Bucolic hiatus

When Antonio was nine, talking perhaps about something his brother had made, he said it wasn’t terribly robust — jabbed his finger in my direction, as he was wont to do, and exclaimed delightedly, “You gave me that word!” Indeed, several days before, it had come up, and needed explaining.

We must acquire all our words from others in that way, with the possible exception of idiosyncratic coinages, but in so doing, make them our own; their pedigree is lost to history, but that history lent them substance. We, as the individuals we feel ourselves to be, subsist in the relationships that have made up our lives.

Those lives are also lived in books, to a greater or lesser extent.

Consider this beautiful scrap, from the first story of J.G. Ballard’s Vermilion Sands:

… and here the rising air above the sand-reefs was topped by swan-like clumps of fair-weather cumulus

The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D

That made me think of Ballard as a boy in Singapore, first encountering the expression “fair-weather friend”. Our knowledge of our native tongue has a richness the foreign learner can never recuperate, because it contains within it a lifetime’s experience, from the vernacular to the sublime. Only a writer would transmute the cliche into that expressive collocation, but he can do so only with the weight of the language’s history as counterpoise, both the literary lexicon, and shapes of sentences that dance, leaving the well-trodden ground behind.

This live weight is congruent with the discovery of comparative philology that languages embrace their ancestry. On the most concrete level, it can be seen in an irregular plural, like ‘men’, betraying the original presence of an -i ending that dropped off before the word was ever written down, but having shifted the vowel before it, that remained as its trace. Taking these results together, we can deduce with varying degrees of certainty that our iron age ancestors kept cattle, because of the relationship between the vocabulary of bucolic husbandry in the child languages, or that they must have lived in certain Caucasian steppes because of their words for trees and other flora with, collectively, a confined geographical distribution; that they had a myth of Prometheus, who stole from the gods; the structure of their families and marriage practices, from kinship terms; and so on.

The generic insight is also contained in the discovery of deep time in rocks: fossils, and sedimentary strata rotated through ninety degrees with igneous rock above them. Even the natural world is the domain of history.

Making sense

It was like old times: reading a piece in the LRB that made me feel I understood an author in rich new ways. Nicholas Spice is an old hand. I went practically straight out to the bookshop to get J.M. Coetzee’s latest, and by serendipity, found Michael Cunningham’s Day practically next to it. Perhaps it would be fair to say the South African author is less immediately accessible, or harder to warm to. Or less flattering of the human condition. As Spice doesn’t quite say at the end of his piece, Coetzee is like a frog who won’t turn into a prince. He shows us “everything that is unlike Bach, horribly, unlike Bach”, displayed like a “glass abattoir”, but still, like Arnold “spooked by the melancholy long withdrawing roar of the ocean, he … holds to the idea of being true to one another”, more in the breach than in the observance as it may be. Coetzee’s exchange with the psychoanalyst Arabella Kurtz, published in 2015 as The Good Story, ponders the different but kindred aspirations of psychotherapy and fiction to make sense of our lives, to give an account that may be illuminating, liberating, healing …

Since we cannot live with the reality of our radically interrupted and discontinuous selfhood, we make up stories about ourselves that paper over the innumerable cracks and lacunae in our experience of being. We choose our relationships based on stories about other people. Within this economy, love relationships depend for their success on the degree of congruity between the mutual fictions that we tell one another: ‘When the fictions interlock well, the relation works or seems to work … [otherwise] conflict or disengagement follow’.

LRB 7.iii.24, p. 8

The vertiginousness of that perspective is common to both analysis, and the kind of fiction Coetzee espouses. We could not conduct our lives without papering over those cracks, and yet, both ventures propose to find truth, salvation, or its impossibility, in recognising that the house is built on sand. Coetzee worries that the yarn spun on the couch may be too soothing, too cocooning; there is also the risk that it doesn’t respect the experience or the agency of the subject. Freud, Coetzee says, aimed to patch his patients up to the degree that they could become able once again “to love and to work”, but those are social functions whose undergirdings are continually remade as society and culture unfold through history. How we might find ourselves in them is as much an ideological as a hygienic question. For example, the possibility of dignity in work is largely a bourgeois prerogative, now everywhere eroded, or consider the evolution of homosexuality from pathology to identity; both these changes have occurred within half a century.

Perhaps the serendipity of the bookshelf is more than an accident, because both books are ones some people must want to read, though one copy in two may end up beached on the coffee table. The satisfactions of Cunningham’s narrative are easier, if not quite princely; but it feels undeniable that both writers espouse an ideal of congruence, of how human beings might be, touched by the better angels of our nature, ways in which we might seek to make sense of ourselves and each other without too much deceit, however much too much is. Perhaps that is possible too, sometimes, for the followers of Freud.

Redundant complexity

I thought I’d posted about “The Map and the Rope”, which can be downloaded here (the abstract is dry as dust, the early pages of the book proper are stylish and informative):

https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/36734

The idea as far as I can remember is one I found illuminating — besides adoring the title. When assimilating a highly inflected language such as Finnish, all that morphological complexity needs to become effortless. Two aspects of the learning process — though in the end, both may be Wittgenstinian “ladders to throw away” — are the rote mastery of paradigms, and an understanding of their underlying phonemic logic. The latter is the map, the former the rope. Knowing why it is like that helps, but recollecting a paradigm involves fewer cognitive steps. In the end, even that dissolves into a “just knowing”. I will give just one example of a hard one:

manner [mainland] –> in the illative case = mantereeseen

The two tricky but entirely regular things are that the sequence <nt> assimilates the dental stop to a nasal in a closed syllable, but not an open one; and the stem of oblique cases ends in a long e (instead of possible short e, or i) giving gen. ‘mantereen’ which looks a bit like an illative … so we then need an ‘s’ to attach it. As Maisa Martin finds in her study, few native speakers of Finnish would be able to explain that, and it may not be much help to the non-native learner in the throes of trying to describe a fjord. But children of two or three can do so effortlessly. They can also walk on the sea in winter, but that is another matter.

This leads me to the actual topic of this post, the difference between how hard it is to learn something versus how easy it is to deploy once mastered. A simple example is found in the Dvořak keyboard layout. The numbers on a standard QWERTY keyboard are placed in numerical order; Dvorak has 7,5,3,1,0,2,4,6,8, which while it clearly makes some concession to being “intuitive” – the higher odd and even numbers being in sequence – places the more common smaller numbers under the stronger index finger. On the other hand, the vowels on the home row are A O E U I, which is enough to offend anyone who has ever taught children how to read, though it may make more sense to Scrabble players.

But once you have learned it, which probably takes no longer than learning QWERTY, it falls trippingly off the fingers, at least just the same, and purportedly with considerable ergonomic advantage. There is, as it were, no map, just rope.

Chinese characters are generally considered to be an extremely complex writing system, that no one in their right mind would have consented to: it is difficult to the point of perversity, and an uncharitable observer would naturally conclude it was just a scheme to retain literacy as the preserve of the few. But although Communist China introduced some aesthetically displeasing simplifications to a few hundred of the most common sinograms (“hollow characters”), there is no appetite among the Chinese to reduce their language to the phonetic transcription that is Pinyin. A Chinese teacher I once had described her distaste at having to do so in another class she taught with students who wanted to sidestep the characters: you can’t see what the words mean, she said. I imagine she, though a native speaker, found herself needing to read out the words in her mind to hear what they meant; whereas ma – horse is a pictogram of a horse, and ma – mother is the same pictogram a bit smaller, with a pictogram of a woman to its left. Harder to learn, harder even to write, but easier to read, and even knowing the language poorly, its writing system feels to me supremely literate and supremely rational.

At the other extreme, I have also dabbled in Gregg shorthand; I am not familiar with any other such system, but I dare say the same points apply for Pitman and the rest. The aim is to simplify writing by reducing redundancy both of phonemes recorded, and the actual cursive shapes. For example, both ‘form’ and ‘from’ are represented by f-m, a curve and a horizontal line, two strokes easily executed. This ‘short form’ can appear as a component in such words as ‘deform’ or ‘information’. The complexity is vast. The upshot is, hard to learn, easy to write, hard to read. Even reading back your own shorthand is like the Chinese teacher frowning at her pinyin on the whiteboard.

Simplicity is a virtue, but what is actually simple is no simple question.

Purple swans

A little Latin is needed after all:

Me nec femina nec puer
iam nec spes animi credula mutui         30
nec certare iuvat mero
nec vincire novis tempora floribus.

Sed cur heu, Ligurine, cur
manat rara meas lacrima per genas?
Cur facunda parum decoro                 35
inter verba cadit lingua silentio?

Nocturnis ego somniis
iam captum teneo, iam volucrem sequor
te per gramina Martii
campi, te per aquas, dure, volubilis.    40

‘iuvare’ can mean help … though (without a large dictionary to hand) I will guess that is mainly when compounded with ad-. But really, it means please, and that’s the only translation that fits with the other laddish activities that also depend on the verb, which Lowell omits: boisterous symposia, knocking back the merum, unwatered wine which was the tipple of topers or young men letting their hair down — and perhaps pursuing a girl at the end of the evening with torches, the ‘komos’. The equivalent for him would probably be a bottle of Jack Daniels, and maybe that was a bit close to the bone. Perhaps both senses could be managed with “hit the spot” or something of the kind. But Lowell’s “was a help” is so off-handedly flat it can only be deliberate. As for his rendering of the final stanza … it’s not the waters of the Tiber (adjacent to the Campus Martius, convenient for washing after exercise) he cannot hold (“iam … teneo, iam … sequor / te”, but the lover pursued in his dreams. But it doesn’t matter, we get the point — another style and mood is being gestured at, that does not befit late middle age.

On another note altogother, what are we to make of purple swans? Purple was apparently Aphrodite’s colour … on the other hand, the classical colour lexicon is notoriously opaque to our expectations (the wine-dark sea) and maybe it just suggests exceptional refulgence; or regal splendiferousness. I don’t think anybody really knows, though.

Intermissa, Venus, diu …

Here is Horace, Odes IV i, in a fine seventeenth-century translation I can’t identify:

https://poets.org/poem/book-4-ode-1-venus

Horace, no spring chicken at fiftyish (‘circa lustra decem’), urges the ‘mater saeva Cupidinum’, Venus with her ferocious cherubs, to pick on a younger man. The critic Eduard Fraenkel points out that being engaged in “love’s warfare” also stands for writing erotic lyric: the poet thinks he is all washed up, but still, he has been visited once more by the muse (compare August Kleinzahler’s “unvisited, I do not live, I endure”). And this perhaps is the connection that prompted Lowell’s late riff on this poem:

Departure

(Intermissa, Venus, diu)

'Waiting out the rain, 
but what are you waiting for? 
The storm can only stop 
to get breath to begin again ... 
always in suspense to hit 
the fugitive in flight. 
Your clothes, moth‐holed 
with round cigarette burns, 
sag the closet‐pole. 
Your books are rows of hollow suits; 
"Who lives in them?" 
we ask acidly, 
and bring them down 
flapping their paper wrappers. 
So many secondary troubles, 
the body's curative diversions; 
but what does it matter, 
if one is oneself, has something 
past criticism to change to? 
Not now as you were young... 
Horace in his fifties held 
a Ligurian girl 
captive in the sleep of night, 
followed her flying across the grass 
of the Campus Martius, saw her lost 
in the Tiber he could not hold. 
Can you hear my first voice, 
amused in sorrow, 
dramatic in amusement ... 
catastrophies of description 
knowing when to stop, 
when not to stop? 
It cannot be replayed; 
only by exaggeration 
could I tell the truth. 
For me, neither boy 
nor woman was a help. 
Caught in the augmenting storm, 
choice itself is wrong, 
nothing said or not said tells -- 
a shapeless splatter of grounded rain ... 
Why, Love, why, are a few tears 
scattered on my cheeks?'

What for Horace is merely a literary conceit — I dare say, not of his own devising, but made famous by him — expresses Lowell’s own sense of what might be called lateness. There’s something almost slapdash in the spare tone, but if you listen carefully, I think you can hear Horace’s metre (let those with the Latin for it try out the verses on their tongue); and if that is charitable, hear the different voices crowding one another out of the verse, from the lapidary ineptness of the rough, perhaps rusty quotations from the Latin, to the self-ironising flatness of the fatal self-pity (‘choice itself is wrong, / nothing said or not said tells’), and the very un-Horatian sense of a well-worn reputation become burdensome — and at the end, through all the weariness, just as in Horace’s poem, the stubborn refusal to give up, either on life (the tears), or on art (the writing about them): Venus, that is, refuses his prayer.

Po

This is just a scrap: an idea I encountered in the local library when I was a boy, which I still find useful. Edward de Bono, whom I have broken the Wikipedia Rule to look up, wrote a lot of popular and gimmicky books, and invented the term (but surely not the substance) of lateral thinking.

Po is, as a mathematician might say, orthogonal to Yes and No, rather than existing in the space between them. It is a way of allowing yourself to entertain an idea that might otherwise be rejected out of hand as lacking plausibility; and then perhaps it turns out to have staying power after all, or else it leads on to something else you wouldn’t otherwise have thought of — this is I suppose “lateral thinking”.

I do actually use this, not terribly frequently, perhaps on closer to a monthly basis than a daily one.

Wikipedia tells me what I didn’t know, that it can be used in conversation too, to allow you to entertain someone else’s view even though it may not seem to you to have legs. This is a pleasingly undogmatic idea. As it might be:

“Let’s get married.”

“Po.”

or:

“Why don’t you buy a bicycle?”

“Po.”

Someone else’s comment on him, predictably, endears him to me (I’m so easy):

This approach to dealing with conflict is completely out of tune with modern thinking and, therefore, unsatisfactory.

But I don’t think his approach to peace in the middle east will gain many adherents today:

In 2000, de Bono advised a UK Foreign Office committee that the Arab-Israeli conflict might be due, in part, to low levels of zinc found in people who eat unleavened bread (e.g. pita flatbread). De Bono argued that low zinc levels lead to heightened aggression. He suggested shipping out jars of Marmite to compensate.

The bathwater

Rummaging in the archives for something else (the two roots of modern criticism) I came across a quotation of I.A. Richards by that vieillard terrible of the LRB, Terry Eagleton: history (not the ipsissima verba) is the record of things which ought not to have taken place. Now the idea that we might do better than that seems to be running out of road, indeed, many might well argue that the very notion of progress, except of the modest if not exactly trivial kind represented by dentistry and other more diabolical innovations such as the virtual panopticon, is itself just another pretext for things which ought not to take place, which are still done, because that end justifies the means; but that very argument is a justification for conservative complacency in what are very great evils and suffering inflicted daily in every quarter. As the Tao Te Ching doesn’t quite say, action and inaction are both action: the world continues to turn on its circle.

If history is the record of our collective failure to live up to the fine ideals on which any claim to the merit of mankind must be staked — contumaceous revolution upon furious epoch, signifying nothing — are we not individually responsible for that? By “we” I mean in particular bien-pensant high-minded people who write blogs, or just read the paper, of whatever drift or persuasion, if you like, the hand-wringing classes, who enjoy the leisure to stand back from the fray, and may in some cases justly hold that gives them “perspective”. I don’t have personal experience of a family at loggerheads over Trump or Brexit, but there is a more general sense in which all our lives embody the fractured Zeitgeist writ petty. We mean to do better, but there just isn’t the scope for it. There are no good answers, but we must pick one. We are beset by a plague of stridency that gives virtue a bad name. Withdrawing from the mêlée in an access of patrician ennui is a dereliction of duty. Perhaps the truest mark of civilisation is kindness, but when push comes to shove, as it now does and is, that’s a luxury we can’t afford.

How can we save the baby? Because the mascot, the standard, the just cause — that is not the baby.

The Greeks have nothing to teach us here. In the Hellenistic period, they too retreated into mysticism and self-help: Epicureanism or stoicism for the cream of society, mystery religions and witchcraft for the hoi polloi. And they meanwhile continued to slaughter one another for no terribly good reason, over centuries deforesting and depopulating the country — for javelin fodder and navies. Eventually, they provided the sons of senators with their polish and culture: when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, his original bon mot was a quotation in Greek from Menander. Till recently we too borrowed the literate finery of the classical world, the common currency of those within the charmed circle. We may do right to prize it, but does it lend us anything more than urbanity? Where is the substance of what we look up to here and there in the past, and aspire to for ourselves?

Where is the baby, our deus absconditus?

On quiet confidence

Credit where credit is due — this post owes its genesis to the LRB, an unusually good one for once. One piece told the history of curing goitre with iodine supplementation in Switzerland, where the glaciers removed the topsoil and with it, naturally occurring iodine. A deficiency in the diet leads to hypertrophe of the thyroid, as it tries to extract more of it from an insufficient supply in the bloodstream. The result is an ugly deformity as well as serious all-round ill health. Based on a hunch, iodine supplementation was tried, and worked so effectively that it was soon adopted nationwide. But the mechanism wasn’t understood, and some opposed it, in part for reasons of personal reputation. Eventually the mechanism underlying the correlation was established, and iodine supplementation occurs today round the world, perhaps also where it is not needed. This story struck me as quietly heroic. A lot of science proceeds on the basis of the imperfectly known, to a degree that is probably not widely understood. Sometimes that means bad ideas are adopted, but this case is one of quiet but solid confidence.

In the same issue was a review of a biography of Elagabulus, a Roman emperor of the third century whose reign was luridly scandalous, and brief. The classicist Ronald Syme studied the underlying historical sources, and concluded that most of what is recorded of that emperor and others near in time is mere titilllating fiction. Historians will tend to spin what they can out of those tales, on the grounds that there must be some underlying truth to them. Syme’s work insists, through meticulous scholarship, that our knowledge is less than the most that could be squeezed out of the sources by as it were joining up the dots: “there must be something in it”. Commonly a source that has been preserved will base itself on a more reliable one that has been lost, but he proves this is not the case. This work is an example of the just appreciation of the limits of knowledge, that I think has something in common with the story of goitre.

A comparison occurs to me that is perhaps rather tenuous. Consider abortion, capital punishment, and illegal drugs. In each case there is a pragmatic argument on the liberal side of the question, that is evidence-based. When the first and the last are criminalised, there are worse social harms. People are going to do those things whether the law permits it or not, through some combination of need and availability. With capital punishment, arguments can be made against it that are empirically based: there are in fact wrongful convictions, that can’t be put right if the falsely accused person is dead; those executed are disproportionately black, poor, or mentally disturbed or limited; and so on. These arguments are intended to sway people who aren’t opposed on principle, and may on the contrary be deeply committed to the lex talionis, but once accepted, they must commonly lead those they convince to more abstract and high-minded reasons.

At any rate, there is traffic between the empirical and the ideal. Not many these days would say that abortion is a terrible evil, but the evils of backstreet abortion are worse; they are much more likely to found their view on a woman’s right to choose. What I want to suggest (I actually think I may have done so here before) is that there is a continuum between the pragmatic and the abstract. For example, we might care about wrongful execution because it seems very wrong that an innocent person should die, but that idea is only a shade away from the feeling that it is barbaric to intentionally kill another human being, whatever they have done. The uncertainty about the truth of what happened is of the same substance as our own recognition of our imperfection. You could put it like this: “there but for the grace of God …” Caring about the truth of what happened, refusing to jump to false conclusions on the basis of flawed evidence, is a form of respect for the individual human being that might also lead us to turn away from condemning that person in all their complexity, utterly and as beyond redemption.

Why Greece?

For some time, patchily documented here, I have ploughed that old furrow: old, that is, even in my own lifetime, four decades back; but old, lately lost in the mists of time, as we let those shades go from our ken. Within my lifetime, since I have lived, the idea has become nonsensical that a man ignorant of the ancient world is an unlettered Philistine. That ship has sailed, so what curse or fate binds me to it, as the Flying Dutchman? And I think besides all the well-rehearsed arguments (lately recast to good effect by Alan Jacobs as “temporal bandwidth”), what it amounts to is a desperate rejection of the really existing world. The possibility of cultural or personal swimming against the current has already been lost. Our cause is lost, and I say that, meaning any we. We have already entered the dark ages, and there is no escaping the cursed Zeitgeist, that visits us in our most intimate sphere, in the bedroom and in the hearth as in the public square. We are beyond salvation, and yet we must live.

Consider then the Greeks, differently gifted than we were, cursed just the same, but also differently cursed. Over five hundred years they danced to Ares’ tune, in wretched alternation of regimes, till first Alexander and then Rome subjected them. The ebb and flow of our own history appeals to justice, and so did theirs, but their grounds of conflict were not ours. As the times turn, we face a collapse of the dichotomy between right and left into one between technocrats and fascists (dear reader, that was a chiasmus, q.v.). Their civil strife was between oligarchy and demos. They knew nothing of the rights of man, but still much that we inherited from them, of humanity. They fought and died, and gained nothing, just as we too have gained nothing but the small comforts of science — dentistry, and worse. It was “sound and fury”, and in that way, though the issues of their day and ours differ toto coelo, and yes, their depths and ours are not of the same substance, still, we are just the same. We argue and posture like monkeys in our mock purple. We treat one another like knaves for the advantage of the moment. Our ideals are false pretexts. We are swayed, so lightly, by mere air.

I wax incandescent in outrage, but the prism of the classical world allows me to do so in abstraction from the particular follies of any one epoch; because what matters is not that someone is wrong, and we are not, wrong though they in fact are. That is, I am not saying there is or was nothing at stake in the questions that stirred us. But there is no profit in them, because we lack the substance to live seriously. Doing so is an ideal, as for instance delineated by Aristotle, of which we fall fatally short, because we are but monkeys in human clothing.

Imprecating the Muses

It’s a commonplace that the only good reason to dally with the Muses is because you are compelled to it. So said Rilke: “Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write?”

Or as August Kleinzahler put it, “Unvisited, I do not live, I endure” — the last line of his poem The Goddess.

As before with other poets, I have been getting to know Kleinzahler, reading one poem as my first act each day. As with the others, one must tune in; but the reader is stupid (or the purpose of poetry is to be a tuning-fork). In this case, I may have skipped the title, and read the poem first as self-pitying; that didn’t sound like this poet at all. But the Muse as lover! Of course.

That made me think again about ‘The Tree’ (unfortunately not online anywhere I can find, but here are the opening and closing lines). The tree is moribund, ‘Pinch a branch to see if it’s quick / […] dogs / pissing at the base / birds nesting up high where leaves had been’

but that shield of bark
photons roam the grain of
and pathogens try to corkscrew into
only to fall apart and dry ...

because it would not bloom
because it would not die

the axman came

Rather than the ruins of a human being, isn’t this poem about a creative blockage?

Ontological furniture

I’ve never got properly to grips with what I might as well call English-language philosophy, but I still took against it as a young man, because of its apparent dryness and lack of ambition. It rubbed me up altogether the wrong way to read the likes of A.J. Ayer dismissing everything of interest as “nonsense”. A good friend of mine who is a philosopher listened to my Romantic philistinism with more respect, or at least patience, than it deserved. The grandfather of that spirit of modesty was Kant, who famously wrote of the “humble abode” of reason, its proper earthly sphere; and it was reading Kant that slowly made me get the point.

My revolt against what seemed a “new scholasticism” was founded on its ceding those important questions to mere opinion or fancy, but the refusal to make vain pronouncements isn’t tantamount to indifference. Recently I have been writing about the kairos. The whole point, if I may baldly summarise, is the absence of a heuristic: in many situations, which may be the most important ones, there is no right answer awaiting discovery had we but the faculties and wisdom to perceive it. We may need to imagine we have been guided by reason, and furthermore, that its conclusions are objectively correct, but in fact, the choice is ours to make, our responsibility, and if we choose with all the self-possession of a piece of rotten flotsam adrift on the tides, the consequences are still ours to bear and justify. If we choose from cowardice or spite, we will probably still call it prudence, and proceed on a more even keel by being able to believe it. Philosophy rightly, with sorrow, averts its gaze.

In a similar deflationary spirit, it is a commonplace that tyranny “just is” (the “philosophical” just, with its distinctive, slightly tense inflection) the absence of certain merely procedural safeguards, habeas corpus and the rest, because human nature is such that it is unwise to rely on the temperance or discretion of policemen, magistrates or bureacrats: they are licensed to use violence and compulsion, but under constraint, partial and imperfect as that is. In the same way, evil really exists, but it just is the absence of humanity, the insufficiency of aidos, “not quite liking” the abominable choice; it is not some ectoplasmic emanation or miasma, to observe it requires no fanciful metaphysical commitments, nor can it be told by strutting cinematic signs, vampiric pallor, a lunatic cackle or eye, Germanic shrillness rising in the throat. To borrow a word from a different context, it is banal.

Mantic placebo

One way of establishing the kairos (what, and perhaps when) is divination. I read an interesting piece some time back in the LRB about pre-battle prognostications in the Ancient Near East: ritual sacrifice was held to guarantee success, as well as determine propitious tactics. If you won, that proved the effectiveness of the priests; if you lost, then they must have done something wrong. It was a perfect self-validating system that created order out of chaos, giving princes control over their military fortunes; rather as the ducking-stool was an effective way of dealing with the witch problem.

I thought I’d written about his here before, but I can’t find it. The I Ching, an old friend once said to me, works as long as you believe in it. This ancient text has acquired accretions like the Talmud, but at its core, relates a military campaign. This means it’s full of ‘kairetic’ questions: whether to cross the river, or wait; whether to humour your enemy, or attack; and so on. One consults the oracle by choosing a question, a matter of doubt; surely the habit of so doing encourages doubt itself, which it might or might not be a good thing to countenance more often. Then with yarrow stalks or coins, a hexagram is chosen, with adjunct passages brought into play by “moving lines”. Then you puzzle out how it might be relevant to the thing at hand, and what the upshot might be.

But this works without attributing heuristic potency to the oracle itself: the process of consulting it is a device to help see round corners. It might be that the fact of considering a possibility you shrink from serves either to close it off, or open it up; and the gnomic words of the hexagram allow either interpretation, according to what one is prepared to contemplate. Or it might be they suggest a course of action or inaction that never would have occurred to you, but which lay silent in the mind.

There’s also an attitude implicit especially in the accretions: a spiritual reticence, that might rub off on a person who lets it in. For those who can’t read ancient Chinese, there’s the difficulty of translation as well, with its tendency to learn only the lessons it chooses from what is an alien world. But the same problem exists for native speakers, perhaps pushed back centuries or millenia into the past, when at one time or another, the text acquired its patina.

I was going to mention this in the last post but one, which had far too many things in it. This is, I suppose, an example (or two examples) of how the kairos doesn’t actually exist in the world, till we make it, whether that means making the best of what might be seen as adversity, possibly of our own making, possibly thrust upon us by others; or trying our best to procure a better outcome, by judicious reflection, or consulting heart as well as head, or heart before head; or whatever is needful.

But on the whole, such a practice probably isn’t going to change a person’s course. The Assyrians and the Hittites will sooner or later come to blows. Thinking of getting a new job, having an affair, getting a bicycle? You probably will in the end.

Pascal’s wager

Pascal’s wager — you might as well choose faith, because if you are wrong, you are no worse off — probably deserves deeper consideration within its time and within the Pensées. I mention it here merely to note that it’s commonly regarded as a bit feeble. Perhaps Pascal intended it as an overture to the sceptical reader, and felt no need himself of such an inducement. The whole way of thinking the question implies is one in which the battle is already lost.

The God of the theologians has many faces, and that inconsistency is both disingenuous and fatal. God cannot be at once a person with whom we engage (inviting theodicy) and a cosmic principle. [The concept of “person” has forensic roots.] But at some point, as is still the case in most of the world today, the existence of God seemed obvious, without whom the whole moral and cosmic order would come tumbling down. Atheism was a position both barely conceivable, and intolerable. The atheist would stand outside society as an amoral predator. In Deism, this idea was watered down to the extent that religion was necessary to maintain social order — a poor remnant of the sense of immanent and sustaining divinity, in which the moral principle that the godhead embodies holds up our hearts and the world.

The Greeks divided things up across the pantheon, a cosmology displaced for the thinking man by the quietist philosophies of the Hellenistic period (when life was to be endured, enjoyed, or mocked, now it could no longer be engaged in as politics by a free citizenry — according to the choice of Stoicism, Epicureanism, or Cynicism). We should not dismiss the Olympian way of thinking so lightly. The gods symbolised the dimensions and parameters of life, and their combination to wreak havoc as history’s Muse dictated. Here is Euripides on Eros (no Greek this time):

Eros, god of love, distilling liquid desire down upon the eyes, bringing sweet pleasure to the souls of those against whom you make war, never to me may you show yourself to my hurt nor ever come but in due measure and harmony. For the shafts neither of fire nor of the stars exceed the shaft of Aphrodite, which Eros, Zeus’s son, hurls forth from his hand. ‘Tis folly, folly, that the land of Greece makes great the slaughter of cattle by the banks of the Alpheus and in the Pythian house of Apollo if we pay no honor to Eros, mankind’s despot, who holds the keys to the sweet chambers of Aphrodite! He ruins mortals and sets them upon all manner of disaster when he visits them.

Euripides Hipp. 525 ff, translation by David Kovacs

Plato, too, notes that Eros deserves more attention among the gods than he gets (Symposium, 177a; 189c). Between florid paganism, the Greek faible for personification, and a pressing awareness of the same facts of life with which we too in our rational age contend, nothing could make more sense, and it is anachronistic to insist that it’s merely figurative, a manner of speaking. These are the present forces of life, be it eros, stormy seas, nice compunction, hunting or agriculture.

That brings me to my point that we do just the same in our own way. We would like to find “meaning” in life, and just as for the Greeks after Alexander, that seems to call for an inward turn, and an openness to wishful thinking. Life will not bear the burden. Materialism and fanaticism are stronger than the bonds of kindness. Parents and children betray one another. The best is squeezed out of us in — almost always — deforming, demeaning work. There is no fairness. War continually returns as the map is redrawn. homo homini lupus. The Fates spin the thread of our lives, measure it out and cut it off, before we go down to the shades.

And yet, our cultural imaginarium is populated by ideals we may put on for a while like a garment, before we must pass it on, notions of the worthwhile, such as the virtues (steadfastness, reasonableness, fairness, forethought); or art; or the family or community; truth, reason; love, faith, friendship. They are not ours to own, but we may inhabit them. Are these not our gods?

On being uncertain whether to marry or buy a bicycle

That was the title of the last post but one, till I realised it risked becoming intractable. The question remains whether it would have been better to synthesize the disparate material, or separate it; there is value in marrying ideas that seem ready to fly apart. The natural break is that it’s possible to consider the idea of the kairos (again, with a certain regret, or even distaste, transliterated) without placing it in the context of a particular Greek play: it is established that it can mean the right thing, not necessarily the right time.

The marriage, or leap, I want to make is between this idea and the process of writing, with reference especially to this writing. I used to keep — still keep — a journal, in which on the whole I don’t write about my actual life, something I lost interest in doing in my twenties. But I think I don’t write so much, or in so articulate a way, about ideas; that has been displaced to this blog, which in turn stands in the place of other forms of writing, that could be called literature. There is no public for Apipucos, but the very idea of having readers makes me try harder to bring these musings into focus; nonetheless, they don’t arrive anywhere. One could take that as a virtue: if I felt the need to establish incremental conclusions, I would just be writing some undergraduate essay, and worse, those who actually know about classics or epistemology or whatever it might be would probably tell me to go back to the library and get my facts straight. Most blogs, I think, really exist as an act of self-promotion, to ponder and advertise some other activity; to put it another way, their essential raison d’être is as a form of ephemeral engagement.

Contrast the Zibaldone of Giacomo Leopardi, with its thousands of pages of careful argument. The existential hesitation I propose is whether I would do better to tauten my journal, and archive this public face? Or undertake some public project with more traction on the world?

Ten years ago, when the florid viciousness of the internet today was a mere peachy bloom on the silicon, I caught the tail of a controversy about creative writing and the MFA, and made a snarky comment about something someone said about it, not knowing that she would get an alert as a result, as I realised when my post received a silent visit from across the water. (I believe this is called a “pingback”.) Thinking about what the blogosphere is actually for brought my misdeed to mind, and I returned for a look and saw not only that I had been unfair (for which I sincerely apologise) but what good sense and rich reflections on the writing life lay below in the same post by Sonya Chung . Here is the corpus delicti:

https://apipucos.wordpress.com/2013/01/18/creative-writing/

I will begin with some thoughts about kairos to prepare the way for the parallel with Chung on good (or perhaps rather, better) writing. Granted the possibility of making mistakes, through dithering or hubris or (thinking of Phaedra) misplaced compunction — whatever it may be — how do you tell? Even in hindsight, that may not be as easy as it might seem; “the road not taken” is one we probably won’t return to as “way leads on to way”. Given a choice, one should try to do the right or best thing (rarely though in practice is there a choice, constrained as we are by our commitments, habits, prejudices); but afterwards, isn’t what makes the difference, rather than the rightness of the choice, following it through with conviction? If for example a talented graduate decides to seek fortune in the new world, or remain in the old country, consequential as the choice is, either way, the chances of success probably lie not in one way being right and the other wrong, but subsequent application and good fortune? Hindsight will then approve the choice, whichever it was; within reason, in the fullest sense, that is, an intemperate, imprudent or unjust choice risks landing so badly it is beyond salvation.

In that post, Chung says that “the difference between a writer and someone who ‘wants to be a writer’ is a high tolerance for uncertainty” — because success is so uncertain, both literary glory and the achievement on which it is supposed to rest (but public taste is fickle). She gives some examples, and then comes this marvellous metaphor:

As when you learn to drive a stick shift, there is a kind of “friction zone,” where your inner imperative to write and your tolerance for uncertainty cross each other, and the energy balance of that intersection either sets you off into motion, or you stall. I have seen many talented would-be writers stall (especially on steep inclines). Some find their way to restarting; others give up for good, they trade in for an automatic. As a teacher, I try to exemplify and nurture a deep love of reading and of sentence-and-story-making—one’s only stay against doubt and the feeling of non-existence that will inevitably creep in. I try to give student writers enough “gas” to help them manage and master the friction zone, so that they come to know that feeling of ignition, of takeoff, both bumpy and smooth, and develop a liking for it, an abiding passion, even an addiction.

If we just knew what “good writing” was, it could be turned out by the yard. All we can do is “keep writing; which by the way is the only way to write better.”

I feel like a suppliant at the temple of the Muses, not admitted as it rains for forty days and forty nights. What keeps me in vigil at the door is the abiding belief in the importance of true language, callida junctura, the mot juste, the aperçu. This can be seen too in the philologist’s pursuit of the truth of the text: both the true reading, and the true tone and sense; though none of these may be entirely recoverable, with judicious enquiry, perhaps they may come closer. For example, are the nurse’s words εἴ τοι δοκεῖ σοι at line 507 of the Hippolytus, to a reluctant, but crumbling Phaedra: “Well if that’s what you think, (then you shouldn’t have done it, but here we are) …” (giving easier sense) or “Very well then, (you shouldn’t have done it, but here we are) …” (reflecting — perhaps — idiomatic speech)? The colour of this moment — whether Phaedra is cajoled or enticed over the hump — is accordingly quite different, and the whole tone of the play also, by the accumulation of similar tough choices.

Rubbing along

I have just discovered something rather marvellous. It is well known that the Greeks had several terms for love; C.S. Lewis wrote a book on the “four loves”, namely Christian love or love from charity (agape); eros or sexual love; philia, the love of friendship; and storge, familial love, especially between parents and children — less commonly of spouses, since after all, blood is thicker than water. Each has its cognate verb, in the case of the latter, stergo. But it has (broadly) two senses, the second of which is to endure evils, or as we might perhaps say, bear with them. One can, for instance, stergein a tyrant, or one’s fate, or one’s ills.

It’s easy to read too much into this sort of thing, and to do the observation justice, I’d need to delve; but at first sight, it appears illuminating.

The commitment to one’s family is not subject to evaluation. They are just there, part of the furniture; it is horrifying when parents abandon their wayward offspring, or vice versa. I’m also reminded of something a friend said to me which I may have mentioned here: in the end, you don’t love someone despite their faults, but because of their faults. The mid point might be: with their faults.

For once, I’ve transliterated Greek — fair enough I think, as I’m not discussing texts.

Reverence again

Plutarch’s comment on Phaedra’s tricky words about αἰδώς should not really be taken as an interpretation; he quotes the snatch of Euripides as an adornment and exemplum of his own argument, which as far as I can make it out goes something like this: when we are guided by an emotion in concert with reason, all is well, but if the emotion stands alone, it tends to lead us astray. Nonetheless — this is the matter that interests him — the emotion itself is of the same nature, rather than being a separate animal. Now Euripides actually says that there are “two kinds” of αἰδώς, and they are distinguished by the καιρός, if only that were clear. I’m not sure either author’s point would change in substance by taking the question the other way, and it may be a distinction without a difference. Here is Barrett again on the bad αἰδώς:

αἰδώς, which inhibits a man from self-assertion in the face of the claims of others, is properly a virtue; but it can turn easily into a diffidence or indecisiveness which prevents him from taking a firm line at all, and that done it becomes a vice — he αἰδεῖται, cannot bring himself, to do even what he knows to be right … [Phaedra] knows that this indecisiveness, this lack of resolution, is her besetting fault, and she names and dwells on it here because it prevents her from fighting down her love as she knows she should … We can see this same lack of resolution hampering her and leading her astray at every turn: by keeping her from the swift execution of the suicide on which she thinks she is determined, by allowing the Nurse to worm out of her the secret she had meant to keep secret; in a moment, at the very turning-point of her fate, we shall see it immobilizing her when she suspects the Nurse of betrayal and yet has not the strength to hold her back.

p. 230

If the καιρός were clear, there would not be “two kinds” of αἰδώς; so she says. It is not, and how then are we to recognise it? Yet if we spare the sickle in Diana’s sacred grove, the garden will flourish, just as parents might spare the rod, even though believing that to do so is to spoil the child; today we would praise their humanity. The dewy meadow, ungrazed and unshorn, cries out for economic rationalisation, but we will be richer for “not quite liking” that.

I see an example of the meaning Barrett finds in Phaedra’s speech in my own life. There is something I know I must do — really, it is not in doubt, though I could come at it various ways, the hesitation between them alters nothing of substance — but I just can’t bring myself to put it into effect; dither too long though, and I will rue it. One might consider this to be “acratic αἰδώς”, and it feels so different from the caring hand of the gardener. Perhaps what the two forms have in common is that they represent a kind of inertia that goes some way to stop us talking ourselves into things we might come to regret, but which may also prevent us from doing what is necessary. Nor need virtue coincide with right action: for example, we may hesitate to put our parents out to pasture in a “home”, and though the right time might have been sooner, the delay shows the very reverence that is at the heart of αἰδώς.

It might tentatively be said that αἰδώς is always a kind of discomfort, but if it is the virtuous kind, it passes when we renounce the thing it made us shrink from.

These moral concepts are alien to our way of thinking, but the strangeness is only skin deep: if we can recognise how they feel when we try them on for size, then they must match our own experience too. Specifically, though we do not teach it and might not know how to name it, I think the scruple that makes us hold back is naturally recognised as a virtue, just as “assertiveness” arouses distaste; the latter’s prospects of joining the canonical seven are surely low. The result is a conservative tendency in our lives and outlook, namely, in microcosm and macrocosm, from the hearth to the forum. Rather than being ground, the proper place of an axe is by the woodpile, in repose.

Reverence

One starstruck commentator on Euripides’ Hippolytus describes the following passage as “one of the most exquisite in all Greek poetry”. Hippolytus has plucked a garland from Artemis’s sacred grove, with which he crowns her statue (73 ff):

σοὶ τόνδε πλεκτὸν στέφανον ἐξ ἀκηράτου
λειμῶνος, ὦ δέσποινα, κοσμήσας φέρω,
ἔνθ᾽ οὔτε ποιμὴν ἀξιοῖ φέρβειν βοτὰ
οὔτ᾽ ἦλθέ πω σίδηρος, ἀλλ᾽ ἀκήρατον
μέλισσα λειμῶν᾽ ἠρινὴ διέρχεται,
Αἰδὼς δὲ ποταμίαισι κηπεύει δρόσοις,
ὅσοις διδακτὸν μηδὲν ἀλλ᾽ ἐν τῇ φύσει
τὸ σωφρονεῖν εἴληχεν ἐς τὰ πάντ᾽ ἀεί,
τούτοις δρέπεσθαι, τοῖς κακοῖσι δ᾽ οὐ θέμις.
ἀλλ᾽, ὦ φίλη δέσποινα, χρυσέας κόμης
ἀνάδημα δέξαι χειρὸς εὐσεβοῦς ἄπο.
μόνῳ γάρ ἐστι τοῦτ᾽ ἐμοὶ γέρας βροτῶν:
σοὶ καὶ ξύνειμι καὶ λόγοις ἀμείβομαι,
κλύων μὲν αὐδῆς, ὄμμα δ᾽ οὐχ ὁρῶν τὸ σόν.
τέλος δὲ κάμψαιμ᾽ ὥσπερ ἠρξάμην βίου.

For you, lady, I bring this plaited garland I have made, gathered from an inviolate meadow, a place where the shepherd does not dare to pasture his flocks, where the iron scythe has never come: no, it is inviolate, and the bee makes its way through it in the spring-time. Shamefast Awe tends this garden with streams of river-water, for those to pluck who have acquired nothing by teaching but rather in whose very nature chastity [I prefer: temperance] in all things has ever won its place: the base may not pluck. But, dear lady, take this coronal for your golden hair from a worshipful hand. For I alone of mortals have this privilege: I spend my days with you and speak with you, I hear your voice but never see your face. May I end my life just as I have begun it!

Translation by David Kovacs, from Perseus

Only the pure [by nature, not instruction] may pluck; all others refrain, from the feeling of Αἰδώς. As a result, the meadow luxuriates, as it were tended by the personified “reverence” that holds off the sharp iron, and waters the verdant green. It is according to W. S. Barrett’s commentary that which “prevents a man from breaking the taboo — αἰδώς, the feeling of ‘not quite liking’ which inhibits his natural self-assertion or self-seeking in face of the requirements of morality and the like …”

So much by way of introduction to a passage from the speech later in the play in which Phaedra, who has fallen in love with her stepson Hippolytus, explains the principles that underpin her decision to commit suicide. I will pick out a few lines that have puzzled the heads of commentators, not to join their conversation, though inevitably I take a certain view of the question, if only as with the duck-rabbit, which one cannot see both ways simultaneously; but rather, to unpick the notion of moral responsibility that has αἰδώς at its heart, and the cognate verb αἰδοῦμαι. Phaedra says she came to what is her settled view by mulling it over νυκτὸς ἐν μακρῷ χρόνῳ, while lying awake at night. She doesn’t think men come to ruin and evil through natural moral infirmity (κατὰ γνώμης φύσιν / πράσσειν κάκιονa); rather, she believes most of us understand and recognise what is right, but sometimes still don’t do it (in contrast to Plato’s view that no one intentionally errs) whether out of indolence, or putting pleasure before virtue. Life holds many pleasures, and (384 ff)

μακραί τε λέσχαι καὶ σχολή, τερπνὸν κακόν,
αἰδώς τε. δισσαὶ δ᾽ εἰσίν, ἡ μὲν οὐ κακή,
ἡ δ᾽ ἄχθος οἴκων. εἰ δ᾽ ὁ καιρὸς ἦν σαφής,
οὐκ ἂν δύ᾽ ἤστην ταὔτ᾽ ἔχοντε γράμματα.

… long chats and leisure, a pleasant evil — and αἰδώς, which has two kinds, one not bad, the other a weight [to crush] houses. If the καιρός were clear, there would not be two of them made up of the same letters. This is her view of the matter, she goes on to say, and there is no way I will change my mind.

Plutarch, discussing how emotion may go hand in hand with reason, or war with it, quoted the passage and remarked: ἆρ᾽οὐ δῆλός ἐστι συνῃσθημένος; ἐν ἑαυτῷ τοῦτο τὸ πάθος πολλάκις μὲν ἀκολουθοῦν τῷ λόγῳ καὶ συγκατακοσμούμενον, πολλάκις δὲ παρὰ τὸν λόγον ὄκνοις καὶ μελλήσεσι καιροὺς καὶ πράγματα λυμαινόμενον; [Euripides] had evidently observed this feeling in his own breast, often going the same way as reason and helping it to set things in order, but often going against reason and producing delays and hesitations that played havoc with his behaviour (De virtute morali 448f, Barrett’s translation)

The passage is an important one that lies at the heart of Phaedra’s understanding of her dilemma and her resolve to end it; the rest of her speech describes how she first tried to keep her love silent, then to master it by self-restraint, turning finally to the plan of suicide, to protect her good name and that of her children: she reviles adultery, which would be the shameful ruin of them all. But it has caused commentators to scratch their heads, and made me scratch mine too. The list of pleasures is rather narrow, even if it is to include virtue (τὸ καλόν); and what are the two senses of αἰδώς? One editor cuts several lines, another suggests there may be one or two missing.

αἰδώς both overlaps and contrasts with the normal Greek word for shame, αἰσχύνομαι, but as Barrett says in his commentary (p. 206f, on 244 of the play), it’s “properly an inhibitory emotion — not the retrospective shame of a guilty conscience, but the shame that restrains one and keeps one’s conscience clear”. It’s what leads the shepherd to respect the sanctuary and graze his flock elsewhere. A nice example from the play itself of the difference in usage is the moment Phaedra is induced to reveal her secret to the nurse, by the suppliant posture she adopts, clasping her mistress’s hand and knees: δώσω· σέβας γὰρ χειρὸς αἰδοῦμαι τὸ σόν (I relent, out of reverence for your hand, 335); contrast 244: αἰδούμεθα γὰρ τὰ λελεγμένα μοι (I wish I could take back what I said). The distinction is blurred, but can still be felt. One example that comes to mind is the reluctance many feel to leave food uneaten on their plate, with its origin a generation or two back in the time of rationing: it’s not (in my case) shame, but simply a sense of impropriety.

The good αἰδώς can be distinguished from the bad according to the καιρός. We may think of it as the right time or due season, but in the fifth century, the word had the broader sense of what is opportune or in keeping, hitting the mark rather than falling short. One thinks of Socrates’ δαίμων warning him at times against a certain course of action. It is, then, a salutary reticence. Its bad form is shying away from action that is necessary: dithering, lack of moral resolve, letting things slide, letting things go. Phaedra sees such a weakness in herself, and her solution is the most decisive action of all.

αἰδώς is not a virtue in much favour in our shrill twilight; all too easily dismissed as feeble, or enfeebling, scruple. Differently from this reading of Euripides (which is basically Barrett’s), I see in it the quiet potential to be our saving grace, where received opinion and specious strident voices carry the day.

One example of αἰδώς in the domain of classical scholarship is the reluctance to emend the textus receptus (notorious in the case of Housman). This passage reflects the tendency for difficulty in construing the words, and uncertainty as to what they should properly be, to coincide with beauty of language and literary or intellectual interest. Whatever is being said here is part hidden behind a gauzy veil, but it may even have been so when the poet first put stylus to scroll. The best we can do is read with the sensitivity, attention to detail and temperance we can muster, adducing textual and lexical parallels, recognising the fragility of the most judicious understanding at which we provisionally arrive.

In love with life

It’s the difficult bits that can be both the most frustrating, and the most rewarding. Here the nurse in Euripides’ Hippolytus (surely an ancestor of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet) has been complaining about how hard life is, when suddenly, she waxes woolly and philosophical, as Euripides is wont to do. Barrett, in his commentary, suspects the passage is interpolated, because it is not easy to make good dramatic sense of it. I am not sure he is right. Perhaps it is partly that the attitude expressed shows a somewhat “later” religious sensibility, that smacks of mystery religions, and is a bit fluffy. The bit I like states the other side of that feeling; the passage as a whole falls short of endorsing our fancies about what lies concealed in the clouds. The passage is 189 ff (with the inclusion two lines from the preceding strophe for context); a rough translation follows.

πᾶς δ᾽ ὀδυνηρὸς βίος ἀνθρώπων
  κοὐκ ἔστι πόνων ἀνάπαυσις.
ἀλλ᾽ ὅ τι τοῦ ζῆν φίλτερον ἄλλο
σκότος ἀμπίσχων κρύπτει νεφέλαις.
δυσέρωτες δὴ φαινόμεθ᾽ ὄντες
τοῦδ᾽ ὅ τι τοῦτο στίλβει κατὰ γῆν
δι᾽ ἀπειροσύνην ἄλλου βιότου
κοὐκ ἀπόδειξιν τῶν ὑπὸ γαίας,
  μύθοις δ᾽ ἄλλως φερόμεσθα.

All man’s life is painful, and there is no end to our toils. Whatever other thing [there is] that is dearer than life is concealed with clouds in the surrounding dark. We seem to be in anguished love (δυσέρωτες δὴ φαινόμεθ᾽ ὄντες) with this “this” that shines (τοῦδ᾽ ὅ τι τοῦτο στίλβει: a very strange expression, but I feel I understand it exactly) here on earth; because of lack of experience of another life, and the non-revelation of what lies beneath this world, we are vainly (ἄλλως) carried along by myths (or perhaps better, “tales”).

The word for “shine” (στίλβειν) is used for example by Theocritus of the bare chests of athletes that carry an erotic charge: it’s an earthly radiance, not an ethereal glow, sunlight, perhaps, rather than the moon. But this is no easy delight, as it were of the Mediterranean holidaymaker. δύσερως adds to love the dys- of dysfunctional or dysplasia. Remembering that this passage answers the utterance of a banal pessimism worthy of Ecclesiastes, or the Life of Brian, and also that the play is about Phaedra’s lovesickness unto death for Hippolytus, this love is surely more bitter than sweet, and far indeed from being reasonable or easy. Spring comes, the sap rises, and there may be no true comfort in it, but we cannot help but desire the light.

Particles

Greek, in common with other languages such as Finnish or German, is endowed with a class of words known as “particles” which lend something like a tone of voice to utterance. They’re hard to pin down, and in reading, one tends to just think “oh, that’s a particle” and rely on the context. In addition, any one particle may be used with different shades of meaning. The problem is addressed for classical Attic prose by the magisterial Greek Particles by Denniston, without which no classics library would be complete: he gives lots and lots of examples culled from his canonical authors.

One such particle is γε μήν. I think the sense roughly corresponds to something like the English sentence “It’s not warm out, but it is sunny” with an emphasis on the “is”. One might equally say “at least it’s sunny”, but that does suggest something a little different.

Theocritus Id. III concerns a lovesick goatherd serenading the unreceptive Amaryllis outside the cave where she lives, curtained with fern and ivy (the erotic resonance is all too tempting, after Freud). At one point he threatens to throw himself off a cliff. The textus receptus (the manuscript tradition) says “And if I don’t die, but you will be pleased”, where “but” translates the particle. There are two apparent problems — γε μήν can’t be used in a conditional sentence like that, and wouldn’t it make more sense without the “not”? Many editions print δή (another particle, perhaps “indeed”) in place of μή (not), and Denniston himself in this passage proposed changing γε μήν to γε μέν, meaning something like “at least”; and it can be used grammatically in a conditional sentence. One subsequent commentator gets the meaning of the particles the wrong way round (relying perhaps on library notes that became misleading somewhere between library and study), another says γε μήν is here used in “one of the senses” of γε μέν, which at least saves altering the text by conjecture. Or you can keep γε μήν in its native use, by supposing an anguished break in the sense between protasis and apodosis (more exactly, there would be no apodosis, if without then followed by an independent exclamation); this works with either μή or δή. It seems both the manuscripts and Greek authors themselves muddled up their particles, especially by the Hellenistic period. They are, after all, subtle!

One commentator mentions that Sappho threw herself off a cliff for love, and subsequent unrequited lovers used the same spot as a drastic remedy: if they survived, they would be cured of their love; which in our case, would doubtless please the beloved. Is that too neat and tidy?

I’m not competent to judge the question, but had I been reading Theocritus without the privilege of a well-stocked library, I would most likely never have encountered the admittedly interesting possibility that the text says the less obvious thing (difficilior lectio), relying instead on the judiciousness of commentators in making the sensible choice. And even if you have the library, it takes time to take stock of such questions. So perhaps the tortoise wins the race after all.

The Hare and the Tortoise

I have been making very, very slow progress with Theocritus. Ken Dover’s edition, with glossary, professes to enable the curious and less scholarly reader to discover at least “what the Greek means” (an ambition that bears comparison with Ranke’s as a historian to ascertain “wie es eigentlich gewesen sei”, what it was really like), but I don’t think I could have done so without recourse to the comprehensive and magisterial edition of Gow, from half a century ago. And even then … The trouble is, Dover is often silent on the really tricky points (and his glossary also). Perhaps he assumes the help of a teacher. There is a tension between working out roughly “what it means” and ruthlessly chasing down all those foxes; behind that lies the tension between taking the word of the notes in whichever edition you use (if they even say anything to illuminate whatever remains opaque), and making one’s own judgment. Something like this occurs when children learn an instrument, and assimilate a musical tradition, before eventually forming their own performance style and personal musicianship: the journey to Mündigkeit.

I have a tentative idea for a project to provide a bit more help to other lapsed classicists to ease the way; apart from anything else, few have access to sufficiently equipped libraries to go it alone (or rather, not alone). That might consist of two parts: an introduction offering general hints on such matters as how to cope with the “hyperdoricism”; and a series of short disquisitions on the really tricky bits, where there is genuine uncertainty about how a line should be taken or a word parsed. Or on the other hand, certain intriguing oddities of thought: I have one in mind about a slipperiness between thought and word and perception that suggests a different relationship than ours to the “inner voice”. Needless to say, one must tread carefully, just as with Whorfian speculations about exotic languages such as Hopi embodying a different way of thinking; but it’s something I think readers should think about, rather than being glossed over. Really that one takes me beyond the idea of the sporadic commentary, as it leads straight to such questions as, but is that just a parody of Homer? Certainly beyond my competence. Many German scholars of the nineteenth century wrote fat volumes speculating about the contours of ‘archaic thought’, and the territory is treacherous.

For now — having read just two Idylls — I’m turning to a diversion. In March I mean to see a play on the Phaedra myth, and I thought it would be fun to read the classical texts (by Euripides, Seneca and Racine). I dipped into the first (Hippolytus) and the Greek is so easy by contrast with tricksy Theocritus! It’s a lot to read in a few weeks, and I’ll have to be more hare than tortoise, or fail.

Before I do that, though, I would like to try the experiment of reading the third Idyll in just a few days. There is another tension which is that of confidence: if you doubt everything, you can make no more progress than Achilles, faced with the lumbering tortoise always just ahead of him. It’s a test of how much osmosis has occurred through this immersion. Or how much fire is in my Grecian mind.