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.