teach by concrete example. What to do? Raise the virtuous, promote meritocracy.

824-25. Benevolence: respect for all, reverence for some. Benevolence is perhaps wisdom long continued, and involves overcoming internal and external barriers. A gentleman should maintain appropriate bearing and speech, consider the context and circumstances of words and actions. Tact is essential.

825-26. Music, religious rites, received customs—not chaos-inducing self-assertion—should be our pattern for development. Statecraft plays a major role in promoting this path. A gentleman should have a certain temperament: one that makes him generally capable rather than merely proficient in a few areas. Confucius and John Henry Newman the Victorian author would agree in that regard: Newman promoted a truly liberal education that would form a person’s character and temperament; above all, liberal education makes a person capable of continuing to learn, and learn quickly. Above all, a gentleman sets a good example for the commonfolk.

826. The young, says Confucius, deserve awe. Those fifty and under should have the potential to develop themselves authentically, at least if they live in a state that follows the Way. So in a sense, Confucius is promoting a “youth culture,” in spite of all the reverence for the old we associate with traditional Confucianism. I doubt, however, that he would agree with Oscar Wilde’s quip, “the young know everything.”

827. Undue sorrow is appropriate, Confucius suggests, if the person you grieve for has earned it. As the Bible says, “there is a time for every purpose and for every work.” It is somewhat less than human, perhaps, to measure out one’s sorrow, confining it neatly by means of the old rituals. Is it not in the very nature of sorrow to have something excessive about it? The deepest sorrows are in response, after all, to events that rake us to the very core of our being. Passage 26 is particularly fine: Confucius is tolerant of the others’ busybody counsels of perfection, but when Tien says he simply wants to “go bathing in the River Yi and enjoy the breeze on the Rain Altar, and then to go home chanting poetry,” Confucius is impressed. Tien’s wish is best because it flows from a sure knowledge of the wellspring of joy: to follow one’s heart in the proximity of the rites, concretely and simply.

828. Benevolence is discussed again. The golden rule is to treat all with respect and with due regard for their station in life. Government by good example is best. Encourage everyone to respect themselves by respecting their duty. It isn’t simply “rank” that matters. One must occupy well a certain station and fulfill one’s responsibilities. People are bound, bonded together, by a strong sense of reciprocal obligation. Even so, Confucius knows that it may take generations to achieve order, based on the multiplication of personal example. Is this because he believes self-assertion will keep cropping up? Sure. Also that the unwise can “teach by example,” creating thereby a prevailing climate of stupidity and greed. To what extent is Confucianism applicable today, we might ask? We live in an age of manufactured consensus, simulacra, global villagism, and so forth. Can cultural learning happen by means of concrete example? What is the root of us?

830. Education is not the same thing as extreme erudition. I agree—it seems best to “think along with” a text rather than simply to regard it as information to be received as fact and memorized.

831. The Odes are a channel for legitimate expression, and they help induce harmony. Society works like music; we must play in tune together, or there will be not euphony but dysphony, chaos, ugliness. We can’t escape our humanity, says Confucius. He is no primitivist. The state should guard the rites and customs. People live within the state, which is not, therefore, to be understood as a mere set of arrangements whereby some people will superimpose order on the lives of other people. Confucius and the nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Hegel might agree on at least one thing: the state is the nursery and guarantor of true individuality. We become who we are under the auspices of the governmental and social order.

Page-by-Page Notes on Chuang Chou’s Chuang Tzu.

835. Chuang counsels self-sufficiency, but not pride in accomplishment. It’s implied that since the Way can’t be known in its entirety, we shouldn’t presume to have met all its demands or to have followed it since we can’t verify our claims. Chuang’s basic approach is perspectivalist, but even that term seems inadequate since it invokes the “here/there” distinction that Chuang finds troubling. In his paradoxicality, he resembles the pre-Socratics, and his approach towards the misleading aspects of language and concepts seems quite similar to Nietzsche’s proto-deconstructive analyses many centuries later.

836. Lien Shu hears from Chien Wu about a “Holy Man living on faraway Ku-she Mountain.” He chides Chien Wu for not crediting the man’s perfection and wisdom. Such a man resists definition, he explains: in his perfections, such a sage remains aloof and refuses to be defined by things, events, or desire: “Though the age calls for reform, why should he wear himself out over the affairs of the world? There is nothing that can harm this man.”

837. Chuang Tzu tells a story about a traveler who made good money and achieved social advancement by buying the rights to a salve for chapped hands that the inventor had failed to capitalize on. The lesson here is that ingenuity pays. Chuang Tzu next explains that Hui Tzu’s shu tree is actually quite valuable in its uselessness, and has something to teach him: “If there’s no use for it, how can it come to grief or pain?” Chuang here seems to be setting forth an anti-utility, anti-purpose ethos. Hui Tzu should adapt himself to the tree’s being, not the other way around.

838-39. Tzu-ch’i’s views on desire are excellent. He suggests, I think, that openness to desire is fine, but we mustn’t try to ground our lives on attaining the object of our desires. We won’t find any false carpe diem claims in Chuang. He also says that “Great understanding is broad and unhurried; little understanding is cramped and busy,” and that those of little understanding “drown in what they do.” Is the body the key to understanding? Well, it doesn’t seem to be the case, based on what is said here: “Once a man receives this fixed bodily form he holds on to it, waiting for the end. Sometimes clashing with things, sometimes bending before them, he runs his course like a galloping steed, and nothing can stop him. Is he not pathetic?” (839) Are words vital? It’s not certain: “Words have something to say. But if what they say is not fixed, then do they really say something?” Or does the Way rest upon something other than these things? Tzu-ch’i says that the mind teaches itself: “If a man follows the mind given him and makes it his teacher, then who can be without a teacher?” (839) Evidently, Chuang’s is not Confucius’ “little accomplishments” philosophy: we find in Chuang a different definition of “the Way,” one suggesting it is not realizable in custom or society.

840-41. The paired categories “this” and “that,” says Tzu-ch’i, amount to conceptual slicing and dicing. The distinction-making into right and wrong (moral categories) stems from desire. But desire for what? For certainty and stability, comfort for mind and body. We humanize, anthropomorphize everything around us. Consider Nietzsche’s Apollo/Dionysus argument, in which both are of twin birth, like obverse/reverse. The similar point is that the sage embraces everything, and rejects only rejections implied by the distinction-makers and anthropomorphizers. So understanding should rest in what it doesn’t understand, and go by “the torch of chaos and doubt” (841 middle). All firm definitions of the Way are false. Heaven is the equalizer, and one should relegate all to “the constant” (840). Tzu-ch’i says, “A state in which ‘this’ and ‘that’ no longer find their opposites is called the hinge of the Way. When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly. Its right then is a single endlessness and its wrong too is a single endlessness. So, I say, the best thing to use is clarity.” Difficult language, to be sure, but at times Chuang’s simplicity is remarkable: says Tzu-ch’i, “A road is made by people walking on it; things are so because they are called so. What makes them so? Making them so makes them so.” When people stop walking on a road, they stop calling it a road, and it isn’t a road anymore. There’s no need, therefore, to get fooled by abstract concepts into confusing words with the world itself. Not all philosophers would agree (if indeed I understand Chuang’s point correctly) that we can keep the two distinct, but the clarity of his remarks is excellent: he understands that “concepts” are impositions on things, not sufficient explanations for them.

842-43. Tzu-ch’i suggests that understanding should “rest in what it does not understand” (842) since “If the way is made clear, it is not the Way.” The sage embraces things, leaves things as they are: this simultaneous embracing and letting-be constitutes success. See 842 1/3, 843 near bottom. We should consider what this philosophy offers by rejecting rejections and the lure of facile concepts and oppositions. See 840 mid: making into one equals allowing, letting be. Tzu-ch’i says that “Ordinary men strain and struggle; the sage is stupid and blockish. He takes part in ten thousand ages and achieves simplicity in oneness. For him, all the ten thousand things are what they are, and thus they enfold each other.”

844-45. I believe that here Chuang is allowing his characters gently make fun of Confucius’ upbeat, social understanding of the Way, of its respect for rank. Chuang recognizes that you can’t look to society’s workings for the “natural order of things.” Why not? Because we humans are inveterate self-promoters, substituting our perspectives and desires for the world, swallowing up or vacuuming all else into our acts of definition and understanding. So who is the man: Chuang Chou or the dream butterfly? See 845 top.

845. The cook Ting teaches Lord Wen-hui something important. He follows the Way, he suggests, by simply doing what he does. His wondrously deft carving of an ox isn’t simply a matter of conscious technique: “After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now—now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants.”

846-47. The old tree’s uselessness—its resistance to men’s needs and desires—protects it. Carpenter Shih has learned to respect the forest, its way of remaining beyond our limitedness. The tree speaks to him in a dream and disinvites comparison, asking, “If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large? Moreover you and I are both of us things. What’s the point of this—things condemning things? You, a worthless man about to die—how do you know I’m a worthless tree?” Crippled Shu, too, remains outside the pale of usefulness, content to be unworthy of notice, though the philosopher notices him.

848-50. Master Sang-hu dies, and Confucius, in Chuang’s telling, sends condolences by Tzu-Kung. Confucius realizes that the man’s friends did not really need condolences. They sing and weave silkworm frames, and don’t lament. Confucius praises them for it, says that he, by contrast, stays in the realm, and thrives in the Way as fish in water: “Fish thrive in water, man thrives in the Way” (850). The emphasis on annulment of change sounds Confucian, but the kind of uncertainty Chuang embraces sounds very different. And singular Meng-sun? Well, he makes no distinctions but wails because others do. Confucius suggests that one may do well to “go along and forget about change” (850 bottom). I think he’s reasserting his perspective: go with, not against, the rites and customs. As for the Masters who didn’t need Confucius’ Hallmark-Card, is there a mild criticism here? Does their joy come from protest against death rather than calm acceptance? (Whitman’s “sane and sacred death.”) We recall Confucius’ willingness to indulge himself in “undue sorrow.”

852-53. Duke Huan learns a lesson about book-learning from the wheelwright P’ien: “When the men of old died, they took with them the things that couldn’t be handed down. So what you are reading there must be nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old.” So much for the Miltonic idea that “a book is a living thing,” I suppose. P’ien’s example of his “knack” for working with a chisel and mallet suggests that just as you can’t really teach people manual skills—they must learn for themselves, for the most part—there’s a great deal that can’t be captured in language.

854. Chuang Tzu is lectured in a dream by a skull on the rhythms of the living and the peacefulness of the dead. He had previously presumed to question this very skull, and had been using it as a pillow. But it’s clear that the skull thinks it has the best of the situation, and points out that life is full of troubles and tasks. It’s hard to see how the living could embrace this philosophy of nothingness and tranquility, but the passage seems to privilege the skull’s viewpoint.

858. The Yellow Emperor learns something about the nature of kingship from a boy tending to some horses: “Governing the empire I suppose is not much different from herding horses. Get rid of whatever is harmful to the horses—that’s all.” Stripping away the ceremony and flattery, the boy is suggesting, leaves the Emperor with this simple imperative as his guide.

Week 05, Virgil

2009-08-16T19:28:00.000-07:00

Notes on Virgil’s The Aeneid

There’s a strong sense of teleology in Virgil’s Aeneid—many noble gestures must be left aside because of the collective task to be accomplished. Aeneas’ personal actions seem to be always scripted by that larger task, haunted by necessity. In this sense, there’s a degree of sadness about the founding of the great Empire-to-be. Virgil understands what’s involved in the founding of empires, just like the man understood big banking when he said that robbing a bank is nothing compared to what goes into founding one.

As for the Trojans’ treatment of the Carthaginians, Virgil makes Aeneas and his men appropriate the good signs given to that people. Their founding period must be harvested to create the momentum leading Aeneas towards Italy. The legend of Troy allows Virgil to assert that the Romans are equal to or superior to the Greek heroes of the past. They may be younger, but their legends go back to the fall of Troy, Homer’s battlegrounds. The destruction of Troy is necessary to the founding of a new civilization. The Greeks can lend authority and serve as a mine of cultural materials, but ultimately it’s Rome that wins. Greek epic must be subsumed (as in Hegel’s term aufheben, participle aufgehoben—preserved and cancelled) into Roman literature and history.

Odysseus had a task, but Homer narrated its accomplishment by fully drawing out all of that hero’s dangerousness and tendency towards excess. Odysseus is familiar with restraint, but only because sometimes he doesn’t allow himself to be subject to it. Aeneas, by contrast, serves a task beyond his own horizons—he has to serve as the living agent of an entire people’s history, not just re-secure his own kingdom. That transpersonal goal forces him to betray Dido, a fellow exile who treats him kindly. Not everything he does is “pious” in a sense we can approve. Aeneas adheres to prophecy, sometimes to his own discomfiture. We might be excused for thinking that Virgil “read Freud” since so much of what Aeneas does seems driven by his status as an agent of civilization—his private erotic energy gets rerouted along lines favorable to Rome’s public, collective doctrine of imperium, not his own love life. At times, Aeneas is almost machine-like, driven by his dedication to the future Roman Empire. It may seem ruthless of him to leave so many friends and loved ones behind, first in Troy and then on the way to Italy, but he has no choice—Aeneas is a corporation man for Rome, Inc. He is the founder of an institution, so he must suit his words, actions, and even thoughts to the needs of that institution, repressing and redirecting his own private desires.

Of course, that necessity also means Aeneas suffers deeply, and seems noble and stoic in the worst of situations. For the Romans, self-sacrifice is one of the greatest virtues since Rome is bigger than any one person. Aeneas is endowed with insight into this (in the form of responsibility towards his crew and his people), and he bears it as a heavy burden. He is responsible for the success of a huge, impersonal order, and there will be little comfort for him either along the way or at the end. Odysseus’ desires are more immediate and personal—he wants to make his way back to his own wife and son, and reclaim his island kingdom.

The Aeneid isn’t really about Aeneas—it is about Rome. As Moses Hadas points out in his History of Latin Literature, no one said being an agent of destiny is easy (155). But Virgil believes in the Roman religion, and in the sanctity of Rome itself. He also seems to have been aware (as in Georgics IV) of Jewish millennialist prophecies, and he imports this messianic sense of history into his work on Rome. Augustus is a messiah-figure who first brings a sword, and then provides the prospects for peace and honor. Rome is on a divine mission of imperium, which will involve bringing order, stability, and civilization to the conquered and assimilated peoples. It involves making oneself and one’s civilization a model for others to follow.

The Aeneid justifies Augustus as the first Roman Emperor, and heralds a new day for Rome, with peace and stability at home and the export of Roman practices and ideals to supposedly less advanced peoples. (A modern analogue would be the French under Napoleon, or the British Empire.) The rationale we refer to as “imperium” surely developed over time, and no doubt there remained a strong element of profiteering and militarism in Roman conquests. But the ideological claims were also strong. The Romans felt that they had something worthwhile to offer others—improvements in their standard of living, and (to some extent) eventual citizenship.

But the celebration of peace betrays a strong need—times before Augustus were difficult and violent. Decades of strife preceded the civil wars that racked Italy before and after the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE. Not until 31 BCE did Octavian (Augustus) defeat Marc Antony and Cleopatra to become sole ruler of what was now openly an empire, no longer a republic (even a dysfunctional one). Augustus kept up the semblance of Republican sentiment, but nobody really believed Rome would return to a republic any time soon, if ever.

Page-by-Page Notes on The Aeneid

Book 1

1-533. One of the first things Virgil clarifies is that Juno’s rage at the Trojans seems potentially infinite; she is a great lover of Carthage, the empire that will, in future, battle Rome for imperial supremacy. Juno goads Aeolus, god of the winds, to scatter Aeneas’ fleet before it can reach Italy. Venus complains to Jove about Juno’s tricks, and he promises her that Aeneas will accomplish his destiny no matter what Juno does (304-334): he will set in motion events and found cities that will lead to “empire without end.” Readers are soon introduced to Dido, who has come to Carthage as a result of murderously unpleasant event in her Phoenician homeland: her brother Pygmalion killed her husband Sychaeus for his wealth, and now she is determined to build her new city into a magnificent place.

533-95. Before he has spoken with Dido, Aeneas visits a temple in a Carthaginian grove and beholds images of his own struggles in Troy against the Greeks. This is what we might call a metanarratival moment, in which a work of art refers extensively to another work of art in that Virgil is reminding us of Homer’s epics about the Trojan War. It is also an ekphrastic moment since what is being described is a work of art carved on a temple. Art has a lot of power at this juncture—the images help Aeneas to move forwards in his quest for temporary refuge with Dido, on the way to founding what will become Rome. There’s irony in that fact that the temple is dedicated to Juno, who favors the Greeks, not the Trojans. But even in Juno’s temple, the Trojans hold their own. They have Zeus on their side (somewhat), along with Apollo, Aphrodite, and several other gods. In another sense, the legend of Troy, its artistic representation, makes action possible. Greek art makes Roman history go.

625-752. The Trojan remnant’s speaker, Ilioneus, pleads with Dido that defeated men don’t go plundering—true, but ironic since the Trojans will be responsible for much sorrow in Carthage before they leave. And of course the Romans will later defeat the Carthaginians in a series of devastating wars. He need not have worried about Dido’s intentions, however, since the Queen welcomes Aeneas’ men and pays homage to him once he becomes visible to her, freed of the mist in which Venus had enveloped him. Dido offers Aeneas equal terms in her kingdom. That kingdom is itself new—they’re building it just as Aeneas lands there, in fact. He will usurp all this energy, frustrating it at the source and stealing it for the benefit of the Trojan survivors.

782-908. Venus is worried about the ultimate outcome of Aeneas’ meeting with Dido, so she sends Cupid down in the guise of Iulus (Ascanius) to enflame the Queen’s passion. She wants to ensure that Dido remains an ally, not an agent of Juno. Dido invites Aeneas into the palace and asks him to recount his story to her court.

Book 2

1-338. The Wooden Horse-inspired finale to the Trojan War is here recounted—as the saying goes, “fear the Greeks, even when they bear gifts.” The lying Greek Sinon manages to talk his way into the good graces of the Trojans, telling them that the Greeks have cut and run—gone to fetch a statue of Minerva (Athena) and bring it back so they can regain her favor for their undertaking. The Trojans fall for the pitch this deft salesman makes, thinking to gain the favor that the Greeks supposedly sought, and the rest is history—or rather foundational myth. Still, Aeneas can’t afford not to engage in some deceptions and betrayals of his own when it’s his turn to carve out his destiny and follow the gods’ orders. Around line 482, however, Coroebus’ stratagem to don Greek armor backfires—at this point, the Trojans are not licensed to do such deceptive things.

339-565. Aeneas recounts the last hours of Troy. He is granted a vision of the great warrior Hector, who tells him not to play the hero but rather to save the “holy things” and “household gods” of his people. Aeneas’ first thought was to throw himself into the final battle and there lose his life honorably, but Hector is right: that is not Aeneas’ task. Virgil imposes strict limits on Aeneas as an individual hero. Only Hector might have been able to save Troy single-handedly—too late for that; Aeneas’ job is different. Single combat isn’t really his province, though we will find him engaged in just such combat with Turnus of the Rutulians in the final books of The Aeneid. Aeneas’ central imperative is to lead the entire people to new life and lands.

566-702. One of the most replayed scenes in ancient legend and history is the subject here—the death of old Priam even shows up in Hamlet, spurring Hamlet on to take his tardy revenge. Aeneas’ narration affirms Greek heroism in the sense that Priam taunts Pyrrhus (Achilles’ son, also called Neoptolemus) with Achilles’ chivalry towards a grieving father. But Neoptolemus’ slaughter of the old man shows that Achilles was the exception, not the rule. Homer sometimes portrayed the Trojans as feminine and weak, but Virgil represents the Greeks as liars and barbarians to counter this dig.

703-998. As Troy is consumed, Aeneas catches sight of the despised Helen, who is here treated, as so often, as the cause of the Trojan War. But Venus brings home to Aeneas the futility of clinging to Troy, and sends him off to gather his family. Now that the gods of Troy have departed from their burnt-out altars, what is left? Piety to one’s ancestors and the hope of a new beginning elsewhere, a new place for the gods to dwell and favor the Trojan remnant. But not everyone will be allowed to come along—Creusa must die with the old order, though her sad shade appears one last time to Aeneas, so that Aeneas may have his new Italian wife Lavinia as already foretold by Hector’s ghost. Pietas must be broadened to incorporate loyalty not just to family, but even more so to the state and its imperatives. Those who want to go with Aeneas are mostly young people, without strong enough ties to “ruined Ilium” to make them go down with the City. At the end of this book, Aeneas is headed for the refuge of the mountains, bearing father Anchises on his back. Aeneas has accepted his destiny, however painful it is to him as a Trojan warrior and hero.

Book 3

1-82. The Trojans sail, landing on nearby Thrace, realm of Lycurgus. Polydorus tells his tale: he was a gold-bearing emissary from Priam, and King Lycurgus betrayed him, siding with the Greeks. Now that he has been slain, the territory itself is haunted by his spirit, rooted to the land in the form of a tree.

83-175. Apollo’s Oracle speaks, but Anchises wrongly interprets the destination as the island of Crete.

176-230. A plague strikes Aeneas’s people while they stay on Crete. At last, Aeneas’ vision yields better advice: Italy is the destination.

231-319. On the Strophades, the Trojan remnant meets the Harpies, who, angered by slaughter of their cattle, prophecy that the Trojans will arrive in Italy, but will end up gnawing on their own dishes. (Not to worry—the “dishes” will turn out to be flatbread.)

320-592. They make landfall at Actium, in the heart of Greece. Priam’s son Helenus rules the territory, and Andromache, shipped here in slavery, is now Helenus’ bride; together, they rule Chaonia. Helenus gives Aeneas a sign to guide him in his task: where he comes across a white pig nursing thirty piglets, there he must found his city. Helenus also gives prophetic advice, telling Aeneas to avoid the hostile Greeks along the Italian coasts, don purple cloaks and do sacrifice, and watch out for Scylla and Charybdis. Aeneas also learns that he must visit the Cumaean Sibyl (in Campania, Northwest of Naples), who will tell him about the wars and ordeals he must undergo. Parting gifts and moving words from Andromache follow.

593-773. The Trojans sight Italy, and they make landfall and sacrifice. They see four horses, but are they to be interpreted as signs of war or peace? They continue sailing, on to Sicily, into the view of Mount Etna (on Sicily near the tip of Italian mainland’s “boot”) and the Cyclops’ territory, where they meet Achaemenides of Ithaca, a recent castaway and comrade of Ulysses. This hapless Greek warns the Trojans to stay clear of Polyphemus, begging passage with them. They heed his advice, and take him along. Unlike Ulysses (Odysseus), Aeneas seems content to remain “the man with no name” rather than to prove his prowess by taunting the now-blind giant kin of Poseidon.

774-829. Aeneas and his crew barely manage to avoid sailing through the Sicilian Straits, i.e. Scylla and Charybdis, but a south wind blows and saves the day. They go around Sicily instead, landing at the port of Drepanum. Alas, father Anchises dies, and her Aeneas ends his tale for the benefit of Dido and her court. In broad terms, it is the principle for which Anchises stood that matters (patriarchal continuity), not the person.

Book 4

1-140. Dido’s affections for Aeneas (instilled by Cupid disguised as Ascanius at Venus’ request since she wanted to make sure he received a fine welcome) are described as “madness,” and herself as prey to a hunter. In classical times, this kind of reference wasn’t necessarily a putdown, but in Virgil’s case it seems to be—Dido is the victim of a noble species of madness. She is not fully in control of herself, and (although the gods seem to be behind her lovestruck condition) the fact that her passion rages out of control is more than enough to seal her doom.

141-345. Juno contrives to detain Aeneas by marriage, and Venus slyly pretends to go along, perhaps knowing that her son will eventually be roused to set sail and abandon Dido to madness. King Iarbas is angry over the marriage to a foreigner when Dido, whom he had helped, has already rejected him. So he prays to Jupiter. Dido’s passion is not politically astute, and (with Rumor’s help) it destabilizes her country, stripping it of foundational purpose. The Queen tries to shape events according to an essentially private passion—something a ruler can’t afford to do. Jupiter sends Mercury to harangue Aeneas, and the tactic works—he immediately turns his mind to his role as guardian of his Trojans and renewer of Trojan power in Italy. The episode reminds me a bit of Circe’s captivity of Odysseus. Like Odysseus, Aeneas wastes a lot of time doing nothing while his kingdom’s danger increases.

345-593. Aeneas decides in favor of deception—he’ll just leave in mid-winter when Dido isn’t expecting him to sail. She confronts him, calling him a liar and cheat. He covers up by pretending that he never intended to deceive her and that besides, he wasn’t actually married according to Trojan custom. This is a low point for Aeneas, at least in terms of heroic quality. His will is not his own at this point, and he must sacrifice his private and personal desires for the greater good of Troy (and the future Rome, a kingdom he won’t live to see). He openly describes Italy as his “love.” The pursuit of kingdom and eventual empire can’t allow a female get in the way. Virgil seems entirely conscious of the contradiction here—Romans prize honor and loyalty above all, but the founding of the state in which those values are so highly prized was accomplished by an act of betrayal. That Dido is the leader of Rome’s future enemy (and not a Trojan or Italian) doesn’t entirely remove the contradiction.

594-876. This part is mostly about Dido’s “fatal madness.” The Queen tricks her sister Anna and gets her to make a pyre with all the artifacts of her love for Aeneas atop, and then ascends the pyre, feverishly thinks through the situation, and stabs herself. This is an emotional high point in the epic—but the character who gives fullest vent to unrestrained passion is doomed. Virgil acknowledges the power of passion, but dramatizes its harsh consequences and insists upon containing the passions. He also emphasizes the notion that the gods wanted it this way, so really there was nothing Dido could do. She’s a magnificent character, but it’s not in the fates that she should succeed. Aeneas isn’t entirely robotic here—as T. S. Eliot would say, “only those who have strong personalities know what it is to try to escape from them.” We are conscious that he is making a sacrifice. On 1105, Virgil’s teleological, typological emphasis shows: Dido’s scream and the subsequent noise is like the fall of Carthage itself—of course that looks forward to the final destruction of Carthage in the Third Punic War in 146 BCE (see Polybius’ account: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/polybius-punic3.html). Juno is hardly unsympathetic, favoring the Greeks and disliking the Trojans as she does—so she sends Iris down to cut the necessary lock of Dido’s hair for passage to the Underworld. As for Augustan distance from Dido, the historical necessity of this is obvious—there’s perhaps even some cruelty in the magnificence accorded to this precursor of a people that the Romans crushed. Anyhow, it may also be that her passion represents an always potential danger—giving in to private, individual feelings at the state’s expense. To be Roman involves knowing what is not Roman, what one may fall prey to.

Book 5

1-74. It’s decided that since the wind has shifted unfavorably, the remnant might as well set ashore on Sicily’s coast, and visit their compatriot Acestes, in whose territory are buried the bones of Aeneas’ father Anchises. On the whole, what begins as a pious and almost light-hearted book in The Aeneid will develop into a genuine challenge of Aeneas’ leadership and determination. The book is part of a continuing process of winnowing out the Trojan remnant almost in the manner of natural selection: only the fittest and strongest-willed should land on Italian shores with Aeneas, there to participate in the founding of the towns and cities that will house the people whom posterity will know as Romans. Aeneas himself is not entirely certain what he should do at this point, and requires the assistance of the gods and his departed father Anchises to help him through this confusing, disheartening time.

75-663. Aeneas decides to hold some games if the ninth day proves sunny—a ship race, a foot race, a javelin hurling event, and some boxing to round things off. The competitions turn out to have some interesting twists, with Cloanthus’ prayer to the gods helping him win the ship race while some of the others barely make it to shore; runner Nisus cleverly turning his own fall into a victory for his friend Euryalus over Salius; and old Entellus having to be goaded into boxing the younger man Dares, whom he defeats so convincingly in a bare-knuckle match that Aeneas has to play referee and stop the fight. Acestes shoots an arrow that catches fire, which everyone takes as an omen from the gods, so he is granted the victory even though Eurytion has hit the dove that was his mark. Through it all, Aeneas does his best to make sure nobody’s pride is ruffled, and he distributes gifts to winners and even to those who don’t acquit themselves so well. Finally, capping off the whole event is Ascanius’ (his other name is Iulus) parade of youthful horsemen. The Romans of Virgil’s day prided themselves on their horsemanship, and we are told at lines 656-63 that later, in Alba Longa, this will become a tradition.

664-773. The games concluded, Juno sends Iris down to urge on the Trojan women who have become sick to death of wandering at sea. Disguised as the old woman Beroë, Iris adds her complaint about the seven years of wandering, and spurs the women on to burn the ships in the harbor, the better to force stubborn Aeneas and his men to take up with Acestes here in Sicily. She even claims Cassandra gave her this idea in a vision. When Iris makes herself into a rainbow, the women lose their wits and begin setting fire to the Trojan ships. Jove (Zeus) answers Aeneas’ prayer and sends a heavy rainstorm to quench the ships, and in the end only four hulls are ruined.

774-864. Aeneas himself at first doesn’t know what to do when faced with this disaster. Perhaps it would be best to settle in Sicily after all. But Nautes offers a better plan: use the misfortune with the ships as a means of thinning out the Trojan remnant, taking only the stronger and most willing along to the Italian mainland and leaving behind the old, the lame, and the unwilling. They are to live in a town that, Acestes willing, will bear his name: Acesta. With the blessing of the shade of Anchises, Aeneas is able to accept this rather depressing advice. And Anchises gives prophetic advice as well, explaining to his son that he must be guided by a Sibyl down to the Underworld and meet him there, in Elysium. Aeneas will learn his “entire race to come / and the city walls that will be made . . . [his] own” (817-18). But at present, Aeneas sets his hand to the founding of Acesta, and we find him naming its divisions in a fully Trojan spirit: Troy and Ilium. This naming decision indicates, apparently, that Acesta will not undergo the growth and transformation necessary for the Trojan remnant to become “Romans,” as of course Aeneas’ followers later will. Even though this infirm and unwilling group must be left behind, Aeneas shows a fatherly regard for them, and even weeps at their loss.

865-972. Meanwhile, Venus complains to Neptune about the shifts of angry Juno, who, as she says, pursues the Trojans even after the destruction of their homeland; she “stalks . . . / the ashes of murdered Troy!” (874-75), and it is she who inspired the Trojan women to set the ships afire in Sicily. It is Venus’ earnest wish that the remaining Trojans reach Italy and the river Tiber; they must have their city walls. Neptune points out that in spite of his dislike for the Trojans (he had helped build Troy’s walls, only to find that the Trojan Laomedon wouldn’t pay him for his work), he protected Aeneas when Achilles threatened to overcome him in battle during the war. Now Aeneas’ remnant will make their way to Italy, he promises, with the loss of only one man. And as it turns out, this man will be the trusty helmsman Palinurus, who is lulled by the God of Sleep into a fatal lapse of duty that causes him to be swept into the sea, where he cannot be rescued by his fellow sailors. Aeneas must take command—it isn’t in his power to prevent the decrees of the gods, and this was Poseidon’s price for helping him in his quest, even if Aeneas doesn’t seem to make the connection right away; he supposes that Palinurus’ death was due to a personal lapse.

Book 6

1-146. Aeneas speaks with the Cumaean Sibyl, who warns him how much risk awaits him in future. Virgil’s portrait of the Sibyl drives home the burden of prophetic insight—it’s clear that Apollo’s priestess is profoundly affected by the knowledge to which she is privy.

147-302. The Sibyl tells Aeneas about the Golden Bough he will need to gain entrance to Avernus, and warns him that burial rites are due to his lost comrade Misenus, which are duly effected, clearing the way forwards.

303-83. On through the entrance to the Underworld they go, and in the vestibule of the place they encounter allegorical figures such as Grief, Conscience, Disease, Dread, and Hunger, and there are Centaurs, Scyllas, Gorgons and Harpies there as well. Then it’s down to Acheron’s waters, where Charon does his work as ferryman of the dead.

384-438. Aeneas’ lost pilot Palinurus tells his story, but the Sibyl is firm in dealing with him, telling him that neighboring peoples will accord him the burial rites he seeks from Aeneas. The dead mustn’t be allowed to assert primacy over the living, and Aeneas takes precedence over him. Like Dante after him, Virgil is concerned to bring order to our perception of the underworld as an ethical universe. He sticks to concrete descriptions and categories, and Aeneas’ experience in the underworld is tied to the demands of Roman teleology. Things were much wilder and less clear-cut in Homer’s Odyssey, and Odysseus departed the underworld just before its terrors overwhelmed him. Aeneas behaves with piety towards the dead: Misenus will have his burial, and Palinurus will receive compensation. But Deiphobus, betrayed by Helen, remains in tattered “skin.” As for Dido, she remains hostile and prefers Sychaeus. It will be war to the death with Carthage. We are treated to a vision of the new line of rulers, especially Lucius Junius Brutus.

439-78. Charon’s distrust of Aeneas must also be overcome; the future of Rome is the subject to be addressed here, and that is more important than protocol in Hades. The Sibyl deals with this obstacle as well.

479-533. Aeneas and the Sibyl cross the Stygian river, the point of no return for the dead. They encounter the hellish judge Cerberus and view the region where those destroyed by love abide, the “Fields of Mourning.” Dido is among the shades there, and Aeneas finds that her anger is unquenchable even in death. The dead continue to hold on to the attitudes that characterized them in life, and again we see how conflicted the Roman concept of heroism is: we know that Aeneas had betrayed Dido, so this moment must be an anguished one for him.

554-637. Onward they go, and they meet Deiphobus, who rails at Helen and that wily Greek, Odysseus.

638-739. Rhadamanthus’ judgments are described—this is the part of the Underworld where dreadful sins are punished by dreadful means. In general, Virgil’s Roman Underworld is a well structured place, more so than Hades is in The Odyssey. At the Gates of the Cyclops, Aeneas and the Sibyl leave their gift of the Golden Bough for Proserpina. Now they are free to enter the region of the blessed.

740-785. First they come across Orpheus the Thracian poet and the line of Teucer, replete with Dardanus the founder of Troy, and others here, where they find also patriots and fine poets. Musaeus helps them realize their quest to reach Anchises, who will survey the future of Rome for Aeneas.

786-869. Anchises appears to Aeneas, and begins to unfold to him knowledge far beyond what is available to ordinary mortals: knowledge of how the heavens work, what animates them and therefore all living things, which are a product, says Anchises, of the fusion of the inner spirit governing sky, earth, the sea, the moon, the sun, and the stars. The teeming souls of a thousand nations to be become visible to Aeneas like “bees in meadowlands on a cloudless summer day” (816). Anchises explains that these souls await the forgetful-making waters of Lethe and reincarnation. So the text suggests that the source of life and history is spirit, and describes Lethean and Orphic purification. Anchises also says that even the punishments of the Underworld are not eternal—the sinners will, after a thousand years of purification, be directed to Lethe and granted their desire to enter new bodies.

870-984. Aeneas learns his personal future: his Italian bride Lavinia and their son Silvius, the latter central to the city Alba Longa that is to be the precursor of Rome. As for Romulus, his mother was the priestess Rhea Silvia, and his father Mars. So are Numa and his descendants, and the great lights of Roman history (Lucius Junius Brutus, expeller of the Tarquin kings, and many more) right down to Virgil’s own time, that of Augustus Caesar. the account covers Rome’s art of pacifying other people—one of its great strengths, according to Virgil’s Anchises, who says to Aeneas that the Roman way or art is “To put your stamp on the works and ways of peace, / to spare the defeated, break the proud in war” (983-84).

985-1039. Marcellus, Augustus’ nephew, is lamented in advance, by way of indicating both the joys of victory and the frustrations of dynastic hopes. Aeneas is sent back through the Ivory gate of false dreams. Perhaps that is the case because he must act more from impulse than from conscious guidance by the underworld. He must not be directed too closely if he is to accomplish his destiny in an authentic way. Structurally, Book 6 caps off Aeneas’ wanderings. Virgil will cease striving with Homer and his old stories.

Book 7

Brief summary. Book 7 announces that Aeneas is ready to move on to accomplishing the deeds of the new race forging itself out of the defeated Trojans. “Back to the future,” in other words, and the focus will be on human enterprise, although the gods still have an important part to play. King Latinus of Latium is about to embark on a course that his father Faunus’ oracle convinces him is deeply destructive for his people: circumstances drive him against his better judgment to offer daughter Lavinia to Turnus the Rutulian king rather than to the newcomer that the oracle says he must accept. When Aeneas and his people find themselves eating the flatbread that serves as dishes for their meal, the leader knows he has found the promised land. He is “home” at last, but of course Juno is there to ensure that things don’t go smoothly. She sends her furies down to stir up Turnus and anyone who needs stirring up to accomplish her anti-Trojan agenda. Turnus will become Juno’s champion against the hated Trojans.

Book 8

Brief summary, 716-858. Venus orders up a shield from the smithy of Vulcan, rather like the one Achilles’ mother Thetis had made for him. The literary device here is ekphrasis, the verbal description of a visual art object. Rome’s crises and founding acts, and heroism and law-giving, are central to this book. This path will end at Actium in 31 BCE, where the future Augustus Caesar will defeat “Asiatic” Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The book ends with a procession of conquered races, subjugated to the Roman people. Aeneas marvels at this expanse of mysterious futurity.

Book 9

1-89. Juno sends Iris to urge Turnus to attack. The Trojans show restraint in their battle plans and personal conduct, while Turnus behaves almost wildly.

90-143. Cybebe (Cybele) pleads with Jove to save the Trojan ships so dear to her because they were made from pine and maple trees in her sacred grove. Jove promises to turn the ships into goddesses rather than let them burn at the hands of the attacking Rutulians. Human strife must not be allowed to defile or destroy something dear to the gods, so Jove complies.

144-209. The narrative returns to Turnus’ fiery determination to win the day and destroy Aeneas.

210-515. Nisus conceives of a heroic act of volunteerism: he will break through enemy lines and get word to Aeneas about the Trojans’ situation. He and Euryalus are killed after they slay Volcens and several other besiegers. This vignette is placed in the middle of a book otherwise bent upon setting the tone for the narrator’s description of the clash of great armies; the story of Nisus and Euryalus emphasizes the bond (apparently homosexual) between these two soldiers, and serves to underscore the limits of heroism in The Aeneid.

516-600. Euryalus and Nisus’ head are displayed, to the Trojan’s great sorrow. Euryalus’ mother laments, and her wailing almost dispirits the Trojan army as they await the attackers in their fortifications.

601-765. The narrator begins with an invocation to Calliope to sing “carnage and death.” Turnus burns down a Trojan tower among the fortifications, and kills Lycus and Helenor when they try to escape. Mezentius makes a kill with his sling. Ascanius shoots arrows at the enemy, and hacks down Numanus when that soldier mocks him and insults the Trojans generally (684-85), accusing them of being soft. Apollo applauds the work of Ascanius, but disguised as Butes, he orders that the youth not push his luck on the battlefield, and the Trojan captains, recognizing a god when they see one, restrain Ascanius.

766-876. Pandarus and Bitias boldly open the gates, as if they could defend the whole fortified area all by themselves. The besiegers rush in, and Turnus makes some kills while the war god Mars frightens the Trojans. Pandarus closes the gate, but now Turnus is inside the Trojan walls, where he proceeds to slaughter as many Trojans as he can. But his exultant conduct causes him to miss a chance to exploit this near triumph for his whole army: his actions are impetuous rather than tactical, and this quality costs him a chance to rout the Trojan enemy.

877-923. The Trojan captains rally their men, who surround Turnus. The Rutulian escapes only by jumping into the Tiber, which purifies him of his battle-gore and carries him back to his own side.

Book 10

1-146. Jove, annoyed at the fighting when he had told the gods not to start any trouble, convenes a council. Venus is afraid he’s going back on his promises to her, and she pleads for Ascanius’ safety, no matter what may happen to Aeneas and his Trojan remnant. Let Carthage destroy this people in the future, she says, so long as Ascanius is safe. Are the Trojans to suffer a second fall, she wonders? Juno lashes out at Jove as well; she says that Aeneas listened to Cassandra’s nonsense—that’s what started all the trouble and made him attack King Latinus. She praises Turnus, thinking him a second Achilles, and even dredges up Paris’ absconding with Helen years ago. Jove pleads neutrality, declaring that as far as he’s concerned, it’s every mortal man for himself.

147-312. Aeneas’ forces are besieged while he’s away shoring up support from Evander and Tarchon the Etruscan king. The narrator provides a catalog of men and thirty ships sailing to the Trojans’ rescue. Aeneas’ ships, now as sea-nymphs, appear to him and warn him that his son Ascanius is trapped. “Seize your shield!” he is told, and the most eloquent of the sea-nymphs predicts that the Trojans will slaughter the Rutulians.

313-427. Aeneas uses his shield to alert the Trojans that he’s coming to the rescue, and they take hope. His crest flames, a marvel that further inspires them. Undaunted, Turnus is determined to turn Aeneas’ ships back and repel their landing. Now the fighting begins in earnest.

428-602. The fighting continues. Pallas rallies the Arcadians, but Turnus declares that Pallas will be his prize alone, and makes good on his boast. Jove warns Hercules not to intervene. Turnus offers a decent burial for the slain Pallas, and strips his armor, taking his sword belt as a prize.

603-714. Aeneas must rally the Trojans. He fights, refusing mercy to Magus, Tarquitus, and the insult-slinging Liger. Again the taunt is that Italy is not the Trojans’ home territory and that the Italians will give even better than they get. They claim to be even better fighters than the Greeks. The siege is broken at last: a key point in the battle.

715-814. Juno complains to Jove, asking now only some better deal for Turnus than the instant death that seems to be his lot. Juno creates a phantom Aeneas, which Turnus then pursues onto a ship that sets sail much against his will and to his extreme anguish and shame. Juno has to restrain him from killing himself while the ship returns him to his people. Apparently she still sees him as her champion, a second Achilles against the Trojans she despises.

815-986. Mezentius fights furiously, but is attacked by his own Etruscans, men who drove him from his kingdom out of hatred for his tyrannical rule. Aeneas wounds Mezentius, but his son Lausus intervenes—and act for which the narrator praises Lausus. Aeneas kills the young man, but leaves him his armor as a mark of respect.

987-1079. Mezentius and his horse Rhaebus go after Aeneas, who joyfully accepts battle with this fierce warrior. He kills the horse, which then falls on top of Mezentius and crushes him. Aeneas exults over the dying Mezentius at 1063-64, and the man asks for burial next to his fallen son.

Book 11

1-241. Aeneas must return Pallas’ body to Pallanteum on the site of the future Rome, and break the news to the young man’s father, Evander. A great mourning procession is part of Pallas’ funeral rites, which include the sacrifice of captive enemy soldiers. Aeneas feels that he has let Evander down by losing his son. Envoys from Latinus’ city come seeking burial of their comrades, which Aeneas grants. One of the envoys—Drances—obviously has no love for Turnus and would as well strike up a pact with the Trojans. After this interlude, Evander is informed by Rumor that his son has been killed, but he does not blame Aeneas; he demands only that the Trojan commander kill Turnus, the man who took Pallas’ life. Virgil seems concerned to dwell upon the costs of war in this section: in truth, warfare has always been at least as much about civilian suffering as about fighting on the battlefield, and that insight is on display here.

242-354. Back in Latium, Turnus faces a restive, resentful populace, who feel that his selfish demand for Lavinia in marriage is the cause of their troubles. Envoys inform the King that Diomedes won’t help them in their battles against the Trojans, and in fact the Greek thinks that Latium really ought to make a pact with Aeneas while it still can. He refuses their gifts and leaves them with that disheartening advice.

355-534. Latinus now begins to change his mind; his misgivings about this whole enterprise against Aeneas come to the fore. He broaches the possibility of offering the Trojan remnant gifts and a promise of ample land to build their new city. Drances steps in to dig the knife still deeper into Turnus, insisting that he give in to the king’s inclination and surrender his claim to Lavinia. Turnus, of course, finds all this talk of peace and blame revolting; he denounces Drances, says he would be only too happy to challenge Aeneas to single combat, and insists that while Diomedes may have refused aid to the people of Latium, Messapus, Tolumnius, and the female commander of the Volscians, Camilla (Italy’s own version of an Amazonian warrior) won’t.
535-705. Aeneas strikes camp and draws up his ranks for battle. Turnus is readying himself, too, laying an ambush for the Trojans, and Camilla joins him with a great desire to engage with Aeneas’ cavalry. We learn Camilla’s story—how she was raised as a shepherdess by her exiled tyrant father, the Volscian Metabus, and how, when he was being pursued by his enemies, he lashed his baby daughter to a strong spear and entrusted her to the winds over the rapids he must swim—her first experience of the spear’s flight that will come to define her life. Camilla is devoted to the goddess Diana, and a virgin. Diana makes the nymph Opis special guard for this young woman, and commands that she punish anyone who wounds Camilla. One might even say that this female warrior almost overshadows Turnus and Aeneas for the time the narrator grants her, and she certainly meets her doom in a heroic manner, one worthy (as the ancients would say) of a male warrior. In her devotion to chastity and purity, she rivals Aeneas himself.

706-891. Now the Trojan army approaches the walls of Latium. A back-and-forth battle ensues, but at last a great pitched battle is fought. Camilla revels in the action, making kills left and right with her spear, including the son of Aunus, one of the cheating tribe of Ligurians, according to the narrator. But soon Jove stirs up Tarchon the Etruscan to harangue his men, who are losing their battle to a woman. Tarchon himself daringly snatches Venulus right off his horse.

891-1068. Arruns, an Etruscan, “stalks” Camilla, determined to bring her down. As he and Camilla go round and round, Arruns prays to Apollo that he may kill this warrior woman and then make his way home. He gets his first wish, but will not get his second. The narrator describes the moment of the javelin’s flight through the air on its way to Camilla, and the spear tears into the area below her exposed breast. Arruns flees, terrified now that he has done what he set out to do. Camilla’s dying words to her sister Acca are that Turnus must now take charge of the battle to defend Latium. Diana’s nymph Opis kills Arruns for his deed against Camilla, but her cavalry flees when she is gone, and things look to be going the Trojans’ way. Turnus is furious, and wants to take on Aeneas in single combat, but night comes on and both armies dig in before the city, preparing for a siege and defense, respectively.

Book 12

1-129. Turnus continues in his desire to seek out Aeneas and settle matters violently between them. Latinus’ misgivings have only increased; he says he was wrong to have given in to Turnus’ strong desire for Lavinia’s hand in marriage, that she really should have gone to Aeneas. And now he wants to end the conflict before Turnus is killed. The Queen and Lavinia add their prayers and tears, with the Queen asking Turnus not to go into single combat with Aeneas. None of this works to undo Turnus’ anger or his determination to take the fight to Aeneas personally. This is a man he considers soft, unmasculine, a “Phrygian eunuch” (121), and he has no intention of letting him alone.

130-259. The armies are readying themselves, and Juno, seeing all that’s happening, sends Turnus’ sister, the water-nymph Juturna, down to protect him as he embarks upon his splendid fight with Aeneas. The opposing sides draw up, and Aeneas makes a pact that if Turnus wins, the Trojans will soon be off to Evander’s city Pallantium. But if Aeneas should win, he promises not to enslave the Italians but rather to live with them as equals. He will build a city to be called Lavinium after his prospective bride, Lavinia. Latinus promises to keep his part of the bargain, come what may.

260-372. But the Rutulian rank and file don’t put much stock in their champion Turnus, and the truth is that he’s looking rather pallid and pensive just now. Juturna spreads rumors among them, trying to ward off this single combat by suggesting that the people of Latium will indeed be enslaved if Turnus loses. She also sends one of Jove’s eagles to seize a swan and amaze them all before dropping it into the river. Now Tolumnius and others declare that this is the time for them all to take up arms, and collective fighting begins.

373-518. Aeneas is still intent on meeting up with Turnus, big battle notwithstanding, but the Trojan is promptly wounded with an arrow, and Turnus trains his fury on a swath of the Trojan forces. Meanwhile, the captains and Ascanius are trying to help Aeneas, and Iapyx the doctor does his best, but not even Apollo’s herbal remedies can fix what ails Aeneas. At last, Venus steps in with some Cretan dittany (origanum dictamnus, a symbol of love and birth; see the Wikipedia entry on Cretan dittany). This does the trick, and Aeneas tells Ascanius to study his father’s way of dealing with adversity, and always to take inspiration from him and from “uncle Hector.”

519-752. The Trojans charge, and Aeneas, restored to vigor, seeks after Turnus. Juturna drives her brother Turnus in her chariot, but tries to keep him away from Aeneas and the other Trojans. The narrator invokes the gods to help him sing the violent battle that swirls around these men and in which they participate. Aeneas, evidently knowing well that the nature of his overall task is collective rather than individual, sees no reason to spare Latium while he waits to engage one-on-one with Turnus, so he makes a frontal assault on the city’s ramparts and threatens to use fire as his weapon, which terrifies Queen Amata (Latinus’ wife and Turnus’ mother), and she hangs herself with her purple gown, thinking that Turnus has surely been destroyed in the fighting. Lavinia rends her cheeks, and Latinus tears his robes in anguish. Turnus, meantime, doesn’t know what’s causing all the lamentation in the city, but he seems to understand that his fateful hour has come. He recognizes his sister Juturna and knows what she has been up to, and he asks only for a quick death so that he will not have to see Latinus’ city burned down.

753-915. Turnus, stirred to shame by a soldier named Saces tells him he’s his people’s last hope, abandons Juturna’s chariot and charges through the lines. Everyone clears the field for the fight between Turnus and Aeneas. When Turnus’ sword breaks, he is forced to flee from Aeneas and seek another weapon. The two men circle each other five times, looking for an opportunity, but then Aeneas’ spear gets stuck in a wild olive tree sacred to Faunus (Pan), in a grove that had been cleared by the Trojans for battle. Turnus prays that the spear may remain stuck, but Juturna returns Turnus’ own sword to him. Venus then helps Aeneas pluck his spear from the olive tree, and now things are even.

916-1029. Jove asks Juno when she plans to stop persecuting the Trojans even though she understands that it’s Aeneas’ fate to do great things. He asks her to cease and desist. Juno defends herself by saying that it was for Jove that she gave up on Turnus, whom she seems to regard as a second Achilles against the Trojans. But she asks one last favor: that the Trojans will never give their name to the new city that will be founded in Latium. “Let Alban kings hold sway for all time, / Let Roman stock grow strong with Italian strength” (958-59), she prays, and Jove can hardly refuse her; he promises that the children of Latium will hold on to the old “words and ways” (967) and that these ways will include the ancient Italian religious rites. The Latin language, and the Italian people, will reign supreme, while the Trojan stock will be assimilated with those they have fought so successfully. This promise made, Jove sends down one of his furies to discourage Juturna from further protecting her brother Turnus, and she realizes it is time for her to steal away, go back to her stream.

1030-1113. Turnus and Aeneas are now left to the book—and the epic’s—final task: their own climactic fight for the future of Italy. Turnus tries to cast a huge boulder at Aeneas, but it falls short, and Jove’s fury continues to distract him, making his mind race and fill with incongruous thoughts and feelings. What is he to do now? As his mind runs riot, Aeneas’ spear strikes him down. Turnus asks no pity for himself, but can’t help thinking of his old father Daunus—will Aeneas send him home for the old man’s sake, or at least send his body back? Aeneas is almost ready to grant mercy to Turnus when his eye is caught by the sword-belt that the Rutulian hero had stripped from his victim Pallas, who of course was a great friend of Aeneas. In the name of his departed comrade, Aeneas strikes home with his sword, stabbing Turnus in the heart and ending The Aeneid. To conclude, the history that Virgil has given us after Book 6 is complex and at times painful: the founding of a whole race of people involves much loss, confusion, and sacrifice. The Trojan remnant’s actions drive home the point that when a new nation is founded, it is invariably established over the bodies and wills of another people who were dwelling in the newcomers’ promised land. Aeneas needed, and obtained, a special alliance with the gods to be successful. We know that Lavinia, Aeneas’ future bride, had already been promised to Turnus by the King of Latium, Latinus and that Turnus had leaned on Latinus to stir up a battle for the sake of keeping his word. But throughout, Latinus’ heart wasn’t really in this fight—he wanted a peaceful union with the Trojans. Nonetheless, the battle for the founding of Second Troy came on, and here in Book 12, Aeneas has killed Turnus, a strong, implacable Italian ruler who would neither mingle with nor be co-opted by the newcomers from ruined Troy. Turnus has his virtues, Virgil acknowledges, but he makes sure that it is Aeneas who will be recognized as the genuine proto-Roman hero. The Romans were a strongly ethical people, devoted to piety and law (our own legal codes largely derive from them, after all), but the accomplishment of Roman destiny really isn’t about the narrowly defined categories of right and wrong; a Roman would probably say their ascendancy was the will of the gods.

In the end, Virgil, in dialogue with Homer, has made sure to incorporate the highlights of the Greeks’ foundational narrative (the Trojan War) into the Roman story, while at the same time not allowing it to overshadow that Roman story. Ruined Troy doesn’t so much conquer Italy as get successfully assimilated into it. And while it’s sometimes said that ancient versions of individual identity rely heavily on definition and shaping by the larger community, it’s fair to say that Virgil has constructed for us a story in which a heroic individual experiences deep conflicts between his own desires and the great collective tasks imposed on him by fate and the gods. Aeneas must do what the group, the nation, demands—without that sacrifice, Rome could never, as Virgil tells the story, have come into being.

Week 04, Aeschylus

2009-08-16T19:27:00.000-07:00

Introduction to Ancient Greek Theater, Followed by Notes on Aeschylus’ The Oresteia (Updated with some corrections 2/11/08)

Books and Online Resources:

Didaskalia: Ancient Theatre Today. http://www.didaskalia.net/index.html. 3-D theatre and mask reconstructions, excellent introductory material on Greek and Roman theatre and stagecraft.

Easterling, P. E. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Kaufmann, Walter. Tragedy and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.

Ley, Graham. A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1991.

McLeish, Kenneth. A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 2003.

Perseus Project. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/. Electronic texts (original languages and translations), critical studies, etc. An impressive resource for classicists.

Pomeroy, Sarah et al. Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

Religious Roots of Tragedy: The Festivals of Dionysus at Athens were called the City Dionysia, which was held in March or April, and the Lenaea, which was held in January. Though classical theater flourished mainly from 475-400 BCE, it developed earlier from choral religious ceremonies dedicated to Dionysus.

The God of Honor: Dionysus was an Olympian god, and the Greeks celebrated his rites in the dithyramb. In mythology, his followers were satyrs and mainades, or ecstatic females. We sometimes call him the god of ecstasy, and as Kenneth McLeish says, he “supervis[ed] the moment when human beings surrender to unstoppable, irrational feeling or impulse” (1-2). His agents are wine, song, and dance. Song and dance were important to Dionysian rites, and the participants apparently wore masks.

At the festivals, three tragic writers would compete and so would three or five comedic playwrights. The idea was that each tragedian would present three plays and a satyr play; sometimes the three plays were linked in a trilogy, like The Oresteia. So the audience had a great deal of play going to do during the festival seasons; the activities may have gone on for three or four days, with perhaps four or five plays per day. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival provides something like this pace.

Organization: How were the festivals organized? Well, the magistrate was chosen every year by lot—the archon. Then, dramatists would apply to the magistrate for a chorus, and if they obtained a chorus, that meant that they had been chosen as one of the three tragic playwrights. After that affair was settled, wealthy private citizens known as choregoi served as producers for each playwright. The state paid for the actors, and the choregos paid chorus’ training and costumes. So there was both state and private involvement in the production of a tragedy or comedy.

The Playwrights: Aeschylus 525-456 B.C. / Sophocles 496-406 B.C. / Euripides 485-406 B.C.
Aeschylus composed about 80 dramas, Sophocles about 120, Euripides perhaps about 90. Aristophanes probably wrote about 40 comedies. Dramatists who wrote tragedies did not compose comedies, and vice versa.

The playwright was called a didaskalos, a teacher or trainer because he trained the chorus who were to sing and dance. As drama developed, the playwright also took care of the scripts and the music. He was something like a modern director, and may at times have acted in his own plays, especially in the early stages of his career. A successful dramatist could win prizes, but generally, playwrights were able to support themselves independently by land-holdings. Sophocles, for example, was a prominent citizen—he served as a general and treasurer. Aeschylus was an esteemed soldier against the Persian Empire, and his tombstone is said to have recorded his military service, not his prowess as a playwright.

The Theater: The theater for the City Dionysia was located on the south slope of the citadel of Athens, the Acropolis. The Didaskalia Classics site offers 3-D images of a later reconstruction: http://www.didaskalia.net/studyarea/recreatingdionysus.html.

The theater had three parts:

1. Theatron: this was for seating around 14,000 spectators; it was probably at first of wood, but later it was of stone. 2. Orchestra: this was for the chorus to sing and dance in and for the actors, when their function was developed. 3. Skene: this was at first a tent-like structure that served as a scene-building, and it had a door for entrances and exits. The Oresteia requires one, though perhaps the earliest plays didn’t. Costume was important, too, because it could be used to determine factors like status, gender, and age.

The chorus remained important in drama, especially in Aeschylus. At some point, a choregos (legend says it was “Thespis,” hence actors are “thespians”) stepped forth and became the first actor, or answerer (hypocrites). So the composer was the first participant to turn choral celebration into what we call drama, with a plot and interaction between characters. Apparently Aeschylus or Sophocles added a third actor. The former’s early plays required only two actors, but even that was enough to make for interesting exchanges between the chorus and the actors and, to some extent, between the actors and each other. With three actors, of course, the possibilities for true dramatic dialogue and action are impressive.

Audience: Would have consisted mostly of male citizens—the ones who ran Athenian democracy by participating in the Assembly. There would probably have been very few, if any, slaves or women present, and perhaps some resident aliens or “metics” and visiting dignitaries. Drama was surely a male-centered affair, as was the political life of Athens. Public speaking was vital in democratic Athens—anyone who was someone in the legal/political system needed to know how to move and convince fairly large numbers of men. Theater and political life, as we shall see from Aeschylus, were in fact closely connected: the same skills were required, and the same class of people participated (male kyrioi, or heads of households who also performed military service). So while the stuff of tragedy seems almost always to have been the ancient myth cycles, the audience watching the plays would have felt themselves drawn in by the dramatists’ updating of their significance for the major concerns of the 5th-century B.C. present. And that present was, of course, the age of the great statesman Pericles (495-429 B.C.), who drove home the movement towards full Athenian democracy from 461 B.C. onwards and who at the same time furthered a disastrous course of imperial protection and aggression that had ensued from victory in the Persian Wars around 500 B.C. Greek tragedy grew to maturity in the period extending from the battles of Marathon on land in 490 B.C. and the naval engagement at Salamis in 480 B.C., on through the Second Peloponnesian War from 431-404 B.C., in which the Athenians lost to Sparta the empire they had gained during half a century of glory following the victories over Persia. Athens’ supremacy didn’t last long as such things go, but it burned brightly while it lasted, and festival drama, along with architecture, sculpture, and philosophy, was among its greatest accomplishments. So the dramas took place in one of the most exciting times in Western history—both heady and unsettling at the same time, shot through with violence, democratic and artistic flowering, victory, and great loss.

Tragic Masks: The masks tell us something about tragedy: with linen or clay masks, a single actor might play several roles, or wear several faces of the same character. (Visit Didaskalia’s interactive 3-D mask page at http://www.didaskalia.net/studyarea/visual_resources/images/masks/mask_mm/rotmask1.html.) Wilde said, “give a man a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth.” His quip should remind us that masks don’t discourage expression—as Kenneth McLeish says, they had religious significance in the theater: participants in Dionysian rites offered up their personal identity to the god, and further, he continues:

“Wearing a mask does not inhibit or restrict the portrayal of character but enhances it, allowing more, not less, fluidity and suppleness of movement; and the character created by or embodied in the mask and the actor who wears it can feel as if it has an independent identity which is liberated at the moment of performance—an unsettlingly Dionysian experience” (9).

That emphasis on what we might call expression is important especially because—Aristotle’s claims about plot being the soul of tragedy notwithstanding—not much happens in many Greek tragedies. Instead, chorus members and characters “take up an attitude” towards the few well-packaged, exciting events that take place on or off the stage. The action is important, but the characters’ words and attitudes help us, in turn, gain perspective on the action. Perhaps when Aristotle emphasizes plot so much, he’s taking for granted the great power of the Dionysian mask to support the plot in driving the audience towards catharsis. Character, he says, will reveal itself in relation to the play’s action.

Aristotle’s theory of drama—we didn’t cover this much in our class, but if you would like to read something about it, please see my Fall 2007 E491 Literary Theory blog (http://www.ajdrake.com/blogs/491_fall_07/), where (in the entry for Week 2) I cover The Poetics in some detail. In Aristotle’s view, a well constructed plot that follows probability and necessity will induce the proper tragic emotions (pity and fear or terror), with the result being “catharsis,” a medical term that may be interpreted as “purgation” (of emotion) and/or as “intellectual clarification.” I should think that the tragic emotions, once aroused, become the object of introspection; thereafter, the audience attains clarification about an issue of great importance—for instance, our relation to the gods, the nature of divine justice, etc.

Notes on Aeschylus’ The Oresteia

Background: the House of Atreus, adapted from Apollodorus’ First- or Second-Century CE compendium The Library of Greek Mythology.

Pelops married Hippodameia, a success he achieved when the lady convinced Myrtilos to murder another suitor, Oinomaos, by rigging his chariot to fall apart during a race. As he died, he cursed Pelops and his descendants. (Pelops was the son of Tantalos, who, aside from having shared ambrosia with mortals, had also tried to fool Zeus and served him a banquet containing his son Pelops as a sacrifice, thereby bringing punishment down on his head; Pelops was then brought back to life.) Well, two of Pelops’ sons are Atreus and Thyestes (though in Aeschylus’ version, they are his grandsons, fathered by Pelops’ son Pleisthenes). Atreus married Catreus’ daughter Aerope (granddaughter of Minos), but Aerope fell in love with Thyestes. Atreus had promised to sacrifice a golden lamb to Artemis, but instead killed it and locked it in a chest. Aerope gave the lamb to Thyestes, who then used it to win the kingdom of Mycenae—it seems an oracle had told the Mycenaeans that they should seek a Pelopid for their king, and Thyestes then insisted that they should choose the man who possessed a golden lamb. This was convenient, since he just happened to have stolen it from the unsuspecting Atreus. But Zeus later took Atreus’ part, which resulted in the banishment of Thyestes. One day Atreus, now king, found out that his brother had slept with Aerope, and decided to seek revenge—he invited his banished brother back to court on the pretense that reconciliation was possible, but then he snatched Thyestes’ sons Aglaos, Callileon, and Orchomenos from the altar of Zeus (god of suppliants, as Homer tells us), cut off their limbs, and served them as a meal to Thyestes. An oracle told Thyestes that if he wanted counter-revenge, he should sleep with his daughter Pelopeia. He did, and the union produced Aegisthus, who went on to kill Atreus and return the kingdom to Thyestes, ruling with him jointly in Mycenae. Agamemnon, the doomed hero of Aeschylus’ trilogy and of course the brother of Menelaus, Helen’s husband, was a son of Atreus, and he had supposedly helped to capture the adulterer Thyestes, father of Aegisthus. Agamemnon married Clytemnestra (Helen’s sister) after murdering her first husband (Tantalos, son of Thyestes). So when Aegisthus participates in the plot to murder Agamemnon, he is taking his revenge for the outrage Atreus committed against Thyestes.

The lesson that emerges from this troubled tale is that both Atreus and Thyestes are steeped in outrage, incest, and blood, and in fact their father Pelops had long since drawn a curse on himself that landed on their heads. The best thing descendants of these people could do is opt out of the House, but of course that’s not possible, so they all suffer for the sins of their fathers. Things only get worse when, at least in one version, Agamemnon listens to his priest Calchas and sacrifices his daughter Iphigeneia by Clytemnestra from military necessity—they need a fair wind to make it to Troy and pay back Priam for the dishonor his son Paris had brought to Menelaus of Sparta by stealing away with his wife Helen. So Clytemnestra has a powerful reason to despise Agamemnon, and so does Aegisthus, her lover.

Line-by-Line Comments on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, from The Oresteia

1-44. The Watchman has been commanded by Clytemnestra to watch for the signal-fire indicating that Troy has fallen. He says that Clytemnestra maneuvers like a man, and he refers darkly at line 42 to the secrets of the House of Atreus, or, more directly, the secrets of Agamemnon’s house. At line 25, he invokes the motif of light versus darkness, greeting the daybreak as “dawn of the darkness.” This mention will come to seem ironic given that the Furies represent a dark upwelling from Hades. Another small thing worth noting is that the trilogy begins with a man on the lookout for fire-beacons as a sign of victory, and ends with references to the torches with which Athena and her helpers light the Furies’ way to their place of honor.

45-258. Here, the Chorus shows us one of its functions: simply to fill us in on things that happened before the play. But almost immediately, around line 55, they begin to complicate that task by taking up an attitude towards what they relate. Much of a Greek play can, indeed, consist in just such adopting of attitudes, whether on the part of the Chorus or of the main characters. This Aeschylan Chorus of old men judge by outcomes, and hold patriarchal values that lead them to distrust and largely discount even the strong woman Clytemnestra, who rules by proxy for Agamemnon. They invoke the gods frequently, but seem inconsistent in their statements about the relation between the divine realm and human events, desires, and predicaments. Still, what they say near the beginning of their speech here is prophetic: the Trojan War, they say, has taken on a life of its own, and there’s no way to “enchant away the rigid Fury” (78), thanks to Paris’ deep violation of Greek hospitality. Fury rages during and follows after war, as they suggest. The old men apparently resent the loss of so many kinsmen and the interruption of their normal lives during such a long, drawn-out military expedition. They lament their own situation, saying that they have been dishonored: they are the “husks” (80) of Argos, the non-heroic elders who have remained behind with women and children. On the whole, the Chorus registers the tensions that the trilogy’s individual characters and gods must work out: the status of women, the role of the Olympians, the power of the revenge cycle, and the province of law.

The elderly Chorus members claim (line 112ff) that they still have the gift of persuasion and perhaps even of prophecy: they link themselves to what the prophet Calchas had said about a sign sent by the gods, namely a pair of eagles swooping down upon a pregnant rabbit and thereby infuriating Artemis. This event may have presaged the sacrificial killing of Iphigeneia by the Greek kings, Agamemnon foremost among them. At line 150, they speak of Clytemnestra as “the architect of vengeance” in a manner that places her alongside the enraged Artemis, and fear what she may do when Agamemnon returns. Much of what the Chorus members say at this point consists in venting their frustrations about their personal situation and their anxiety about the war’s consequences. (Later on, we shall find a new and more action-oriented kind of language at work in other characters.) But they try to hold on to some degree of hope, and wish piously, “good win out in glory in the end” (125 and 160).

The Chorus next introduces the theme of the fall of royal houses (line 165ff), a pattern that began with the gods: while the male principle may reign supreme, its rule has been anything but serene since the patriarchal gods Kronos, Saturn, and Zeus fought with one another. At line 180, the Chorus claims that we may “suffer into truth” and that we shall attain “ripeness” (182) or a degree of wisdom and balance. They believe, in other words, that we learn only through suffering. The Greek passage for lines 180-84 runs τὸν φρονεῖν βροτοὺς ὁδώ- / σαντα, τὸν πάθειμάθος / θέντα κυρίως ἔχειν. / στάζει δ’ ἔν θ’ ὕπνῳ πρὸκαρδίας / μνησιπήμων πόνος : καὶ παρ ’ ἄ- / κοντας ἦλθε σωφρονεῖν. / δαιμόνων δ έπου χάρις βίαιος / σέλμα σεμνὸν ἡμένων. (It’s the same passage that Robert F. Kennedy found moving and quoted as “ Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”) From line 200-57, the Chorus goes on to detail Agamemnon’s frenzy in killing his daughter, and the bind in which he has been placed—he can either do justice to his own daughter and let down his fleet, or he can do justice to the public cause and kill his daughter. Either choice will bring consequences. Agamemnon realizes he may bring another curse upon his own house. His was not a willing sacrifice, so it was not a pure one.

258-358. Although the Chorus members say they trust the Queen, towards whom they now turn to address, they keep peppering her with doubts, and at 277, Clytemnestra says she feels they are treating her like a child and ridiculing her, and she explains how she set up the torch-signal system as a way of learning the outcome of the Trojan War: “And I ordained it all. / Torch to torch, running for their lives, / one long succession racing home my fire” (313-15). Her words are rewarded with the pronouncement, “Spoken like a man, my lady, loyal, / full of self-command” (354-56).

359-492. Clytemnestra having re-entered the palace, the Chorus praises Jupiter and the Goddess Night. Now they see the fall of Troy as justice, momentarily realigning themselves with the Queen’s view. But they continue to emphasize the pain and anguish caused by war, and by line 470, they have returned to questioning Clytemnestra’s authority, finding it impossible to accept that a woman can rule.

493-682. The Herald enters and first informs the Chorus that the war has indeed ended. He gives us the soldier’s perspective on war, with all its confusion, despair, and triumph. Agamemnon is nearby. When Clytemnestra enters at line 580, she publicly declares her loyalty to the soon-returning King; she has been, she insists, utterly faithful and pure: “in ill repute I am / as practiced as I am in dyeing bronze” (607-08).

The Herald departs after telling the Chorus (which remains after Clytemnestra returns to the palace) that Menelaus has been swept away by the sea-storms that hit the returning Greek fleet. Like Odysseus of Ithaca, Menelaus is destined to do some wandering before he makes it back home, in his case to Sparta. As for the cause of the storms, here is what Apollodorus says in his compendium of Greek myths:

“Troy is sacked … Lokrian Aias [Ajax], when he saw Kassandra clinging to the wooden statue of Athena, raped her: for this reason the wooden image gazes up to the sky … As they were about to sail off after ravishing Troy, they were held back by Kalkhas[Calchas], who told them that Athena was enraged at them because of the impious act of Aias. They were on the verge of slaying Aias when he ran to an altar, so they let him live. After all this they held an assembly, during which Agamemnon insisted they stay and sacrifice to Athena. So Diomedes, Nestor, and Menelaos all left at the same time. The first two had a good voyage, but Menelaos encountered a storm … Agamemnon left after making his sacrifice, and put in at Tenedos. Thetis came to persuade Neoptolemos to wait two days and make sacrifices, and he obeyed her. But the others left and were overtaken by storms in the region of Tenos, for Athena had begged Zeus to send a storm upon the Hellenes. Many ships sank. Athena threw a thunderbolt at the ship of Aias. As the ship fell apart, he scrambled to safety on a rock and declared that he had survived despite Athena’s designs. Then Poseidon struck the rock with his trident, splitting it in two, and Aias fell into the sea and was drowned.” Apollodorus, The Library E5.22-6.6.

683-793. The Chorus members set forth their view of the Trojan War’s cause: Helen. That view is hardly uncommon, though I wouldn’t pin it on Homer’s epics—Homer is more sophisticated than that. (Gorgias of Leontini deals the anti-Helenistas a blow in his famous “Encomium of Helen,” providing a number of argument-lines in the great lady’s favor.) But the Chorus members say also that “Only the reckless act / can breed impiety, multiplying crime on crime” (751-52). As the Norton editors point out, this view departs from the common one that too much good fortune in itself is enough to bring disaster on mere mortals.

794-841. Agamemnon completely misses the point of the Chorus’ warning about disloyalty at home. The conquering hero is tone-deaf, a politician-king too drunk with his own glory to hear what others are saying to him or, at least until the end of his address to the Chorus, to notice that Clytemnestra has been hauling out the Tyrian red carpet for his entry. He thinks the most important thing now is to establish a tribunal to hear “this cause involving men and gods” (830). He may be addressing the Chorus’ concerns as he understands them—i.e. the traitors, whoever they may be, must be tried and punished. His next words are full of unintended irony: “Wherever something calls for drastic cures / we make our noblest effort: amputate or wield / the healing iron, burn the cancer at the roots” (834-36).

842-976. Addressing first the Chorus, Clytemnestra tries to build sympathy for her loneliness and suffering during Agamemnon’s long absence at Troy. To the King himself, she explains that their son Orestes has been sent away, supposedly to keep him safe in case disaster should strike at home. Dissembling her rage at him, she overcompensates by insisting that he must enter the palace only by walking on a Tyrian crimson or purple carpet. Agamemnon distrusts this gesture and finds it excessive, declaring bluntly that his wife is trying to reverse their roles and make him out to be an effeminate dandy: “You treat me like a woman. Groveling, gaping up at me! / What am I, some barbarian peacocking out of Asia? (912-13) Agamemnon himself has already spoken like a true politician, flattering and impressing the Chorus, but now he finds his wife’s words and gestures insincere. Clytemnestra manages to bend his will to hers even as they both compete in a display of strength. The Trojan War was initiated to avenge an act of inhospitality and betrayal, and now the chief among the Greeks’ returning heroes is to be brought down by the supreme inhospitality of his own wife.

977-1031. The Chorus is terrified, and seems to hear a “dirge of the Furies” (994) promising death to Agamemnon. There may be some hint of the Atreides’ history, but it seems that as yet the exact nature of the threat is not specified. Perhaps, as the editors suggest, the Chorus fears for Agamemnon because of his “triumphant excess” in the Trojan War, wherein so many on both sides have died.

1032-1368. Cassandra the captured Trojan priestess of Apollo builds suspense while we await the outcome of Agamemnon’s somewhat unwilling entrance into the palace. Refusing the Queen’s devious invitation to enter after Agamemnon, Cassandra laments and rails wildly, retelling the curse of the House of Atreus, which she describes as “the house that hates god, / an echoing womb of guilt, kinsmen torturing kinsmen, severed heads, / slaughterhouse of heroes, soil streaming blood” (1088-91). She reinvokes the horrible banquet to which Thyestes was treated by Atreus (see above, “ Background: the House of Atreus”) , and tries in vain to make the Chorus understand that even now the slaughter is being prepared as Clytemnestra casts her “net flung out of hell” to trap Agamemnon and render him helpless for the death blow. Cassandra finely refers to herself as the “last ember” (1174) of burning Troy, and laments her city’s losses. When the Chorus members ask her how she knows so much about the shameful history of the Atreides, she explains her relationship with Apollo—the god, enraged at her last-minute refusal to have intercourse with him, burdened her with the gift of prophetic powers that would nonetheless carry no weight with those Cassandra tries to warn. She knows now that she was brought to Argos to meet her fate alongside Agamemnon, and in the end resigns herself to it, asking only in her last dirge that “when the avengers cut the assassins down / they will avenge me too” (1348-49).

1369-1604. The deed is done, and Clytemnestra is by no means in the mood to quiet down and “lawyer up,” as they say on today’s crime shows. No, she positively exults in her bloody act: “Words, endless words I’ve said to serve the moment— / Now it makes me proud to tell the truth” (1391-92). She even struck the King a third time, she says, for good measure, and standing before the Chorus, she declares, “I revel / like the Earth when the spring rains come down, / the blessed gifts of god, and the new green spear / splits the sheath and rips to birth in glory!” (1412-13) Agamemnon, she says, is her “masterpiece of Justice” (1430), and although the feeble Chorus would banish her on the spot, she is at this moment more conquering hero than Greek woman—quite a transgressive thing to be in a patriarchal culture like that of the ancient Greeks, and not a role acceptable to the Chorus, who in spite of her heroism see her as a deceiver rather than as the bold warrior she wants to be. She has long resented and loathed Agamemnon for several reasons. There was his covetousness regarding Achilles’ prized concubine Chryseis over in Troy—now Cassandra lies dead in proxy payment for that insult. And when the Chorus invokes Helen as the cause of it all again, Clytemnestra turns on them furiously: “never turn / your wrath on her, call her / the scourge of men” (1491-92). At this point, the Queen claims to be nothing less than the Fury that follows the doomed House of Atreus: “Fleshed in the wife of this dead man, / the spirit lives within me, / our savage ancient spirit of revenge. / In return for Atreus’ brutal feast / he kills his perfect son—for every murdered child, a crowning sacrifice” (1528-32). Agamemnon was, of course, the son of Atreus, so killing him is payback on the part of Thyestes. Perhaps most heinous of Agamemnon’s outrages, however, is the fact that he sacrificed daughter Iphigeneia for the fleet’s sake on the way to Troy, as Calchas the priest directed him.

1605-1708 (end). Aegisthus, son of Thyestes, enters and reminds everyone of the dreadful banquet to which his father had been treated. Together, he and Clytemnestra somewhat ignominiously brave the feeble old Chorus, with Aegisthus even claiming he will work to civilize the rude people of Argos. The play ends with Clytemnestra’s declaration to Aegisthus, “Let them howl—they’re impotent. You and I have power now. / We will set the house in order once for all.” Which remark, of course, sounds like the mother of all premature conclusions: there simply is no way to set the House of Atreus in order—at least not here in Argos itself.

Line-by-Line Comments on Aeschylus’ The Eumenides, from The Oresteia

1-65. Pythia prays first to earth and tradition, and then she mentions Phoebus Apollo, the civilized and prophetic god. Apollo speaks for Zeus. She praises Athena, Dionysus, and Zeus. We might take this prayer as foretelling need to placate all the gods, and the Furies later. As Simon Goldhill says, relations in the divine order mirror the uncertainty and strife we see in the human realm. Right after this prayer, at line 33, Pythia appears to be shaken: she envisions first a man, Orestes, coming as suppliant to Apollo’s Oracle at Delphi. She also sees beings that she can’t identify and that must have to do with pollution. From lines 33-65, Pythia insists that Apollo must purge his own house: the gods are not exempt from the need to purify their order after their deeds have befouled it.

66-96. Apollo promises to help Orestes. Even Apollo does not name the Furies, though he calls them eternal virgins and obscenities. He counsels Orestes to go to Athena’s sanctuary. At line 85, Apollo says he’ll devise the master stroke—it seems he admits some responsibility for what has happened. Orestes wants strict justice, which Apollo knows must be tempered with compassion or at least with a sense of realism. The Furies are loathed by men and gods, so they will all have to come to terms with these creatures.

97-139. Clytemnestra rouses the Furies. She says that for those she killed, the charges of the dead will never cease. Her own Furies owe her something—a dream is calling them, she says. The Furies cry out in their sleep, “Get him.” A dream calls them, and now Clytemnestra calls them. The underworld’s shades are not phantoms—they are real and have real effects upon those they visit. At line 136, Clytemnestra insists that the charges she levels are just. As always, she does not lack for eloquence combined with a certain bluntness. Orestes having escaped, the Furies awaken.

144-75. The Furies speak, first lamenting the loss of their prey. The quarry has slipped from the nets—that’s the same reference used in reference to Clytemnestra’s killing of Agamemnon. She will set them on Orestes as hunters. Unless this happens, thinks Clytemnestra, there’s no justice. Around line 173, the Furies accuse Apollo of polluting his own shrine.

176-232. Apollo argues with the Furies, who (at line 151) have accused him of taking away their prerogatives. He sides with civility, reason, and order, employing a series of violent images to describe the Furies—they belong with wild animals and with people who act like wild animals. Apollo doesn’t accept their right to be where they are. But isn’t he denying the prerogative of the revenge cycle, which he calls unacceptable and loathsome? He says the order of Olympus will be against the Furies, but that won’t happen at the trilogy’s end. Apollo accuses the Furies of being unbalanced in their notions about justice: they privilege Clytemnestra because killing a mother is killing irreplaceable flesh and blood, and with that proposition the male god disagrees. At line 222, Apollo puts his faith in Athena. At line 230, he says that Orestes would become a terror to gods and men, a frustrated suppliant, if his killing of Clytemnestra isn’t validated. Incivility and not keeping one’s word, not observing proper relations between gods and men, are Apollo’s greatest anxieties. He has no problem with more or less “forgetting” how the Olympian order itself came to power, it seems.

233-407. Orestes prays to Athena’s statue, but his call for help isn’t answered at once. The Furies, with their references to hunting, appear to him first. Notice the reference to the Eagle of Zeus hunting the hare. At line 235, Orestes says he’s purified, his hands are clean. But he’s still an outcast, and the Furies don’t recognize his statement as valid. They have come to a holy part of the City, thirsting for blood.

253-73. The Furies speak of their kind of justice—blood for blood, not Athenian law. They invoke the might of Hades, their own realm. They don’t see this invocation as a call to perpetual anarchy: the accounts of men’s deeds are written on Hades’ tablets. Revenge, as Sir Francis Bacon says disapprovingly in an essay written around 1600, is “a kind of wild justice.” The Furies favor the argument from antiquity: their justice is binding upon men and gods, and it predates (and therefore supercedes) written law and civic institutions. Perhaps Aeschylus wants to show the persistence of tradition even in the fifth-century-BCE present. One cannot wish away the violent past or the traditional ways of dealing with it. Even settled law and order are always beset by the threat of violence, and it’s vital not to forget that fact.

287-90. Orestes invokes Athena; he wants justice without a battle. He wants a new settlement for himself and Argos.

304-06. The Furies assert their own parallel authority: they must sacrifice Orestes to their own law, unwillingly, which is corrupt sacrificial practice. (Ritual sacrifice of animals, by the way, called for getting the victim to “nod” approval of its treatment.) Just as Apollo said he would use a spell, so will they. They sing a chain-song to bind human beings, a song we must balance against the Olympian hymns at the trilogy’s end, and vice versa. The two songs must, that is, be made to harmonize.

307-407. The Furies extol the independence of their own realm, and the result is an oxymoronic hymn of fury. They pray to their Mother Night (Nyx), and call Apollo a whelp. Nobody can shake their grip, and the Fates have given them independence even from the gods. They mock the notion of a trial, standing instead upon their rights. They insist at line 363 that Zeus wouldn’t champion Orestes or Apollo. Everyone is arguing over what the gods will do. Neither do the Furies accept Orestes’ washing of his hands—see line 362, where he is still described as “streaked with blood.” At lines 372 and following, the Furies mock men’s dreams of grandeur—so much for human pretensions, aspirations and illusions; they will be swallowed up by this realm that antedates even the order of the gods. Proleiptically, the dreams of grandeur referenced by the Furies would include Athenian edifices of law and stone: the classical and golden era of art. All these ways of building up humanity will be lost when the Furies sing and dance. Their language threatens to undermine human beings’ attempts to use these artistic forms in the service of civilization. Here we are close to the territory of Friedrich Nietzsche’s early writing about the inseparable “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” elements in Greek culture—a great deal of what we call “civilization” seems to depend upon what Nietzsche labels forgetting—forgetting the necessary violence and cruelty that went into the beautiful forms and practices we deem worthiest of humanity. The Furies, at least (and in their unforgiving manner), don’t want us to forget. If they had their way, we may imagine the bad memories piling on top of earlier bad memories, the outraged cries filling the air with cacophony until all is overwhelmed. It would be our own fault since, after all, the Furies don’t commit the outrages themselves. Even so, the earth would soon become unlivable.

Apollo, by contrast, is determined to make his hymns to reason and Olympian order prevail: harmony will replace anarchy. This point connects to Aeschylus’ probable view of drama’s power—it’s an art form that urges harmony (or at least a working settlement) between man and god, an understanding between them. As always with the Greeks, aesthetics turns out to be more than mere entertainment or relief; it’s part of the strategy we have devised to maintain our place on earth and in the presence of the gods. From lines 399-403, the Furies deny any possible evolution from the wild and violent to the civilized. At line 401, they refer to their own prerogatives as law. Apollonian constructions that help the Greeks endure are not to be allowed. One possible contradiction emerges from lines 396-407: the Furies say that they have their pride, but they also admit that they have been banished to the realm beneath the earth. Nonetheless, their assertion of eternal privilege and sacrosanct status does not entirely square with the facts. It seems that change can occur, in spite of the Furies.

408-449. Athena enters, armed for combat, in defiance of what Orestes had asked. Both the Furies and Orestes start off equal in Athena’s eyes—she mixes them together. The Furies must name themselves as curses and daughters of the night. Athena is fair-minded and she will accept the facts. The Furies, meanwhile insist again that revenge never ends as far as they are concerned. Athena distinguishes between the name of justice and the act of justice; she would like to see a settlement amongst the warring parties. At lines 444 and following, a pivotal moment occurs because the Furies exhibit some interest in a settlement—this may come as a surprise considering what they claimed earlier. The point Athena makes to them is that oath-taking should never lead to injustice. As Simon Goldhill says, we are dealing in part with an argument over the purpose of language—how does it mediate between or affect the various realms?

461-65. Orestes says to Athena that he has purified himself, and then explains why he killed his mother. Apollo shares the guilt, Orestes says. He implies that he was in a bind: he had to avenge his father, or face punishment. Orestes wants to know if he has acted justly, and he wants things to end.

484-85. Even Athena will call for a full trial—humans must get involved. She acknowledges the Furies’ power. So she is in a bind, too, along with Agamemnon over Iphigenia, Clytemnestra over the murder of Iphigenia, and Orestes over both his parents. It seems that the divine realm mirrors the uncertainty of the human realm with regard to relationships.

497-99. From the interaction between men and gods will come a way to settle the problems permanently. A new justice that will involve all three realms.

506-71. The Furies sing a powerful song: if Orestes wins, they ask, what’s the point of living? Violence would overwhelm the cosmos. They say 536-41 that they want a settlement and ‘‘ measure.’’ At this point, revenge consists in measure. We will find later that Athena agrees with them, at least to an extent. The Furies see themselves as powers bringing order and measure when humans threaten anarchy. They ally themselves with a kind of justice we might not have given them credit for understanding. In essence, they counsel that fear restrains men and women from doing injustice, that fear lies at the heart of religion itself—who will respect the gods if there is no fear, if all is decided and arranged on the basis of shallow reason?

What, therefore, must happen? Humans must accept the Furies as a counterforce, and must accept them into the civic space and psyche of Athens. In being accepted, they are renamed as “the Well-Abiding” rather than the Erinyes or Furies. Are they transformed, or are people’s perceptions of them transformed? It seems to me that the latter is the case. Violent impulses and movements must always be hemmed in by the Furies’ “tide that threatens to sweep the world.” Anarchy and violence are present in the founding of civic order, and cannot be banished entirely. Rather, we need words, song, dance, law, and magic charms to contain it and yet embrace its presence and power over us. See line 517: we can only define true justice against what threatens it. Anarchy faces those who deny the Furies’ power.

585: Apollo says he’s partly responsible, and asks that the trial proceed. He has always said he trusted Athena.

591-614. The Fury leader questions Orestes, who turns to Apollo. The Fury leader is playing lawyer at this point—this “lawyering up” constitutes tacit consent to the trial, to the institution of a new kind of justice. They want to be players in this new game.

630-84. Apollo argues back, using Athena as his main exhibit in favor of the male principle. She sprang from Zeus’ head, and Zeus is the most powerful god of all. From 643 on, Apollo offers a lawyerly description of Clytemnestra’s crime. His enthusiasm, though brief, evokes her exultant language transforming the deed. At 650, the Furies remind Apollo that Zeus shackled his father Cronos. Apollo’s response is emotional, not rational—he’s really praising might as right. Still, when humans do an injustice, it’s irretrievable, while Zeus can make things right. But the Furies still want to know at lines 661-63 how Orestes could possibly fit into the civic order given what he has done. From 665-84, Apollo makes his concluding speech or “peroration” to warlike Athena, as a negation of the female principle. But Athena is still a goddess, so things are more complicated than Apollo credits. He appeals to the male principle in Athena, who was not, we recall, born of a mother—she sprang fully grown from the head of Zeus.

692-725. Athena sounds much like the Furies as she calls for the casting of lots. Neither anarchy nor tyranny should be the goal; we must never banish terror from the gates, not outright. The Areopagus will remain “swift to fury.” Notice the reference to keeping watch, which is the way the trilogy began. Athena’s act is foundational—here she inaugurates and defines the powers of the Court of the Areopagus. There seems to be a mixing together of the male and female. She mentions the Amazons who fought Duke Theseus. Notice the phallic language Fagles (our translator) employs. The Amazons sacrifice to Ares, god of war, and Athena is standing with the Amazons. As for the Areopagus, the term ties in to contemporary politics just before Aeschylus’ play was produced. In 462 BCE, a democratic, anti-Spartan reformer named Ephialtes tried to limit the still mostly aristocratic power of the Council of the Areopagus mainly to homicide cases. He was later assassinated, and in 461 BCE Pericles took over the reformist party and became the ascendant power in Athens until his death in 429 BCE. (That was a few years into the disastrous Second Peloponnesian War with Sparta that lasted from 431-404 BCE; the first one stretched out undeclared from 460-445 BCE). Perhaps Aeschylus’ audience would have seen the playwright’s own attitude as favoring the aristocratic Council; but one can’t be too sure about this thesis since in the play, as some critics have pointed out, the Court seems to have only the powers Ephialtes himself wanted it to have.

726-48. Here Apollo and the Furies argue. Both threaten each other. They’re all waiting to see how things will turn out. On the whole the Furies aren’t very good prosecutors—the new kind of law, born of compromise, will require a suppleness in administration and mediation that the zealous Furies lack. The only arrow in their quiver is the “slippery slope” argument that if their claim be denied, anarchy will prevail and the bloodletting will never cease. But the ten judges of the new Areopagus that Athena has founded on the site of an Amazon challenge to Duke Theseus will prove able to handle the complexities, the balancing and stressing act, required to keep the City going in future.

750. Athena declares in advance that she will vote for Orestes.

760. Orestes prays to Apollo for an end, one way or the other. They say much the same—either they’ll go down forever, or they’ll win. But things won’t be so clear-cut.

768-790. Freed, Orestes praises Athena, Apollo, and Zeus, promising Argos’ friendship with the Athenians. He says he will visit punishment on anyone who breaks the deal. He sounds like Athena and the Furies here.

791-899. The Furies reel and lament, repeating themselves in an elegiac passage. Athena bears with their anger, and shapes it. At first she doesn’t have much success. The Furies complain that much has been taken from them. Athena promises them a home. I don’t see that they change; rather, the perspective of gods and humans alters in their favor.

912-40. The Fury leader wants the power to bind people forever, and Athena acknowledges that they are connected with the dark soil, rooted in the earth. They will be the power that underlies the City and its institutions, and whoever denies this power will face disaster. This granted, the Furies have no reason to deny Athenians the produce of their rocky soil or render the people barren.

951-1058 (end). Athena promises clarity of relations between the realms. The Furies will have a clearly defined space and role, and will suffer no dishonor. Her Olympian hymns and promises function as something like a magic spell. In Christian terms, one thinks of Faustus summoning Mephistopheles, prince of darkness. But with the Greeks we are dealing with pre-Christian legend, so it isn’t “evil” that we see in operation in The Oresteia. The forces threatening the social space and the individual psyche are summoned in this trilogy by means of divine intervention, song, spectacle, and dance. The Furies are invited into the City, become associated with what is best in it, and are there to stay, undergirding its bright surfaces and great accomplishments. Athens can’t just banish the Furies; the City must come to terms with them, renaming them and welcoming them as guarantors of all it holds dear.

Week 03, Genesis and Job

2009-08-16T19:26:00.000-07:00

Notes on Genesis.

Genesis 1-3: The Beginning, the Fall

How powerful the spoken word is in the scriptures! God ‘‘speaks’’ the world into existence, and apparently without any need for raw materials with which to create. His words are acts—no separation between the two, as there is for us. God is somewhat anthropomorphized in Genesis—at times, he sounds like a powerful patriarch who takes issue with the beings he has created. He does not like it when his creatures try to rival him—eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil can only lead to eating from the tree of life, and then Adam and Eve might “be as we are.” God begins to regret that he has made the world at all, so sinful are the human beings he made in his image—this is odd in light of later Christian doctrine that God is omniscient and omnipotent; how could such a perfect and transcendent deity “regret” anything? But the Hebrew Bible writers are dealing with God in a dramatic fashion—they have Milton’s task of making pure transcendence and inscrutability talk to us in ways that we can appreciate. What kind of answers or explanations does Genesis give to the huge questions it raises? Well, they are sometimes provocative, and always majestic. Adam and Eve are told to “be fruitful and multiply” (57), and the creation should contain all that it can—”plenitude” and diversity are two great laws of the universe. But why should that be the case? Why should there be something rather than nothing, light instead of darkness, sound and not silence? There really are no answers to such questions—God has simply bid that it should be so, according to Genesis.

The text says that God has made Adam in his image, and there are two overlapping stories of humanity’s creation, it seems: the fuller one in Genesis 2 (pp. 57-58) explains that God first makes Adam from the dust (the name Adam is derived from the Hebrew word for “red clay,” as scholars point out) by breathing life into him. Then God puts Adam to sleep and creates Eve from one of his ribs, to serve (along with the rest of the creation) as a fitting companion for him. A law of hierarchy, as yet gentle enough, binds all creatures from the beginning. God has made mankind in his image, but since he is perfection itself, anything he creates must be less perfect than he is. Apparently to reinforce this principle for Adam and Eve, God plants the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and next to this tree he plants the Tree of Life. The first couple have dominion over everything around them, but not over these two trees. This is simply an interdiction—God does not explain to Adam and Eve why he has made such an interdiction, except to tell them that they will “die” if they disobey. How are we to gloss this act on God’s part? Perhaps we may extrapolate by supposing that God is something like the greatest of romantic poets: the creation is his perpetual poem, and natural process is his “expression.” He has generously given Adam and Eve a chance to help advance the beauty and dignity of his work—they are to tend his garden and take pleasure in the work they do as a way of worshiping him. If, as seems reasonable, they are to draw nearer to the perfect being who has made them in his image, their ascent must be gradual, not sudden. They must not try to usurp God’s place in the hierarchy of the universe by seeking to attain forbidden knowledge. (Incidentally, the text doesn’t say that God has interdicted them from eating of the Tree of Life, though I think it must be implied based on what he says on page 59.) But the serpent, that slippery character “more subtil than any beast of the field” (58), tempts Eve, convincing her that God’s motive is jealousy and stinginess: eat the fruit of the forbidden tree, he says, and “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods.” This imputation that God is withholding something good from her simply to preserve his own prerogatives, to maintain a distinction between himself and his creation, is very powerful. The text explains that Eve succumbs to the fruit’s apparent deliciousness and its supposed wisdom-giving properties, and completes the Fall by giving Adam some as well. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with innocent curiosity, but that isn’t what Eve shows at the moment of choice: her desire to learn is obviously not accompanied by respect and wonder—it is fundamentally selfish and envious, and flows from what one of my former professors in Renaissance literature calls (in reference to Milton’s retelling of Genesis) a “sense of injured merit” not unlike that of Milton’s Satan himself.

The immediate effect of the fall is described somewhat enigmatically: “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (58). As I understand this passage, what was previously the innocent principle of generation—the means whereby all creatures would “be fruitful and multiply,” has become for Adam and Eve something shameful, something to be covered up. Their pride has caused them, in effect, to take God’s generosity for selfishness, and now they construe sexuality the same way, since their understanding has become deranged and darkened. Their being seems shamefully “carnal” to them now, and spirit is no longer at peace with matter and its principle of physical generation. From this point forwards, as God’s stern pronouncements in Genesis 3 make clear, Adam and Eve’s relationship to each other, to their fellow creatures, to the earth itself, and to God will involve difficulty and sorrow: Adam will labor to bring forth his sustenance from an alien, harsh land, and he will “rule over” Eve, who will give birth in pain. And of course, to borrow a line from Milton, they have brought “death into the world.” No longer will they converse pleasantly with God or labor joyfully in his garden amongst their fellow creatures. The laws of life now (as subsequent books in the Bible show) are fearful obedience, painful effort in the face of necessity, cruelty, dishonesty, envy, and misunderstanding with regard to one’s fellows, and dispersion over the earth’s surface: alienation, distortion, derangement.

Genesis 4: The First Murder.

Adam and Eve are the first sinners, but the pattern of sin, which follows an arc of pride, envy, and selfishness, begins with Cain and Abel, their offspring. God doesn’t accept Cain’s offering, presumably because Cain didn’t make it in the right spirit—it makes sense to suppose he offered his gift to God only because he had to, not because he wanted to. As the Bhagavad-Gita later says, one must “act in the spirit of worship” and not be obsessed with getting something from one’s action. Cain hasn’t acted in this selfless or charitable spirit. Then, envious of his brother’s favor with God, Cain kills him without warning and impudently responds to God’s outraged questioning, “am I my brother’s keeper?” As a consequence of his deed, Cain will feel still more deeply than Adam and Eve a sense of alienation from his fellow beings and from the land: “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth” (60). But as a consolation to Cain, who fears that now he will be marked for death as an outlaw, God preserves his life by declaring that “whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” Apparently, then, one human being may not use the wrongs done by another to justify further wrongdoing. As God’s phrase from Deuteronomy goes, “ To me belongeth vengeance and recompence” (32:35).

Genesis 6-9: The Flood.

Noah earns God’s remembrance because of his goodness, and is spared from general destruction in the Flood. In Genesis 9, God sets his “bow in the cloud,” he says, as a “token of a covenant between me and the earth” (63). The covenant amounts to a promise that God will never again destroy the earth by flood. Why does he make this concession? Well, in Genesis 8 God had accepted Noah’s burnt offerings and decided that since “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (pg. 62), there is no point in destroying such wayward children altogether. To me, it seems as if we are to understand from this declaration that God finds it appropriate to be merciful with human weakness, and to show pity for the world that weakness has deranged—the covenant, after all, is not only for human beings; it is for “every living creature of all flesh” (63). But there is genuine sternness in these chapters of Genesis, too: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God made he man” (62). Then, too, God’s description in Genesis 9 of what “dominion” over the animals means is revealing: “the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth.” Evidently, within the limits prescribed by God, there is to be much harshness, much strict justice between man and man, and men will rule the animal kingdom by fear and brute force.

Genesis 11: The Origin of Languages.

In this chapter, human beings again try to rival God; they obey their own desires and set themselves up as proprietors of a divided or rival empire, as evidenced by the building of the Tower of Babel. Here, God discerns that the best way to punish such impiousness is to “confound” the builders’ speech, making it impossible for them to join easily in such nefarious enterprises as raising a building almost to the heavens. The Tower is the first skyscraper. An already self-limited human capacity for learning and understanding will be further limited by the diversification of signifying systems and by physical dispersal across the earth. As the Bible stresses again and again, human language is a fallen instrument, and, in the language of King James I’s day, human combination is apt to be taken as “murmuring against the king”: society breeds an arrogant presumption of self-sufficiency and autonomy far beyond what simple exercise of free will dictates.

Genesis 22: Abraham and Isaac.

God puts Abraham’s faith to the test in this chapter, requiring him to offering his beloved son Isaac as a sacrifice. On the one hand, Genesis 22 reinforces the painful lesson that after the fall, everything is forfeit to God and man can find security in little or nothing: Abraham must be willing to sacrifice even his own son to prove his faith in the Lord. But again, because Abraham is willing to act—because he acts in the right spirit, however troubling the command is to him—he finds mercy in God’s sight. What has not been withheld will be returned manyfold: God promises Abraham, “I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed…” (64). It’s easy to see why Christian tradition has read this chapter typologically, with Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, his “lamb,” serving as a prefiguration of God’s willingness to send “his only begotten son” to atone for mankind’s sins.

Genesis 25, 27: Jacob and Esau.

It seems that God’s providential design justifies considerable “trickery,” as we might call it, amongst the descendants of Adam and Eve: the human order of things must be rearranged sometimes to suit God’s plan. If God requires it, the youngest son must use deceit to take on the powers of the eldest son. Jacob (his mother Rebekah’s favorite) tricks his elder brother Esau into giving up his birthright for some “red pottage” (65). And what Esau has, as the text puts the case, “despised,” Jacob will now secure by tricking old father Isaac (son of Abraham) into bestowing the blessing of the first-born upon him. The plan comes off well, and the blessing, which involves exercising dominion over brethren and even nations, is duly given. This blessing, once given, cannot be retracted, so we can understand Isaac’s feelings about what has happened. But to Esau, too, Isaac offers comfort: he will serve his younger brother, but the servitude will not last forever. In Genesis, Jacob and Esau are reconciled. Jacob’s twelve sons (Asher, Benjamin, Dan, Gad, Issachar, Joseph, Judah, Levi, Naphtali, Reuben, Simeon, Zebulun) will become the twelve tribes of Israel, while Esau’s descendants are said to be the founders of the Kingdom of Edom, a kingdom with which, later on, Kings Saul and then David will clash. See Wikipedia’s entry on the Twelve Tribes and the Edomites. Jacob himself has much service to do—he ends up serving Laban for fourteen years to gain the hand of Rachel, and six years for his stock of cattle. He is renamed “ Israel” after wrestling with an angel in Genesis 32, and is of course the father of Joseph, hero of our next selection.

Genesis 37, 39-46: The Story of Joseph.

Joseph is Jacob/Israel’s son by Rachel, and is possessed not only of a “coat of many colors” given to him by his now elderly father but also the gift of prophetic dreams and the interpretation thereof. One of those dreams gets him in dire trouble with his brothers, since in it, Joseph says, “the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me” (pg. 67, Genesis 37). Only Reuben’s fearful counsel keeps them from killing him outright, and they sell him to the Ishmaelites, who in turn bring him to Egypt , where Pharaoh’s servant Potiphar buys him. Joseph’s powers of interpretation result in his being rescued from the prison where he was sent thanks to the scheming of Potiphar’s wife (whose sexual advances he refused), and Pharaoh is so impressed with Joseph that he makes him all but a co-ruler. As almost always seems to be the case, a gift that places someone in close contact with the divine comes at great risk and cost: insight must be “paid for,” so to speak. When Joseph’s brethren are sent by their father to seek out some wheat (“corn”) during years of famine, the now powerful dweller in Egypt first pays them back for their cruel treatment of him, but then reconciles with them, showing remarkable generosity and inviting them all, along with the youngest son Benjamin and old Israel (Jacob) to come to Egypt and live there. Israel has been promised by God that his children will constitute “a great nation,” and with this faith he enters Egypt. He will live and die there, and so will Joseph. The departure from Egypt and from the clutches of Pharaoh, of course, will only occur when Moses comes to maturity; the story of Moses is told in Exodus.

Notes on Exodus

Moses. His strength from obscurity and peril. Pitied by an Egyptian. But also his limitations—the need to get the people to shoulder their own burdens in accordance with laws.

The Children of Israel. They need almost continual reassurance by means of heavenly signs and material benefits. When things go badly, they question Moses to the point of exasperation. These “murmurers” must be given guidance so that they may shoulder their own share of responsibility and live with piety and regularity. Ritual and law will be vital to them.

Pharaoh . The very pattern of a wicked, hard-hearted, selfish ruler. Excessive cruelty, dishonest. He doesn’t observe the wider patterns of things or pay attention to the true significance of signs and wonders. He keeps resetting to the “default” settings of fallen humanity. He is a figure of frustration, his autonomy mocked. Pharaoh is a bit-part actor in a pageant scripted by God, with Moses taking the part of the unlikely leading man.

God. Demands recognition and loyalty. He is processively on display in the first part of Exodus, using Pharaoh’s depravity to reveal his own power. Once the miracles have been done, he gives laws—patterns by which the Israelites may govern themselves and respect him.

Chapters 1-2. Moses’ birth and development into a courageous young champion of oppressed Israel.these first couple of chapters show the simplicity and strength of Moses. He is born in perilous circumstances and his birth is something of a secret; God seems to like agents of that kind. He is born to a son of the house of Levi to a daughter of that same house, and he must be spirited away to avoid the fate prepared for him and other Israelite children by the Egyptian king, who has become worried about how strong the Israelites are becoming in Egypt. Note the parallel to Jesus’s birth-circumstances. Moses grows up to be a courageous young man, and is rewarded for standing up to certain shepherds who tried to interfere with the daughters of a local priest when they were drawing water from a well. The reward is the daughter or rather a daughter of this priest. When the first mentioned King of Egypt dies, God remembers “his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.”

Chapters 3-6. In the third chapter, God calls upon Moses to take up his role as leader: an angel of the Lord appears to him “in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush.” God announces that he has heard the suffering of his people in Egypt and that he will deliver them. Moses is given to understand that he is the one chosen to help God, and at first expresses uncertainty. In Chapter 4, Verse 14, God provides his famous answer: “I am that I am.” Moses is told to say to the Egyptian king that he wants to go out and sacrifice to his own God. God points out that he is quite certain the King will not allow this, so he will help the King along, so to speak, by demonstrating his great power. The people of Israel will triumph over the Egyptians who have kept them in bondage for more than four centuries. In the fourth chapter, Moses is still dubious about his central role in all this, so God calls forth his magic in the form of Moses’s rod. He also points out that Aaron, Moses’s brother and a priest, will serve as his assistant and will speak eloquently for Moses. The elders are informed of the plan God has set forth, to which they agree. In the fifth chapter, Moses tells the King that his people must go into the desert and sacrifice to Jehovah, but the King is scornful and tells them to get back to work, and he lays even greater burdens upon them. The chief people among the Israelites begin to complain to Moses, and in turn, Moses complains to God directly: “Neither hast thou delivered thy people at all.” In the sixth chapter, when frustration ensues, God gives a firm promise rooted in previous assurances to the Chosen People: “ye shall know that I am the Lord your God.”

Chapters 7-10. God strikes Egypt with several plagues, but each time Pharaoh takes back his reluctant promises to let Israel go and sacrifice to their god. In the seventh chapter, Moses goes back to the Pharaoh, and again there is a test of wills: Aaron casts down the his staff, and it becomes a serpent; when the Egyptian priests do the same, Aaron’s serpent devours theirs. The Pharaoh is warned as he is bathing that he must either “Let my people go,” or the river will turn to blood. When he fails to listen, that is exactly what happens, and the fish die, and the water becomes undrinkable. This blight continues for seven days. In the eighth chapter, further plagues follow: frogs, lice, flies. The Pharaoh at first promises to let the Israelites go, but the pattern of pride and deception continues when he hardens his heart against mercy. In the ninth chapter, Egypt suffers still more plagues: a terrible cattle disease hailstones. God announces his determination that “my name may be declared throughout all the earth.” Only the children of Israel do not suffer from these plagues. At the end of the chapter, the Pharaoh almost seems to understand that he has done wrong, but as usual this insight dies upon his tongue. In the 10 th chapter, still more plagues: locusts ravage the land, and darkness for three days terrifies the people. But again, there is light and health for the Israelites in the midst of sorrow. The Pharaoh emphatically wishes the Israelites gone once and for all, and tells them to depart his kingdom, though he will only allow this under further compulsion.

Chapters 11-12. God brings down his “one plague more”: the killing of the firstborn of all living things in Egypt. He warns Moses, who, in the 11 th chapter, prepares Israel’s households for this ordeal. They are to follow certain ritual prescriptions, eating unleavened bread for seven days and so forth, and, most importantly, killing a lamb whose blood above their doors will warn God not to strike their firstborn. The Egyptians’ first born all die, and Israel spoils the people and departs Egypt, driven out by the distraught Pharaoh in no uncertain terms.

Chapters 13-14. God prescribes the Passover commemoration in the 13 th chapter, and makes Moses lead the people through the Red Sea’s wilderness rather than directly. The reason for this is that he wants them to avoid the Philistines who are at war, lest the Israelites lose heart and decide to return to Egypt. In the 14 th chapter, the people complain, but God commands Moses to raise his staff and part the Red Sea. When Pharaoh’s army tries to follow the people of Israel through the path that has been opened, God overturns their chariots and destroys them utterly. This is the culmination of the great pageant of God’s triumph. He has demonstrated his infinite power over a prideful King who would set himself up as a rival order autonomous from God. This king followed no law but his own wicked heart.

Chapters 15-17. Celebration gives way to complaint in the desert since there is no water to drink. But God makes a pact with the children of Israel that if they will follow his ways, his laws, he will provide. And he does—they come to a place where they find “twelve wells of water.” In the 16 th chapter, God continues to assist them, providing manna, which he will continue to do for the Israelites’ forty years of wandering. The people do not exactly followed God’s orders to the letter in gathering and eating this heavenly food, and he expresses his disappointment in them. In the 17 th chapter, the Israelites are again complaining about water, so God instructs Moses to strike a rock, which will then gush water. Next, Amalek and his army are defeated by Joshua while Moses, with some assistance, keeps his arms raised to ensure an Israelite victory. The message is clear: Israel will be remembered, but its enemies obliterated.

Chapter 18. Moses’s father-in-law Jethro comes to him and rejoices, accepting God. When he sees Moses trying to be the sole judge among his people, he advises him that a little delegation goes a long way: let able judges deal with the smaller cases, while Moses should settle only the major ones. There must be division of powers and responsibilities—one man alone cannot do everything.

Chapters 19-20. The Israelites enter the Sinai Desert. Moses is made to understand that he must prepare his people for the great event to come: the descent of God from the sky down to Mount Sinai. The people must remain within boundaries set for them, at the base of the mountain. Only Moses and Aaron will meet with God directly on the mountain. God delivers the Ten Commandments, after which the thundering awesomess of God makes the people afraid, and they ask Moses to speak to them rather than allow God to speak to them. The Commandments are as follows:

1. No other gods must be worshiped.

2. No graven images of God or of anything in heaven or beneath the earth.

3. No taking God’s name in vain.

4. No working on the Sabbath.

5. Parents must be honored.

6. No killing.

7. No adultery.

8. No stealing.

9. No lying, i.e. “bearing false witness.”

10. No coveting others’ goods, loved ones, or servants: avoid greed and envy.

The very fact that these things must be explicitly forbidden tells us that people had become very bad indeed; this strict governance is part of the deal to contain the effects of the Fall. It is both part of the punishment God laid out in Genesis, and a consolation: live by His laws and honor Him, and in turn you will be honored by the Lord; that’s the promise. And we notice that magnificent as Moses is, the Commandments are aimed at each person in the tribes of Israel. Moses is not all powerful; he is not Pharaoh (who keeps up that pretense of omnipotence).

Final things—much of the rest of the chapter consists in building the sacred Ark of the Covenant to house the remnants of God’s miracles employed in his rescue of Israel from Egyptian bondage. This ark will go before them, protected by God as they wander in the desert for forty years. Also Moses’ breaking of the original Tablets with the Ten Commandments because the people are disobeying, and then God renews the Tablets.

Notes on Job.

From the outset, we are told that Job is a “perfect and upright” man, yet God will use this good man to demonstrate to a scoffing Satan the perfection of his order and the loving obedience of his servants. (Satan is not the devil of the New Testament; rather, he is an accusing or adversarial angel amongst God’s council; see the Wikipedia entry on Satan.) Satan sees a fine chance to show that God is mistaken: “Doth Job fear God for nought?” he asks, meaning evidently that Job only obeys and loves God because as yet he has no reason to do otherwise. He has a good, rich life—what is there to be afraid of? Satan’s claim is that once Job suffers a genuine setback in his fortunes, he will hold God in contempt and curse him to his face. But Job responds eloquently to both the first phase (loss of kindred and goods) and the second phase (loss of bodily soundness) of his trial. Satan has lost his wager, but the text has much more to do than prove Satan’s incorrectness.

Job’s wife tempts him to “curse God and die,” and his friends, after keeping a seven-day vigil with him, beset him with additional foolish advice. In essence, their counsel follows from the notion that one’s earthly fortunes can be linked directly to the morality or immorality of one’s conduct. In other words, life is a matter of reward and punishment, and nothing else. How does Job process what has happened to him? He prays for death, the great leveler of men and silencer of troubles. This “death” doesn’t seem to entail an afterlife; Job simply wishes to cease existing altogether, and thereby to find peace. He knows in his heart that he is not guilty of what his accusers say he is: “I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.” He never took his good fortune for granted or puffed himself up with pride on account of it. He is not a self-aggrandizer, a miser, or anything of the sort. So far as he is able to discern, he has been genuinely righteous and has never ceased to praise God for his blessings, and he won’t be so hypocritical as to pretend that he understands why he is suffering now. (The knowledge of God’s wager is denied to him—it is known only to us, the readers. But of course, the notion of a wager that causes such suffering is hardly a sufficient justification by any reasonable human standards. We would not easily pardon another human being if he or she did to us what God has allowed Satan to do to Job.)

Eliphaz picks up on Job’s refusal to accept the charge of iniquity, and urges him to embrace his troubles as the “correction” necessary to purify him. But Job again prays for death instead, pointing out that Eliphaz’s logic is a “pit” into which he will not fall. There is no correspondence between earthly prosperity and moral rectitude, and his own anguished soul tells him that such explanations are brutally insufficient and cruel.

Because Job’s “days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope” (82 top), he will not keep silent. He will take this one brief chance to voice his anguish and uncertainty. His complaint is not petty: Job demands to know why an infinitely magnificent and powerful God would bother raining trouble and confusion down on a poor servant like Job. What is the point of such contention between God and man? Contention implies the acknowledgment of a relationship, however unequal. We notice, too, that on these pages Job pleads neither perfection nor the virtue of patience: “If I justify myself, mine own mouth shall condemn me: if I say, I am perfect, it shall also prove me perverse…. If I say, I will forget my complaint … I know that thou wilt not hold me innocent” (83). His one need is that God should enter into a conversation with him, should declare himself and explain why he has done such things to a mere mortal: “I will say unto God, Do not condemn me; shew me wherefore thou contendest with me” (83.10).

Job insists on attending to the problem of his relationship with a divinity with whom he can find no commensurateness, no manner of accommodation or understanding. This “desire to reason with God” (85.13) does not stem from stupidity or arrogance. To his friends he says, “I have understanding as well as you” (85.12). He understands the basis of their explanation, and he knows that God will do as God wills. But by this point in the text, Job’s conversation is turned away from his friends and towards God, to whom again he addresses questions such as “why do you insist on troubling me? what have I done?” His desire is that God should declare himself and enter into dialog with him. Job’s spiritual turmoil (caused by suffering and by uncertainty about the great question, “Why?”) is intolerable, so the dialog for which he asks is a necessity for him.
Job searches his heart—has he in fact done something wrong, or even something right in the wrong spirit? No, he is unable to accuse himself honestly. With one further plea that God will “remember” him and speak with him, “The words of Job are ended” (89). He will not accuse God of unrighteousness or curse him, but neither will he condemn himself. At last, God declares himself from what me may presume is the perfect calm within the chaos of a deafening whirlwind, telling Job, “Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me” (89.38). What follows is more a series of clarifying questions than a full conversation.

All of the questions God poses declare and demonstrate his own sublimity. It is from such language that William Blake probably borrowed when he wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius; lift up thy head!” Like Krishna in The Bhagavad-Gita, the God of the Hebrews deigns to “put on his terrors” for a time. He made Leviathan (on whose subsequent career see Revelations) and Behemoth, and he is behind the tremendous power of all natural processes on earth and all celestial forces in heaven. This “Unmoved Mover,” as Christian theologians (following Aristotle’s older terminology) will call him, seems annoyed with Job, who “darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge” (89.38).

Job’s best response is to say, “Therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.” He has seen God, at least to some penultimate degree, and the vision leads him to declare, “I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (92.42). Divine and human understanding are not commensurate: apparently, that is what dialog with God teaches us. But “that” turns out to be enough: Job prays for his misguided friends, and God decides to reward him and restore him to great wealth and status. Job’s soul-searching and then his conversation with God have demonstrated a necessary spiritual process: the man may not have been able to understand God fully, but nobody can do that anyhow. He has at least refrained from presuming or cursing, and his questions are not hypocritical or timid, but honest. It seems that God appreciates Job’s honest questioning. Ultimately, the text seems to identify a need for mystery and wonder, and for prayer, as the essence of religiosity. The system of reward and punishment one can find elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures ( Deuteronomy, for example) seems less important than these things. On the whole, Job promotes the principle of a divine order than transcends anything possible to conceive in human terms, not the principle of a divine order that somehow corresponds with human ways of understanding order. The great value of the first-mentioned principle, of course, is that it draws humanity out of itself, and sets it on a course towards greater spiritual effort and understanding; it preaches self-transcendence, and perhaps even something like what in Eastern philosophy (Hinduism and Buddhism in particular) we might call “creative self-annihilation.” There is some difference to be noted, in that Job’s offering up of his old self restores him to an even more rooted sense of personhood, so to speak. With regard to the Eastern texts it might be more correct to suppose that the annihilation of self is meant to rid us permanently of such notions as “personhood” altogether.

Week 02, Epic of Gilgamesh, Egyptian Poetry

2009-08-16T19:25:00.000-07:00

Notes on The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Prologue and Part 1 (12-17).

As with the Greeks, a certain kind of wildness or violence is proper to human beings. Early on, Gilgamesh is unrestrained in his violence and does not show proper respect to his people. He doesn’t understand that he is supposed to be a shepherd, not a wolf. Enkidu is “wild” and strong, but I don’t get the sense that he was violent before he became a man after sleeping with the temple prostitute—a violation of the separation between human and animal. He ran and ate grass with the herd animals, the gazelles, and foiled human attempts to kill these peaceful animals. He is also given womanly attributes—the metaphor of a marriage bond between him and Gilgamesh comes into play. When Enkidu sleeps with the temple prostitute, he becomes (like Gilgamesh) a challenger to the state’s orderliness. He becomes estranged from the animals, who reject him. This rejection stems from the animals’ perception of his interest in humans, and from the fact that he now knows “the woman’s art.” As for Gilgamesh’s bond with Enkidu, it’s a case of like taming like. The strong must consort with the strong, or else they will turn upon the weak. To become a man is to become violent, and violence must be both recognized and restrained, limited to proper boundaries. The story demands that human and animal be kept at enmity—Gilgamesh’s pity for the “snared bird” can’t be encouraged—but this may betray equally strong anxiety about the boundaries, which are maintained at great cost. Being human is an exhausting task.

Part 2. The Journey of the Forest (17-24).

Gilgamesh says on page 17 that destiny leads him to stamp his name on bricks. He will raise a monument to the gods after cutting down the evil in the land, Humbaba, who is identified with the wild mountain and woods that Gilgamesh and Enkidu must enter. These mountains and woods are apparently the place where the gods dwell.

Enkidu at times counsels turning back, and at a critical point Gilgamesh weakens. Is he confronting the threat of meaninglessness, something like an ancient sense of nihilism? That would contrast with what one author has called the “ego” as a material force that must be connected with others beyond the individual. He counters Asian philosophy’s tendency to focus on self-annihilation with African rootedness in the material (but not mere materialism).

What is the reward for killing Humbaba? Is this a primal struggle with nature, in which humanity must assert its powers? Is it a confrontation with death? Or with some of the gods—Enlil in particular? We might relate the reward to the fate Enlil has decreed—Gilgamesh belongs to the dying generations of men, but he wields the power of darkness and light. So perhaps going to the forest amounts to confronting the dark side of the gods and of human destiny. Gilgamesh fells the seven sacred cedars and will build with them a temple in Uruk. We might suppose that this journey, aside from asserting the power of human effort, is about reestablishing divine order in the face of a menace—but of course the gods themselves aren’t exactly in agreement. Shamash helps the heroes, but Enlil becomes enraged, even though it seems he’s the one who told them to kill Humbaba.

Part 3. Ishtar and Gilgamesh, and the Death of Enkidu (24-30).

Ishtar becomes enamored of Gilgamesh, but he scorns her and announces his distrust—she’s had a succession of unfortunate lovers, so why should he be added to the list? She unleashes the Bull of Heaven, which Enkidu promptly kills. She then vents her outrage to the other gods, and, in spite of Shamash’s objections, Anu declares that one of the two heroes must die. When Enkidu is stricken with a wasting illness, he reveals to Gilgamesh his dream about the Underworld, presided over by Queen Ereshkigal. The earth’s great kings are mere servants here. Even the greatest of human beings mean little to the gods, it would seem. Ancient literature seems full of such implications—as when, in Indian lore, a self-important Indra is humbled by a vision of infinitely many Indras marching as a long file of insects. The metaphysical layers of the cosmos—its infinity and transcendence of ordinary time—annihilate all human pretensions.

Sometimes even the gods are dwarfed by infinity and cosmic cycles. Well, Enkidu’s vision is a sad one—perhaps the best humans can hope for is this kind of melancholy insight. Is it better to know, or not to know? It’s better to know, if only because failing to take the insight that is given amounts to cowardice: “We must treasure the dream whatever the terror.” Gilgamesh still needs to learn how to take the ultimate knowledge afforded by Enkidu’s dream of the Underworld. He mourns for a space, and then goes searching for life everlasting. He fears death, and will confront his fear. The pattern that emerges from Gilgamesh is that humans will be compelled to ask grand questions to which the answers will always be disturbing rather than comforting. The strength and honesty with which people bear the weight of this gloomy insight goes a long way towards establishing their value.

Part 4. The Search for Everlasting Life (30-35).

Gilgamesh goes to the Scorpion-Guardian of the Mashu Mountains, who opens the mountain gate for him. In the Garden of the Gods, Shamash and then Siduri the winemaking goddess with her golden bowl tell Gilgamesh he’s on a fool’s errand, but the hero declares he will look straight at the sun, and confront death itself. On 32-33, Siduri’s advice is simply to enjoy the “good things that lie at hand” (to borrow a stock phrase from Homer’s Odyssey); to revel in his physical being and in whatever transient pleasures mortal life offers.

Still, Siduri directs Gilgamesh to Utnapishtim’s ferryman Urshanabi, who will convey him across “the waters of death.” Gilgamesh damages the boat’s tackle and destroys the sacred stones, thus sacrificing his own and Urshanabi’s safety. But the journey will be made, and apparently by Urshanabi’s “pole-vaulting” stratagem, Gilgamesh (now alone) reaches Utnapishtim “in Dilmun at the place of the sun’s transit.” This sage is the only man the gods have made immortal. And what does he say? Well, for the moment, only that “there is no permanence.” All human distinctions come to nothing when, at last and never quite certain what is going to happen, we arrive at our end. Well, as Hamlet says, “Alexander dead and turned to clay, would stop a hole to keep the wind away.” Still, these ancient cultures and texts are remarkably concerned with matters of rank. There are a few rulers and high lords, and everybody else is a slave or a commoner. We may be tempted to invoke Freud: isn’t the emphasis on hierarchy an attempt to overcome the primal threat of nothingness, of meaninglessness, ennui, that strong countercurrent to heroic action and civilization-building?

Part 5. The Story of the Flood (35-38).

Utnapishtim agrees to tell Gilgamesh how his immortality came to be granted. It seems that the gods, spurred on by Enlil, decreed the extermination of the teeming, noisy human race. These gods hardly found it acceptable that humanity’s din and activity should set up against them a rival order. The great Flood is not, therefore, a punishment for humanity’s wickedness; instead, Enlil is simply upset about all the noise and files a celestial noise complaint! Ea saves Utnapishtim of Surrupak because of an oath he must keep, and so Utnapishtim rides out the flood on the boat he has built for himself and his fellow citizens, along with many wild and tame animals. As many scholars have noted, the story strongly resembles the one in the Bible about Noah and his Ark. Ishtar the Queen of Heaven relents, and the flood recedes at last. Ishtar gives Utnapishtim a gift of jewels, and Ea rebukes the raging Enlil, who promptly bestows upon Utnapishtim immortality. He and his wife will dwell “at the mouth of the rivers.” So in the end, Utnapishtim rides out the flood, Ishtar repents, and he is granted eternal life. But he’s not a happy man. He has what he and all others have sought, but it doesn’t comfort him, and his wisdom doesn’t comfort us, either.

Parts 6-7. The Return, The Death of Gilgamesh (38-41).

The thing I find most interesting about the Epic of Gilgamesh is its unrelenting rejection of the “happiness principle,” as we post-Utilitarians would call it. Utnapishtim gets the last word—there is nothing permanent for human beings, and that seems to be the wisdom he imparts to Gilgamesh, who has sought him out to learn about death, his greatest fear after the passing of Enkidu. The idea that Gilgamesh actually grasped in his hand not immortality but at least youth, and then lost it, is almost a cruel joke on the part of the narrator’s gods—even this hero (himself partly divine) gets no more than a tantalizing touch of what lies beyond humanity.

At least, that’s the way it is in our version of the story. The destiny decreed by Enlil is cited at the end of the epic: it emphasizes the need to be fair to one’s subjects. Gilgamesh has no cause for despair—he has been given “power to bind and to loose, to be the darkness and the light of mankind.” That is, the partly divine, partly mortal hero has been given a chance to participate in wielding the gods’ ultimate power. His fame will be carved in stone. Perhaps that hardly amounts to what we might demand today—personal immortality, or at least a measure of satisfaction. In a sense, the power granted by the gods is the power to participate against oneself, against one’s own species—after all, the gods may swear that earthly kings should be fair with their inferiors, but they themselves deal as they wish with human beings.

Notes on Egyptian Poetry

Pharaoh Akhenaten’s “Hymn to the Sun.”

I treat these poems in a general, philosophical way since we are dealing with relatively loose translations—it couldn’t be otherwise when the original consists of hieroglyphic writing. The movement and precision of the original surely can’t be rendered into modern English without loss since languages are not mere aggregations of words with dictionary-style meanings, and you can’t always find an exact equivalent in a second language for a word from the first. Cultural practices differ, customs and concepts change over time, words pick up new meanings and lose old ones, and so forth.

In Akhenaten’s monotheistic-tending “Hymn to the Sun,” everything is attuned to sun, given sparkle (eye-light), purpose. The King wants to be like a concentrated beam, to epitomize purposiveness. He is the reflective consciousness of his people, embracing all things of the eye and mind, and is most worthy to rule because he is most cognizant of the order that the Sun God bestows. Throughout the hymn there are metaphors of reflection and light, mirroring, etc. Such metaphors both capture the creation’s diversity and speak to the Pharaoh’s role as described above. Order in the cosmos coincides with great diversity, and there is no contradiction. This poetry celebrates the beauty of the cosmos: Akhenaten affines himself to the Sun God by mentioning as much as he can of what is harmonized in nature under the Sun. As Hopkins’ poem says, “glory be to God for dappled things . . . . He fathers forth whose beauty is past change: praise him.”

Polytheism seems to be based on amplification: if you want to build up a view of how the world is, you look around at natural processes, the sky, the growing of crops, etc., and that’s how you envision what the gods must be like. You construe the divine realm as an amplified imitation of human and natural goings-on. You then relate to this amplified realm and treat is as a cause. This “method” has its virtues in that it can process apparent chaos by doing something other than simply asserting order where there seems to be none. The gods are sometimes crazy, and so is the world. So be it; we can pay homage to the divine without claiming that everything “makes sense.” This attitude probably kept ancient people open to the natural world and to the gods, but at the same time it must have left them open to the disillusionment proper to such an outlook: after all, we are capable of conceiving of a universe that actually makes sense, or one that would make sense. So the real thing is bound to suffer by comparison to the ideal. What I’m asserting is that most likely, there’s always at least (by negation or “hinting”) some sense of a transcendent ideal of order, even in a culture that characterizes the gods as powerful children who do as they please (like the Sumerian/Babylonian gods, or the Olympians). So I may seek a better answer than one my religion gives me, and become alienated and disillusioned.

Monotheism, of the modern sort that posits a distant, inscrutable Jehovah, or an ancient variety like that of Akhenaten’s worship of a sun that blesses us physically with its wonderful beams, posits a higher principle of absolute intelligibility, one towards which we can at least strive. Monotheism tends to draw people beyond themselves and become something more than what they are, to affine themselves with divine excellence. So it’s a vehicle of spiritual progress that may allow people to become capable of things they previously couldn’t have conceived of accomplishing.

The Leiden Hymns .

The Leiden poems are also striking—Horus the Sun-God isn’t the only god, but he’s the source of the other gods and brings order to the pantheon. Interesting here, as the editors suggest, is the way the speakers try to “express the inexpressible” with respect to time, space, and spirit. The Sun is like an unblinking pair of eyes (one eye is the moon, and the other is the sun) that always keeps all things in view, though mortals sleep. That quality seems to be important to the speaker—humans live and die, fading in and out of consciousness, but the great God never sleeps. The poet employs the strategy of incarnation and anthropomorphization without confining himself or the Sun-God to the bodily contours thereby delimited. At some point—and here I would suggest that point is set forth quickly and frankly—religious language must bear witness to its own inadequacy or, perhaps a better phrase, its ultimate incommensurateness with what it tries to express. There’s no discomfort on this score, so far as I can see, in these Egyptian hymns. The Hebrew scriptures portray Yahweh more circumspectly—burning bushes, and so forth. It isn’t as if in the Bible you’re going to get an image of a huge man with one eye as the moon and the other as the sun. The Hebrew God is inscrutable both in shape and, for the most part, in thought. The Leiden Hymns, by contrast, are cheerful in the face of the need to express what can’t be fully visualized or expressed in any medium. “The Mind of God is Perfect Knowing” is a good example of this attitude. All things turn instinctively towards the sun as their source, and the act of turning is proof enough of its powers.

Love Poems.

The love poems are full of appropriate reserve—though not about sex or expression of sexual feelings. This is not a shame culture like Christianity. Rather, the reserve comes from the sense that one might not be accepted or that the lover might not be able to convey his or her passion in the right way. Good lyric poetry never comes across as smug regarding the inherent power of expression; it is never really sure that “conveying emotion” is a simple task or that language is up to it. Even so, the possibility that words may or must fail us at some point doesn’t necessarily enjoin despair—that’s an issue Wordsworth addresses straightforwardly in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” when he points out that even if the romantic poet were to be thought a translator of his or her own feelings and thoughts, the task of poetry is to reawaken the immediate pleasure in us that in turn reminds us of our common humanity. If a “translation” can do that, so be it. The Egyptian poems we are reading, of course, make no such theoretical statements—they simply adopt a frank and sometimes sunny attitude towards the relationship between language and love.

Week 01, Course Introduction

2009-08-16T19:23:00.000-07:00

Welcome to CPLT 324, World Literature to 1650
Fall 2009 at California State University, Fullerton