Poetry Post

My father always urged me to do something with my poetry. I don't think them all that great, but I decided to put them up on this blog so here is a first.

I also have insights into Odyssey and Jewish Kabbalic thought which I'll try to enter at some time soon (so look for them).

A coarctation soon let it through
The tide of the numinous
A flood inexorable
An ochre of the cardinal
The sun and the moon

A conjunction of the elements
Through the world’s bright aorta
The vesica piscis
That beats within your cage
The sun and the moon

Your little hands
May grow soon to violence
And staining of innocence
From albumen to purpura

We’re all drawn to that original
The penumbral reverie
The solitude of Albion
A sea of bright placidity
The sun and the moon

The images of paradise
That float on foaming inundates
Like welcoming Vesuvius
Soon course through your veins
The sun and the moon

Your little hands
May grow soon to obedience
And silent frigidity
At rest upon your shores

Beneath the spreading sky
And avenues of air
Where the canopy runs shimmering
Above the world revolving
The sun and the moon.

A post mortem

For those of you who do not know, my father is deteriorating rapidly and will probably pass on sometime very soon. His long struggle with cancer is finally over; cancer won the physical, but my father, God bless, won the more important battle. If you do not know my father, I consider him one of the greatest men I've ever known. He's never entered politics, he's never commanded armies, he's never invented gadgets that alter the course of history, nor has he published the definitive North American novel. But my father did two things much more important.

First, he was a dad. He loved my mother and us six children and he spent time with us. In our day and age, such fathers of honor, fidelity and courage are rare. Recently, my son said that "I love my dad b/c he talks to me." Strangely, that is what makes my father so great in my estimation... he talks to me. He engages me as a human being in conversation and thought and has, over the years, become more friend than father.

Second, he was a warrior. I don't know all the demons with which he wrestled, but I know many and am familiar with that most dangerous demon of the abyss. I know what it's like to stare into that nothingness at the heart of human existence, being incapable of a Kierkegaardian leap, and instead cowering at the edge like Kurtz saying "the horror! the horror!" Dad never gave into that. He ran the race, completed the course. Or, to use the other metaphor, he held the line against the attacks of the enemy. When he could have despaired, abandoned all seven of us, thrown away the trappings of civilization and culture and given over to the riptide of popular barbarism he chose instead honor, courage, commitment to us and to honesty. His thought was clear, neither cluttered with acerbic atheist despair, nor clouded by overly pious religious flim flam. Dad was honest and honestly courageous and I find that admirable in any man; most of all in this great friend of mine.

I don't agree with Dylan Thomas in his "Do not go gentle into that good night" that old men should respond with rage when they think about their own oblivion having accomplished nothing. Rage is not the answer. As Lord Peter Wimsey realizes in "Strong Poison" if we give in to that rage to smash things, someone will just come along, clean up the mess and return everything to the same condition it was in before. Rage accomplishes nothing. Nor does our anger at the necessity of death succeed in producing any results. We don't postpone death; nor do we ease our own death so that, like Ivan Ilych, we feel ourselves stuffed into a bag. Death comes. Tempus fugit, nocte venit. Et in Arcadia ego. If it is true that "called or uncalled the God will be there" how does raging against the god effect anything? Certainly, we don't just roll over and die, but rage? no. There is no rage.

All is gift. All is wonder. All is joy. And I am overjoyed in the midst of intense sorrow at losing my friend and father that I have a father/friend to lose. I also don't agree with Hopkins in his "Spring and Fall" that the grief is for myself. It isn't. My father dies without pain of body. The cancer has deteriorated his muscles and b/c he can't get enough nutrition his body is eating itself; eating the muscles that work his limbs. There is no pain (the doctors say) - he just grows weaker and sleepier until he falls asleep and doesn't awaken. So I don't grieve for his pain of body but thank God that he is spared that. Nor do I grieve for his spirit; he has not despaired like Denethor despite having stared into the Palantir for some time. He has remained honorable and loving and good. Nor do I grieve for myself b/c I know that I will die. My own death doesn't cause me any grief, even if the possibility of nothingness, that abyss of Hesiod and Genesis and Kierkegaard, does. So Hopkins is wrong even in his beautiful poetry.

No, my grief is because I love. To love is to feel pain. The second you open yourself to that terrible joy of love you run a great risk. The thing you love will die and no amount of transference to some abstract concept of God will replace your love of temporal things or beings. If you love you will lose and if you lose you will feel pain. The reverse formula is simple. If you do not wish to feel pain simply do not love. Love nothing. Never submit to the sweet joy of honesty and eros. But that is inhuman; it is nothingness, and if the abyss terrifies me this desert of emotional barrenness carries an equal terror. Perhaps they are one and the same, abyss and desert; oblivion - to not be remembered in love - to never love - to cease on the midnight with no pain.

I agree with Hamlet when he says

We defy augury. There ’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’t is 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. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is ’t to leave betimes?

My father was ready, had been ready for many years, had made himself ready by the slow, steady giving away of himself in love. When his final moment comes he will have accomplished that spiritual alchemy that transforms the leadenness of our fearful selfish little souls into the gold of love.

No, I am grieved b/c, as my brother put it, I'm selfish and don't want the party to end. But I do think that this is what the Passion of the Christ means; not wanting to let the party end, yet having the courage to endure the pain involved with allowing it to end. All men are mortal. My father is a man. Therefore my father is mortal. Thank God that he is man enough to have joined the human race and leave behind grieving but joyful loved ones.

If this is an encomium then I'll end with a final poem. This from old English, the Battle of Maldon; it was always one of my father's favorites.

Brythwold spoke, grasped his buckler, He was an old comrade, urged the men, He full boldly cheered his soldiers, "Thought must be the harder, heart the keener Spirit shall be more - as our might lessens."

Nietzsche (Again)

I read the most excellent article on Nietzsche in Commentary (one issue ago). What can I say? Nietzsche has always been a challenge, not leastly because one has to type has bloody name each time. I hope to give account of some of the thought stirred up from my brain's muck concerning this article, but if you haven't read the article yet go here and read "Nietzsche's Deeper Truth" by R.R. Reno. (hopefully you can access it w/o a subscription). I'll post here my reflections at some future date...

A theory

Rereading the Odyssey (and loving every minute of it) I was struck with a sudden possible interpretation of the wanderings. The movement of the work is from Kalypso to Penelope, the tropical island to the home in ruins, from fantasy to reality. As such, the work abounds in image after image of women and male/female relationships. Unlike Iliad, Odyssey is chock full of women and descriptions of women and sexual imagery. Why? Is it possible that Homer is proposing that the journey is one from a fantastical vision of what men want women to be (the immortal sexy insatiable supermodel on the tropical island) to what women are (the faithful, crafty but aging mortal woman on the island that needs a king)? If so, in the journeys, every monster seems a permutation of either the male or female fantasy; they are ways of looking at the world that are monstrous.

For instance, Scylla and Charybdis are both female perversity. Charybdis was the daughter of Poseidon and Gaia (Sea and Earth) and she devours, sucks down everything. She is like the joke about what you call a woman who can suck a tennis ball through a ten foot hose; yet she is monstrous and dangerous. Like Tiamat or other ancient feminine goddess figures she seeks to devour everything and has to be avoided. Even the ocean is sucked down into her maw, causing a whirlpool, an image which has obvious feminine connotations.

On the other side, Scylla, is also feminine; a monstrous mutation of a nymph whom Circe calls "no mortal, she's an immortal devastation, terrible, savage, wild, no fighting her, no defense..." the only response one can have is to "just flee the creature." Scylla seems to be the all devouring sexuality of woman unchecked. The type of woman that "eats men alive".

But to escape this, the final test of the journeys, Odysseus must pass through hell and horror. He has to come to grips with his own male tendency to fantasize women as goddesses, which makes them into monsters.

Thus, in his journey back to normalcy, Odysseus must slip through that thin gap between the all devouring feminine forces; placing women too low or too high. He cannot make it unscathed but loses 6 of his men - then after the incident with the cattle of Helios, loses his entire crew to a storm and is driven back to Charybdis. He survives only by clinging to a fig tree. Why? Why is he "driven" back to that monstrous vision of female sexuality? Why is it a fig tree that saves him? The fig is associated with fertility and female eroticism; sacred to Greek and Roman; was it associated with Athena? Is his salvation from the feminine beast to cling to the slim idea that women (and their sexuality) are really goods? Why does he lose all of his crew? Are they the remnants of teenage delusions of grandeur? The appetites? Those forces which a grown man must divest himself of if he is to survive? Further down the road, how does the cattle of Helios incident play into this? The Cyclops, Sirens, Laistragonians, Lotus-eaters, all are easy to see as permutations of this monstrous vision of woman as goddess/devil. What of the cattle that belong to the sun god?

Every man has to sail back to normalcy if he is going to be sane. He must come to see women as sisters, daughters, wives, mothers, and not as supermodels impervious to change or thought or imperfection. Only then can he at last "come home" from a world of war and monsters to his own role as daddy, husband, son, beloved of those most beautiful and protector of those most loved.

A Little Logic

So how is it that we know anything is true? How is it that all things aren't just opinion?
Let's try some logic. Let's rule out those things which don't submit well to opinion such as mathematics, basic physics, and Keanu Reeves acting ability and focus only on that realm much subject to opinion and arrogance, morality.

There are three possibilities:
1. all things are opinion and nothing is true
2. some things are opinion and some things are true
3. no things are subject to opinion and all things are true

If all things are opinion and nothing is true then there really is no argument at all - b/c all things are simply the subjective view of the opiner. But how do we know that all things are opinion? Wouldn't this be a truth? So nothing is true except that nothing is true? The only truth is that there is no truth? That makes no sense.

So let's skip number 2 and go on to number three. All things are true and there are no opinions. But if there are no opinions don't people have divergent views on things (morality that is)? Then if all things are true wouldn't every view be true even if it diverges from another view? Am I right and are you right and is all quite content? Wouldn't the existence of divergent viewpoints indicate that not everything is true? Either I am right or you are right b/c we can't be both right and diametrically opposed to one other... that makes no sense.

So we're left with number 2; some things are opinion and some things are true. If so, then wouldn't the process be to convert opinion into truth? How best to do this? Wouldn't the best way be to find out what other thinkers and writers, respected and noted on the subject, have to say? To read them, determine what they are saying, discover what they mean? Surely it wouldn't mean to simply find flaws in their arguments, not read them, or dismiss them b/c they contradict our deeply held beliefs (such as the right to have long hair or the right to be sexually active).

Seems that, as Aristotle and Plato both point out, if the purpose of life is to be happy and if happiness comes through virtuous living and if virtuous living can only be discovered by hard work and intense focus then not doing the work, being satisfied with talent, allowing ourselves to persist in our own idiocy would not be the best way to become happy.

Just a guess, of course.

The Writings of John and the Eleusinian Mysteries

I just finished a fine article on the writings of John (Possible Influence of the Mysteries on the Form and Interrelation of the Johannine Writings , 1932) wherein the author, Elbert Russell, claims that the three texts composed by Saint John bear striking resemblance to the three movements of the Eleusinian mysteries. The mysteries were composed of a preparation/purification period (called katharsis/prorresis) the acting out of the drama (called dromonen) and the explanation of the elements of the ritual (called the epopteia). Russell notes that "The First Epistle of John...was an introductory writing, corresponding to the preliminary purification and instruction, the katharsis and the prorresis; the Gospel formed the drama or dromenon; and the Apocalypse provided the opopteia with the symbolic assurance of future blessedness." Russell goes on to explain that the rites of Eleusis evolved originally from agricultural rites - a fact which I only mildly agree with. I think the Eleusinian cults didn't evolve but continued a vision which even the chthonic religions of the neolithic age saw; life works in patterns, even the cycles of the seasons, the planting, harvest, the motion of the stars and planets. The cult of Eleusis merely recast this understanding (which drew together the agricultural aspect with the mathematic and the metaphysical) in terms of a specific mythological atmosphere.

John's writings, as they do seem to conform with the pattern of the mystery cults, and even Christianity itself don't seem undermined by the conformity, rather Christianity seems to build upon an ancient vision of the world, offering new insight into the questions undoubtedly asked by the Psalmist and the initiates into the mysteries; "if all this is true than what am I? How do I fit in?" or to use the words of the Psalmist "when I look at the stars, the work of your hands, the sun and the moon, what is man that you should love him? mortal man that you should visit him?" Christianity suggests that in the midst of these very real patterns and structures of the world man is not just a cog; he isn't just a decimal point in the equation. Man is so vital that the Patterner himself came down, the Logos became incarnate as one of us; God so loved the world that he gave his only son.

Discussing whether this is only a message, or whether it really happened is a bootless discussion. This is what Christianity proclaims; and the energizing hope that such a message carries (as Benedict XVI discusses in Spes Salve) allows believers to live like no other people on the earth. That is very exciting indeed - and I think the early Church was right to adopt the signs and symbols of the cult which so closely proclaimed what it was proclaiming. Our modern Church is deadly wrong in stripping her alters bare and substituting the feel good Mass for the smells and bells of old. For if the message is to be believed then the katharsis and the prorresis have to be completed correctly, the dromenon must be completed with lights, props, incense and other time honored tools, and the epopteia must be accomplished such that people understand. Boy what a lot of work remains.

An Inconvenient Truth (the Wild Cherry Dub)

I thought that Al Gore's little terror flick needed a snappier soundtrack. I also tried to reiterate his message more clearly at the end of the movie by allowing him to repeat himself (which he never does). Anyone else notice that the clip of the globe at the end of the movie is focused on the Middle East? Why is that?

Quickly on hope and inquiry

I am struck by the frequency of others to question the validity of statements rather than inquiring into their merit. Why is it that we (myself included) have more of a tendency to doubt the validity of what another person says rather than inquire into whether what they are saying has some meaning that we don't yet see? I'm thinking of the frequent criticism of the psalms or of recognized philosophers (such as Plato or Aristotle) each of which seems to be perceived by more sage thinkers of the modern era as potential targets open for hunting down and killing rather than as potential veins of gold open for mining. Those works accepted for so many generations as sapiential are dismissed quickly b/c they do not fit our more elevated sensibilities. I think this is an egregious error for it shuts out far too quickly the ability to see in the work of others answers to the very questions we have ourselves. Thus, in our zeal to shoot down the great artists and thinkers, we only wound ourselves. Thus we make the attainment of hope that much more difficult as with each generation we work laboriously to find a clue that leads us out of the labyrinth of the mind.

In answer to Anselm (and in praise of Saint Thomas)

I wrote this as a response to an excellent blog by Andrew Haines on Saint Anselm's ontological proof of God:

A good analysis of Anselm's Proslogion argument. Thank you. I much prefer the thought of Saint Thomas, however, who suggests in Summa Prima Pars, Ar. 1 that God's existence, though self-evident in itself, is not self-evident to us b/c we cannot know the essence of Being (God). Rather, Thomas suggests, we come to understand more about who God is by negative differentias and by a series of "comparisons with material things", thus proceeding from one comparison to another we grow closer to being able to put "things in their right order and control them well," as Thomas states in the opening of the Contra Gentiles.

Although I agree that Anselm's proof can lead to a greater comprehension of the mystery of God, I think he fails in two respects. First, by relying only on a rational argument and seemingly ignoring the second form whereby man attains to truth (one that "transcends all the industry of reason," as Thomas says) Anselm fails to convince the reader of God's existence. Aquinas' five proofs are far more convincing, not b/c more sound but b/c Aquinas admits to their being not "articles of faith, but... preambles to the articles." The five proofs of Aquinas, consequently, become buttresses for furthering the faith of one who believes, not as bludgeons to force a non-believer into belief.

Second, by using the ontological proof as an airtight argument against which only "a fool" would argue Anselm cuts out the agony of the atheist's struggle. Indeed, the psalm suggests that "the fool in his heart has said, 'there is no God'"; but Aquinas takes this to mean that rejection of the LOGOS (God) makes all thought impossible and thus makes man foolish. This does not, Aquinas notes, make the struggle any less b/c the atheist in struggling to recognize that LOGOS exists realizes his darkness and yet cannot overcome it by his own power. As Thomas notes "(the existence of LOGOS) precisely is not admitted by those who hold that God does not exist." But Aquinas offers a way out for the perplexed by suggesting that "the prime author and mover of the universe is intelligence," before suggesting that he is YHVH or Joshua bar Joseph or any sort of personal god.

Thomas thus shows more mercy to struggling humanity when he states that all men, even "the simple", come to know God through his effects by a slow, gradual process of "(putting) forward divine and spiritual truths by means of comparisons with material things" and not by intelligence alone, lest "the truth about God such as reason could discover, would only be known by a few." Thomas is less elitist, more understanding of human weakness, and thus far more palatable than Anselm in his advocacy for belief.

Thanks again for the thoughts on Anselm which provided for a brief intellectual escape from the cold of Minnesota and the agony of grading essays.

George Orwell Kicks Butt (Again)

Orwell on language (thanks to jmcnamara at Capital Community College Foundation):

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our language—so the argument runs—must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

A New Archbishop

Poor Rowan Williams. Seems he's in hot holy water after his statement, which he made without meaning to offend anyone, that Sharia law in England was an inevitable event. Moreover, Williams said, in a statement which he made without trying to cause offense to anyone, the imposition of Sharia law in England might not be a bad thing. As Williams noted, without trying to offend anyone, at least Sharia law promotes family values.



Poor slob.



Now his congregation is demanding he step down because he was offensive.




Might I suggest another candidate for Archbishop in the person of Rowan Atkinson? I think he'd do a fine job.

Willy Pogany

While composing the last post I was reminded of the artwork of Willy Pogany who first ignited in me a visual fantasmagoria for the Iliad and the Odyssey. His work, though not in favor these days, was some of the best illustration for children's literature ever. His greatest masterpiece, the illustrated "Parsifal", even today is selling on Amazon for $1,243.96 (original 1912 printing). That's staggering! Here are a few of his illustrations. Dover has since put out some of the texts illustrated by Pogany, but in these days of rotten children's literature, I'd like to see more still. Though some of his work should be carefully reviewed by adults (Bilitis, for instance) Pogany still ranks right up there with the grand illustrating ability of Howard Pyle and I'd recommend him to anyone.

More on The Iliad

While grading student papers it suddenly dawned on me that there are three dopplegangers of Achilles in the epic. Each parallel character represents a stage of Achilles' life and each one is stripped from him.

Briseis, the sister/lover, is closely associated with mommy, Thetis; she represents a world of the feminine, the world of childhood, a time when the young man could run to mommy or the shelter of the beloved for comfort. She is stripped from Achilles by the brutal leader, Agamemnon and her seizure precipitates his movement into the next stage of life. Achilles' grief is for more than just a slave girl; it is for the whole world of comfort and easy love that childhood embodies. He grieves for the sorrow of losing himself, losing his innocence.

Patroclus, the brother/friend, is closely associated with the thumotic youth of Achilles. He only appears midway through the epic and his appearance shows a new love for Achilles. Much has been made of the homosexual element btwn Achilles and Patroclus, but I think that is a red herring. Whether he is or is not the lover of Achilles seems inconsequential. Just as Briseis represented more than just a slave girl/concubine, he represents a person loved. His connection to Briseis is highlighted when she, weeping at his death, claims that he was always gentle to her. Patroclus, it seems, embodies all that is best and noble in Achilles - he is the brother figure and the mirror image of the great warrior without the hubris that clouds Achilles' judgment. He is not entirely representative of innocence for he sees the brutality of war, even sees the brutality of Achilles, but he is courageous enough to take action as a young man might, to tend to the wounded, to speak against Achilles' headstrong pride, to want to right through mere force of arms the wrongs done his comrades. When he dies, that other world of youth and happiness, carefree living, the bright future free of cynicism and the weight of adult knowledge, is lost to Achilles.


Priam/Hector represent the third doppleganger. Being that they are father/son they consist as a set, each representing a different aspect of the same thing. Priam is the aged father, looking down the dark tunnel of ruin and despair. Hector is the noble man, already dead - he is Patroclus in nobility and death and he is Patroclus' killer. Yet both also represent the future of Achilles. The Achaean knows, now that he has chosen war over peace, that his demise is not far off. He knows his time is marked and the knowledge, previously remote, is grievous to him. He hearkens back to his father and sees in Priam the sorrow that his own father will experience when he dies. Thus another connection is made between Achilles and Hector, Peleus and Priam. In the last book, Priam becomes the father, figuratively, of Achilles and Achilles trades roles with the now dead Hector. Thus, the realization of age, ruin and death are all made quite immediate to the Greek warrior and he must face the harsh reality of adulthood. He will lose what he loves most, not comfort & joy, not youth & nobility, but his very self. Thus Priam is also representative of "the enemy" - the other which we seek to shut out from our own imagination. We do not wish to think about our own ruin and death, but Troy will fall and Priam will die, slipping in the blood of his own son. Though Achilles will, by then, not be alive, such ruin has been the telos of all his actions to this point. Neoptolemus, his son, will be the killer of Priam (as we learn from Virgil) and thus Achilles will have "killed" Priam - the king within himself. This is a harsh and yet necessary reality and Achilles acceptance of it, represented in his going down into the dust to communally weep with Priam, marks the warrior's capacity for humanness.

The American Way

Raptoralis recently posted on my blog "My Favorite Captain America" saying...

Im not sure that "the american way" is something that we aught to claim any more because of what it has been defined popularly as. It makes me very sad to see the news almost anytime so I dont watch it anymore because of the garbage I see. All this in the name of america, freedom of speech, once again we see the realm of the aesthic driving the world around us. Driving it in an almost subconsious or subliminal way to say that freedom is actually libery.(in the sence that eric cartman means it when he says "whatever whatever i do what i want"). The ideals of the nation (life, Libery and the persuit of happyness) were perhaps badly worded or perhaps the nation has been twisted by those who would see it crumble, through the process of destroying our words. Im uncertain if im being nihilistic at the moment as I havent yet studied in depth on the subject but the outlook seems bleak to me.
~Raptor

What is "The American Way"? Good question. Certainly in current trends it seems to be something akin to rape, burn, pillage for the almighty dollar, and indeed I am highly critical of the culture that seeks to dehumanize and destroy all that is good in the human person. I suspect the term was originally just a bit of jargon amidst all the jargon of the 1940s and 50s when we were so hell bent to win the two great wars (Fascism and Communism) that people spoke in cliches only.

But I do think there is "An American Way" and that it reaches back to the very founding of this nation. The Revolution of 1776 was, we are told, based on freedom and the desire of the colonies to be free from a tyrannical government. But freedoms then, as now, are only realized in the physical world. Locke claimed that man had an inherent, or inalienable, right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property." Jefferson changed this to "...pursuit of happiness" and the change was a good one, but consider the connection. Happiness is closely tied to property. Locke's definition of the word included all those things which we lay claim to owning; body, ideas, foodstuffs, home & land, business, whatever we consider as an extension of ourselves. Without the ability to do with these things as we wish, in fact, without these things, liberty is only a phantasm and life is enemic. American liberty has, consequently, always been tied to materialism, for good or ill, so much so that the very revolution is actually a revolution of economics.

Materialism is mostly used pejoratively b/c, as the pope noted in Centesimus Annus, rampant consumerism dehumanizes people and causes a degeneration from democracy to tyranny of the rich over the poor. Thus Americans are frequently, and rightly, accused of lording their prosperity over poorer nations of the world and even over their own people. Nevertheless, to extricate freedom from property is an impossible operation. If one is free he must be free over some THING. Without property (goods, home, land, whatever) freedom is only a name. So I think first in the "American Way" thing is a sense that every man ought to have the ability to own property and exercise his liberty through such ownership.

Second, Locke claims, and Jefferson reiterates, that government exists for one reason only; namely, to secure inalienable rights. Rights to life, liberty and property exist b/c God made us so, not b/c some king or warlord allowed us such and such. Our government exists ONLY to make sure that these rights are honored by all, passing laws in order to perpetuate this security and levying taxes only to maintain its function. Government serves people, not people government. Thus, Americans ought to consider government intrusion a necessary evil which should only be invoked when other means have been exhausted. If the first element of "The American Way" is a right to certain inalienable rights, namely property, the second element is a vision of small government which ought not to interfere too much in the lives of its citizens.

Third, then, is the vision of self-reliance. B/c of our initial need to survive in a terrain which was challenging to say the least we have, as a nation, long held the opinion that a man must stand on his own two legs. We are not only able to make our own decisions, we are also held accountable for those decisions. No one ought to blame culture, race, handicap of any kind for the decisions they ultimately make and as Americans as much as we honor the decisions of others we also expect that they are going to take responsibility for those decisions. Included in this, I think, is an American respect for the opinions of other people and, thus, the ability to discourse rationally even with people holding opposing opinions.

Fourth seems to be an American talent for improvisation. We are always analyzing, reconstruction, tinkering and rebuilding everything; including ourselves. Part of our current fits of apoplexy are due to an intense need to refashion who we are following the trauma of 9/11. As much as I disagree with the naysayers of the war and with the conspiracy theorists, I know that what they are saying is part of the American thing. Americans are not "my country right or wrong"; that would be like a nation of automatons. Rather, we are "my country's successes, let me fix her wrongs." The inventions not just in technology but in cinema, foodstuffs, government & law, nutrition & science, production of goods, language, arts has been dominated by America for the last 200 years! Why? Coincidence? No, I'm in agreement with Victor Davis Hanson; the culture determines the culture. How we view ourselves determines what sort of culture we are, so that the dominance in invention is not circumstance by systemic in the culture.

Fifth, as we like to reinvent ourselves, we are also perhaps the one nation that has a sense of humor. Other nations certainly laugh, poke fun at things, enjoy life - I'm not saying they don't. But America has a remarkable ability, as a nation, for poking fun at herself and at others. We don't have the dementia of class-system or of race politics (for the most part) or of caste-system, we don't have open civil war in our streets (yet), we don't have grinding poverty or rampant disease (like Russia), we don't have forced abortions and a krypteia terrorizing our populace (as does China), we don't have the indolent wallowing in state-sponsored suicide as do most European nations. Consequently, we seem able, as a people, to laugh at ourselves; perhaps bitterly, perhaps jovially, but we laugh. Our entertainment industry, for all its faults, creates joyful works and works of great humor. We enjoy sporting events, gaming, leisure and group activities w/o fear that tanks are going to roll into the soccer stadium at any minute. Heck, we even find politics a sport and not something to riot over. Americans laugh. That's a good thing.

Now I know that these are generalizations; I know that the excesses of freedom allow for pornography, abortion, abuse, indulgence, addiction, corruption, and other really horrible things; I know that the government often oversteps its bounds and requires Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford to correct it; I know that there are many people here in the States that are ignorant, arrogant, corrupt and brutal. All these things exist in any human culture. What I'm saying are generalizations, I know, but they are generalizations that work. If we are to look for the best things that make 21st America a better place to live than, say, Cuba, or Russia, or China, or ... France; if we are to look for the best things that make this country greater than Ancient Rome & Greece, or better than merry old England, or better than 19th century America, I think it would be these things; inalienable rights, view of government, sense of independence & responsibility, improvisation/improvement, and sense of humor.

Finally, with all the blemishes she has, I think the United States isn't just a fun place to live b/c we have lots of Burger Kings and Wal Marts. I really think that the United States, the philosophy that makes the nation more than a geographic location on Google maps, is invaluable and a treasure and ought to be exported to other nations willing to attempt the philosophy if not the excesses. Call me an imperialist slob if you will, but I really think, with Lincoln, that America is "the last, best hope of mankind."

Again with the Artwork!

A recent exchange with a student concerning artwork:

Mr. A,

To prevent being completely productive in the two weeks when it would be most beneficial to do so, I started writing a commentary at my blog on the lyrics to "Call It Clear", a song by Halloween, Alaska. So far I have only written on the first 3 lines, but the more and more I think about those three lines the more I see in them. At a certain point I have to imagine I've overstepped the author's intent and am only using the text as a tool for explaining my idea, not explaining the text by my ideas.

When reading a great play or novel is their a point at which your interpretation is no longer intended by the author but some kind of fluke connection? If so, how do you know where that point is? You have said that you believe such and such an author chose every single word with intent, but how do you determine if the author you are reading was that mindful of his own work? In other words, is it possible to read a book with no intended symbolism and manufacture your own dynamic interpretation? How do you know if you are doing that?

Thank you,

Student Aix Wizee

Thanks for the email, Aix, and in order to waste my time I’ll try to give a quick response.

Of course there is a difference btwn reading the text and reading into the text. Unfortunately, there is no rubric to know exactly when you cross that line. One way to know that the author intended X is to read as much of his other work as you can and see whether the message stays consistent. Look also and see whether the imagery used is appropriate for the rest of the message (for instance, does the author make his hero suddenly become a bunny rabbit? If so, is that consistent with the culture, as it would be with Indian or Buddhist culture but not so with Western)? Also an aid is to read what others have to say about the author; frequently such opinions offer great insight which an initial read might miss.

Ways to know when you’re really off? Any bending of the imagery to meet what you want would be a misread (for instance trying to insist that the color red represents purity). Any wishful thinking contrary to the actual text and imagery would be a misread (for instance hoping to find the golden proportion where it doesn’t exist). Any anachronistic interpretations would be a misread (like Marxist or feminist readings into an earlier historical work; or Christian for that matter).

Unfortunately, the only sure way to know a misread is the gut response one has to the text; it seems right or wrong. No one has ever read the Grendel cave as a womb (at least to my knowledge) but it is; under water, in the earth, reached through a passage, dark, feminine & devouring life. That just seems right. So in any essay I right I make the case that it is so and hold up to public scrutiny whether this is right or wrong.

Finally, the odd thing about all art is that it transcends the artist. Sure, we say that the artist “intended” XY or Z and with great artists they really are careful in their choice of word, note, or color/form b/c they are very aware that their choice will have some effect (I’m excluding here poor or sloppy artists whose work seldom is great except by some fluke). But the work is greater than the artist and can frequently speak to an audience of things which the artist himself never saw or intended. He intended a great message, but perhaps a greater message than what he intended corresponds to the work. This observation Plato himself made in the Republic when he noted that artwork corresponds to realities beyond the limitations of the artist. Thus a piece of music may speak volumes to us when the artist just found it a whimsy or small work. “Carnival of the Animals” for instance, was loathed by Saint-Saens who wanted to write only “serious” music. The Mona Lisa was only a minor portrait by DaVinci and the Last Supper was merely a decoration of a refectory; rent payments. But the impact these works have had on others has been tremendous. So when you find a work speaking to you and your analysis growing out of control just remember that the analysis may be still correct.

Hope this helps. I’m not intentionally obscure but I play it on TV. I would suggest reading Aristotle’s Poetics and Walker Percy’s “Message in the Bottle” as well as Santayana’s “Reason in Art” and Carl Jung's "The Spirit in Man." Also a great work is “Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper” and “Sexuality of Jesus Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion” by Leo Steinberg and “Harmonies of Heaven and Earth” by Joscelyn Godwin. Lots of reading, but all good stuff.

Sincerely,

Abecedarius Rex

Ars and Techne

I think this problem is one of semantics. We use the word "art" to mean any old number of things that sort of kind of look a bit like a thing that kind of does a certain thing that is something or another and gets some awards. The classical world, though, distinguished btwn "ars" and "techne", a distinction picked up in the 19th century by Kant and also by R.G. Collingwood (as explained here by Denis Dutton)

Craft is something performed with a known outcome and skill which guarantees that outcome; such as the building of a chair or the putting in of a window. Art, on the other hand, is the expression of human vision or emotion, the outcome of which is not always a guarantee. Art, as Kant said, possesses a certain "genius" or infusion of the spirit which craft does not have. Though art benefits when one knows craft (say how to use paints) knowledge of craft is not necessary for doing art. W/o the infusion of genius, however, craftsmen can do their job quite well. So it seems that art isn't so much a "what does it do" question as a "how is it done" question. If the object produced is one which was achieved knowingly with a guaranteed outcome (as in, this will reroute the sewer) it is craft. If it is produced such that the outcome is not entirely known, yet the work is infused with the indescribable element of genius, it is art.

Do I agree with this?

Yes and no. It seems plausible enough and seems to be extolled by such greats as Kant and even Plato in the Republic; yet I do think that there is a craft to art which can also produce an outcome knowingly. Certain images or forms do certain things, or strike us in a certain way. Colors affect us, images affect us, notes affect us in a fairly consistent manner. Thus the artist, although expressing genius, does so with a knowledge of how his creation will affect others; in other words, he knows what could convey his vision effectively (instead of just trying things until they work). This, of course, is the skilled artist not the hack.

So what is art? To give a criteria by which we say "this is, this isn't" I think is near impossible. Art is the expression of the human soul, the trying to recapture lost paradise, the visions of the beautiful and the damned. How that plays out defies definition. There are some things, though, that work and make us say "yes, that is it" and others that do not work at all and leave us disgusted and flat.

Perhaps, then, the more important question than "what is art?" is "what does art accomplish?" Do artists just produce stuff haphazardly to satisfy themselves in an ars gratia artis way? Do artists produce for cash only? Do artists seek to alter their audience and in what way? These, I think, are more engrossing questions that what the thing is. Ultimately, ars is simply that; literally "a making"; what the Greeks called "poiesis". It is the thing we do that no other animal does. In itself neither a good or evil. But in how it is made and what it seeks to accomplish, therein lies the good or bad art.

BTW, great article on ars and techne by Christopher Janaway entitled "Arts and Crafts in Plato and Collingwood" here at JSTOR if you can access it.

Notes on Nationalism - Essay by George Orwell

A very interesting read on the dangers of nationalism. I esp. like his comments on the maniacal hatred of one's own or another's country that form as a result of nationalism.
Notes on Nationalism - Essay by George Orwell

The Serpent, the Eagle, Agamemnon and Aeschylus

While rereading the first play of Aeschylus' great trilogy I came across this statement by Klytemnestra:

You claim the work is mine (the killing of Agamemnon), call me Agamemnon's wife - you are so wrong. Fleshed in the wife of this dead man, the spirit lives within me, our savage ancient spirit of revenge.
(1526-1530)

What a startling admission by the central character that what has been done is the embodiment of our natural human tendency toward violence. We are fallen creatures; and at our heart we are dark and savage. We must, as Robert Fagles points out in the essay "The Serpent and the Eagle" strive for a "...victory... over the barbarian latent in (ourselves), the hubris that unites the invader and the native tyrant as a targets of the gods." This is only possible through "...compassion and lasting self-control" in the pagan world. There is no hope of redemption accept through the wearisome toil of self-control and rational thought which allows us to think through how we are to govern ourselves. Without such thought, without such toil we fall into that cycle of feuding bloodlust that drives even today one clan, one gang, one family to seek the annihilation of the other. Only through law, adherence to self control, and constant exercise of compassion and charity can we hope for a better world.

Klytemnestra, notably enough, is also devoid of any individuality. The revenge murder which she has plotted these 11 years, to which her entire intellect has been turned, has stripped her of individual will and the ability to see reason (or ratio); she is no longer an individual in the LOGOS but an archetype acting as the agent for that "savage ancient spirit of revenge." So do all people who resort to violence over compassion, anger over understanding, dictatorialism over democracy, lose their individual importance and become just another face in the yelling mob of faces. Only goodness is unique; evil is ordinary.

But more, still, for the toil and labor of our own sweat and blood to hold ourselves to the honorable course of self-control and compassion is an impossibility in the long run. You injure mine and I will crush you - "annihilation" as Medea says. In the pagan realm one can marvel at the unique glory achieved through self-control and compassion as a principle, but we fall short, we fail of achieving this glory ourselves and so we end up as victims and losers. Pagan thought offers no solution to this failure. The barbarian latent in ourselves cannot be mastered through our own efforts and so we continue to be pursued by those dark cthonic gods we call "Eumenides".

Christianity alone offers any solution to this conundrum for (as Nietzsche pejoratively declared) Christianity is a religion of losers.
Failures.
The weak, the broken, the sorrowful and the crushed.
Christianity is all about not being strong enough to endure the grinding Grendelian churning of the wheel of human nature; we cannot master ourselves, and yet that's okay. In Christ is our hope and our salvation. We die that he might live and all our glory, says St. Paul, is due to him. The failures crucified on either side of the Divine Failure are given hope that their sanctity is ensured, not because of their own broken muscle and sinew, but because they recognize their smallness and weakness and give over their broken and contrite heart to the Lord.

Then
in the midst of that sorrow and failure
a miracle!
for Jesus Christ is born this day
and Lo! he makes all things new.

An Exchange

This was a recent exchange with a student:

Hi Mr. A,

I was just procrastinating (my last final is a take-home due tomorrow morning), and I was reading through your Tolkien quotes via your blog. I happened to notice the one I was expecting to find wasn't there. I'm sure you've read it before and perhaps didn't think it fit among the quotes about LOTR and his other works... So on the off-chance you actually haven't stumbled upon it, I thought I'd share it with you. And if you have, I figure it's always great to read some beautiful thoughts on the Eucharist. It comes from a letter he wrote to his son, I believe:

Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament ... There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man's heart desires.

Sincerely,
A Studentia

Dear Studentia. How excellent to hear from you. Do stop by and witness all the wonderful produce of my teeming brain and all the gripes fit to share with grads.

About the Tolkien quotation: I don't recall if or why that quotation was excluded, possibly the author of the blog was unfamiliar with the corpus of JRRT's work (including his letters). For my part, that quotation has always had a place with the other great words about the Eucharist. Tolkien, unlike Lewis, had a phenomenal vision about what the world was and how love should relate to it; perhaps born of his suffering at the Somme, perhaps simply a byproduct of his remarkable literary intellect. One of the most striking things about the quotation is that it is in the context of a letter to his son about girls and relationships. How, then, did Tolkien view the conjugal relationship, romance, marriage, and the Eucharist as interconnected? I certainly think he did. The Eucharist is “…the one great thing to love on earth…” but not the wafer; rather “the Blessed Sacrament.” So what does that mean? What is the sacramental vision of life? Is it that, as Hopkins said, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God” or as Aquinas pointed out the world and everything in it is good? Test all things and retain what is good, said the Medievals. Sacramental vision means that one sees the order, structure, and goodness of the world even amidst the “horror and frustration” the filth and disappointment; amidst pedaphiliac priests and indifferent congregations – even in the midst of the mire of man’s sweatiness, there too is the Christian divinity “... There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth…” The focus must remain on the Eucharist and one clings tenaciously to that vision that man is inherently good, the world is inherently good, despite every sorrow that speaks contrary to this. Moreover, one is not simply Pollyannish in this vision, for the vision is one that also finds “Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all.” We find beauty, joy, sorrow, pleasure, love, terror, success and failure, all drawn toward the person of Christ and thus made comprehensible.

There was a time when I ceased to believe in the Divine Presence… that we consume a wafer of bread? That we venerate a wafer of bread? To do a double kneel to the wafer of bread in a monstrance? How preposterous, silly, infantile. Such thoughts still plague me on bad days, but here’s the deal; the wafer of bread, like all created things, has a connection to the divine realm --- it has become the representative of all things as charged with the divine presence of the LOGOS, the order. Thus it isn’t the bread I venerate, it is the LOGOS, of which the bread is but a conduit or representative. “Why bread and not cheese?” asks the skeptic. But that’s the point. As all created things are connected to the divine, each thing has in its construct a reason and purpose, a symbolic quality; trees are trees and eggs is eggs. Why? Why is an egg eggie? Why is a tree “treeish”? And what is it about bread in that shape with that quality that separates it from a loaf or a shoe or a dog? Why is man man? If the LOGOS has a purpose it’s purpose is learned by looking at the creations and asking such questions as “what makes the red man red?” Bread and not cheese is the perfect representation for a something which the LOGOS wants to make manifest and it’s my job to figure out what that thing is; in fact, it’s my salvation and eternal lifelong task to figure out what that thing is. Sure, there are questions in the back of the head which gnaw at belief and threaten to overthrow all religious sentiment, but the real questions are not “why ought I to believe this crap?” but rather, “how does my belief and the understanding of that belief strengthen who I am? What must I do? Why is a dog not a god?” The threat of these questions is like looking into death; confronting a dragon, or that evil force that wants us to despair and fail (like the Nazgul lord at the gates of Minas Tirith or Sauron in his dark tower probing Amon Hen). But I must allow that peering into death question if I am to also be open to the honest questions which make a man a man. As Tolkien put it “…and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man's heart desires." All is beauty, all is gift, all is love, and that sustains me (and, I hope, contributes a bit to my salvation).

Thanks for the letter.

Stop by anytime.

AbecedariusRex

Macbeth the Damned

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–28

Note here the repetitive use of the word "tomorow"; thrice is a charm and just as the three weird sisters speak their charms in three, so too does Macbeth speak his own damnation thrice. He thus confirms the damnation as an inevitable reality. The repetition borders on tedious monotony (one more and he'd seem daft) and thus conveys the hopelessness that the next day will be different from the present and the insanity that drives one to see each day as identically devoid of hope. Further, the cadence of the line is thus daDUMdum, ba daDUMdum, ba daDUMdum; or in poetic terms it is a series of iambic + anapestic + anapestic, sort of. In actuality the line follows no set rhythmic form of poetry (breaking Shakespeare's normal use of iambic pentameter) but is itself a series of stressed and unstressed syllable which act like waves crashing into the reader. Macbeth has "so far waded into blood that it would be as tedious to turn back as it would be to go o'er." He is a man drowning in his own damned fatalism. So his vision of the morrow consists of one day after another hitting like breakers against the drowning swimmer.

Additionally, the days seem to "creep on by" for him. They do not run or jump or gallop, they do not gambol or lunge or lurch. Creeping is a slow, monotonous action that again bespeaks the perpetuity of damnation which the future now seems to hold for him. But creeping also has two other connotations; first, animals on the prowl creep toward their prey. In this first sense, the future is like a carnivore stalking Macbeth, waiting to devour him. He endures a sense of impending doom from the future as though he will eventually be found out and the great crime he has committed will be revealed. Second, though, is that creep is normally associated with weird or uncanny things (as in "that's creepy"). For Macbeth the future has become something fraught with terror of the unknown and stalked by horrors and creatures from the other world. He sees ghosts and moving forests. His future has become nothing but a long Creepshow.

Also note, the creeping is done in a "petty pace." Indeed, pettiness means something small, mean, and unbecoming of noble men. To be petty is to be pusillanimous, small souled. It carries with it the connotation of claustrophobia and being trapped in one's own self. But why not "petty track"? or "petty gait"? or "petty cadence"? Shakespeare seems to have chosen the alliteration of the "p" sound for some intentional purpose. For one thing, the formation of the p sound involves a puffing of the lips, an action done to express frustration or juvenile disdain. For all its horrors and pain, the future may seem to Macbeth to be a frustrating series of base or ignoble trials to be endured without purpose and without cessation. For another thing, the puffing out of the lips involves an exhaling of breath, as though the final exhaling of breath, death, is the inevitable end of all this wearisome toil.

The petty pace ultimately leads "to the last syllable of recorded time." How is time involved with syllables? Why does Shakespeare use here a word, "syllable", associated with poetry and story to delineate time? And who is doing the recording? "Recorded time" is either backward looking or forward looking; that is, either time is being recorded after events happen and thus is retrospective, or it is already recorded and men are merely fated players on the stage. The syllables that compose the story of our lives are written either by a benevolent god who creates story in tandem with his creatures (thus allowing our free will to remain operative) or they are written by dark and severe god who has set down the story in stone from which no created being may deviate. The latter possibility seems to confirm the fatalism of Macbeth and suggests that he sees the future with nothing but horror for when the last syllable is spoken the tomb will be shut and Macbeth's life will be thoroughly and completely damned.

Aquinas and the nature of science.

Check this out.

http://www.medaille.com/thoroughly%20modern%20thomas.pdf

I was struck today by the distinction btwn physics and bio. 11^th and 10^th graders hate both b/c they see only the drudgery of the discipline but I, being free of the work part of it, was interested to note that they are the same study, that is, “why is there stuff and how does it work?” If it is the guts of a frog, why do the guts have the order they do and why should they be at all? If it is the movement of physical objects, why ought they to exist, or move in this way, or move at all? These would be powerful questions for Thomas, I’m sure, b/c he was asking the greater question "Who is God?"

Why, for instance, do we have bodies unless they are meant for a purpose? If they are not for a purpose, then isn’t all creation useless and what sort of god would make a useless construct? Or if the “prize” is only in the next life and this world is to be abnegated, then what sort of god would create a useless construct with the intent that our glory be further on, after the destruction and burning of this world? Cruel god? Capricious god? Vindictive god? Then isn’t god the same as Zeus or Baphomet or Ahura?

IF we believe in a god who is good, rational, merciful, then aren’t we bound to consider what the structure/purpose of this world really is? Seems to me that’s exactly Aquinas’ point. He works in the Summa from the premise that God is one, good, merciful to the premise that the world and all in it is worth study. We are not only allowed to study the LOGOS in order to be one with God, we have an obligation to do the same to the best of our ability, b/c only that which is known can be loved.

Looking into the Abyss

I found an interesting passage in Euripides' "Women of Troy" yesterday where Hecabe laments how she now sees "...the cold abyss of truth" (Vellacott). This abyss seems to parallel the abyss from whence emerge Erebos and Night as mentioned in Hesiod's Theognis. It also is a striking parallel to the abyss over which moves the ruha of YHWH at the beginning of Genesis. It is the same abyss described by Goethe and Kierkegaard and Melville and John Paul II. What is most striking is that, given the syntax of Hecabe's realisation, truth comes from that abyss just as creation comes from the abyss of the waters. Is Euripides (like the other great writers) suggesting that our existence hovers over an abyss? That at the heart of things there is a darkness? Or is he suggesting that the experience of the abyss is necessary for wisdom (a la Job)? Or is the suggestion that the abyss separating man from the truth of God, separating Augustine from belief, separating Gatsby from Daisy, is so vast that we can't always see clearly that there even is another side to which we might strive. Thence comes sorrow, grief and despair.
I'm reminded, though of two cultural references; Apocalypse Now "Never get off the freakin' boat" - don't abandon the craft when you lose sight of the farther shore. Gattaca "I never left anything for the return journey" - striving for that ever receding Ausonian shore with every ounce of our being and not saving anything for getting back to normality. Is that what Hecabe is experiencing? And does that mean that true wisdom ONLY comes after draining dry the cup of suffering?

Ahab says to Starbuck, "All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event ... some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.... I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. The inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate."

Ahab twists into something unholy and terrifying the vision that all things are metaphor for something else. Yet in Moby Dick the vision is already twisted and terrifying; the god is an unreasoning whale, the sea is dark and protean, the crew is savage and brutal. The world is already a nightmare such that Ahab's vision is but a nightmare within the nightmare. The book itself is therefore a pasteboard mask, hiding through Melville's obscure language and copiously unnecessary minutia of whaling lore some dark vision of how things might be. If indeed everything is a metaphor for everything else, Melville intimates, how then can we ever know what is the really real? Aren't we just pushed about by dark forces that don't kill us outright but rather maim us and leave us to live on with only one lung? Dark shadows with condor wings, to borrow from Poe. It is a dark vision, indeed, and not easily softened by the platitudinous responses of Melville's more religiously-minded critics. St. John of the Cross offers this sort of reflection, to descend into the darkness w/o the hope of return as a thing necessary if we are to grow. Yet even the suggestion that this endurance of the darkness, the horse doldrums of uncertainty, might be for our betterment and growth is to delete the experience of its effectiveness. Maybe there is no betterment. Maybe things just happen. And your ship gets staved in by the malignant force with a hump like a white hill leaving you clutching for dear life to Queequeg's coffin, held liminally between the infinite depths of the sky and the infinite depths of the abyss.

On Plato

A recent exchange with a student on Plato.

Hi Mr. Rex!

I hope everything is going well for you!

I just had a quick question that I thought you might be able to help me out with. In 611c of

the Republic and in the surrounding area, Socrates is speaking of how factious things made

up of parts ultimately corrupt and only unities and harmonies are eternal. If this is the case,

then in 611c when he mentions justice and injustice he uses the plural- implying that justice

is factious. If this is the case, doesn't this imply that Platonic thought viewed justice as

conventional and volatile? This seems to contradict the entire message of the Republic, but

as it comes at the end and it seems very deliberately placed, I can't quite pass it off. Can you

make anything of it?

N.O.

Dear N.O.,

Thanks for the email. You caught me on an exhausting afternoon with an open house looming before my eyes so I wasn't able to answer toot sweet.

About the Republic 611c line. I hadn't given it much thought actually. In all likelihood, there is little chance that a single word would throw into confusion the entire bulk of the text. Still, it is not beyond Plato's ironic dexterity with language to do exactly that; to say, "well, in the end, maybe it's all balderdash." What is Socrates really talking about, after all? It is only nominally Justice, just as it is only nominally about philosophy or a city. The city works to talk about justice which serves to talk about the examined life which serves to talk about ... what? A vision Plato had? An ineffable beauty within but not of the world? In which case, all metaphors break down. The city metaphor only goes so far before it gives way to the cave metaphor which only goes so far before giving way to Er and so on. If the term of Justice has served its purpose, Socrates/Plato no longer wants us to dwell on it; this is god and not god - or, "look pilgrim and then pass on" as Virgil says to Dante. All metaphors, even the words and concepts of abstract thought, move us toward a deeply silent and personal contemplation of what really IS; being qua being. Thus, if Plato were to throw into confusion the definition of justice he so carefully has crafted to this point I would not be surprised. Is his message, then, that of the Eleusinian mysteries that we ought not to cling too readily to any one thing? All things change? All things are mutable? The only constant in life is change. Why should we be surprised by fortune's inconstancy, advises Boethius, when change is her nature? Plato wants us to be able to say, this is Justice, yet more to the point he wants his readers to find humility and thus wisdom (philoSOPHIA, after all). Such humility only comes by accepting that we are not gods and change happens; a good bumper sticker, or phylactery, or mantra. The trick isn't so much to claim that we know what these shadows are b/c we see them more often than others, nor to gain prizes b/c we actually are better at naming them, but b/c we accept that we are not gods to see them and pass out of the cave into the light. This is justice, but justice even is not the point. I know what justice is, but it isn't "my justice" nor do I claim divinity b/c I know what justice is; rather divinity is granted me b/c I know that I do not know.

I'll look further into this when I have breathing room. For now, have to help a student with an essay then go down to play practice.

Gnothi seauton.

A. Rex

Analysis of the Evidence

Photographers of any worth are very intentional about how they compose their photographs. Each picture is supposed to say 1,000 words, to whit photographers are meticulous about lighting, color, pose, background, setting, props, focus, film type and numerous other details that consumers like you and I take for granted.
Take for instance The Esquire photo of Bill Clinton a few years back:

Exhibit A

Bill Clinton, erstwhile commander in chief and darling of the liberal media.
There he sits, the picture of masculine power and confidence, the smug smirk on his face, well groomed hair, soft blue lighting, the halo in the background; note the size of the hands - controlling, powerful, rugged; note also the lay of the tie - powerful, yet casual, not prim at all; note the position of the hands akin to the Lincoln statue in the memorial; note the pose - legs spread in that dominant male stance to show off the groin; note the angle of the photograph which takes the role of an intern begging for direction; note also the black stool which we all know is a stool that blends with the black suit such that, though we know it's a stool, it takes on other ramifications of innuendo and subliminal impact (boy is Mr. Clinton endowed, isn't he? Don't you want to be an intern? Don't you want to worship before his might? The photographers is intentionally creating an image to inspire adulation before the golden boy of the left.

Compare such an image to

Exhibit B

Ann Coulter; conservative hothead and no-nonsense commentator on liberal policy.
Long legs exaggerated, the lighting again like a halo, but somewhat disturbing (no pleasant blue background here); the chair an oversize leather bit of painful pop art; note the clothing, the dark dress, white tights, black shoes like some nun or Puritanical mistress of all that oppresses freedom; note the pose as though ready to leap from the chair and go for your throat - no smile - no twinkle in the eye- severe, angry, unflattering; note the hands (one of the most attractive things in a woman) hidden from view; note the angle of the camera with its prurient upskirt view like some crazy private school Abby Hoffman waiting to take advantage of this conservative schoolgirl prude. Not the same photographer, true, but the photo of Ann could have been different. It could, after have been like this...





Exhibit C

Current Junior Senator and President Elect Hillary Rodham Clinton, the great white hope of the liberal left.
The colors; warm red, powerful, inviting, communist, but also redstate. The couch, some Edwardian beauty taken from somewhere in the White House, reminescent of those couches royalty used to employ when visiting hours at Buckingham palace occurred; the great, regal frame of some important potentate hangs overhead; the camera, slightly above shoulder level, looks down from a standing position, as though the photographer were at the Christmas party hosted by the CEO and you round the corner carrying your glass of egg nog with the best rum in it, and there, sitting demurely in a Victorian decorated room is Hillary, a smile on her handsome face and her hair in a perfect Martha Stewart, sitting side-saddle facing you directly; her dress is a dark, velvet number like Grace Kelly might wear or Princess Diana or some other regal-seeming individual with a gorgeous foreign accent; one hand lies pleasantly on her lap, the other pats the couch, as she purrs, "I'm not a threat. I'm a beautiful woman ready for Christmas. Come, sit next to me, tell me how you want to see the country fixed."

Incomprehensible and therefore Funny

I found this on a website about the Koran:

Gerd Puin, the world’s leading specialist in Arabic calligraphy and Qur’anic paleography, studying the oldest manuscripts, speaks with disdain about the willingness of Muslims and non-Muslims alike, to accept Islamic dogma. He says: “The Qur’an claims for itself that it is ‘mubeen,’ or clear, but if you just look at it, you will see that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn’t make sense. Many Muslims will tell you otherwise, but the fact is that a fifth of the Qur’an is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Qur’an is not comprehensible, if it can’t even be understood in Arabic, then it’s not translatable into any language."

It figures.

On Mercantilism

Mercantilism was the theory that gathering the limited supply of wealth in the world is vital to the survival of a nation; thus mercantilists insisted on very strict government control of trade and commerce. Well, if that's the case then the Stamp Act, Tea Tax, and all other impositions by the British government on trade in the Colonies make sense. The same taxes et alia were imposed in Britain to almost 3 times the amount they were in the colonies, yet Britain didn't revolt. Why not? B/c the colonists had discovered how wealthy they could become if the government left them the hell alone. So our entire Revolution owes a big tip of the hat to the laissez-faire economics that runs in opposition to mercantilism.







Moreover, in our century (20th) FDR tried the same trick as King George; the New Deal laid a heavy series of taxes and controls on big commerce and trade and consolidated American votes in Washington with the excuse that they were "looking out for the little guy." They weren't. It was mercantilism under another form. And the damage that FDR did to the economy and the government didn't even begin to be undone until Reaganomics in the 1980s.