Monday, December 17, 2018

O Sapientia, December 17

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem, fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia: veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

"Surely there is a vein for the silver, and a place for gold where they fine it. Iron is taken out of the earth, and brass is molten out of the stone. He setteth an end to darkness, and searcheth out all perfection: the stones of darkness, and the shadow of death. The flood breaketh out from the inhabitant; even the waters forgotten of the foot: they are dried up, they are gone away from men. As for the earth, out of it cometh bread: and under it is turned up as it were fire. The stones of it are the place of sapphires: and it hath dust of gold.
"There is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not seen: The lion's whelps have not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it. He putteth forth his hand upon the rock; he overturneth the mountains by the roots. He cutteth out rivers among the rocks; and his eye seeth every precious thing. He bindeth the floods from overflowing; and the thing that is hid bringeth he forth to light. But where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding? Man knoweth not the price thereof; neither is it found in the land of the living. The depth saith, It is not in me: and the sea saith, It is not with me.
" It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof. It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire. The gold and the crystal cannot equal it: and the exchange of it shall not be for jewels of fine gold. No mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is above rubies. The topaz of Ethiopia shall not equal it, neither shall it be valued with pure gold.
"Whence then cometh wisdom? and where is the place of understanding? Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept close from the fowls of the air. Destruction and death say, We have heard the fame thereof with our ears. God understandeth the way thereof, and he knoweth the place thereof. For he looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven; To make the weight for the winds; and he weigheth the waters by measure. When he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the lightning of the thunder: Then did he see it, and declare it; he prepared it, yea, and searched it out. And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding."

"Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the feast. And when they had fulfilled the days, as they returned, the child Jesus tarried behind in Jerusalem; and Joseph and his mother knew not of it. But they, supposing him to have been in the company, went a day's journey; and they sought him among their kinsfolk and acquaintance. And when they found him not, they turned back again to Jerusalem, seeking him. And it came to pass, that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers. And when they saw him, they were amazed: and his mother said unto him, Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing. And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business? And they understood not the saying which he spake unto them. And he went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them: but his mother kept all these sayings in her heart.
"And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man."

"The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made any thing from the beginning. I was set up from eternity, and of old before the earth was made. The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived. Neither had the fountains of waters as yet sprung out: The mountains with their huge bulk had not as yet been established: before the hills I was brought forth.
"He had not yet made the earth, nor the rivers, nor the poles of the world. When he prepared the heavens, I was present: when with a certain law and compass he enclosed the depths: When he established the sky above, and poised the fountains of waters: When he compassed the sea with its bounds, and set a law to the waters that they should not pass their limits: when he balanced the foundations of the earth; I was with him forming all things: and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times, playing in the world: and my delights were to be with the children of men.
"Now therefore, ye children, hear me: Blessed are they that keep my ways. Hear instruction and be wise, and refuse it not. Blessed is the man that heareth me, and that watcheth daily at my gates, and waiteth at the posts of my doors. He that shall find me, shall find life, and shall have salvation from the Lord."

"At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight. All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him."

"In her is an understanding spirit, holy, one only, manifold, subtle, lively, clear, undefiled, plain, not subject to hurt, loving the thing that is good, quick, which cannot be letted, ready to do good, kind to man, steadfast, sure, free from care, having all power, overseeing all things, and going through all understanding, pure, and most subtle, spirits. For wisdom is more moving than any motion: she passeth and goeth through all things by reason of her pureness. For she is the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty: therefore can no defiled thing fall into her. For she is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness. And being but one, she can do all things: and remaining in herself, she maketh all things new: and in all ages entering into holy souls, she maketh them friends of God, and prophets.
"For God loveth none but him that dwelleth with wisdom. For she is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the order of stars: being compared with the light, she is found before it. For after this cometh night: but vice shall not prevail against wisdom. Wisdom reacheth from one end to another mightily: and sweetly doth she order all things."

"It is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God."

"Wisdom shall praise her own self, and shall be honoured in God, and shall glory in the midst of her people, and shall open her mouth in the churches of the most High, and shall glorify herself in the sight of his power, and in the midst of her own people she shall be exalted, and shall be admired in the holy assembly. And in the multitude of the elect she shall have praise, and among the blessed she shall be blessed, saying:
"I came out of the mouth of the most High, the firstborn before all creatures: I made that in the heavens there should rise light that never faileth, and as a cloud I covered all the earth: I dwelt in the highest places, and my throne is in a pillar of a cloud. I alone have compassed the circuit of heaven, and have penetrated into the bottom of the deep, and have walked in the waves of the sea, and have stood in all the earth: and in every people, And in every nation I have had the chief rule. And by my power I have trodden under my feet the hearts of all the high and low: and in all these I sought rest, and I shall abide in the inheritance of the Lord.
"Then the creator of all things commanded, and said to me: and he that made me, rested in my tabernacle, and he said to me: Let thy dwelling be in Jacob, and thy inheritance in Israel, and take root in my elect. From the beginning, and before the world, was I created, and unto the world to come I shall not cease to be, and in the holy dwelling place I have ministered before him. And so was I established in Sion, and in the holy city likewise I rested, and my power was in Jerusalem. And I took root in an honourable people, and in the portion of my God his inheritance, and my abode is in the full assembly of saints.
"I was exalted like a cedar in Libanus, and as a cypress tree on mount Sion. I was exalted like a palm tree in Cades, and as a rose plant in Jericho: As a fair olive tree in the plains, and as a plane tree by the water in the streets, was I exalted. I gave a sweet smell like cinnamon. and aromatical balm: I yielded a sweet odour like the best myrrh: And I perfumed my dwelling as storax, and galbanum, and onyx, and aloes, and as the frankincense not cut, and my odour is as the purest balm. I have stretched out my branches as the turpentine tree, and my branches are of honour and grace. As the vine I have brought forth a pleasant odour: and my flowers are the fruit of honour and riches.
"I am the mother of fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy hope. In me is all grace of the way and of the truth, in me is all hope of life and of virtue. Come over to me, all ye that desire me, and be filled with my fruits. For my spirit is sweet above honey, and my inheritance above honey and the honeycomb. My memory is unto everlasting generations. They that eat me, shall yet hunger: and they that drink me, shall yet thirst. He that hearkeneth to me, shall not be confounded: and they that work by me, shall not sin.They that explain me shall have life everlasting.
"I, wisdom, have poured out rivers. I, like a brook out of a river of a mighty water; I, like a channel of a river. and like an aqueduct, came out of paradise. I said: I will water my garden of plants, and I will water abundantly the fruits of my meadow. And behold my brook became a great river, and my river came near to a sea: For I make doctrine to shine forth to all as the morning light, and I will declare it afar off. I will penetrate to all the lower parts of the earth, and will behold all that sleep, and will enlighten all that hope in the Lord. I will yet pour out doctrine as prophecy, and will leave it to them that seek wisdom, and will not cease to instruct their offspring even to the holy age. See ye that I have not laboured for myself only, but for all that seek out the truth."

Friday, November 23, 2018

A Review of The Shaping Book 1: Satan's Saga, translated by Douglas VanBenthuysen (AKA Parch)

Satan's Saga is the first part of VanBenthuysen's rendering of the Old English poems conventionally called Genesis A and B. He calls them The Shaping, in accord with his preference for the vivider feel and image of the English root. The title puts God, angel, devil, men, and women (the shapers, manglers, and begetters of our reality in the poem) in a continuum with poets (Old English "scop," or “shaper”), translators, and other makers who strive to give a certain shape to the pure, impure, always dynamic, and often recalcitrant elements in which they work. This title, more native and near in feel than Genesis, yet also far more odd and rife with suggestive possibilities, sets the tone for his choices through the rest of this first installment of the old English epic. This first book he has deceptively designated “Satan's Saga.” This is because VanBenthuysen hopes that Satan sells books, and not because the Devil either owns the story or plays the role of protagonist.
Some translators of literary works seek a conventional idiom of their own time and attempt to recast the original's images, feelings, and meanings within patterns effortlessly accessible to its readers. VanBenthuysen has a different aim. Though he uses modern words, he makes them work and ring in ways that our language has forgotten. In the vital, formulaic baby-talk of his translation, the differences between common nouns and proper names, the one and the many, sign and signified, medium and message, seem always about to disappear—giving the reader a sense of being plunged into proximity with the origins of mind, meaning, and things themselves. He, moreover, insists on leaving core elements of Old English vocabulary essentially untranslated. "Mod," for instance, (a thick word which in Old English means “courage,” “heart,” “anger,” and “intent”) is consistently rendered "mood," where most translators would opt for a variety of renderings. The result of such choices is a kind of exploded modern English, immediately familiar yet obviously working in unfamiliar ways. In the poem, we love God “with our moods”; the devil's party fell “through over-mindfulness”; the devil himself is “overly moody,” he uses “hate-speech” and “pride words” and sets “a sick helmet” on his head; the Angels and Satan and Eve are “shiny”; heavenly bliss is a “dreaminess”; the fallen angels lament that their “reach” is not “roomier” and that God has taken “the heaven reach” from them; the tempter promises Adam that, if he eats the forbidden fruit, “your mood-safe would become more, and your body much more light, your shape much more shiny”; God is “the meter” that moves through the cosmos, through our nature and moods and poems, and with or against which we shape our “wyrds,” so that Adam and Eve “began, at God's behest, to beget children as the meter bid them”; immensities are, strangely, “the unmet,” e.g. “the unmet evening,” as if—when we lack meter, reject what or how God metes out to us—we will nor really “meet” anyone anymore, doomed to a life and death of “unmet evening”; the Creator possesses and shares a “genitive power”; to “deal” is often to divide one thing into two, so that part of Adam's curse is that “for you, body and soul have become dealt”; Adam is a “self-shaped man,” Eve “a free-willed woman”; the first couple are “the marriage-bound two”; to leave is “to lay tracks”; God decides to “nail those born of the curse” with a flood; the ark is a “temple” in which Noe (“Noah”) and his sons and their wives are “ghost's riders”; when Noah grows drunk, “his mind-safe goes away.” 
If this sounds forbidding, it shouldn't. Language is no fixed thing—as if God or man formed it only to be abandoned in frigid chains. It was made to play, and mingle, and produce new ways of saying. The mind and ear soon quicken and move to the meter of this poem's new-old idiom which keeps coming into being as it is read (preferably aloud!). We rejoice to remember that our words have “shaping” and “dealing” energies within them, genitive power, roomy reach; they are self-shaped, free-willed. 
Not only the immediate experience of the poem, but also the story it tells is surprisingly fresh—even to readers who may be familiar with the Biblical narrative or Milton's epic. The temptation of Adam and Eve, for instance, has many very distinctive and provocative features. Since in this poem Satan—more like Dante's Lucifer than Milton's—remains in the prison of Hell, chained in “great grids of hard, heat-forged irons,” not he but a “go-between youngling” tempts the first parents. This lesser fiend boldly claims to be a messenger of God who carries a divine command with the sanction of divine punishment. And, since Adam and Eve cannot really know whether he is telling the truth, their trial requires of them a special steadfastness and “self-shaped” courage. Indeed, the awful responsibility of every individual man and woman is one of the poem's most often sounded themes: “men's children might make a choice: good or evil; each person, wellness or woe.” “I don't know, though,” says Adam to the tempter, with startling authority, “if you fare with secret thought, or if you are the chief's go-between from heaven. Listen. I cannot know your pattern a whit, words or ways, treks or sayings. I know what he bid me himself, our savior, when I saw him last. He ordered me to hold worthy his words and hold them well, track his lore. You be not like any of his angels I have seen before. . . . For this, I cannot hear you, but you may go forth. I have fast belief up to the almighty God who wrought me here with his own arms and with his own hands. He may give me every which good from his high reach, though he need not send his youngling.”
Turning to Eve, the tempter tells her that Adam's proud refusal of his command has earned him God's wrath unless she will carry it out. She seems genuinely deceived by the fiend (as Adam is later by her), thinking that she is doing God's will. Even more interesting is the tempter's promise of angelic vision: “Eat of this fruit!” he tells her, “Then, your eyes will become so light that you may afterwards see so widely over the world, and your master's own seat, and have his favor henceforth.” And so complete is the tempter's deception that, on eating, she seems indeed endowed with angelic powers of vision: “Then, she could see widely through the loathesome one's loan, … so that she thought heaven and earth whiter, and all the world lighter, and God's work much and mighty, though she did not see it through human thought.” She tells Adam that she sees God himself, and so wins her husband over, “I may see from here where he himself sits . . . wound in goodness, he who shaped the world. I see his angels hovering around him with feather-cloaks, the foremost of all folks, the most joyful of riders. Who might give me such wits if God, heaven's wielder, did not send it directly? I may hear roomily and so wide, across the whole world over this broad creation! I may hear sky games in heaven! It became for me light in mind, outside and inside, since I bit of that fruit!” This angelic imagination, this mind that Eve is loaned for a time, seemingly flooded with unmediated light, seems to me a truly unique and provoking element of this telling.
After Adam succumbs and the bright vision darkens, showing itself to be “death's dream” indeed, the man cries out, “Whom shall we two now become?” and wishes God had never made Eve. Yet the poem sees Eve better than Adam does in his grief, and immediately corrects him. There is goodness, generosity, penitence, and courage in her, it tells us: “She was God's work, though she had become deluded by the devils craft. 'You may hurt me for it, my friend Adam, with your words, though it may not pain you worse than it does me at heart.'” Adam too is full of nobility. Not future punishments but the thought of being no longer under God's word, in his loving friendship and service no more—this is the blow that devastates him. He does not know if he will ever hear a word from God again. Even an angry word would be a balm: “Even if heaven's God, in hate, now orders us to fare, wading in a flood, it would not be as fearfully deep as this! No ocean-streams as this! For that, my mood has become forever betrothed to his. But I would go into the ground if I might work God's will.” There is tenderness, nobility, realism in these speeches of our first parents—and they give us man and woman in the heroic mold. 
In another inspired passage, the poem's vision opens after the first murder, when man first “slew his free-kinsman, his own brother, and spilt his blood, Cain of Abel.” From this act a tree of death sprouts and spreads and roots itself across time and space: “Middle-earth swallowed that one's death gore, man's blood, after the slaughter stroke. Woe, pain's progeny, was reared. Ever since, from that twig, horrible fruits have loathesomely grown, longer as more strongly. That crime's boughs have spread widely throughout men's homelands. The harmful branches, severely and sorely, have struck mankind's sons. They still do! From then, broad blades of evil began to sprout! We must lament that story, slaughter-grim wyrd, with weeping, not at all without cause.” 
Beautiful too is poem's sense of how good it is, even in a woe-wracked world, to “fill the earth and subdue it,” to possess the ground, look up at the stars, establish a household, a family, a line—to share in the genitive power of the shaper, by action and word and procreation initiating a free future whose ends are beyond our scope and control, but embraced in the divine meter of wisdom and love: “Malalehel held the land and goods for a swarm of seasons. The first-spear had five and sixty winters when he began begetting children by a wife. The bride brought him a son, a maiden into mankind. He was powerful in his tribe, they tell me, a warrior from youth called Iared. Afterwards, Malalehel lived here long and enjoyed bliss, mankind's dream, here among worldly-treasures. He had five and ninety winters, and eight hundred, when he went forth. He left heirs, land, and tribal guardianship. Long since, he brought guys gold gear. The earl was noble, an honor-fast hero, and the first-spear was beloved to his free-kinsmen.”
It is to be hoped that VanBenthuysen, or Parch, or whatever he calls himself in future, will complete and publish the rest of The Shaping. I would encourage him, even as he encourages me in his dedication, to “keep your line alive”!

Thursday, August 23, 2018


Roman Fountain (Villa Borghese)
Rilke, Translated by Len Krisak

Two basins, one above the other, from
within an ancient rounded marble rand.
And from the top one, waters softly come,
spilling to waters under them that stand

and wait and meet their whispers, playing dumb.
Hidden, as in the hollow of a hand,
they show them sky behind the green and gloom,
like some strange object from a foreign land.

Calmly, within their lovely basin-shell,
they widen—never homesick—ring by ring,
and only sometimes, ping by dream-soft ping,

drop down the mossy scrim in single file
to reach that final mirror softening
the basin with its stone-transforming smile.
Römische Fontäne (Villa Borghese)


Zwei Becken, eins das andere übersteigend
aus einem alten runden Marmorrand,
und aus dem oberen Wasser leis sich neigend
zum Wasser, welches unten wartend stand,

dem leise redenden entgegenschweigend
und heimlich, gleichsam in der hohlen Hand,
ihm Himmel hinter Grün und Dunkel zeigend
wie einen unbekannten Gegenstand;

sich selber ruhig in der schönen Schale
verbreitend ohne Heimweh, Kreis aus Kreis,
nur manchmal träumerisch und tropfenweis

sich niederlassend an den Moosbehängen
zum letzten Spiegel, der sein Becken leis
von unten lächeln macht mit Übergängen.

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

'With What Eyes': Seeing Tragically at Colonus


'With What Eyes': Learning to See Tragically at Colonus
Socrates asks us to consider two states of the soul that look the same to those who see someone in them, and that feel the same for someone experiencing them. A person stumbles and gropes about, because the eyes the soul are bewildered and can find no familiar object on which to focus, no anchor of safety on which to rest. It may be that one has stepped down from the light into darkness. Or it may be that, 'having turned from darkness to day [one] is dazzled by excess of light' (Republic 7.518). Genuine learning does not happen without disorientation. As one takes the first steps out into a fuller, bigger, brighter, realer reality, things turn out not to be what and where you always thought they were; things that you thought were solid give way when you lean on them; you bump into objects you didn't know were there, you stumble about in 'a region of unlikeness'. In extreme cases—which we all may be headed for—the very ground seems to give way beneath our feet, and we are suspended flailing in a horrifying free-fall. If we can bear this state of disorientation, suffer through it, then, slowly, a new and deeper ground will rise out of the darkness to support us, things will come into new focus, we will live a different life, conversant with mysterious realities. We will draw near to sources of blessing and power to which many are oblivious.

Think of Oedipus at the beginnings and ends of his two tragedies. At the beginning of Oedipus Rex he appears an almost god-like figure, hearing the cries of his people with great-hearted sympathy, poised to become their savior for a second time. At the end of the play, the ground has been swept out from under his feet—his life, as he has now discovered, is not the life he thought it was. The most familiar and basic realities—mother, father, marriage, home, city, daughters, sons—turn a countenance of horror toward him which bansishes all comfort, all stability, all peace from his world. For his relationship to each of these basic human realities has concealed a horrible, perverting secret. Most horrible of all, that secret is somehow he himself, who he is, what he is—and there is nowhere he can go to escape it. We leave him at the end of the play cast down from his former serene authority, flailing about in the face of his fate, his eyes bleeding from self-inflicted wounds—wanting to look upon the world no longer. Though in an agony more excruciating than despair, he does 'not choose not to be'. He does not despair. There is something of the proud and great-hearted king still in him, something that cannot be beaten into quiet submission and despair. He suffers a rapture of agony and disorientation, humiliation and shame, but he goes on. He does not choose not to be. It looks like he has been plunged in darkness, but could it be he is taking the first steps 'from darkness to day, dazzled by excess of light'?

At the opening of Oedipus at Colonus, we see an old man, beggar, vagabond, with no home or city to call his own, an oucast 'from whom men shrink,' polluted as he is by incest and parricide. He has suffered twenty years of hunger, weather, sleeping out of doors—relying on the charity of strangers—consoled only by the presence of his loving daughter, on whom he must lean for support and guidance. Instead of eyes, uncanny pitted hollows gape upon his face. And yet he is unbowed by all his calamities. In the slow passage of time, he has achieved an inner quiet in which he takes pride; “suffering and time, / vast time, have been instructors in contentment, / which kingliness teaches too,” he says (Colonus, 6-8). At the end of the play, he exits, not guided or leaning on others, but leading them (as far as they can follow), by means of an inspired second sight, into the sacred darkness at the heart of the cosmos, crossing the threshold of mystery to a place of blessedness, honor, and power into which heaven or earth, opening with love, receives him. He now sees aright. He is no longer dazzled by the darkness or excessive light of reality, but moves through its dimensions with a marvelous liberty and assurance.

How has he arrived at this almost god-like condition, so different from that which he seems to possess at the beginning of Oedipus Rex? I want to return briefly to what seems to me a crucial turning point in the first play, one without which the events of the second play could never have happened. Having realized the full horror of his actions, Oedipus rushes with wild frenzy into the house, where he finds his wife Jocasta—whom he now knows as his mother also—swaying dead from the roof beam. His drawn sword is in his hand. But instead of taking his life, he drives Jocasta's brooches into first one eye, then his other. The chorus of Thebes' old men does not understand or approve: “I cannot say your remedy was good.” they say, “You would be better dead than blind” (Rex, 1368). But Oedipus defends his action, protesting, “What I have done here was best done—don't tell me otherwise, do not give further counsel. I do not know with what eyes I could look upon my father, when I die and go under the earth, nor yet my wretched mother ...” (Rex, 1370 ff.). This is a sublime response. For one thing, we see that Oedipus is thinking of the afterlife, the otherworld. Unlike the chorus who only want to rid the city of pollution, put it away, put it out of sight, out of mind as fast as possible, Oedipus knows that realities, the truth of things, cannot simply be dismissed. “I do not know with what eyes I could look upon my father ...” “With what eyes?” Not with these eyes that have deceived me, luring me on to think that evils were goods, that the monstrous horrors in which I have in fact been snared were comforting, sweet, and noble relationships. With what eyes, then?

Oedipus's act of self-mutilation, in fact, is a cry to the gods to grant him an entirely new way of seeing, a resurrected sight that has passed through destruction and calamity. In the midst of his darkness, he grasps upon the seemingly flimsly hope, yet hope nonetheless, that one day—in the underworld—he will encounter his mother and father, his children, and be able to see and love them rightly, though up to now everything has been wrong, wrong, wrong. Moments later he says, “Yet I know this much: … I would not have been spared from death, if not for some strange ... fate. Well, let my fate go where it will” (Rex, 1455).

In our play for today, Oedipus at Colonus, the Tragic poet Sophocles, himself at the end of his life, returns to his most famous and total Tragedy to see it anew, and reflect on what Tragedy—the work of his life—most really and fully means. What is it for? In the play, we see various ways of undergoing tragedy represented by Antigone, Polyneices, and, of course, Oedipus himself—as well as patterns of witnessing Tragedy, in the responses of the citizens of Colonus, and the hero Theseus. Creon falls into both categories, because he thinks he is witnessing a Tragedy when in fact, through his unfeeling pride, he is falling into one of his own making (a dire warning for us).

Like Sophocles, Oedipus has been reflecting on Tragedy. For twenty years he has been wandering through Greece, in his own inner darkness, led on by a fate that—as he recognized in the earlier play, “goes where it will”—all the while reflecting on the Tragic experiences of his life. As any tired beggar might, the old king sits down to rest on a kind of natural park bench made of stone within a cool, dark grove. He does not know that he has stumbled on the grove of the Furies.

Who are these august, terrible ladies whose sacred grove he seems to have violated? They are ancient, primordial goddesses, older than the Olympians, daughters of that original Night that is at the beginning of all things. The Night from which light and all things first came into being, a night pregnant with possibility and mystery, the night of creation and generation, but also the night of unmaking and annihliation—a night that remains in background and waits to engulf us all. The special domain of the Furies, the all-seeing ones, is to haunt and pursue with calamity those who have committed sacreligous violations, oath-breach, kin-slaughter, parricide, infanticide, incest, cannabalism—Oedipus's own life has been well acquainted with the Furies. Yet they are also called 'the Holy Ones', 'the Kindly Ones'. In part, these are euphemisms, we call them 'the kindly ones' because we hope they will be 'kindly' to us. But it's more than that; for to those who regard them wisely and uprightly (to those who dwell in sober recognition of possibilities terrible, as well as possibilities deeply happy), they grant blessings: friendships and homes and marriages with a fruitful and rich inner life, cities capable of courageous action and self-defense, reverent communities who stand in right relation to the divine. These blessings are represented by the inhabitants of the Furies' grove: in this space of shelter, protected from the sun, and immune to weather, dwell clear-running water, blooming flowers, the singing nightingale, the rooted olive tree 'planted by running streams,' the threshold of the otherworld, and, in the end, Oedipus' himself.

Oedipus' life has prepared him to receive the blessings of the Furies. When he learns from the scandalized citizen of Colonus that he has stumbled on the Furies' grove, he recognizes a providence in the action: “May they be gentle to the suppliant. / For I shall never leave this place” (Colonus, 44-5). This recognition is explained a few lines later in his prayer to the Furies to let him remain in their covert: “For when [Apollo] gave me oracles of evil,” he says “he also spoke of this: a resting place, / after long years, in the last country, where / I should find a home among the sacred Furies” (Colonus, 87 ff.). His whole life has been leading to this end, as he now sees. In that very oracle which before seemed to have foretold him only unspeakable horrors, he finds, after long reflection, a promise of blessedness. And to the people, the audience that can rightly receive him and his story—to those who can receive his Tragic wisdom—he will become a transmitter, a conduit and conductor, of the Furies' blessings. If we (the audience) reflect on his sufferings with openness and generosity, with pity and fear and growing understanding, his sufferings will deepen, strengthen, and bless our lives.

How then do we receive these blessed influences? In the citizens of Colonus and in Theseus, their king, we find a pattern of how to respond to the Tragic figure. When he first appears in Colonus, Oedipus seems to the citizens little more than a vagabond, the refuse of the earth—possibly a petty threat, likely harmless. Nevertheless, such people, beggars, outcasts, unexpected guests are protected by the gods—and a good city must try to do what it can for them. The lone stranger who first meets him challenges him for tresspassing, yet is courteous and informative, clearly proud of his little city and Theseus its Athenian King. He is interested in the stranger and recognizes that there is something out of the ordinary about him, “You're clearly well-born,” he says, “though obviously unfortunate” (Colonus, 76). Aristotle tells us that the tragic hero is someone “better than the average man, though not preeminently good,” and a person who suffers a terrible reversal of fortune. While not knowing his story, this citizen bypasser already senses Oedipus's tragic stature.

Perhaps because they appear in numbers—and a crowd is never as intelligent as its individual members—when the whole chorus of the townsfolk appear their response to the stranger is far more extreme, “Impious, blasphemous, shameless! / ... Not of our land!” they cry, “... Vagabond! Vagabond!” (Colonus, 120 ff.) They are indignant at his trespass, but they dread the inhabitants of the grove that he has made his own, and so fear to remove him forcibly. When they see him, they are initially struck with pity by his blindness, and ask him to come down from the grove to give an account. But, since they fear that he will contaminate them, they make him remain at a distance, still half in the grove, to speak with them. They are both attracted by pity and repelled by fear. His very presence makes them experience contradictory emotions.

But when they discover who he is, their repulsion is visceral and total. This is not just fear, but horror. And remember that Oedipus is horrible. He is polluted, unclean, 'one from whom men shrink'. Not only does he have monstrous hollows in place of eyes, he married and lay with his mother in love, re-entering the womb where his father, whose blood was on his hands, begot him; his sons are his brothers, his sisters are his daughters--”Away with you! Out with you! Leave our country!” “Wind not further your clinging evil upon us!” (Colonus, 226, 235-4)

Only the beautiful and faithful daughter Antigone, Oedipus' fellow sufferer, who has given up her life to care for him, manages to waken their pity again—she pleads with them and helps them see Oedipus not as grotesque monster, but a helpless man in need. Her eyes of love intercede with them to have pity on the eyeless father whom she has loved so selflessly. Such things as happened to Oedipus could come upon all of us, she says, “You will never see a man in all the world whom God has led to escape his destiny!” (Colonus, 237-50). This is a fellow human being like you and me—and what happened to him, could happen to you. The young Saint Francis could not bear to look upon, much less touch a leper, whose face and flesh were so horribly disfigured. When he learned to see a fellow human being in the leper, he took the first steps in the love of God. When he kissed him, he was flooded with peace and consolation and a new unshakable stability—and in the end he came to see, in the face of leper, the face of Christ. Tragedy makes us look at horrors that overtake and disfigure human life, things we recoil from, would prefer not to look, possibilities we would prefer not think about. It is okay, it is natural to feel revulsion (if you haven't felt it, that means you're repressing it—you will feel it eventually), but we must overcome that initial reaction and learn to look on monstrous suffering with kindness and a desire to understand.

Now the citizen-chorus is evenly poised between pity, fear, and horror—they can do nothing but listen, while Oedipus tells his story. He has gained new insight in twenty years, and now he can boldly insist on his innocence—he did horrible things, but he thought he was doing good and noble things—how could he have known otherwise? His horrible acts were things he suffered, not things he willed and performed. If the citizens of Colonus should add to his suffering by rejecting him (as the citizens of Thebes have done), they would commit a great injustice. Gesturing to the dark grove that looms ominously behind himself, he says, “In reverence to your gods, grant me this shelter. … Think, their eyes are fixed upon the just, fixed on the unjust, too” (Colonus, 275 ff.). With the Furies behind him, he warns them, “that he is one endowed with powers beyond nature” (Colonus, 287-6). Hearing this, the chorus allow that his is a weighty case, one that they are in no position to judge; they are content to wait until their King arrives.

As they wait, sitting and watching the blind Oedipus, their wonder and their curiosity grows. Though still in horror, they are no longer in shock—and their horror has been softened a bit by pity and awe. After a long silence, they address Oedipus again, with gently probing curiosity, “What evil things have slept since long ago, It is not sweet to awaken, and yet I long to be told ...” (Colonus, 510 ff.) Line by line, they draw his story out from him. This exchange is painful for him, and he suffers the old pain again in having it teased out in the open like this. And yet, to share it with a sympathetic audience is also healing. “You suffered” “Yes unspeakbaly” “You sinned!” “No! I did not sin! … Before the law—before God!--I am innocent!” We would like the sufferer to be guilty, because then we could separate himself off from us in our minds and hearts—we could pity him, yes, but from a position of superiority and immunity, in which we do not really enter into his fate with genuine compassion. Yet, bit by bit, these defences we throw up to seal ourselves off from the suffering creature, must be worn away, undermined, and we must see feelingly that we too are vulnerable to Tragedy. If we do not, we can neither truly see our world, or love each other genuinely, or act in it effectively—we will always be shying away from, resisting the truth of our lives. If you hide from the truth, the eyes of your soul will grow blind, your world will grow dim; within its blankets of self-protection, your heart will slowly, surely die. Watching a tragedy helps us be vulnerable and open to the action of the truth. And the truth will set you free.

The chorus is opening itself to this truth when Theseus appears to show and teach them (and us) how finally to respond to the Tragic hero. Theseus himself is a hero, he has battled down bandits, robbers, and cruel outlaws. Though he himself was born in another city, he freely took Athens' curse upon himself, delivered himself up into the labyrinth, did battle with the horrifying Minotaur in the darkness, prevailed, and so saved the city. Such a man has undergone himself the depths of privation and uncertainty. Such a man fears nothing. Nothing can unsettle him beacause he has given himself to his mission so totally. He has left behind natural, self-protective impulses and has made a venture, a gift of himself. He knows there are dangers, and that victory and hapinness are not certain in our mortal life. Because he does not hide from reality, he can act in accord with it. He sees right. He acts decisively.

Even if on my way I was not informed,
I'd recognize you, son of Laius. The garments
and the tortured face make plain your identity.
I am sorry for you. And I should like to know what favor here
you hope for from the city and from me. …
Tell me. It would be something dire indeed
To make me leave you comfortless, for I
too was an exile. I grew up abroad,
And in strange lands I fought as few men have
with danger and with death.
Therefore no wanderer shall come, as you do,
and be denied my audience and aid.
I know I am only a man; I have no more
To hope for in the end than you have. (Colonus, 553 ff.)

Theseus alone will see the mysterious end of Oedipus. It takes place off-stage and neither we nor the citizens of Colonus (who stand in for us in the play) are given this final vision. Yet we hear something of it, and can receive something of its mysterious blessing.

But in what manner
Oedipus perished, no one of mortal men
Could tell but Theseus. It was not lightning
Bearing its fire from God, that took him off;
No hurricane was blowing.
But some attendant from the train of Heaven
Came for him; or else the underworld
Opened in love the unlit door of Earth.
For he was taken without lamentation,
Illness or suffering; indeed his end
Was wonderful if mortal’s ever was. (Colonus, 1655 ff.)


Even Theseus, who alone beholds this mystery, shades his eyes 'as if from something awful, fearful and unendurable to see' (1650 ff.). If we want to be prepared for an experience of the-more-than-human, the more-than-natural, if we want to have hearts open to God, we must be open to the wisdom of tragedy, we must create a place within our minds, hearts, and cities to behold and dwell upon imgaes of the utmost suffering to which our human state is vulnerable. We must learn to see with clear and steady eyes of compassion. We must love the sufferer that we meet even as we love ourselves, and in doing so, we will recognize that we too are balanced precariously over an abyss of possiblities, terrible, horrible some of them, and some of them filled with divine blessing beyond what our minds can conceive.

Let us retrace the reactions and responses of the people of Colonus to the Tragic figure of Oedipus, and internalize their succession and pattern, so that we can receive the same education in Tragedy that they do.

We challenge the stranger courteously, and see that he seems like a noble man who has undergone some nameless misfortune. Since he trespasses in places that we would fear to tread, we are indignant and afraid of him—we would like to write him off as a trespassing vagabond, and get the proper authorities to take him away. But when we are reminded, by one who loves and cares for him, that he is suffering something that we could suffer too, we feel pity once more, and sit to hear the story. Yet when we recognize the deep horror of his experience, we recoil once more and more deeply, frantically wishing that this monster be removed from our experience, yet dreading to do so ourselves for fear of becoming contaminated or committing a terrible injustice. So we sit and wait, helplessly poised between pity, fear, horror, and an almost religious awe, and as we sit, we eventually grow quiet within, and quietly looking on, we see another human being once more, and are moved by curiosity and wonder, ready now to hear and imagine his story more inwardly, putting ourselves in his place, acknowledging that we are no position either to judge the suffferer or to seal off our world from his. Suddenly, the possibilties of our world are opened, deepened—life is more dangerous but also resonates with divine voices. Now, we are ready to follow Theseus, the hero who generously makes the lot of suffering humanity his business, and receives the blessing of Oedipus for himself and his people.

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Marriage as the Root of Comedy in the Odyssey: Hard for Mortal Men to Dig Out

Marriage as the Root of Comedy in the Odyssey: Hard for Mortal Men to Dig Out

In the Iliad, Achilles is revealed in his full stature and spiritual depth only in book 24 where, out of all eyes, he is moved to admiration and generosity by the fearless devotion of Priam, the bereft father and humiliated king, in whom he sees his spiritual peer. Achilles recognizes a startling beauty in the actions of this noble enemy—and tells him that life (ineradicably mingled with evil though it is) is a gift to be received, and its loss accepted, with deepening courage and reconcilement. He himself prepares the body of his hated enemy for burial (securing an armisitice of 12 days so that the city can mourn its hero and its own now certain doom), and sits, weeps, and eats with the father, sharing the manly consolation of his hard-earned wisdom. The warrior over whom death hovers (and for whom life had seemed to have nothing further to offer) gazes in wonder at the “brave looks” of the old man and “listen[s] to him talking,” while to Priam, the young man whose death-dealing hands his own appeal has made gentle and generous seems, “in his size and his beauty, … an outright vision of gods.” The glory that Zeus owes Achilles as the counterbalance to his mortality only now finally appears—in the night, in Achilles' shelter, unseen by many. It is only by compelling Achilles to suffer, as none has suffered before, the bitter terms of mortality with deepening rage, sorrow, and final acceptance, that Zeus has made his hero a true revelation of the divine image in man. Out of the inward hollow left by the loss of Patroklos in his soul flows a pure and mysterious kindness. In caring for Priam, he shows man's capacity for goodness. In wondering at him, he sees man's potential beauty. This transformation of Achilles from superb warrior to a soul inwardly open to the divine movements of love is the glory which Zeus, nodding, agreed to bestow on him in book 1—revealing this mortal man to be in the image of the unknown God who, walking mysteriously among heroes and guiding them in the immortal night, dwells beyond Olympus and deeper than the house of death. The Iliad's final revelation of its hero thus comes to pass in the poem's most concealed sheltering—in the night, in Achilles' underground shelter, unseen by any save Priam, Automedon, and Antilochos.

Like Achilles, Odysseus aspires to heroic deeds at Troy. In book 2 when, in longing for homes and wives, the army makes a stampede for the ships, he inspires his own commitment to heroism in them all, reminding them of the gods' promise that the taking of Troy will be “a deed late, late to be accomplished, but whose glory will perish never.” Athena shines at his right hand as he awakens his own resilient courage (lover of home and wife though he is) in the heart of each man, so that “now battle became sweeter to them than to go back in their hollow ships to the beloved land of their fathers.” As with Achilles again though, the steadfast root of Odysseus' shining deeds and the final revelation of his glory, must be sought in a concealed sheltering out of the eyes of many (in the second-to-last book of his own epic). Just as Achilles undergoes a thorough remaking in the crucible of anguish, Odysseus must lose all he has and is, become a kind of nobody among men, a wanderer on land and sea, cursed, pummelled, and scarred, seemingly abandoned by the gods who support him—in order to find and reveal the deepest, most providentially confirming movements of his spirit, shelterered and brought to fruition in his marriage to Penelope.

Concealment seems congenial to Odysseus. Unlike Achilles, he is a man of many turns, a beautiful liar, a spinner of tales—he wears disguises, contrives strategems, gains his goals by dissembling them. His habit is to harbor his thoughts and feelings deep in his chest, to spring from cover and take enemies by surprise. In book 10 of the Iliad, he slips past Trojan lines wearing his grandfather's robber-helmet, extracts information from the cowardly Dolon with false assurances of clemency, spies out the enemy encampment, and steals the shining horses of Rhesus. It is his devices that ultimately take the city, playing cruelly on the unsuspecting piety of the Trojans. From beneath his disguise as “nobody,” his manipulation of anonymous possibilities concealed in the things of the world overpowers the much mightier Cyclops—and helps him escape peril after peril with his skin. But, for nine years, from the fall of Troy to when he is washed up on the shore of Scheria, Odysseus seems to wander farther and farther from his spirit's true home. It is precisely the endless versatility of his mind, both to see through and project persuasive concealments, to deploy appearances to achieve hidden goals, yes, to manipulate the base and noble dispositions of others, that threatens to usurp his inmost being, deplete and frustrate his deepest concealed longings and powers.

Odysseus' affinities for the kinds of concealment that can be practiced on others for the sake of victory, gain, survival, and dramatic effect are his heroic signature. (And wherever the stranger arrives in Homer's world, he is greeted with the challenge, “From where do you come sailing over the watery ways? Is it on some business, or are you recklessly roving as pirates do, when they sail on the salt sea and venture their lives, bringing evil to alien people?”) Yet what distiguishes our hero from a mere predator is his commitment to larger goods that gain and survival subserve—goods that can be prepared for, but cannot be attained by planning and execution alone, goods which surprise the soul in its inmost covert. Ends that the strategist does not give to himself, but the intuition of which transforms the record of his deeds into a story, and reveal a divinely bestowed pattern in his life. Beneath Odysseus the adventurer, the contender, the warrior, the trickster, the thief, the beguiling speaker is Odysseus the man, the sufferer. Not the “famous name” he has made for himself and is as anxious to proclaim to the defeated Cyclops as he is reluctant to share with the kindly Phaiakians. Rather, the nobody who is at the mercy of the elements, vulnerable to the kindness of a host, who—when listening to the words of the poet, cannot hide his tears over the victims of his own famous strategy at Troy but weeps like “a woman weep[ing], lying over the body of her dear husband, who fell fighting for her city and people as he tried to beat off the pitiless day; … she sees him dying and gasping for breath, and winding her body about him she cries high and shrill, while the men behind her, hitting her with their spear butts on the back and the shoulders force her up and lead her away into slavery.” Who, when the girl Nausikaa stands up to his unpromising, near-naked and sea-beaten appearance on the beach, is so moved by her courageous welcome that, even while he takes advantage of her hospitality and plays on her hopes, “wonder takes [him] as [he] looks on her,” and a simile for her person rises unbidden from his memory, “yet once in Delos I saw such a thing, by Apollo's altar. I saw the stalk of a young palm shooting up … and as, when I looked upon that tree, my heart admired it long, so now, lady, I admire you and wonder.” Who tells to Alkinoos and Nausikaa and their people his whole unfinished story, both what is flattering and what is not, trusting in their goodness to help him, and in the gods to give a good ending. Who returns to his home not guided by the steering plots of his conscious mind, but ferried sleeping over sea, so that his return seems to come over him out of the deepest reaches of his heart, the concealed and artless center of his being.

This interior vulnerability, readiness, and receptivity belong to his God-given identity (perduring beneath and darkly shining through every disguise he adopts). It is this which his long trials and sufferings serve to expose, making him fruitful and wise. It is this that makes the man of many similes profoundly like himself in the end, empowering him to take possession of his own being, his household, kingdom, wife, and son. And this identity is protected and guaranteed most of all by his marriage to Penelope, to whom he has entrusted his uninvented being, his heart. His marriage to Penelope embeds his Zeus-like mind in the world, making it fruitfully rooted rather than aimlessly wandering and playing over it. The fact that she—called periphronos, minded all around—keeps the wanderer in the center of her mind as he, wandering all around, longs after her, shelters the inmost man and provides him with inner resilience, genuine invention and intelligence; it gives him something to live for, and preserve in himself. When he washes up naked and gasping on the island of Scheria, it enables him to see the covert made by two olive trees as the place of preserving concealment where a man “buries a burning log in a black ash heap in a remote place in the country, where none live near as neighbors, and saves the seed of fire, having no other place to get a light from,” so burying, preserving the bright seed that is his very self. It extends a saving grip for him in the shape of a fig tree as he hangs for life over the horrible, faceless, feminine mouth of the whirlpool Charybdis. It provides the root out of which the Delian palm shoots forth into his memory when he wonders at the pure-hearted courage of the Phaiakian princess, and it wins him her succour, and his own homecoming.

When Odysseus' wanderings approach their turning point, this concealed rootedness of Odysseus' being—on which the whole poem rests and turns toward comedy—appears in a Hermetic sign which will receive its fulfillment only in the poem's penultimate book. Marooned on a secluded island, unprovisioned, and lost, Odysseus gets word that half his crew have been snared by the goddess Circe, and he sets out to dare the peril alone. He is met by Hermes, the god of double meanings, concealed truths, and the interpretive genius that discloses the nexus of human and divine purposes. “Where are you going, unhappy man, all alone, through the hilltops, ignorant of the land-lay?” says the god, gently mocking the now helpless man of devices. But to secure him against the spells of the witch goddess, Hermes gives him a “good medicine” that “he picked out of the ground”: “it was black at the root, but with a milky flower. The gods call it moly. It is hard for mortal men to dig up, but the gods have power to do all things.” When Circe tries to enchant Odysseus she is baffled by the moly's counterspell: “There is a mind in you no magic will work on,” she says. “You then are Odysseus.” Where Circe expects Odysseus to become a boar or some other beast, he only turns into himself, Odysseus. This moly is mysterious, and its name only conceals its nature, since “moly” is not a Greek word, or a human word at all, but from the language of the gods. That language's roots are unknown. The roots of the moly too are hidden, “black” and “hard for mortals to dig up,” but they produce a beautiful flower. The moly grants Odysseus the power of remaining like himself. Your cleverness cannot ultimately save you, Hermes suggests, but something hidden, something grounding at the roots of you (deeper than your intentions but giving them sustenance and strength) will allow you to retain the form of your humanity—the white flower of yourself.

The sign of the moly recieves its interpretation in the marriage-chamber of Odysseus and Penelope, a sacrament into which human effort, artifice, and intentions all enter but which is spoken into being by the language of God. When Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, converses with Penelope in the night, he sees her melt with the longing his tales stir in her. Then, she weeps for her husband who sits beside her and pities her in his heart but sets his eyes like flint. Thoughout their interview he finds many ways to conjure and probe the memory of Odysseus she preserves within her. When she wakes later that night, she says, “For on this very night there was one who lay by me, like Odysseus as he was when he went with the army, so that my own heart was happy. I thought it was no dream, but a waking vision.” She is full of the memory of the man who left her 20 years ago. But is the stranger-Odysseus that appears the next day in the hall, sitting on his throne, bloody with the slaughter of the suitors—magnificent and somewhat horrifying—her Odysseus? Is he still “as he was when he went with the army”? She will not melt before him again, not until she knows not only that he is the factual Odysseus, but that he is her Odysseus: that he still loves her, that he remains true to the commitment that shelters the root of their shared participation in being. Like Nausikaa, Penelope neither runs nor turns away from Odysseus as he confronts her bloody and sullen—but treats him as the stranger his outward appearance may in fact conceal. Though Telemachos scolds her for having “a heart harder than stone,” Penelope replies that “she is full of wonderment, and I cannot find anything to say to him, nor question him, nor look him straight in the face. But if he is truly Odysseus, and he has come home, then we shall find other ways, and better, to recognize each other, for we have signs that we know of between the two of us only, but they are secret from others.” Odysseus sends their son out. He asks for the sound of wedding music in the hall, buying the time he and Penelope need to renew their marriage. He washes the filth of slaughter off himself, and the gods grace him with the beauty that is his. And when Penelope remains distant, he tells her, “You are so strange,” and then in words that comically echo Achilles' wonderment at Priam, “this woman has a heart of iron within her.”

Concluding in consternation that she will not welcome him that night, he asks the nurse Eurykleia to make a bed for him in the hall. Penelope, matching him word for word, replies, “You are so strange. I am not proud, nor indifferent, nor puzzled beyond need, but I know very well what you looked like when you went in the ship with the sweeping oars, from Ithaka,” indicating that she wishes to test the reality beneath his appearance, to probe the unseen root of this fair-seeming flower of a man. And so, she provokes him, saying, “Come then, Eurykleia, and make up a firm bed for him outside the well-fashioned chamber: that very bed that he himself built. Put the firm bed here outside for him.” Given what Odysseus calls “the character” of his bed, to have had it removed would imply a serious and deliberate act of infidelity on Penelope's part. The very suggestion makes him angry and confused—and shows that he is as much at her mercy, as she is at his. She shows herself his equal, too, in her capacity to “tell lies that are like truth,” lies that bring the heart of things to light. “What you have said, dear lady, has hurt my heart deeply. What man has put my bed in another place? But it would be difficult for even an expert one, unless a god, coming to help in person, were easily to change its position. But there is no mortal man alive, no strong man, who lightly could move that weight elsewhere. There is one particular feature in the bed's construction. I myself, no other man, made it. There was the bole of an olive tree with long leaves growing strongly in the courtyard, and it was thick, like a column. I laid down my chamber around this, and built it, until I finished it, with close-set stones, and roofed it well over, and added the compacted doors, fitting closely together … and decorated it with gold and silver and ivory. There is its character, as I tell you; but I do not know now, dear lady, whether my bed is still in its place, or if some man has cut underneath the stump of the olive, and moved it elsewhere.” Into the construction of the bedchamber goes Odysseus' purpose, pride, and skill. The tree on which it is founded comes not from him but the rocky soil of Ithaca, from the givenness of his native world. This trunk looked to him like a column when he chose it—we remember that Penelope stands, whenever she appears in the hall, beside the household's central column, a formula repeated so often that it becomes an embodied simile or epithet to her person. On the bed is built a sheltering, concealed room where two may welcome and foster each other, and around it the whole noble household builds itself up. Its roots, like those of the moly, are hard for mortal men to tear up, and its language—the language of human lives supporting, ennobling, guarding, and marvelling at each other—is a language spoken only by God. This olive stump is the rooted center of Odysseus' being. It is what gives him the will to survive, and a mind on which no magic will work. It is sacred to him—so that he cannot help but be hurt by Penelope's suggestion that it has been (or could be) uprooted or cut down. This is the proof she needed. She recognizes him. He is her Odysseus in truth. “You then are Odysseus,” as Circe said. Penelope's gladness that her Odysseus has indeed returned is wonderfully compared to the joy of a shipwrecked man who finds himself on home ground once more, for it is only in her welcome that his homecoming is won, even as she returns to herself in him. Athena holds back the dawn for them and, in the communion of their hearts, time opens inward. They go together to bed and to “their old ritual.” After their lovemaking, they tell each other their stories. Penelope recounts everything that she endured in his absence. And Odysseus—ignoring the advice of Agamemnon's shade—tells Penelope all that he has done and endured. He tells her the whole Odyssey. It's the only time in the poem when we hear his whole story in its proper order from beginning to end. In telling all, Odysseus experiences a full and redemptive reordering and release, made possible by the total confidence and total vulnerability of the married couple before each other in their sacramental sheltering. 

The confidence of their encounter is protected by the wise and wonderful disguises and indirections under which they approach each other. Its redemptive power stems from the total honesty with which (led on by nature and their own like-mindedness) they open their hearts, hiding nothing. Here hidden in the heart of their household, apart from their people, their servants, even their son—they shelter each others' souls, and stand before each other like the first couple “naked and unashamed.” This total confidence of Odysseus and Penelope before the stranger each encounters in the other, has power to renew a culture and civilization of hospitality from within, and restore the divine image in it. It is this mutual sheltering that has preserved Odysseus in war and wandering, not only directing his brilliant schemes to a noble end, but also enabling his heroic generosity and graciousness along the way, making him susceptible to divine influences from the minds of the many men and women he encounters. It is his dwelling in the heart's shelter of his marriage to Penelope that enables him to honor Nausikaa, for instance, with words that speak to her heart's desire and reveal his own: “May the gods give you everything that your heart longs for; may they grant you a husband and a house and sweet agreement in all things, for nothing is better than this, more steadfast than when two people, a man and his wife, keep a harmonious household; a thing that brings distress to the people who hate them and pleasure to their well-wishers, and for them the very best glory.”

*Quotations of the Iliad and Odyssey are from Richmond Lattimore's translation (the last slightly adapted). 
Even though I don't refer to any secondaries above, there are a few that have shaped my reading in substantial ways. I owe my understanding of the Homeric poems as wholes to Glenn Arbery's excellent essays ("Against the Belly of the Ram: the Comedy of Deception in the Odyssey" in a collection called The Terrain of Comedy, and "Odysseus' Nostos: Concealment and Revelation" in Classic Texts and the Nature of Authority, as well as his essay on the Iliad, "Soul and Image: The Single Honor of Achilles" in The Epic Cosmos, and a chapter of his book Why Literature Matters: Permanence and the Politics of Reputation called "The Sacrifice of Achiles"). My thoughts about the the moly-flower and Odysseus' and Penelope's marriage bed were also helped by two essays of the odd poet, Anne Carson--though she does not connect them herself--"Every Exit is an Entrance" from her book Decreation (essay available here, https://fleurmach.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/anne-carson-decreation-every-exit-is-an-entrance-2005.pdf) and "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent" (available here, http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_carson.php).

Friday, February 16, 2018

A Word of Introduction to Vergil's Georgics

A Word of Introduction to Vergil's Georgics

     Each book of the Georgics--ploughing and planting fields (book 1), growing vines and trees (book 2), herding sheep, goats, horses, and cattle (book 3), and beekeeping (book 4)--takes place within a lover's quarrel between the farmer and the earth. And each book is filled with hypnotically clear and loving transcription of the particulars of its realm. The farmer's world appears in its bright, raw, naked thingliness and always alive with suggested feelings, analogies, and thoughts.
     Vergil's theme is not merely the natural order and the goods and beauties it offers, nor merely that order in fruitful tension with human effort, making, and civilization, but something active within both of these: the intuited radiance of the divine creation that fills the poet's eye and heart with light. Vergil's realism gives us soils and ruminating or stamping creatures, birds and stars, a leaf unfurling, the rich textures of human crafts, the waxen wicker of the hive humming with its communal life, all as lit up by the active presence of their Creator, with the breath of God still on them, freshening them.
     That is why the world appears to him as a radiant, gigantically strange, and ever-proceeding gift, to be newly received again and again. One could prove this by quoting almost any line of the poem! But one thinks especially of the passage that recalls the first Spring of the rising world, of the wild trees of hills and forests that offer themselves to our sight and use in a ceaseless, prodigious free gift, and of--that first line of book 4--"heaven's gift of honey, pure as air."
     This intuition is why Vergil can so delight in the world, even as he acknowledges and feels deeply that nature, culture, and human history include terrible pain, ugliness, futility, frustration, and inexplicable evil. Witness his cry of despairing prayer over the Roman future at the end of book 1; his reflection on the corruption of urbanized manners in contrast to the piety and steadfastness that characterize the family farm, his many-sided meditation on human lots--blessed and unblessed--the farmer's, the philosopher's, the public man's, his own (the poet's)--at the end of book 2; the brutal plague he pursues in brutally exhaustive detail at the end of book 3; the unsettling picture he paints of the inundations of animal love that sweep over animal and human herds; his exploration in the Orpheus and Eurydice-story of the haunting power of poetry, but also its impotence in the face of death, and the unknown destiny of human loves.
     It is books 2 and 4, the world of trees and vines and the virtuous society of the bees (both which realms are blissfully free of animal passions, heat, blood, and sex), that most unmistakeably communicate the undying light of the first creation, but even here blight, unruliness, toil, war, plague, and death have made inroads. Between himself and the powers of darkness, Vergil interposes not the intellectual life (not the philosopher's visionary detachment) nor optimism about the civilizing project of Rome--though both hold great interest and attraction for him--but the native stoicism, practical wisdom, and piety of the surefooted Italian farmer on the one hand and, on the other, his own peerless poetic gift, whereby he sees--even if he cannot explain it--the world in its thisness and whatness charged by the grandeur of God.

Thursday, October 26, 2017

Two Poems of Rome by Hildebert of Lavardin

Par tibi Roma and Rome's Reply by Hildebert of Lavardin (Circa AD 1056 to 1133)

     Par tibi, Roma
Par tibi, Roma, nihil, cum sis prope tota ruina
     Quam magni fueris integra fracta doces.
Longa tuos fastus aetas destruxit, et arces
    Caesaris et superum templa palude iacent.
Ille labor, labor ille ruit quem dirus Araxes
     Et stantem tremuit et cecidisse dolet;
Quem gladii regum quem provida cura senatus,
     Quem superi rerum constituere caput;
Quem magis optavit cum crimine solus habere
     Caesar, quam socius et pius esse socer,
Qui, crescens studiis tribus, hostes, crimen, amicos
     Vi domuit, secuit legibus, emit ope;
In quem, dum fieret, vigilavit cura priorum
     Juvit opus pietas hospitis, unda, locus.
Materiem, fabros, expensas axis uterque
     Misit, se muris obtulit ipse locus.
Expendere duces thesauros, fata favorem,
     Artifcies studium, totis et orbis opes.
Urbs cecidit de qua si quicquam dicere dignum
     Moliar, hoc potero dicere: Roma fuit.
Non tamen annorum series, non flamma, nec ensis
     Ad plenum potuit hoc abolere decus.
Cura hominum potuit tantam componere Romam
   Quantam non potuit solvere cura deum.
Confer opes mamorque novum, superum favorem
     Artificum vigilent in nova facta manus,
Non tamen aut fieri par stanti machina muro,
    Aut restauri sola ruina potest.
Tantum restat adhuc, tantum ruit, ut neque pars stans
     Aequari possit, diruta nec refici.
Hic superum formas superi mirantur et ipsi,
     Et cupiunt fictis vultibus esse pares.
Non potuit natura deos hoc ore creare
     Quo miranda deum signa creavit homo.
Vultus adest his numinibus, potiusque coluntur
     Artificum studio quam deitate sua.
Urbs felix, si vel domnis urbs illa careret,
     Vel dominis esset turpe carere fide.




Dum simulacra mihi, dum numina vana placerent,
     Militia, populo, moenibis alta fui.
At simul effigies arasque superstitiosas
    Deiciens, uni sum famulata Deo,
Cesserunt arces, cecidere palatia divum
     Servivit populus, degeneravit eques.
Vix scio quae fuerim, vix Romae Roma recordor,
     Vix sinit occasus vel meminisse mei.
Gratior haec iactura mihi successibus illis:
     Maior sum pauper divite, stante iacens.
Plus aquilis vexilla crucis, plus Caesare Petrus,
     Plus cunctis ducibus vulgus inerme dedit.
Stans domui terras, infernum diruta pulso;
     Corpora stans, animas fracta iacensque rego.
Tunc miserae plebi, modo principibus tenebrarum
     Impero: tunc urbes, nunc mea regna polus.
Quod ne Caesaribus videar debere vel armis
     Et species rerum meque meosque trahat
Armorum vis illa perit, ruit alta senatus
     Gloria, procumbunt templa, theatra iacent
Rostra vacant, edicta silent, sua praemia desunt
     Emeritis, populo iura, colonus agris.
Durus eques, iudex rigidus, plebs libera quondam
     Ista iacent ne forte meis spem ponat in illis
Crux aedes alias, alios promittit honores,
     Militibus tribuens regna superna suis.
Sub cruce rex servit, sed liber; lege tenetur,
     Sed diadema gerens; iussa tremit, sed amat.
Fundit avarus opes, sed abundat: foenerat idem,
     Sed bene custodit, sed super astra locat.
Quis gladio Caesar, quis sollicitudine consul
     Quis rhetor lingua, quae mea castra manu
Tanta dedere mihi? Studiis et legibus horum
      Obtinui terras: crux dedit una polum.
     Rome Was
     Even in nearly total ruin, Rome,
You have no peer; though shattered, teach us yet
Your pristine magnitude. Slow time unbuilt
Your prideand Caesar's works, and shrines of gods,
Lie down in so much swamp. That giant work
Is overthrown which made the grim Araxes
Tremble while it stood, and weep its fall;
Which swords of Kings, the Senate's prudent care,
And gods above made head of all the world;
Which Caesar sought to make his own by crime,
Betraying public trust and wedded faith;
Which, rising by three arts: her foes by force,
Her crimes by law, her friends by wealth—subdued,
Pursued, and bought. Her fathers watched her grow. Her site, her river's pious welcome helped.
The world sent craftsmen, costs, materials,
Her own hills offered quarry for her walls.
Her generals poured out spoils, kind fates their gifts,
Her artists loving pains, the world its wealth.
The City fell—and when I strain to say
A fitting word for her, there's only this:
Rome was ... and flying years, and fire and sword,
Cannot efface the glory that was hers.
Man's giant efforts to construct a Rome
The gods have proved unable to undo.
     Get wealth! new marble! brighter auspices!
Let hands of artists toil upon new works—
But how will you contrive to match the wall
That stands, or even to restore its ruins right?
So much still stands, so much lies in collapse,
That what remains cannot be levelled, nor 
What's lost rebuilt. Here the gods themselves
Gaze awestruck on the images of gods,
And long to mime their own imagined looks,
Gods such as nature had no power to make—
For whom a man wrought likenesses divine,
So nameless powers found a countenance ...
Revere the artist's gift, and not his god.
     Blest Rome! If only free of overlords,
Or if your lords thought scorn not to be true.

     Rome's Answer:
     Long time content with idols and false gods,
I rose aloft on warfare, people, walls.
But since I smashed my superstitious shrines
and images, I serve the one true God;
My forts have yielded, palaces collapsed,
My nobles become base, my people slaves.
I hardly know the thing that was—I Rome
Retain the faintest memory of Rome.
     But this downfall is sweeter than success.
For I am greater poor than rich, brought low
Than proud. Peter is more than Caesar was,
A helpless flock than all my generals,
And nobler than my Eagles is the Cross.
Standing I dominated earth, brought low
I pummel Hell; I governed bodies once,
But, humbled and cast down, I shepherd souls.
Then my commands were to the wretched plebs,
But now to powers of hell. My rule was felt
In cities then, but now among the spheres.
    And lest all this appear the prize of wars,
Of Caesars, and lest superficial things
Beguile both me and mine, that force of arms
Expired, the glory of the Senate fell,
The temples crumble, theaters lie still,
The rostra vacant, silent all decrees,
And public virtue lacks its due reward;
The people, civic rights; the farmer, fields.
The knight was hardy once, the judge severe,
The people free—and lest I set my hope
On these, the Cross proclaims another home,
And other honors, promising its hosts
New realms on high. Beneath the Cross the King's*
A serving man, yet free; restrained by Law,
Yet wears a diadem; he dreads yet loves
His orders; greedy to pour out his wealth,
And it abounds, forsafe-deposited
Beyond the stars—it yields him rich returns.
     And what did Caesar's sword, the Consuls' care,
The tongue of Cicero, the steel of camps,
Win me that can compare? Their efforts, laws
Gave me the world. The Cross gave Heaven too.

*I am not sure whether the Christian King in general is meant, or the Pope (monarch, of sorts, in Rome).