Hot Take on Art

Visible/IR comparison of possible Rembrandt painting, retrieved from:
https://hyperaxion.com/culture/fake-painting-genuine-rembrandt/

  Somewhat following on the previous post, I had a set of comparisons with thermometers come to mind, and in the interests of personal history am scribbling them down rapidly and publicly.

One of the problems that it doesn't take long to run into is the issue of whether art is objective or subjective.  Say it's purely objective and it's easy to point out that who is viewing it, what they know, their state of mind, and so forth matters a great deal.  Say it's purely subjective and you'll be awarded an English Literature degree encounter the problem that certain works maintain their quality through time and with many people, and that it seems absurd to claim that there is absolutely nothing inherent in the object itself which contributes. 

Due to recent cultural history and comparisons with science, the latter view has mostly prevailed, but I think the problem is simply that the question is a bad one.  And to explain why, I need to talk about thermometers.

A thermometer is a device which is designed to measure the temperature of an object.  It seems as straightforward of a function as possible, where the final result is a single number and there is absolutely no debate as to whether the cultural biases of the thermometer affected its judgement.  But look closer, and this view of a thermometer unravels.  First, some types of thermometers:

1. Traditional mercury/alcohol thermometers that rely directly on the expansion of a fluid to fill a bulb and ascending stalk, and so indicate the temperature based on how high they go.
2. An older Galileo thermometer which also uses the expansion of liquids, but does so by having several bulbs full of different fluids that expand at different rates.  Their relative location in a column indicates the temperature.
3. The type of thermometer that was traditionally found in thermostats in houses, where a bimetal bar, made of two metals with differing rates of expansion, would bend relative to each other and so move a needle to indicate the temperature.
4. Modern electronic thermometers that are based on how the changing temperature affects the resistance to current flow.  This is converted by an internal microchip into a numerical readout.
5. Infrared thermometers focus the infrared radiation emitted by warmed objects onto a receiver which changes its voltage output as a result.  Like the electronic thermometer, this is then turned into a display for us to read.

Well, this is fine and all, but what has this to do with art?  I bring this up because looking closely it makes something obvious: none of these thermometers indicate temperature directly.  They are all proxies, the reaction of one thing to another to another which we infer informs us of the nature of the world.  How much the kitchen counter moves is a thermometer, if one just knows how to read and interpret it.  How much I am sweating now could be a thermometer... if it weren't so complicated a process to unravel.  The point is that we need to be careful to recognize that the device that is measuring is an integral part of measurement itself, and that the individual quirks of each are what we are observing.

So how do we actually read thermometers?  First, we have to calibrate them.  To take a traditional thermometer, if the marks for the temperature are put in the wrong place then it will give us a wrong number.  Of course, that doesn't mean that the thermometer didn't work; the liquid expanded as it always did, we just didn't know what that reaction meant.  We had no way of turning it into an assessment.

We also have to use them properly.  For instance, IR thermometers won't measure air temperature; they rely on radiation being given off, and the gases in the atmosphere are not at such a density or energy level as to affect it.  Not all thermometers work for all tasks, and the failure of one thermometer to measure something isn't a commentary on temperature but on the very nature of the apparatus.  As noted above, we need to be clear on what a thermometer is actually doing if we are not to misapply it.

I hope there is some inkling as people read this that I am trying to give an indication of the issue in art.  We want to express something such as quality or beauty, consistency or elegance, etc. in a work but the only tool we have to assess this is human minds (somewhat, there are some interesting attempts to analyze art through algorithms, but TASFAD).  As these minds are highly variable it should come as no surprise that given differing settings there are different readings, and that in particular an education which helps better calibrate them improves their ability to "read" art.  That often what we are left with is not an analysis, but merely being able to pay careful attention to our own profound reactions and feelings and then, if possible, try to turn it into something more.  But those "readings," like the bending of a bimetal bar or a change in conductance, came before any final analysis of what they meant.  In other words, the terms subjective and objective are simply misused for something as simple as a thermometer, let alone for a topic as complicated as art, where in both cases the measurer is not separate from the measured.

"Yes, but in the end there is a real temperature to be measured out there while there isn't any such thing as real quality."

Now we venture into the last point, and this is why I think the fragmentation of science, philosophy, and art has been to the detriment of all, for it requires something of all of them to make this coherent.  I'm going to say that there is no such thing as temperature either... but it is a highly useful fiction.  There are two ways of approaching this.

First is to point out that the very definition of temperature is an abstraction.  It is, ostensibly, the motion of molecules, or a measure of their heat.  But it is the average motion of many molecules, not the motion of any individual particle.  So it is already a statistical construct, an abstraction that we have created.  And it is only a sampling.  If you ask what the temperature of an object is, then you have defined a boundary of your observation, considering it unimportant that different parts may have different temperatures should you have averaged them individually.  This regresses to the problem that thermometers are always, inevitably, doing an imperfect sampling of the object in question.  We know this - a thermometer tells you the temperature of the air around it, not the temperature of the whole room's air, your whole town's air, or the whole atmosphere.  

However, this is not really my primary argument here, for it regresses always to, "Yes, but there is something you are measuring out there."  But I would take this a second step, and I am going to borrow a comparison from Philip Ball's Beyond Weird: measuring the location of an object.

Imagine that you are in a dark room and there is an object suspended in front of you.  At your disposal are many small balls which you can throw, and which you know where they end up after being thrown (for the sake of thought-experiment here).  Well, as you threw the balls repeatedly you would come to notice that some come right back at you, some are deflected at certain angles, and of course some continue on unimpeded.  Using many many ball throws it would be possible to reconstruct the object in the dark, both its size (based on how many balls pass by) and its shape (knowing the angles at which balls bounce, it could be inferred the attitude of the surface they struck).

In all this, though, you have not ever "measured" any of these qualities.  You have measured the reactions of the balls to it and worked backward from there.  The idea of it having location and shape and all these features is a deduction based on certain rules; not bad rules, mind you, but nonetheless rules.  It is the issue that Locke ran up against when, after formulating the world as substance and properties, he realized that we could never know anything of substance itself.  Just of properties and their interactions.  What is substance "out there"?  What is location if not the interaction of things with others in a predictable pattern?

To return once again to art, then, my ultimate answer to the objection above is that real doesn't exist in the way we naively assume as humans.  Of course, thermometers aren't arbitrary, and as noted are highly useful.  They are measuring something of the universe and we care a great deal about it.  Location too.  But the very nature of measurement is that it is bound up with what is doing the measuring, and therefore it makes no sense to ask of anything what it's "really" like "out there."  And therefore it is no surprise that art, being vastly more complicated than temperature, as interpreted by human brains/minds, which are vastly more complicated than thermometers, is a topic in which this issue makes itself so clearly known by the variability of responses and measurements. 

What color are the six persimmons?

(Color wheel retrieved from https://blog.closetomyheart.com)

"Religion begins with experience… [and] because the experience is of things that are invisible, it gives rise to symbols as the mind tries to think about invisible things.  Symbols are ambiguous, however, so eventually the mind introduces thoughts to resolve the ambiguities of symbols and systematize their intuitions.  Reading this sequence backwards we can define theology as the systematization of thoughts about the symbols that religious experience gives rise to."
-Huston Smith, The World's Religions

I find on my hands this morning an old idea using an old comparison, but in nuance of the ideas feeling somewhat insightful.

An old metaphor for the difficulty/impossibility of describing novel experiences is the color red; that having seen red, nobody could really describe it, only say that others would have to experience it because ultimately it is irreducible to other colors.  Red is red, and who knows even if everybody's red is the same.  It's a good way to illustrate the problem, that experience seems to lie at the heart of our thought and is necessary to supply the pieces with which rationality can work... while also bringing up the problem of how experiences can exist without a framework.  

This morning as I was musing on how I would explain certain elements of my spirituality to somebody, I turned to a similar idea to help clarify.  One of those interesting occurrences is how across many cultures the same colors "came into being" in the same order.  That is to say, we see early words for white and black, followed by reds and browns, greens and yellows, and ultimately blues (there is some debate about this ordering, but it doesn't impact the point here).  If you show color pallets to different peoples who don't have a word for blue, they have a more difficult time picking out blue hues; conversely, many languages have nuanced words for colors like green that English lacks, and they are rather more adept at noticing when two shades of green differ.  

I believe that there is an import here that goes far beyond color perception.  Namely, if we do not have words-concepts for things then we have a tremendously difficult time noticing or thinking on them.  And more deeply, I suspect that this reflects that all of our mental models are just one of a very large (infinite?) number of patterns that could be drawn from the world; the ones we do extract are typically useful and in many cases are the result of evolutionary refinement.  Our folk notion of mass may be completely illusory, but it does retain value in referring to something.

Returning to the realm of spirituality, I believe this has several implications.  First is that I suspect many more people have had spiritual experiences than they are aware, but that without any sort of conceptual framework they find themselves baffled as to express these new hues, and so despite their power they nonetheless slides from the mind.  I would know, because I believe I had the same happen to me; that in 2011 I must have experienced something powerful and profound which forever shaped my feelings afterward, but that I could neither explain it nor even remember it happening.  I am only so lucky in that it was related to an event I could identify later, an encounter with a piece of art, and so reference that work to help me explore what must have happened.  I was an archaeologist in my own mind; how strange to think.

This is why I suspect that reports of spiritual experiences drop in secular ages.  The skeptical answer is that because people stop being superstitious and begin to attribute to proper sources the events; visions become hallucinations, spontaneous swells of feeling are just the subconscious, and nobody any longer thinks Jesus is talking to them.  And I don't doubt there is some truth to this; I have sat in many a religious meeting where people shared their stories and I could only think that it was a vast misattribution on their part (especially when it comes to the Devil and temptation).  But I think there is more to it, that when people are no longer educated in any sort of spiritual tradition they lose the words and ideas that help these ideas take form.  This to me is why the Huston Smith quote up top is so insightful (although it may have been drawn from T.R.V. Murti): without spiritual geniuses to plow the way by giving us symbols, the rest of us become stuck in the drifts.  Again, I know this from personal experience; I had spent six years in an expressible fog with my 2011 experience, but after several months of reading on religion it was only then that I was finally able to begin to get a handle on what even I was trying to describe.  One cannot really realize why the religious vocabulary was created until one has the phrase "Amen" come spontaneously to the lips and know what a sentiment of reverential assent it contains.

However, what really turned me onto this color-perception analogy in this circumstance was that I realized it would help my mental opponent/pupil (odd how those two show up as the same) understand certain oddities of mystical speech.  His name is Justin, an acquaintance from the internet whom I disagree with periodically, but who here served as a focal catalyst.  It just helps to imagine one is talking to a specific person, and I can see why Plato structured his treatises as dialogues.  In fact, I will do so here, in a world where most people had not seen purple:

Me: I have seen a new color.  It was strange, not quite like any color I have seen so far.
Justin: How do you know it wasn't simply a delusion?  Most people haven't seen this color so that seems a lot more likely.
Me: That's fair enough, but it was also so immediate... I truly have a hard time believing it was anything other than real.
Justin: Okay, so aside from that not being very convincing, can you at least describe somewhat what it is like?  I mean, it's a color so it has to be sort of like other colors.
Me: Hrm.  I'd say it's kind of like blue.  You know how blue has that sort of deep, soothing sort of effect; that sense of being awash but undisturbed.  Blue isn't really a violent color, and this wasn't either.
Justin: So it's just another shade of blue?
Me: No... not quite.  It was also like red.
Justin: Red... you mean the aggressive, bright color at the opposite end of the spectrum from blue?
Me: Yes, just like that.  It was blue and red at the same time, but wasn't really quite either one of them.  It was sort of like green too.
Justin: ...now you're making things up.
Me: No, really!  Blue and red kind of feel like "pure" colors, you know?  Primary colors.  But this new color doesn't feel like a primary color; it's more like green in that it is a mixture, a bit of hot and cold.  Also even though it seems totally opposite from yellow (Justin: yellow?) I feel that it would complement it as well, like a natural pair.
Justin: So in the end, you're saying that this color is like all the other colors but not the same as any of them?
Me: I'd say that about summarizes it.

My poeticism is not quite on Plato's level, but I think it gets the point across.  Rudolf Otto quips in his famous The Idea of the Holy that if truly nothing could be said about the ultimate then the mystics would be silent.  As they are rather characterized by voluminous output, it would seem that some comparisons, even if they all fall far short, can be made.  It is like nothing else but also like everything else, and that despite being paradoxical it is not nonsensical.  My own particular expression of this came as a realization that after years of alternatively describing it as truth, beauty, and compassion that it was somehow simultaneously all of these, or like all of these, and yet none of them at the same time.  In no originality, I christened it Holy, and as above there is no way to convey why it deserves its own religious word without self-experience.

Ultimately, however, my goal here isn't to set it apart entirely.  I feel rather that these spiritual experiences only lie at the end of a continuum of a kind, and that it is only their distinct lack of ready-made biological-physical metaphor that causes them to be regarded as so problematic.  In other words, and in a topic to be more fully explored another day, we are all given shared mental structures and concepts to work with by evolution because they were, and often still are, useful for not dying.  To pick the patterns out of the world that correspond to color recognition had great value in determining food safety and quality; picking out God, not so much.  It takes much time and effort by our greatest souls to help us see outside these habits, and the result is so often the same: it is all mysterious, colors as well as Holy, and it is only waiting for us to notice.

The Iliad #3: Stop confusing my heart

I have been somewhat laggard in writing these Iliad posts, so much so that I have since completed the Odyssey and Gilgamesh in the meantime.  I think it is because the poem made such an impression on me that I have sought to reflect that by giving each of these essays my all.  Yet I find that I have perhaps gotten too wrapped up in certain points, straying too far into trying to be profound rather than more straightforwardly expressing all of what affected me.  So I think here it is time to descend from the rarefied heights, or ascend from the pelagic depths, however you prefer, of the Greek worldview and focus on one of the chief delights of the poem: the characters.

As somebody coming into the classics from outside I had a certain notion of how the Iliad would work.  It would be an epic poem, full of epic language about epic events, and staffed (or stuffed) with epic characters.  I think part of this comes just from common cultural stereotypes, but for me it was likely aided by my interest in the art coming before the literature.  It gave me an image that Greek writing would be like their statuary: larger than life, transcendent of particulars, and fundamentally formal.  An expression of archetypalism captured in a way that only the Greeks could.

Lattimore's invaluable introduction was the first step in disabusing me of this notion.  In it he devoted, what was to me, a surprising amount of time on analyzing the characters.  Laying out his vision for each one in a way I did not expect the story to contain.  And I admit thinking to myself at the time that perhaps he was reading into them a bit much.  But what I did pick up on was the sense of indignation in his words.  These characters are beloved to him in the original, but due to their iconic status have been subjected to the process of cultural telephone: reused, reinterpreted, and eventually misinterpreted they have become deformed, becoming simplistic caricatures of themselves due to repeated transmission. 

Now having finished it for myself I find myself both in agreement and disagreement with Lattimore.  On one hand, having only spent a few weeks with them I feel like I have come to know these people, and indeed they are masterfully constructed.  I can only imagine for Lattimore, with his long years of acquaintance, these men have become practically his kin, and I find myself having some sympathy when I reflect on how I feel a few of my own favorite characters are commonly, and critically, misunderstood.  

Yet even with that, I cannot help but feel as though in several cases he has missed the mark.  That in his years of laboring against preconceptions he now overcompensates.  For instance, he does not merely try to rescue Agamemnon from being the stereotype of a despotic tyrant but positively attempts to elevate him to a ruler who exemplifies, "Heavy is the head that wears the crown."  This I simply cannot see in Lattimore's own text; all the evidence points toward a man who is a mediocre ruler, born into his position but of only passable stature as a hero.  He is fainthearted and selfish, and it is only the repeated rallying by his companions, who truly exemplify good counsel and courage, that saves the entire Achaean misadventure from being a route.

Conversely, Lattimore is particularly piqued toward Hector, who he feels has been over-elevated by the millennia.  Honestly, I can see why.  By any modern standard, Hector is far more relatable than any of the Achaeans.  He is a good father, a good husband, a good son, a dutiful pillar of his city, and ultimately the one who we feel has far better moral claim to our sympathy as he fights to protect what he cares about:

"One bird sign is best: to fight in defence of our country."
-B12, p264

Lattimore's scathing assessment of him as a blowhard has some truth to it, for Hector does have a habit of talking a big talk only to be forced to eat his words.  His reasoning at the Scaean Gate in particular is more than a little petty: he'll stay outside to fight Achilles just because he's afraid of being mocked if he goes in, only to nope out (the phrase is slang, but very apt here: "It can mean wimp out... or just flee without implying cowardice or timidity.") the second he sees that living war machine coming for him.  But I feel it is ultimately unjust to place that at the center of the analysis of his character.  There's no shame in running from suicide, and while he does make poor decisions based on some pride, he also lays claim to many of the most touching scenes in the poem.  I find it notable that the epic ends not with an exaltation of the Achaeans but Hector's heartwrenching funeral.  The last line in particular, when I read it, left me somber:

"Such was their burial of Hektor, breaker of horses."

It is so simple a statement, yet perfect.  After all the action and rage it brings back that essence of Greek tragedy; when all's said and done, people, good people, die.  That is how to end an epic, holding a final lonesome note that fades quietly into the stillness of completion, and brings out the subtle touch of humanity that makes it all worthwhile.

However, to be solemn is not my purpose here.  Rather, it is to convey the sort of living recognition that I saw in these people, and having spent some time criticizing Lattimore it seems only right if I throw my own hat into the arena concerning my favorite, or at least most memorable, characters.

 

The Belvedere Torso depicting Ajax, By Clockchime - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46668234

 

Telamonian Ajax

"Salvation's light is in our hands' work, not the mercy of battle."

-B15, p329, Ajax

When I was younger I liked fighting superhero-esque stories as much as the next male.  My own experience happened to be drawn from the anime of the early 2000s than the comic books of the West, but it served the same function.  There is a simple thrill in feeling the power in a character, and knowing that when he arrives on the scene everything is okay (or at least is about to get real messy).  It had been a while since such a thing had excited me, but Ajax was... kind of awesome.  There is no more academic way of expressing it that captures my reaction.

While the other Greek heroes each come and go, given their moment of aristeia only to fall back, Ajax never budges.  He is a rock.  Lattimore notes that his iconic tower shield was unique in the Greek literature, and for me it became part of his image or nature - a sort of benevolent Goliath that appeared wherever the need was greatest, ready to protect a comrade.  It was a shield built for a man who needed to cover something more than himself.  Though such a role is less Mycenaean-glorious than the wanton slaughter granted the other Achaeans, to my mind it possessed a tenaciousness that was far more admirable.  And if this were not enough to recommend him there was also the humorous shock of familiarity:

"Do you not hear how Hektor is stirring up all his people
how he is raging to set fire to our ships?  He is not
inviting you to come to a dance.  He invites you to battle."
-B15, p322-3

How many drill sergeants and commanders have said similar lines throughout history to their men?  It is the eternal sharp reminder that, "This ain't no summer camp here, boys!"  Combined with his sparse lines it gives that essential recognition of his character, a man at once gruff and stoic but not aggressive or hostile.  Just an immense center of power that others can take refuge in.  I caught myself mid-chuckle when Odysseus challenged Ajax to wrestling in the games, and in that moment I realized I had so thoroughly incorporated the idea of who Ajax was that it drew from me an immediate sense of visceral pity for anybody would try to match their might against him.  So for me, that is Ajax: the first to be where he is needed, the last to quit the field when done, and roaring defiance to bolster the morale of his comrades even as he himself is beset, there is nobody you want at your side more.

 

Tondo of an Attic red-figure cup, c. 490 BC by Brygos Painter,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2228794

Nestor

...and between them Nestor
the fair-spoken rose up, the lucid speaker of Pylos,
from whose lips the streams of words ran sweeter than honey.
In his time two generations of mortal men had perished,
those who had grown up with him and they who had been born to
these in sacred Pylos, and he was king in the third age.
-B1, p65

If Ajax was awe-inspiring then Nestor was somnolent, but in a lovably benign way.  I remember reading his first introduction in those lines above.  He seemed auspicious, and I was ready to accept that Nestor would be a king of matchless wisdom; he would be dignified, sagacious, with every action having a purpose.  And certainly he does offer sound advice to Achilles and Agamemnon, warning them against the strife that nearly destroys the Achaean forces.  Yet in the middle of his upbraiding he takes a detour:

"Yes, and in my time I have dealt with better man than
you are, and never once did they disregard me.  Never
yet have I seen nor shall see again such men as these were...
[Goes on to list them]

And I fought single-handed, yet against such men no one
of the mortals now alive could upon earth do battle.  And also
these listened to the counsels I gave and heeded my bidding."
-B1, p66, L260-272

When I first read this I blinked.  I had anticipated epic speeches being a bit long-winded, but this was... something more.  Rambling.  I didn't give it much thought at the time, but after a few more such exchanges, where in each one Nestor somehow finds a reason to relay his youthful escapades while griping about the paltry stature of his own current companions, I came to realize that we're listening to the eternal grouchy old man.  Back in his day Nestor fought wars uphill both ways in the snow, and if he were in the prime of his life he would have already won this war singlehanded.  And unfortunately due to right of age everybody has to endure hearing about it again and again and again. 

It reminds me of when I was younger and in my congregation there was an older man who liked to tell stories.  He was intelligent and kind enough, or at least as much as I can recall from my hazy memory, but he had this habit of always turning the conversation back to his time at Stanford.  Those were his glory days.  They were who he was, and while he wasn't out to continually aggrandize himself he couldn't help but return to them in his musing whether it was relevant or not.  Just so here.  Nestor shows his quality by being here even as an elder, but nonetheless there is a price to pay when it comes evening around the fire.

Hector Scolds Paris by Pietro Benvenuti, 1808

Paris and Hector

"These [the Trojans] would not have hidden him [Paris] for love, if any had seen him,
since he was hated among them all as dark death is hated."
-B3, p112, L453-4

There is a brilliant exchange near the beginning of Book Three as the Trojans and Achaeans line up for battle.  Paris jumps out front and begins to taunt the Achaeans to bring forth their champions for combat, but as soon as he sees Menelaus moving toward him in response he slips back into the ranks and hides.  Discretion is the better part of valor, apparently.  Seeing this Hector reproaches him:

"Evil Paris, beautiful, woman-crazy, cajoling
better had you never been born, or killed unwedded.
Truly I could have wished it so; it would be far better
than to have you with us to our shame, for others to sneer at.
Surely now the flowing-haired Achaians laugh at us,
thinking you are our bravest champion, only because your
looks are handsome, but there is no strength in your heart, no courage.
[You are the reason this war has come on us]
And now you would not stand up against warlike Menelaos?
Thus you would learn of the man whose blossoming wife you have taken.
The lyre would not help you then, nor the favours of Aphrodite,
nor your locks, when you rolled in the dust, nor all your beauty.
No, but the Trojans are cowards in truth, else long before this
you had worn a mantle of flying stones for the wrong you did us."
-B3, p101, L39-57

It brought to my mind a problem I had not quite considered before then: why didn't the Trojans just give Helen back?  I had assumed that all of Ilium loved Paris and that the reason they were all going along with this was that it was a matter of national pride in supporting a beloved countryman for holding onto his wife.  This is... obviously not the case.  Hector is depressed that not only has Paris managed to bring all this evil on his city, the citizens themselves have not even stood up for it.  My guess is that it is Priam the people love, and since he as king dotes on his sons everybody has to follow him.  Hector, being the good son that he is, supports his father... but he doesn't have to like it.  And as if to drive this home, Paris replies:

"Hektor, seeing you have scolded me rightly, not beyond measure--
still, your heart forever is weariless, like an axe-blade
driven by a man's strength through the timber, one who, well skilled,
hews a piece for a ship, driven on by the force of a man's strength:
such is the heart in your breast, unshakable: yet do not
bring up against me the sweet favours of golden Aphrodite.
Never to be cast away are the gifts of the gods, magnificent,
which they give of their own will, no man could have them for wanting them."
-B3, p101-2, L59-66

I never expected in reading ancient literature that I would come across, "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful" as a defense.  Sure, Paris offers all the proper honors due an older brother but there is an essential bit of defiant foppishness here.  I suddenly realized these weren't two statues talking but rather brothers.  It made me wonder: perhaps Homer couldn't have Helen given back because that's what the legend said, but he wasn't going to let it go unexplained.  So instead he gave us real people who act quite within reason, or out of reason, but with understandable human dynamics.  The best of this comes when Hector finds Paris in bed with Helen while the battle rages outside:

But Hektor saw him, and in words of shame he rebuked him:
"Strange man!  It is not fair to keep in your heart this coldness.
The people are dying around the city and around the steep wall
as they fight hard; and it is for you that this war with its clamour
has flared up about our city.  You yourself would fight with another
whom you saw anywhere hanging back from the hateful encounter.
Up then, to keep our town from burning at once in the hot fire."

Then in answer the godlike Alexandros [Paris] spoke to him:
"Hektor, seeing you have scolded me rightly, not beyond measure,
therefore I will tell, and you in turn understand and listen.
It was not so much in coldness and bitter will toward the Trojans
that I sat in my room, but I wished to give myself over to sorrow.
But just now with soft words my wife was winning me over
and urging me into the fight, and that way seems to me also
the better one.  Victory passes back and forth between men.
Come then, wait for me now while I put on my armour of battle,
or go, and I will follow, and I think I can overtake you."

He spoke, but Hektor of the shining helm gave him no answer...

-B5, p161-2

Once again there is Homer's epic style that lends a certain grandness to the exchange, but underneath you can hear the familiar beats of two brothers, one dutiful and beloved, the other lazy and resentful for it, tossing words at each other:

 

    Hector: "What the hell are you doing Paris?  You do realize this whole war is your fault, right?"

    Paris: "Yeah, yeah, bro, you're right as always.  But, you know, I was feeling kind of down and so was taking a breather.  It was only for a minute, though, so don't give me that crap.  In fact, I'll show you right now; you go ahead and leave and I'll be there so fast it'll make your head spin."

     Hector: "...shut up and get your armor on."

That I had many renditions of the scene to choose from in painting indicates that this exchange has borne up well over the centuries.  Same as it always was, and with Paris' last retort Homer has given us a very good reason why none of the Trojans would hide Paris when Menelaus came searching for him. 

Idomeneus and Deiphobus

Searching for a picture for this section, I came on the term "pankration," which was a Greek sport that mixed boxing, wrestling, and do-whatever-you-want-ing to beat the opponent to the ground.  There were basically no rules, and for this section it seemed seemed quite appropriate.

Previously I remarked how brutally frank the violence of the Iliad was.  I wrote that after the battle of the fifth book, the first when the Trojan and Achaeans first engaged.  While that was intense, the fight at the ships in Battle Thirteen left me scoured emotionally.  It wasn't that the descriptions had become more graphic (although Homer had a penchant for having eyeballs drop out of heads in this section) but that the tone changed.  The earlier fight, with all its bloody gore, had a sense of honor about it, and was capped with that bizarre exchange between Diomedes and Glaucus.  They were all warriors just doing their thing, nothing personal.

But at the ships, this set piece was replaced by the hate-grudge of Idomeneus the Achaean and Deipohobus the Trojan.  It begins when Idomeneus kills Othryoneus, a man who had come to defend troy in exchange for promises of Cassandra's hand.  Knowing this, Idomeneus taunts the dead body as he drags it back to the ships:

"Othryoneus, I congratulate you beyond all others
if it is here you will bring to pass what you promised
to Dardanian Priam, who in turn promised you his daughter.
See now, we would also make you a promise, and we would fulfill it;
we would give you the loveliest of Atreides' daughters,
and bring her here from Argos to be yoru wife, if you joined us
and helped us storm the strong-founded city of Ilion.
Come then with me, so we can meet by our seafaring vessels
about a marriage; we here are not bad matchmakers for you."
-B13, p281, L374-83

This is truly ugly gloating.  No respect for the man who fought in life, and no respect for the dead and their rights.  Instead there is a pointed hatred brought about by familiarity; Idomeneus enjoyed killing this guy, and it wasn't just out of the joy of prowess in battle.  He goes on to slay Asios in a particularly brutal segment, and in retalliation Deiphobus kills Hypensor:

"Asios lies not now all unavenged.  I think rather
as he goes down to Hades of the Gates, the strong one,
he will be cheerful at heart, since I have sent him an escort."
-B13, p282, L414-6

In retribution, Idomeneus kills Alkathoos back:

"Deiphobos, are we then to call this a worthy bargain,
three men killed for one?  It was you yourself were so boastful.
Strange man.  Do you rather come yourself and stand up against me..."
-B13, p283, L446-8

The war which had thus far been in some sense run by rules has turned personal, and it has added a believably vicious edge to the events.  It is the sort of brutal tit-for-tat bravado that feeds gang violence.  While all the heroes have a certain propensity for this, what sets these two characters apart is how they revel in it.  It is their arena.  Indeed, when we meet Idomeneus later at the funeral games he continues to express this quarrelsome coarseness, getting into a petty verbal disagreement with Ajax the Lesser over the chariot race.  Insults fly back and forth and it is only the other Achaeans who prevent it from turning violent.  Even though he is a minor hero, there is here a consistent character, one who is easily dragged into squabbles because in the end he likes them.

Attic Black-Figure Neck Amphora - Achilles and Ajax
playing a board game overseen by Athena, c510 BC

Achilles

"Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilles
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians..."

What I found remarkable is that despite his importance, Achilles is not present for most of the Iliad.  He set the events in motion but once they are he only checks in occasionally to see how they are going.  It's reminiscent of how villains like Darth Vader are treated: they have little screen time, but it is the aura and anticipation about them, the way people talk of these characters, that causes them to grow in stature.  But I wouldn't want to sell Achilles short.  Lattimore stresses that he is a deep and intelligent man.  I am not sure I agree, but I do think it is important to differentiate between crazed and passionate.

Achilles is a man who lives absolutely by his emotions.  When he is high, he is high, and though everybody else is ready to rest after the day of Patroclus' death, he wants to storm out there and fight that very moment regardless of circumstance.  And when he is low he is low, rubbing ashes in his hair and rolling in the dirt in a whole-being lamentation.  What gets him up and going in the morning is not duty, but the excitement of the new day and what he might do; conversely, if the day doesn't look exciting, he'll just hang around, or maybe try to make it interesting.  This approach has taken him far, for on the merits of his matchless skill and god-given support he has made a name for himself as uncrossable.  In an honor culture such as the ancient Greeks, this is invaluable:

"Now I go back as a messenger to Achilleus, to tell him.
You know yourself, aged sir beloved of Zeus, how he is;
a dangerous man; he might even be angry with one who is guiltless."
-B11, p251-2

To us this is just being a barbarian, but nobody in the Iliad hates Achilles for this trait.  Rather, he is feared, and hence revered, for it.  In a strange way, it reminds me of the accounts of Michael Jordan.  While he was beloved by his teammates, they were also a bit terrified of him too; everybody knew that if they didn't give it their all, they'd have him to contend with.  Nobody wanted to make him angry.  I think we have a hard time appreciating this virtue nowadays.  We want everybody to be nice, and believe that being nice is a necessary trait to any form of success; when it is revealed that Jordan was harsh it is treated as an exposé.  I'm not trying to turn the clock back to elevating Achilles as an ideal, but I think that there is something to be said for what he embodies.  Achilles' passion may have had him by the nose, but he also used it, and as both the examples in this paragraph show, this sort of intensity for challenges and victory is what leads to the top.

This, I believe, is how to best understand Achilles' anger at Agamemnon.  Achilles lives for the fight because that is his craft.  It is his form of self-expression and like Jordan he knows he's great and feels no need to express humility about it.  He has proved himself a dozen times over and continually hungers to do so again; bring it on, anytime, anywhere, he'll be ready.  Yet Agamemnon has failed to acknowledge him.  He will not willingly serve a coach who does not value his immense contributions:

"Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard.
We are all held in a single honor, the brave with the weaklings.
A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.
Nothing is won for me, now that my heart has gone through its afflictions
in forever setting my life on the hazard of battle.
For as to her unwinged young ones the mother bird brings back
morsels, wherever she can find them, but as for herself it is suffering,
such was I, as I lay through the many nights unsleeping,
such as I wore through the bloody days of the fighting,
striving with warriors for the sake of these men's women."
-B9, p206

Here is Achilles in a fine temper.  Frustrated and angry, he's now collapsed into a depressive spell and turns this into lamentation about life.  That is, I do not read this as Achilles seriously questioning his values or speaking grandly on Greek fatalism.  I hear in it a petulant complaint, the sort of griping that reaches outward to find reasons to reinforce itself.  He's had his honor impinged by Agamemnon, and so now he's going to rant about how all honor is pointless.  This self-pity is shortly reinforced by the enumeration of his sorrows.  Achilles is no sacrificial mother bird; he lived for the fighting, and didn't begrudge the accompanying hardships.  But now when he's feeling down he dredges up every little sorry feeling and imagined slight to reinforce the sense that he has been wronged.   

This groping for justification, though, also leaves Achilles in an awkward spot.  He doesn't want to stop fighting or leave, but having talked himself into a corner he cannot back down.  For a man of honor threats can never be idle; if they are, then the fear-reverence that accompanies him turns to contempt at his perceived inability to defend his word.  So Achilles sits undecidedly on the beach, brooding, waiting, needing a sufficient pretense to return, while ensuring everybody knows how mortally his pride has been wounded to defend his disastrous inaction.  It is only Patroclus' death that causes this charade to come crashing down on his head while also giving him pretext for reconcillation... and retribution.

I think it is also at this moment that the modern reader struggles with Achilles, for he is utterly merciless to the Trojans, far out of proportion to what the killing of one man in the field of battle ought to warrant.  He takes no prisoners, except the twelve he intends to sacrifice over Patroclus' grave, and completely disregards any trappings of civilized warfare.  When Hector asks Achilles before their duel for an agreement to allow the loser's body to be returned home this is the result:

Then looking darkly at him swift footed Achilleus answered:
"Hektor, argue me no agreements.  I cannot forgive you.
As there are no trustworthy oaths between men and lions,
nor wolves and lambs have spirit that can be brought to agreement
bur forever these hold feelings of hate for each other,
so there can be no love between you and me, nor shall there be
oaths between us..."
-B22, p422

The same singleminded passion that drove Achilles to glory now drags him to vengeance, both equally without restraint.  It is his character, and the nature of Greek tragedy, that his great virtue be the same that causes so much grief.  I think that is his gain by the end of the poem, for there are moments that he is imminently pitiable as well.  He hitches his chariot up in the middle of the night with Hector's body still attached and rides it in circles around Patroclus' burial mound.  Once again, barbaric.  Yet you can feel it, this man who has lived his life with an intense recklessness, trying pathetically to somehow compensate for his loss by rekindling the triumphant feelings of victory.  But his old approach has deserted him now; nothing will ease the passing of his beloved companion, and I believe it is with sincere remorse (if not quite regret) that he says to Priam:

"There was not
any generation of strong sons born to [Peleus] in his great house
but a single all-untimely child he had, and I give him
no care as he grows old, since far from the land of my fathers
I sit here in Troy, and bring nothing but sorrow to you and your children."
-B24, p489

Odysseus Meets Elpenor in the Underworld, The Lykaon Painter,
c450-425BC

Odysseus

Odysseus doesn't get much time in the Iliad, but what he does get made a particular impression on me.  I have come to share Lattimore's annoyance that over time he has been given such short shrift as an amoral political manipulator.

In the second book, that dull recounting of all the members of the Achaeans and the boatloads of men they brought, it stands out that while most of the big names bring forty to fifty ships, Odysseus only contributes twelve.  Yet he ranks among the kings as an equal.  Next to Ajax, I found the most to admire in his character as a man who had his head on his shoulders.  There are several "Ah me" scenes where we hear the internal monologue, and this is Odysseus' as he sees the Trojans moving to surround his position:

"Ah me, what will become of me?  It will be a great evil
if I run, fearing their multitude, yet deadlier if I am caught
alone; and Kronos' son drove to flight the rest of the Danaans.
Yet still, why does the heart within me debate on tehse things?
Since I know that it is the cowards who walk out of the fighting,
but if one is to win honour in battle, he must by all means
stand his ground strongly, whether he be struck or strike down another."
-B11, p245

You never get such musings from Ajax or Achilles; they just do.  Similarly, when other characters, such as Menelaus and Agenor (a Trojan hero) introspect they often decide to flee, or at the very least require the gods to back them up and change their minds.  Here Odysseus sees what is coming, understands its implications, and decides to stick it out.  He even chides himself that he would try to worm out of his duty.  It is admirable in a very conscious way, and a pattern that is later replicated in the Odyssey.

But his shining moment for me was not on the battlefield but at the banquet where Achilles and Agamemnon finally come to terms.  At last the Achaean host can breathe a sigh of relief as their leader and the great warrior are going to get their act together and come to an agreement as Agamemnon offers material recompense.  Or, they could, if Achilles weren't a hothead:

"Son of Atreus, most lordly of king and men, Agamemnon,
the gifts are yours to give if you wish, and as it is proper,
or to keep with yourself.  But now let us remember our joy in warcraft,
immediately, for it is not fitting to stay here and waste time
nor delay, since there is still a big work to be done."
-B19, p396

Achilles will be Achilles, and he has only a mind for avenging Patroclus, impulsively turning down Agamemnon's restitution in his fervor.  It's something he'll certainly regret later, and immediately Odysseus chimes in that the men are tired and hungry from fighting all day and they need to rest.  It is sound advice, but Odysseus' insistence in the scene strikes me as more: he sees that these two need to make amends right now in front of the entire army so that nobody is left in doubt.  So he further urges Achilles to rest and prepare.  But...

"Food and drink mean nothing to my heart
but blood does, and slaughter, and the groaning of men in the hard work."
-B19, p397

At this point you can almost hear Odysseus grinding his teeth.  He promptly, in a very eloquent Homeric way, tells Achilles to sit down and shut up, while ordering others to immediately fetch Agamemnon's promised gifts.  Get this done now before Achilles runs off or Agamemnon finds some reason to worm his way out of paying things back.  Odysseus knows these men, and he knows that this moment needs to be taken advantage of before they find pretext to change their minds.  Bind both of them in a new oath, publically, so that they cannot back down.  Indeed, even as Agamemnon praises Odysseus' wisdom he shoots back:

"And you, son of Atreus, after this be more righteous to another
man.  For there is no fault when even one who is a king
appeases a man, when the king was the first one to be angry."
-B19, p397

"Remember, Agamemnon, you screwed up.  But you're being offered a face-saving way out here; take it now and don't be stingy with your apology."  Which is finally what he drags out of both of them.  Odysseus in these pages demonstrates to me a profoundly well-written cunning.  Just as how I was impressed by the detailing of Ajax's tenacity, not just as a "mighty warrior" but in evidenced his individual actions, here too Odyseeus comes out having demonstrated pragmatic interpersonal psychology. This was an invisible turning point that could have gone catastrophically, but luckily for the Achaeans Odysseus was there to save the day.

Same As It Ever Was

"...as when a little boy piles sand by the sea-shore
when in his innocent play he makes sand towers to amuse him
and then, still playing, with hands and feet ruins them and wrecks them."
-B15, p319

Throughout this particular entry I found that I naturally gravitated toward utilizing contemporary examples and expressions to illustrate my point.  It is not my usual style, but it simply felt natural to do so.  The trappings change and the details shift, but the patterns remain still recognizable.  The quote above is such a case.  No single image brought home to me the realization that despite nearly three thousand years having passed the same psychology, with the same sorts of joys and sorrows, are at work.  It reminds me of my response to an early line of The Brothers Karamazov:

"In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes.  And so are we."

In a note I have stashed somewhere, I scribbled a response: "The brilliance of insightful writing, I think, is to unite the complicated, messy expressions of individuality with the recognition that only a few drives are at work."  This is what Homer managed, and on a scale that I find awe-inspiring with such a broad cast.  Although I am now wrapping up my time with the Iliad, moving on to other works, I find a great swell of gratitude for having had the opportunity to engage with it.  As a recent speaker in a talk I attended said, "I would not want to live in a world without Homer."  And now I find that neither do I.

Epic of Gilgamesh: Because of my brother I am afraid of death

Gilgamesh Cylinder Seal, Akkad 7th Century BC

"I will proclaim to the world the deeds of Gilgamesh.  This was the man to whom all things were known; this was the king who knew the countries of the world.  He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood.  He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labour, returning he rested, he engraved on a stone the whole story."
-Opening lines on p61 in the Penguin Classics version of "The Epic of Gilgamesh"

Taking a brief detour from the Greek world in my ancient classics project I decided to read The Epic of Gilgamesh last night as compiled by N.K. Sandars (the quotes will not have line citations as this version is in prose form, condensed and unseparated into the tablets).  

As has become a habit, I want to comment on the introduction offered by the author.  I tend to skip such things in newer works, such as the Austin or Dostoevsky I've read this last year, because I am in part looking to be a surprised by the unfolding plot.  But here I bow to the inevitable that while context matters in all art, the oldest is often not even intelligible without it.  Simply to have it clarified how we know the story, from a collection of tablets spread over time, admittedly incomplete, and surrounded by an assumed cloud of mythology on the part of the reader, prepared me personally for the odd jumps and omissions I encountered.  

Yet truthfully, I cannot quite see the boundless glory that Sandars exalts Gilgamesh to throughout her introduction.  In particular it was the discussion of parallels and similarities with other epics that left me distinctly unsatisfied and left me feeling oversold.  On one hand she would propose with enthusiasm that many of the great stories of the Western world were in some sense direct descendants of Gilgamesh, and that if we could only trace it backward everybody from Odysseus to Gawain would have a bit of Gilgamesh in them... only to summarily withdraw it, admitting that such was just speculation.  Conversely, she would tantalize with the ideas of the hero cycle, only to not follow them through, and so exploring how the similarities and differences might be informative.  The result was frankly to not shed a great deal of light on either proposition.

If I may say this without sounding derogatory, it felt like compensation.  Gilgamesh is a relative newcomer on the scene, and its devotees must prove that it belongs in the long-accepted pantheon of epic travels alongside the Odyssey and the Aeneid.  So they pour out praises upon it, linking it to every possible story they can, almost like a sort of inverted lineage, where rather than proving descent from Zeus as qualification for hero-ship we now try to prove Zeus's validity by citing all the heroes he sired.  The actual details of that linkage, though, do not entirely matter; just need to have the reference to get the attention.

Yet I cannot help but point out the obvious: Gilgamesh is not the work of a single mind.  While Homer and Virgil drew from their culture, the ultimate product is the synthesis of a single mind.  But here we are faced with the product of many people having their best and worst collated by the Assyrian scribes, who if they're anything like today's scribes need not have any special brilliance, and now somewhat artificially assembled into a single narrative.  I can accept that in a long and rich oral tradition the best segments rise to the top and are retained, ensuring that this epic is far more than just a campfire story, but it reinforces in me the sense that a work of collective imagination will never quite have the lucid power of a single artist.  

Panel from Bull-Headed Lyre of Ur,
2550–2450 BC

Journey Start

Now, all this said I do not wish to give the impression I found Gilgamesh unworthy of time and thought.  Rather, it is prelude for explaining how I experienced it: in patches of brilliance interspersed with tracts of commonness. The first half in particular, from Gilgamesh's introduction to Enkidu's taming to their travels to the Cedar Forest, left me wanting something.  This passage demonstrates the problems well:

"...in three days they had walked as much as much as a journey of a month and two weeks.  They crossed seven mountains before they came to the gate of the forest.  Then Enkidu called out to Gilgamesh, 'Do not go down into the forest; when I opened the gate my hand lost its strength.'  Gilgamesh answered him, 'Dear friend, do not speak like a coward.  Have we got the better of so many dangers and traveled so far, to turn back at last?  You, who are tried in wars and battles, hold close to me now and you will feel no fear of death..."
-P76-7

It begins with an emphasis on the heroic mightiness of these men: they walk fifty leagues a day carrying some six hundred pounds of weapons and armor.  All good; just the sort of thing you would expect from a mythological hero story.  Then bizarrely when Enkidu shows reluctance Gilgamesh reminds him of all they've suffered thus far... in three days.  It is safe to assume that there are missing passages, the natural elaboration of this cultural adventure down the centuries, but nonetheless it feels a bit... kludge-y.  Even trying to stretch my imagination to accept that the mythological need not conform to mundane experiences, I cannot seem to get it to fit that they experienced great struggles and sorrows in such a short time while also keeping up an average speed of 23 kilometers an hour during daylight.  The effect falls completely flat.

This also impinges on Enkidu's story itself.  Sandars emphasizes that this story, like the Iliad, separates out from the misty heights of the past concrete individuals with personalities.  Yet here it feels so much more guided by epic expectations than psychology.  For instance, at least in the version I read Enkidu went straight from the wild to being Gilgamesh's friend, only to find that sitting around in the palace all day brought on ennui:

"I am weak, my arms have lost their strength, the cry of sorrow sticks in my throat, I am oppressed by idleness."
-P70

Hearing this, Gilgamesh proposes they should go on an adventure to immortalize their (or at least his) names.  But to reference above, where are all of Enkidu's exploits in wars and battles?  Sandars mentions there is a missing Enkidu cycle of its own, so presumably they exist there, but nonetheless this is no Ecclesiastes lamenting the pointlessness of everything he's done.  It seems more that Enkidu is feeling his vitality leaking away due to being pampered, something that just doesn't seem to flow from all his apparent missing adventures.  Again, pieces glued together.

However, beginning at about halfway something started to connect.  I think the turning point was Gilgamesh's speech over Enkidu's dying body:

"What is the sleep that holds you now?
You are lost in the dark and cannot hear me."

He touched his heart but it did not beat, nor did he lift his eyes again.
-p95

Perhaps it is my inherent morbidness, but when the epic turned from questing for glory to questing for an answer to death, and hence to life, I found it far more poignant.  Those lines above are so simple, but so direct; much goes into translation, but Sandars' rendition of them is truly poetic in their flow of thought.  Gilgamesh is talking his friend as he always has, then realizes that he is really just talking to himself, and the last line sadly confirms to him why this is.  The loss is painfully bare.

Now his subsequent journeys become wearisomely long.  Not for the reader, but for Gilgamesh; while they occupy no more page space than his previous escapades, they nonetheless have solemn weight to them, as well as the epicness I felt had been missing earlier.  He crosses the wilderness, goes through the endless dark mountain, wanders the fantastic garden of the edge of the world, then finally embarks on a boat beyond even that to reach his goal.  In this regard, I was far more moved than in the Odyssey (which I finished just before this and which will eventually get an entry here); perhaps less wild imagination with fewer Scyllas and Sirens, but a deeper, stronger sense of having truly touched the bounds of human reality.  And the theme of death throughout is expressed with a moving eloquence, with two lines in particular that stood out to me.

"Let my eyes see the sun until they are dazzled with looking.  Although I am no better than a dead man, still let me see the light of the sun."
-p100

Here is humanity's yearning.  Gilgamesh speaks this line not just to another human but to Shamash, the sun god, himself after being told to leave the god's garden.  To accept his lot and stop searching.  It is a sort of fatalistic defiance that is relevant millennia later.  Let him live!  He knows against hope that being mortal he can demand no more, really that he can demand nothing, but nonetheless he will demand of the universe that he at least be given this dignity.  

"Already the thief in the night has hold of my limbs, death inhabits my room; wherever my foot rests, there I find death."
-p115

And here is humanity's fear.  There is something in that last line in particular that draws me, conveying an image that I cannot fully articulate but which is nonetheless perfect.  It surpasses primitive anthropomorphism of death and expresses exquisitely the feeling of being haunted by one's own mortality; wherever one looks, inside every object one lays hands on and patch of ground one steps, the reminder is there that it will not always remain.  I wish I could do it more justice, but perhaps that is what the line itself is there for.  And though the story should climax with Utnapishtim, it was Siduri's wisdom that stayed with me afterward:

"Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to?  You will never find that life for which you are looking.  When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping.  As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice.  Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man."
-p102

In such circumstances I am careful to not read too much into these, knowing I am interpreting them through a vast matrix of my own, but nonetheless I am given pause.  Sandars says that this segment is to be understood as a simple injunction to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.  Just another expression of ancient fatalism and pessimism.   And of course, literally that's what it says.

...yet I feel like the way it is expressed is not so grim.  There is a sort of thoughtlessness, of purposeful shutting out of reality by gluttony and profligacy, that accompanies that attitude.  Yet the last line here, "for this too is the lot of man" has a quiet dignity to it.  In my first post on the Iliad I remarked on the separateness, and hence wholeness, of tragedy and wellness in the Greek view.  Perhaps that is this, yet unlike the completely unmitigated Greek pessimism I feel that by ending the speech with a phrase that wraps up the good and evil together, both being the lot of man, it brings some measure of peace to it.  Though perhaps not a final answer, it is nonetheless moving to me, like an ancient version of mindfulness.  It just doesn't have the language yet beyond the physical good to express something more.

Tablet fragment of Epic of Gilgamesh

Journey End

"This too was the work of Gilgamesh, the king, who knew the countries of the world.  He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood.  He went on a long journey, was weary, worn out with labour, and returning engraved on a stone the whole story."
-p117

As the reader may have noticed, this essay somewhat humorously reflects the nature of its subject material.  I began it with a sort of brash confidence.  Part of my attitude as I explore art is to not be afraid of forming an opinion, to reflect honestly and therefore not credulously praising every "masterpiece" put before me.  Sandars' introduction being what it was, it only inspired me to write a bit of a repudiation; I would love to not only form a view here, but show off that I could separate the wheat from the chaff.  In this case, however, Gustave Flaubert caught up with me:

"The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe."

As I made my own journey further into writing, I came upon death and afterward I found to my surprise expressions of genuine pathos flowing from my fingertips.  I do not know where these sentiments had been hiding, but there they were: after all my proud words to the contrary, I was moved.  At first I thought that perhaps I ought to go back and scrap this essay, or redact the earlier portions, but I have decided to leave the whole story where it is.  I think that accepting some public chagrin is a small price to pay for chronicling my own development.  Too bad blogs are not as permanent as stones to engrave it on.

This experience brings to mind a similar one I had once before while watching an anime franchise named Aria.  It has three seasons, and I admit that aside from a single episode (S1, Ep11) I found the first two simply a wash of sentimentality and banal optimism.  Truthfully I finished them largely because they're the favorite of a friend and I think understanding somebody's favorite art is one of the best ways of understanding them.  But then I reached the third season and somehow in a way it lifted the other two up and made the entire product feel whole; the quotidian earlier portions suddenly found their place as part of an invisible journey, and while I cannot say that I will ever truly love Aria, nonetheless I have a strange fondness for it because of this exposure.

Here is the same.  My views on the early part of the epic are still roughly the same; they still feel fragmentary, simplistic, and dependent on being awed by the mightiness of larger-than-life figures.  Yet now I realize that my discounting was embarrassingly premature.  The good times with their blithe confidence are necessary, for without this initial life-ful-ness we could not appreciate the weight of the later search to reclaim them from death.

For me, then, the final delight was found in the last lines of the epic (if one excludes the Death of Gilgamesh, which is an appendation anyway).  It is a reflection, near-identical, of what began the poem.  At the time it meant nothing to me; my eyes slid over it, taking it in as just the sort of preamble every myth is required to start with.  Nothing to be gained.  But coming at the end now, it was a powerful bookend.  Before we were just told Gilgamesh was great, but we didn't really know what that meant.  Now at the end, the same words sat side by side, we know all of what went into them, for it is only after such journeys that we know what certain words truly mean.

Sound and Fury, together signifying more

 Terracotta amphora with kithara player,
attributed to the Berlin Painter, c490 B.C.

"What is too subtle to be said, or too deeply felt, or too revealing or too mysterious - these things can be sung and only be sung."
- Kenneth Clark, Civilisation

I just had the enjoyable experience of watching a short video on the recreation of Greek music where in it they discuss not only some of the technical details, but more broadly brought home the point that Greek poetry was meant to be sung, often to music.  Now I knew this fact before the video, but I realize now it had not quite percolated into my mind in its full implications.

As I have been reading Homer I am at times suddenly... annoyed by how he seems to melodramatically dawdle in his lines.  I do not mean merely the repetition of epithets, which has its own metric basis, nor in a difference of modern expectation, where we have much less the patience of his original audience.  Instead it just seemed as though he were tossing out impromptu speeches, turns of phrase that seemed just a bit of out place and sought to soar higher than I felt warranted.  It was like people breaking spontaneously into song in a musical, something I admit I never had much sympathy for either.

But on reaching the part at 13:15 where the choir begins to sing a portion of Euripides' Orestes, it just clicked.  There is a quote I scavenged from MacIntyre's After Virtue that describes it well:

"The relationship of our beliefs to sentences that we only or primarily sing, let alone to the music which accompanies those sentences, is not at all the same as the relationship of our beliefs to the sentences that we primarily say and say in an assertive mode."

Singing Orestes' lament as he was fleeing from the Furies made all the difference.  Had I read those lines I might have been somewhat impressed by the imagery, but in the context of the music one can hear the running.  The frightening pursuit, the way the lament is dashed off, as one would bemoaning internally, had the proper power.

But I don't want to give the impression that's the full of it.  There's something else, both in that quote and in the experience, that was over and above the contents of the sentence.  I'm not quite sure what it is, but reflecting backward I can suddenly see how this element of Homer makes such sense now, that one should be walking, pacing, bending up and down and gesticulating in some of these scenes as they are narrate, and I realize why I took such delight in saying the first lines of the Iliad out loud. 

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p.s. Is it not remarkable that we can reconstruct these things? A few marks on a page, a sketch on a vase, and back it comes to life - Attic Park, featuring extinct sounds rather than dinosaurs.  Although perhaps that metaphor is better reserved to a (rather humorous) reconstruction I once saw of Neanderthal vocal qualities.  Nonetheless, information is everywhere - we just need to know how to read it (TASFAD on the Morrison Formation).

On Ants and Atomization in the 20th Century

Reading Sosiak & Barden 2020, Multidimensional trait morphology predicts ecology across ant lineages has me thinking.  First, a brief overview of the paper: taking a large sampling of ant species from across all major groups the authors: 

a) Classified each species into niches based on their nesting habits (e.g. underground, in wood), foraging habits (e.g. arboreal, subterranean), and functional role (e.g. generalist predator, fungal farmer).  

b) Measured many morphological traits such as leg segment lengths and eye placement and entered them into a database.

c) Used machine learning to see which traits, or suites of traits, correlate with different "ecomorphs" (distinct combinations of nesting, foraging, and functional niches). 

Now, the findings themselves are of debatable value; although the program can predict with some 77-85% accuracy which ecomorph category an ant belongs in just based on morphological data, in some ways these simply corroborate what had already been observed.  However, this is really all just a preamble to frame something else I want to talk about. 

Figure 3 from Sosiak & Barden (2020)

Binned Findings

"Across our analyses, we find that ecomorphospaces overlap in a core region, where a large proportion of species are clustered. These ants reflect a generalized platonic ant morphology, where they are not strongly morphologically specialized relative to other taxa."
-Sosiak & Barden (2020)

I want the phrase "platonic ant morphology" inscribed somewhere.  I do not know if it is serious or tongue-in-cheek but I admit I found it distinctly funny.  Forget horse-ness, ant-ness was where it was at all along, for as they note despite having some 14,000 different species most ants nonetheless cleave to being close to ideal proportions.  Myrmidons truly were the Greek ideal.

Okay, setting aside my amusement, this phrase also happens to be the one that tipped me into writing this post.  What is interesting is that although in the end the authors only use ten ecomorph categories, there could have been up to 120 (6 functional niches x 5 nesting niches x 4 foraging niches), or at least the 35 that were contained in their sample of some 166 species.  However, instead they found:

"Collapsed or summarized ecomorph syndromes improve prediction by simultaneously considering multiple ecological niche aspects and accommodating some plasticity."

Why do I find this interesting enough to write on?  Because at first glance it is counter-intuitive that a smaller number of categories would be more useful.  We would expect that a process which paid attention to every feature and most finely delineated categories would be ideal.  After all, isn't this getting closer to the truth?  Yet instead their own preliminary results led them to conclude otherwise.  Trying too hard to differentiate didn't work because their data itself had imperfect categories, and so it performed better when simplified into fewer groups which assumed wiggle room.

Yet this is, of course, precisely what we do as humans.  In a world full of variation we are forced to make arbitrary, but useful, distinctions.  It reminds me of Donald Hoffman's "fitness beats truth" theorem, that what natural selection has pushed us for as beings with limited time and processing power is an ability to make generalizations.  Useful generalizations.  That's the key here.  The validity of categorization is linked to outcome, and there is no clear rule for determining how finely it ought to be done except that the two extremes are equally useless: if everything belongs to one category or if everything has its own category we may have perfect predictive power... but it is useless.  And in the vast middle area is left us to decide when and were to subsume particulars to a larger classification as we make the universe as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Supremacist Composition: White on White
by Kasimir Malevich, 1918

Family Resemblance

"We find that multidimensionality greatly aids in the characterization of ecomorphs... Ecomorphs are often defined by integration of traits moreso than individual measurements."
-Sosiak & Barden (2020)

I sometimes have this feeling that we are getting back to where we once were a century ago in terms of appreciating the complexity of the world.  That may seem to be a strange thing to say in light of the vast advances in science in this time, but it is a thought that has particularly been on my mind since earlier today as I read a paper involving the history of ecological development.  The author notes that nineteenth-century scientists were well-versed in the impact of environment on development, but that later advances in genetics and molecular biology drove such observations from the center stage.  That what they offered, and what we wanted, was a clear sort of mechanism, one made only of the simplest parts that would allow us to ignore all the baffling variety and circumstance in natura to reach the real truth underneath.  That would satisfy us.  

I am hardly the first person to observe or critique the trends of reductionism, but as I thought on it I wondered just how great its breadth and impact was.  It is true that science inherited from its physics roots a propensity for breaking things into their components, and it achieved much success with it, yet I feel as though that element of success carried another overtone.  A sense of liberating simplicity that cuts through the morass of existence:

“Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light."

As I read Art Through the Ages what struck me was how art in the 20th century was distinctly atomized.  Rothko's color, Mondrian's composition, and so forth.  They were not mature narratives but single thoughts.  Another book I was reading (Janson's History of Art for Young People) called Picasso's Bull's Head "a visual pun" and I thought the phrase was incredibly apt.  We cannot deny that puns are comedy, yet they are only a fragment of it.  A shard of humor.  The smallest piece before it ceases to belong to that category.  Yet so many of the twentieth-century works fixate on these small pieces so strongly as if desperate to grasp a truth in it, or behind it; that it is only complete simplicity which allows for certainty.  There is a quote from Naum Gabo which summarizes this mentality perfectly:

"Such artfully constructed images are the very essence of the reality of the world which we are searching for."

Another, from Kasimir Malevich:

"The essential thing [in pictorial art] is feeling - in itself and completely independent of the context in which it has been evoked."

Context again, or rather its absence.  I think there was something at work, an essential drive that ran through the twentieth-century mind to blast away everything and get to the bottom of it all in a frenzy of disgusted disillusionment.  In his brilliant essay Iconophobia, Kenneth Clark notes that pure monotheisms are hostile to representational art for they are a form of beguiling idolatry.  They aren't the real thing, just something's fake of it, and all they can possibly do is lead one astray.  It is the result of feeling that they are in the service of the one core truth of the universe which makes all else distraction.  He then goes on to observe that much of modern art is also iconophobic.  It detests representation in favor of abstraction, and that it is perhaps for much the same reason: a desire to purify one's vision and so draw closer to the truth.

It causes me to question the place of reductionism in all this.  I had always assumed that it, being part and parcel with science, was the driver.  That all wings of the human endeavor were attempting to copy science in all its success.  Yet that may only be part of the story.  Perhaps rather reductionism in science wasn't maintained on the basis of results, but because it appealed to the need we increasingly felt to ground ourselves after having unchained the Earth from the Sun.  That truth would be found in a forcible negation of the old view which dissolved all the contextual stories and left us with certainty once again.

To return to ants here at the end, I am reminded of when I read William Morton Wheeler's The Ants.  What struck me was his assured holism, that he took it for granted he was observing an organism in its entirety, and that organism has a reality all its own.  Like he wasn't looking over his shoulder, afraid that its reality would dissolve into a meaningless assemblage of organic chemistry coded by nucleotides.  He knew from hours of long observation that he had a sense for these insects, and that such knowledge, though not quantified or rooted in a lower stratum, was nonetheless real.  I do not believe that this is merely because he did not yet have access to those findings but because he was assured of his world and its context.  

Yet even as I praise this, his own writings validate the suspicion that led to their demise.  His observation was acute, but it was in the service of certain values that have proven untenable.  He compares types/stages of human societies to those of ants; that Ponerines are hunter-gatherers, leaf-cutters the agriculturalists, and slave-makers the barbarians.  He particularly regards inquilline ants as "degenerate," a phrase he uses not just to denote their reduced morphology but as an indictment; little advanced from Aesop in this manner, there was a cosmic lesson from an animal in how a loss of upright self-sufficiency is ethically reprehensible.  I think it is realizing these mistakes, among a thousand others, that conferred on us such a desire to not be fooled again.  As a price for stripping away the old beliefs we also stripped away the habits of thought that would see value in context, contingent categories, visual representation, and as the paper puts it, "multidimensionality," the "integration of traits" and "accommodating some plasticity" in our understanding.

I do though have some optimism that we are beginning to return to an acceptance of fuzziness.  That after being estranged from categories we have realized they are indispensable, but now we are better aware of their nature.  Similarly, that having buried ourselves in a sense that the only thing that mattered is the selfish gene, the simplest unit we can envision, we are crawling out and seeing that it is not a failure when it takes multiple factors in order to contextualize an organism (or a truth).  Perhaps even that they can have value in themselves.  That, I think, is a good direction to go.