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| Attic lekythoi depicting two women at a standing loom, 6th century BC |
"It often happens, however, that in attempting to convey the impression of a work of art a critic is forced beyond a straightforward description of the subject, and must have recourse to allusion, metaphor and analogy. The most famous description of a work of art in the English language, Walter Pater's evocation of the Mona Lisa, is of this kind, and we may argue that with an image so complex, a simple description of the subject would have been meaningless. Pater's accumulation of associative images - the rocks, the vampire, the diver in deep seas, the sound of lyres and flutes - may seem rather far-fetched; and no one supposes that they were in Leonardo's mind when he was at work; but to the nineteenth-century reader, with his rich, elaborate mental furniture, they did to an extraordinary degree convey the mysterious power of the original painting."Since my last entry on the Iliad I've continued to mull over certain thoughts which never quite found full expression there. There is something about reading this book, one written by a mind familiar because it is human but alien because it is so ancient, that brings about clarity in contrast.
-Kenneth Clark, Art History and Criticism as Literature
Above I had to quote a whole paragraph just to get to a single phrase: mental furniture. It is a striking metaphor to me, and one that has self-referentially become a fixture of my own since first reading. It is the image of a mind populated by set pieces, bought elsewhere and brought here in order to enrich the surroundings, organized for particular effect, yet together creating a proper living space, each one the result of some individual effort of craftsmanship. For Clark, it is the great artists and cultural figures who have been the main contributors and who have left their visible and invisible mark all around us. It is the deepening of the human experience by bringing it to viable expression.
Homer, coming as such a dawn-author, does not have this. True he draws on his own elaborate Greek mythology and epic tradition, but these have not yet had the time and complexity to conceal certain problems of human existence. They are a first pass at addressing them, and in their primevalness reveal habits that have long been covered up, like a bare stool versus our motorized stuffed armchair. I don't make the comparison to diminish the former, for this simple seat has a beautiful elegance all its own, but because in its spareness it reveals components of construction. The essentials for making the space in our head livable as we try to make sense of it all.
It is an intuition of mine that the world is mysterious and that we must strip back the known to know it. Here some outcropping is exposed, a mind that is more complex than unhewn animism but not yet stuffed by abstraction, and perhaps through it we can learn something of ourselves.
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| Sacrifice of a pig in ancient Greece (tondo from an Attic red-figure cup, 510–500 BC, by the Epidromos Painter, collections of the Louvre) |
Deeply-Moved Movers
"God does not play dice." - Einstein
As I was formulating my thoughts for this section, I realized that we never really ask why something doesn't happen. We may ask why something different happens, why events unfold one way rather than another, but that is really just offering a different explanation. Not-things do not not-happen, so there is no need for not-explanations. And we don't believe in chance.
Or, to be clear, we don't believe in true randomness, and hence true un-caused-ness (notice we don't even have a word for it). We may recognize that from our perspective things may appear random, but that is not really our fundamental attitude. Even the rarefied modern scientific outlook, with all its emphasis on contingency as opposed to a directed cosmos, fundamentally reaffirms a caused order. When we reach the edges of this, either in quantum mechanics or the beginning of the universe, where our causal "Why?"s stop, we are deeply dissatisfied. Whether it be the nature of our brain, that supreme pattern finding machine, or some deeper impulse, we are never truly settled with the explanation that something happened for no reason. For patterns are pleasantly self-confirming but as of yet we have no mathematical test for randomness. We do not even know if it exists.
Now, that is a topic that extends far beyond the scope of this essay, but it is an issue that I wanted to bring to the forefront before looking back. That one of the core elements of the human experience is building up a corpus of explanations using mechanisms we understand, and that these "Why?"s are a prerequisite for any culture. What awoke this train of thought for me in the Iliad was a mundane passage where Agamemnon sacrifices lambs to consecrate the oath between the Achaeans and Trojans (quotes from Lattimore):
...the life breath going away,
since the strength of the bronze had taken it from them.
-Book 3, p108
It is an innocuous passage, but the wording stuck with me. It was the strength of the bronze which had allowed it to accomplish its purpose. Now, this is of course a translation so I would not wish to put too much stress upon a single word choice, but after many mentions of "pitiless bronze" and spears seeking to find their targets it seemed to me to hint at the thought process behind it all. We are several centuries out from Aristotle, but nonetheless it has a sense teleologically striving for a goal or end. That is, the blade did not mechanistically cut the lamb by overcoming the hydrogen bonds and van der Waals forces. It cut the lamb because it was mightier, because the blade could exert its will and take away from the victim something the lamb did not want to give up, the same way a stronger man may overcome a weaker one and force him to do as he wants.
In fact, I would guess this is almost exactly it.
A theme which guides much of my thought, and which I bring to the discussion here, is that in order to truly understand humans we must recognize that we are physically-embodied, visually-oriented social apes, and that a shocking amount of our thought is constructed from these building blocks. While there is some debate over the full validity of the social brain hypothesis, I nonetheless am something of a believer, if not that the raw size of our brain correlates with social size but that many of our most complex mental models are built on social ones. That is, the most elaborate problems we had to solve evolutionarily were dealing with other people, and now that we have expanded our horizons we nonetheless fall back on such habits. That transitive logic habitually arises in unrelated social creatures as macaques, jays, and wasps would seem to support this view, and I suspect this is why I could use words such as "overcoming" and "force" in both a scientific and social sentence above without appearing inconsistent.
So long before there was any notion of law or mathematical regularity in the universe, there were humans interacting. They jostled for position, wheedled for desires, and fought and cooperated to get what they wanted. Central to this is will, the teleological concept above, one which ties together what happens with what was desired to happen. It is the cause we are first and foremost familiar with, for nothing is more natural than the sense that we will our body to move and it occurs (unless "the strength is taken" from us, as so often accompanies death in the Iliad). In fact, it is so obvious it deserves an aside.
The idea we have is that when we envision our arm to move we have a final position in mind and perhaps a purpose. Yet curiously this bears no resemblance to what must actually happen to bring this about; there is no nerve that carries position or purpose, just varying levels of muscle recruitment. Somehow one must be translated into the other (and we have no idea how). But of course the Greeks did not know this; the order to move the arm moved the arm, and the position that was desired was the very thing that proximately controlled the action. That is, unlike us, it is not the will that set into motion a series of events that ended in the movement of the arm, it was the will that moved the arm. The will and the event is the same. In turn this logic can be run in reverse: when things move there is a will behind it somewhere, and that if something is prevented from moving it is due to an even greater will opposing it.
...'Why then,
child, do you lament? What sorrow has come to your heart now?
Speak out, do not hide it. These things are brought to accomplishment
through Zeus: in the way that you lifted your hands and prayed for...'
-B18, p377
But there exists a conundrum at the heart of this outlook: sometimes we get what we will but it is not what we find we want. Above is the passage where Thetis comes to comfort Achilles as he mourns Patroclus. To us as moderns it is simple enough: Achilles was a proud fool and spitefully wished disaster on Agamemnon and everybody else to prove they needed him. Whether or not we think it just desserts that he now lose his best friend after praying for his countrymen to suffer, we can at least understand that's not what he wanted.
However, I'm thinking that for the Greeks it may not have been so separate. The Iliad has shown us through its narrative that the chain of willful causality leads back to Achilles; it was his prayer which swayed Thetis to intercede on his behalf with Zeus, and his prayer was fulfilled completely. But he certainly didn't wish for this outcome... did he? How is it possible to will something so fervently only to have it betray him? It would be as though he told his arm to hug a friend and instead it slapped them; it simply makes no sense. So if Achilles' own volition is out then the only option which remains is that the causal power of another being, one with a will greater than even his, overruled his intent and he just didn't know it. This is precisely the angle Agamemnon takes in his own "apology" later:
'This is the word the Achaians have spoken often against me
and found fault with me in it, yet I am not responsible
but Zeus is, and Destiny, and Erinys the mist-walking
who in assembly caught my heart in the savage delusion
on that day I stripped from him the prize of Achilleus.
Yet what could I do? It is the god who accomplishes all things.
Delusion is the elder daughter of Zeus, the accursed
who deludes all; her feet are delicate and they step not
on the firm earth, but she walks the air above men's heads
and leads them astray. She has entangled others before me.'
-B19, p394
I found this such a delightful passage to read for many reasons. For one it is a situation we can recognize: Agamemnon is playing politician, trying to slip out of being held accountable for his terrible leadership choices. His selfishness and spite have cost everybody and needs to figure out how to blunt their ire. It is so eternally human that we can still hear in it the same refrain that sounds whenever a miscreant today tries to deflect blame. It's never their fault; it's always somebody else's.
Yet at the same time, it should be noted that Agamemnon would not offer up to his listeners an explanation they would not accept. To us it may seem contrived, but for them it is not. I think it is a bad habit of modern thought to believe that the ancients were utterly credulous because their superstitious beliefs always overwhelmed their critical faculties if only the gods were involved. That undersells them and blinds us to what is actually happening here: Agamemnon is attempting to convince his listeners that he didn't will this. Everybody has been murmuring that he chose his own personal gain over the good of the Achaean force, that he weighed the two and decided in his own favor, and that hence the disasters that have unfolded can be laid at his feet. After all, in retrospect he should have seen this coming.
Once again, I must emphasize that there is no idea of the divided mind or cosmic law that can come to the rescue here. The resolution to this problem in the minds of his men lies solely with assigning malicious intent to the correct being. And he wants them to know it assuredly isn't him. He thought that what he was doing was befitting a king, but that was only Zeus through Delusion working out a different plan. And since Zeus is assuredly the mightiest will of all there's no way he could have resisted. Such reasoning has a certain soundness within this worldview, and indeed Achilles accepts Agamemnon's defense:
'Father Zeus, great are the delusions with which you visit men.
Without you, the son of Atreus could never have stirred so
the heart inside my breast, nor taken the girl away from me
against my will, and be in helplessness. No, but Zeus somehow
wished that death should befall great numbers of the Achaians,'
-B19, p399
With this, Achilles has his answer too. The reason people can intend for one thing to happen, only to have it come about with unforseen consequences is that they are overruled by another being who has more power than they. Achilles got exactly what he asked for, but his asking for this was manipulated in him by Zeus, because there's no way he could actually desire what happened in the end. That'd be an incomprehensible thing for Achilles, hero of the Greeks, to do under his own volition. But events don't happen unless somebody wants them to, and who is left to blame but the gods?
Or fate.
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| From NICHD Exchange Recap: “Genome Editing: Rewriting Fate”, https://science.nichd.nih.gov/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=142411766 |
Fated Conclusion
'For my mother Thetis the goddess of silver feet tells me
I carry two sorts of destiny toward the day of my death. Either,
if I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans,
my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting;
but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers,
the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life
left for me, and my end in death will not come to be quickly.'
-B9, p209, Achilles
We now reach the place I willed this essay to arrive from the beginning. Last post I concluded with remarks on the Greek outlook toward the uncontrollability of the world. That fate was not inevitability but chance, and that they were united into a single concept by the inevitability of chance. It is still a good piece of writing, and in fact I'm a bit proud of how that segment turned out, but I recognize that in light of such passages as the one above, fate cannot be adequately summed up in a single statement such as that. After all, we abhor chance.
'Now, since I am not going back to the beloved land of my fathers,
since I was no light of safety to Patroklos, nor to my other
companions, who in their numbers went down before glorious Hektor,
but sit here beside my ships, a useless weight on the good land...'
-B18, p378, Achilles
I believe we have all experienced regret similar to Achilles' upon discovering what had happened because of his wishes. Probably not so tragically, but still where having seen how events turned out it is obvious in retrospect that our actions led that way. That the germ of the future was always contained within the past, but that we were unable to appreciate it until it was too late. We could have acted differently but, almost by definition, we had acted in line with who we were and what we knew at that moment.
Achilles, through the power of storytelling, has been given knowledge that mortals do not normally possess. He can see the juncture at which his life splits, where the Achilles of either future could trace back in memory what had brought him to that place. Achilles on the farm thinking back in his old age to how he ran from the greatest battle of his life, and that with that the flame of his passion went out. Achilles dying on the battlefield reflecting on how if only he had left he might have saved himself and his friends. Everything clear in hindsight.
This to me seems to be the origins of the problem. Our immediate experience of the world is imbued with a sense of free will, that first cause that somehow allows multiple possibilities to exist and that although in the end the world unfolds one way, it could have unfolded another. The future in this view is indeterminate. Yet we can also see clearly how one thing leads to another, and that in retrospect we can grasp that there were forces at work which brought about the final ends. Especially forces in ourselves, our own nature and our own ignorance; if history were repeated we would do the same thing again. The future, then, seems fated too. It is paradoxical, that both seem defensible in our experience, and though modern science has largely ousted older explanations (for the better), we've yet to truly encompass what this all means.
So these two had looped over both sides a crossing
cable of strong discord and the closing of battle, not to be
slipped, not to be broken, which unstrung the knees of many.
-B13, p280
This is the passage which grants this page its name, a scene around the boats where Zeus, supporting the Trojans, is secretly undermined by Poseidon, bolstering the Achaeans. They are some of my favorite lines of the Iliad. While the poem is replete with similes, which often go on far longer than seems reasonable, this is one of its few metaphors. It gives a particular immediateness to the comparison, a vivid image of a chaotic tangle of invisible bonds, one that interlocks everybody on the field, unaware, into a single mesh under the sway of wills greater than they. It is not called fate, but it has the same flavor.
And it seems... lamentable in its haphazard and deadly nature.
"Of all men's miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing."
-Herodotus, Histories, 9.16
I have struggled with how to end this essay, for I have covered much ground and have few conclusions to offer, except that while the Greek idea of fate is not a consistent one, it is perhaps a more compelling one than I previously gave it credit for. It seeks to address a problem that has never entirely gone away, and did so in a fashion more resonant than ours does now, caught as we are between an unforgiving determinism and the doom of being free. I do not believe that going back to the Greeks is the answer, but as always they are a fertile source to mine, I am grateful for the hints that they have given us.
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