The Classical Condition

A lot of times when older people hear me talk about my love for Neil Young; they raise their eyebrows in surprise, wondering what I’m doing listening to “the music of their generation”. If they only knew that I am not the only person under 40 who can openly acknowledge the brilliance of Neil Young. Like Bob Dylan, he was one of the great folk rock poets of our time, and his legacy didn’t die out as time progressed and the music scene changed. Neil Young will always be first and foremost on my musical repertoire, and while other artists come and go my love for him and his timeless poetry and music lingers. Neil Young conveys the music of the young spirit, a subject that there will always be a place for in the world of art. Like classical literature, classic rock set a standard that has been filtered through to our present culture.
How can we explain a musician like Neil Young, whose moment in the spot light has long since past, still being appreciated and respected by my generation, while many of his colleagues from that period go unrecognized? Why is it that ten years from now, English Professors will not be teaching A million little pieces as part of their curriculum, but the classics that have been taught for ages will remain in the curriculum? Where do we draw the line between trendy and timeless? I want to explore this notion of the timeless in literature and art: what does it take to endure through the generations?
I remember the first time I heard “Cortez the Killer” by Neil Young. I had this strange sensation that the song already existed within me; it was as if it was intuitive. This sort of experience is not uncommon for me: when it seems that all of my prior thoughts, feelings and memories have culminated in that one perfectly crafted song, or sentence, or utterance. In that culmination there is a strong sense relief in the release of mental tension; the condition has been acknowledged and therefore, we are not alone. This seems to be a major contributor to the timeless nature of art: that art which concerns itself with the universal human experience. The psychologist Carl Jung would agree that an artist strikes on the timeless when their work dips into the “collective unconscious”, which he explained as being a “reservoir of the experiences of our species”. The collective unconscious is said to exist prior to our experiences. This explanation would account for the constant realization of strange coincidences and astounding epiphanies we encounter in the classics.
The best things in life seem to be those that have endured through time and still manage to bring us joy today. My favorite “classic” we explored in English 213 was Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This thick collection of mesmerizing stories has the reader bear witness to one extraordinary transformation after another, all under the beautifully kept theme of change. Ovid’s Metamorphoses has endured through the ages because of its premise: all things change, yet never die. His observation is perfectly aligned with the theme of our class: that all that is past possesses our present, meaning that everything playing out in our culture and in our lives are vestiges of classical myth, timeless truths that we keep coming back to. Our reality is permeated by myth. This concept seems completely ambiguous since, by definition, myth means story and reality is real. Just like in the library, fiction and non-fiction should remain segregated. But we are constantly seeing the two merge every day without looking farther than the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. Perhaps the fact that mythologies are recurring is an indicator of their ultimate truth.
The classics and mythologies (I am using the two interchangeably) acknowledge and are built upon our collective human experience. They operate on something of a cyclic time scale, where everything has happened before and will happen again. Therefore everything links; everything seems like a coincidence, because in the realm of myth we continually return to the same ideas. Mythology is apart from scientific and historical truths, which are constantly being re-evaluated and revised. Poetic truth is constantly being relived, in a process that we are only vaguely aware of, until we encounter it in the classics. We know poetic truth when we feel universally human, when we comprehend our condition. Classic literature comes to us with answers to questions about ourselves that we could never really wrap our minds around, until it was related to us in such a way. And the culmination of that quest for universal truth is why we come back to these pieces days, years, decades, and centuries later. They comfort us any time. They do not operate by time. They are without: Timeless.

Gods on Fire

As I related in my previous blogs, Ovid Metamorphoses is colored by stories of characters who are "hot with love", set aflame by passion, and how I am enjoying this colorful description of our nature. We have seen Zeus emerge as the biggest womanizer of all, raping beautiful women frequently throughout Ovid's stories. While our class reads on in disgust at Zeus' lack of control, in greek mythology madness was actually looked upon as a gift of the gods. Dionysus had the power of freeing people from their inhibitions by bestowing madness (often induced by wine). In Phaedrus, Socrates speech declares that madness is not a bad thing, and that the greatest goods come through madness when it is "divinely inspired". In fact, he goes on to say that love is madness. In greek mythology, when characters are set on fire with desire, it is a sign that god is near.
Psycology seeks to give complex names and explanations for the forces of madness, for those "powers that act upon us" (Calasso 94). In this modern age, we attempt to assign some responsibility for the feelings that overcome us. Mythologies of the past are different...

"The homeric heroes knew nothing of that cumbersome word responsibility, nor would they have believed in it if they had. For them it was as if every
crime were committed in a state of mental infirmity. But such infirmity meant
that a god was present and at work. What we consider as infirmity they saw as
'divine infatuation' (ate). They knew that this invisible incursion often
brought ruin: so much that the word ate would gradually come to mean 'ruin'. But
they also knew, and it was Sophocles who said it, that "moral life can never
have anything great about it except through ate" -"The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony" Roberto Calasso

Ate- ruin: from Sophocles, the great tragedian, ruin being the defining characteristic of tragedy. It seems all mythology is dependent upon this principle of madness.

Hot with Love

I've spent my Spring break taking in Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is no small feat. Held up as one of, if not the most important source of classical myth, Metamorphoses is said to be "the most comprehensive, creative mythological source handed down to us from antiquity" (Galinsky). Ovid sings of "bodies becoming other bodies" (3) and, indeed, the binding theme is transformation: it occurs in every story throughout the 15 books.

While all the stories are united in the theme of change, there are variations of themes beneath it, and one of these that is inescapable is that of love. We've been seeing in classical lit that everyone in Greece is "hot with love". It's portrayed as an epidemic; the characters we're meeting are sick with love, love is driving them to madness. But no where in literature have I ever encountered more incessant, colorful descriptions of this epidemic than in Metamorphoses. And I'm having a lot of fun with it!


The painting to the left is from the story of Coronis, the Raven, the Crow, and Nyctimene in book 2. Coronis tells the story of how, one day, while she was walking by the shoreline, Neptune (the sea God) saw her and "grew hot with love" (p. 60) He chased Coronis down trying to have his way with her, and the Goddess Athena pitied the virgin and turned her into a bird so she could fly away and escape her.

The picture to the right is from the story of Narcissus and Echo in Book 3. When Echo sees Narcissus roaming through the woods, she becomes "inflamed with love" (p. 92). She was cursed by Zeus' wife Juno, and punished so that she could only repeat the last syllable of what she heard. Narcissus shunned her, and in her depression she wasted away until she was only a voice.

In subsequent stories we encounter characters who are taken out of their element by love. In the story of Medea and Jason, Medea, the king's daughter, sees the hero Jason and is struck by "the raging flame of love" (p. 209). I like how Medea describes her condition in the soliloquy that follows. She has never been overtaken by love, and she laments "If I could blaze no more, I would be healed. Instead, despite myself, a force that I have never known before impels me now: my longing needs one thing; my reason seeks another. I can see- and I approve the better course, and yet I choose the worse" (p. 209-10). This relates back to my previous blog about extremes... her soul is at odds, reason waging against passion. And while she knows what is best, she is hot in the flame of love and she cannot fend off her passion. She must help Jason. As the story goes on, the fire analogy is used repeatedly to depict the burning desire that she must succumb to.
Variations of the theme of madness and love are rampant in Ovid's stories, increasingly as we get into books 6-11. The pathos of love is perfected in Metamorphoses. Senses are heightened in the reading; we experience the passion these characters suffer vicariously through vivid descriptions of hot, burning, feverish, uncontrollable love. And I enjoy it all over again as it comes up in each story, this notion of our lust experienced in heat. Last semester in American Lit 2 we read a poem by Wallace Stevens called "Poems of our Climate". The poem closes with these lines:
"The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds"

That line- "The imperfect is so hot in us" - was one of my favorite things that I read in Wallace Stevens, one that will never leave me because, ironically, that is the perfect way to express what it is to be human, and flawed, and prone to excess, contending with our conscience and collapsing under the weight of our desires. To see it resurface again and again in Ovid- these perfect depictions of the heat of imperfection- has been exciting and beautiful.

Greek and Roman Names

As I got into Ovid, I quickly realized that the names Ovid uses in his stories for mythological characters were unfamiliar since they are different then the ones we have been using in our class discussions. This is because Ovid is a Roman writer. The Romans adopted many of the legends of Greek mythology, adapting them to a Latin equivalent. Here you can find a list of the most well-known parallels and their descriptions:
http://www.geocities.com/athens/troy/2774/mythgods.html

Madness

I have found myself bombarded with the theme of extremities in the books that I have been exploring in the last week. Do you ever notice how in life we sometimes fail to find the middle ground that our sanity depends upon? It's either all or nothing, black or white, good or bad, high or low. I really believe that life can be harder for passionate people because they experience emotions and pursue goals with marked intensity, and thus are prone to these extremities. I have been fascinated reading about characters in mythology suffering from this passion, which is a blessing and a curse.
The Phaedrus is a book that's been sitting on my shelf for months, but I'd forgotten about until we got into the Symposium in class. The two works are spoken of as companion dialouges. But rather than an open discussion amoung friends at a party, Phaedrus takes place between two characters only: Phaedrus and Socrates. And while it also centers around the topic of love, Phaedrus explores a wide range of other high passions including madness, divinity, art and beauty (which is why I enjoyed it even more than the Symposium, and would highly reccomend it as a compliment to that discussion). And the best part of Phaedrus, I thought, was it's discussion of the nature of the soul and the extremeties that rule us: our lust for pleasure, and our conscience or judgement that aims at what is right. In other words, excess and restraint. Socrates uses the perfect metaphor of the soul in 3 parts: A charioteer driving two horses. On the right is a white horse: he is good, noble, and obedient. On the left is a black horse: he is evil, disobedient, and drives the charioteer towards excessive and lustful delights. And Socrates says that for true love to flourish, the dark horse must be tamed and the good one freed. As we learned in the Symposium, love is highly reliant on balance; for true love to flourish, the dark horse must be tamed, and the good horse freed.
Classical Literature is littered with examples of the extremities. Even the genres of comedy and tragedy represent opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. Comic characters are worse; the heroes in tragedy are better. I am really enjoying the exploration of madness and sanity in the material we're reading. In the beginning of Phaedrus, Socrates tells Phaedrus that he is "sick with passion for hearing people speak". He goes on to a deeper discussion of madness, defending it in a way, because great things come from madness, and this is true. When we become possessed by passion, that is when action is taken. Aristotle said in his Poetics that action is active: when we percieve something that we want, something beautiful, we move ourselves towards it. Madness, and passion, is a driving force. It is productive. Love is madness: it takes us to the extremes. Which leads me to Ovid...

"Myth"

The word "myth" comes from the greek "mythos" meaning "story" or "tale". I just thought that was kind of curious, since the ancient greeks considered these "stories" to be true; they took it for religious truth. And if you examine the basis for the most popular religions today, they all center around myths and stories that a culture believes to be true. Sort of a paradox, but I thought it was a neat observation that myths are recurring across time in all cultures, and that religion is a realm of life that operates within the cyclic time scale as opposed to the linear. Think of reincarnation and living eternally in heaven. I guess linear time is a very established, worldly, modern scale but cyclic is something more sacred. It actually ties in very well with Aristotle's view of poetry and history. Linear time is historical, and cyclic is poetic. Just adding some thoughts on the idea...

Thought of Eternal Return

I forget in what context we brought up the "myth of the eternal return" in class last week, but my interest was peaked, and I googled it that afternoon. There are two big endorsers of this idea who's names frequented my search results: Mircea Eliade and Fredrich Neitzche. I found an excerpt from Eliade's book "The Myth of the Eternal Return" online that amused me:

"The past is but a prefiguration of the future. No event is irreversible and no transformation is final. In a certain sense, it is even possible to say that nothing new happens in the world, for everything is but the repetition of the same primordial archetypes; this repetition, by actualizing the mythical moment when the archetypal gesture was revealed, constantly maintains the world in the same auroral instant of the beginnings."

Now those blockquotes are holding in some mind-boggling ideas about life and the universe- the same idea that was boggling my mind in my linguistics class that I have just prior to Classical Lit. The day we brought up "eternal return", I had just come from a discussion about linear and cyclic scales of time. This applied to linguistics b/c we were discussing obligatory tenses and how when we speak in our culture, we put everything onto a scale of time: past, present, future tense. But I learned that day that not all cultures view time in this manner, some indigenous cultures see time as cyclic. They believe that the important things in life are recurring, so nothing is in the past or future, it is constantly coming around again. I was having a hard time wrapping my mind around this scale of time; how does a culture function on this time scale? What about history? Then MS mentioned "eternal return", and my google search gave a lot of insight into this concept, which is essentially the central belief of our English 213 class: Everything that has happened before and will happen again, since the universe (or time itself) is fundamentally cyclic
Imagine that: did it ever even cross your mind that time could be anything but linear? I know I never questioned the system. I like the idea of cyclic time. Nietzche used it as a basis for practical hope. I think there is a lot of hope in the idea of constant recurring, but how deep are we taking this? To say that nothing is ever new and nothing is irreversible is to deny reality, because while the ideas keep recurring throughout history, they occur under different circumstances and yield a situation that is entirely unique. I completely believe in these archetypes and universal themes- they're the stuff that epiphanies spring from! But they are all colored differently according to the terms under which they occur. I guess that's how history is made. So in a broad sense, I subscribe to this "thought of eternal return"- and absolutely to it's application to this class- but these situations are recurring if you examine them broadly and without the details. The details are what make time linear, and real. And since time is such a fundamental component to our entire existense, it's good to know we have options!
So we know that the word myth comes from the greek "muthos" meaning a "traditional tale". This is indicative of a story, something made up, but in greek society these myths of the gods that we are studying in class were taken for truth.

Antigone(s)

For all of you who are having difficulties mentally digesting George Steiner's study and criticism of the tradegy of "Antigone", here is a different, perhaps more easily understood interpretation of the themes presented in the drama and their influence on our culture...
http://mason.gmu.edu/~lsmithg/ahegel.htm