Seeing Monet's Colors

 

Path Through the Wheat Fields at Pourville, Monet 1882

There is a sense I sometimes get when reading art history books that Monet is considered ever so slightly jejune nowadays.  Great tracts are devoted to Manet's pictorial rebellions and Cezanne's classical abstractions, but it is as though Monet is only worth mentioning but not expounding on at length.  He's just very pretty and appallingly popular.  It reminds me in an oblique way of the criticism Western academies leveled at landscape paintings: that pictures which lack intellectual or moral content are inferior, and that Monet, despite his contributions, was stuck at such a level all his days as the sole holdout of the original Impressionist approach.  Now, perhaps I admit my own level here, but I still favor him of all the original Impressionists, and I wish to speak somewhat on that point.

A couple of weekends ago I was wandering around Denver and decided to make the art museum my destination.  In mind I had an exhibit which I had already seen but which nonetheless drew me, an ongoing display of the museum's collection of 1800s art; to go again would be a treat, and makes me reflect that I ought to purchase an annual pass.  Among those on display, Monet's Path Through the Wheat Fields at Pourville (1882) had particularly drawn me.  I'm not one for artistic thrills but it held me in quiet appreciation for some time, and on leaving previously I had sought in vain for a decent-sized print to accent my apartment.  

However, this second visit was thwarted by COVID restrictions on the number of occupants, and I was about to leave when I had the impulse to wander into the gift shop.  I think I retained the somewhat silly notion that a print of Monet's Path would have emerged in the intervening weeks.  To nobody's surprise it had not.  After spending some time using the gift shop as a surrogate for an actual gallery, and reading enough of a book on landscape art (hence the reference above) to feel guilty enough that I ought to buy it, I was preparing to leave when I encountered the puzzles.  And there, in the middle of the offerings, was my picture in 1000-piece form.  Impulse won and it was purchased, the result being that my dining table has since been occupied enough to force me to eat around the edges.  A happily acceptable cost.  As of this writing I have sunk many hours into its assembly, but cannot brag of more than assembling the outline and middle strip, where the features of land and plant encircle the central sea.

When you stare at a painting, even a real one, you can only do so for so long.  I'm reminded of Clark's quip that he can only be enraptured by a painting about as long as he can enjoy the smell of a fresh orange - or about a couple of minutes.  After that the mind has to do something; it has to find some technique to examine, some historical detail with which to lend it context, just some intellectual program that is deeper than wallowing in sensation alone.  Part of my self-justification for purchasing the puzzle was that my efforts might have the same benefit, giving me something to do while tirelessly keeping my attention fixated on the image.  And there is a certain joy in discovering the mottled subtleties of color that differentiate one area from another, where the mind learns to recognize this thatched azure is not the same as that wispy cerulean.  It is remarkable how I often find myself reaching for a piece before I can say why, only to discover that it is indeed of the fit of some locale I had given upon working on some minutes before.  

If this were all, though, I would have considered my original half-formulated rationalization fulfilled.  But I have also got something I did not expect.  Previously I had noticed that after spending time with Impressionists the world looked somehow prettier.  It was a vague sense, but it was there.  Now, though, after some intensive effort with just this painting I had the most curious experience: stepping out onto my balcony after a few days of this I saw the clouds.  

Shot from my balcony (though not the one I saw that day)

 

 

 

I am an avid patronizer of clouds.  I step outside on more days than not to appreciate them, especially the effect the sunset has over the Rockies as the plains clouds encounter the uplifted terrain.  It is nothing new for me to go look at them in happiness.  But this was a bit different.  This was seeing them with proper attention, all the gradations and mixtures of color that had previously been lumped into one now expanded to read.  I found the same applied to the trees and hills as I drove on the highway, the individual yellows, grays, purples, and greens detaching themselves and each commanding attention.  It is as though my brain is looking for the pieces that would match those patches as well, except having learned that task for a menial purpose has discovered in it a far more rewarding utility.

I am reminded with some humor of my naive, and negative, reaction to Impressionism originally: it was abstract.  This wasn't what the world looked like, especially not what Monet painted.  The world was made up of things, and these jotty strokes were just too fanciful.  I've only learned later that my attitude ironically recapitulated the original reaction, and hence the name given in scorn to the movement.  But of course this name is the truth: it is the result of somebody who has not abstracted yet, who is painting things but is yet only in pursuit of their immediate visual impact.  It reminds me of this video on vision reconstruction and the curious similarity between the reconstructions and works by Turner.  There is a certain genius that was called forth in the 1800s by their intense need to cut through illusions and perceive what the world is really like, and Monet looked.  

This is the first time that "seeing the world in a new way" has held true for me in painting.  As a result of Monet's acuity I have been able to add something to my own faculties as well, something which is more than a passing appreciation of his paintings alone.  For that I am grateful, and now both vehemently agree and disagree with the statements I began with up top: Monet's paintings at their best do indeed contain some emptiness.

Fractals rhyme

From medium.com

One of my pastime thoughts is that if I ever learn enough to warrant it, I would want to teach a "Science for Art Majors" and an "Art for Science Majors" pair of classes, as I think that the separation of the two cultures has largely had an enervating effect on our society.  Science drives our worldview, but our artists being ignorant of it are unable to search for expression in a human fashion.  By comparison, our scientists continue with a course that is unaware of how much of the human experience must be accounted for - let alone the benefits that a liberal education bring, and the fact that scientists are increasingly called upon to act as advisors.

In any case, what follows is something of a fragmentary discussion I had with myself earlier, and would perhaps be a partial lecture or idea in one or both of such classes.  

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.”

The famous Walter Pater quote.  Now paired with Rutherford:

"All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

I would like people to think about these two for a second, for even if one disagrees with the statements I believe they point toward something key in both endeavors.  

What is it that art is after?  Obviously asking such a sweeping question is perhaps presumptuous, and to offer an answer even more so.  However, I am going to try in order to frame the issue as I understand it.  In the end, art to me seems to be the human outlet for expression of experience, an outlet which by and large is able to bypass words because they are too limited.  It is one of those habits we fall into easily, that we think that our words are our ideas, and that our ideas are our experience or Reality (and when I say "idea" I mean it in the broadest sense of concept or symbol).  It is an error I believe even more reinforced by the ascendance of science, that if something cannot be put into words then it does not exist.  

Artists, then, are in the business of annealing these transitions.  For either giving us an insight into their ideas in a way that mere words could not, and, most aspirationally, seeking to perhaps even elevate us to a glimpse of that experience ourselves.  In this long struggle for expression, two trends appear (at least in the West, I cannot speak for elsewhere), which can be broadly termed the Classical and the Romantic.  The former favors form, clarity, and often immortality; the latter the particular, the obscure, and the fleeting.  It is a back and forth, where one approach is ascendant, then the other, and either taken to extremes is moribund.  Ultimately, though, it is about content of experience and finding a way to bring it out.

This, to me, is how I then understand Pater above.  Music is unsymbolic, and while symbols act as convenient vessels for experience (giving it form), ultimately they are all handmaidens (they cannot be the content).  

Scientists aspire in some sense to achieve the exact opposite.  If you read a scientific paper you will notice that the first person is never used and that often references to the researchers entirely omitted; it is as though the experiment ran itself, and that it does not matter who was there.  If art aspires to the state of music, science aspires to the state of physics, which in turn aspires to the state of math (or logic) wherein it is all form and no content.  It does not matter what is in the A's, B's, and C's of a syllogism, and it does not matter whether the object falling from the tower is a cannonball, a rock, or a person so long as one has one or two basic characterizing measurements of them (obviously I simplify the situation; perhaps I should say falling on the moon).  

Last semester I had the opportunity to read several papers about the growing field of "Systems Biology."  It is a curious thing, for as far as I can tell it is yet another sallying forth of the physics mindset into biology.  Its main proponents are indeed the chemists, the biophysicists, and the computer scientists.  It is their goal to find the essential qualities of the biological systems and interpret them as circuit diagrams, much in the same way that once one has figured out the functions of resistor, capacitor, and so forth the details about their composition do not matter, just their given values.  In this way, they believe, at long last biology can be brought into the realm of a proper, predictive science.

What I find particularly telling (and admittedly a bit humorous) is that it has a real hostility to being conflated with molecular biology, which has essentially pursued the same dream its entire history.  It's the vanity of small differences, that with the previous program of molecular biology failing to account for all of life and reduce it to a few pieces we can grasp, a new group has "broken off" and must differentiate itself while essentially doing the same thing, although setting its sights more broadly.

Now, I don't mock this endeavor, but I find it extremely interesting because in my experience biology lies at the tipping point of science.  Science wants to be the ultimate Classical endeavor, and in order to do so the universal must always be able to account for the particular.  Biology as a discipline has clearly yielded a sense of order, with some fields such as population genetics being both amenable to and incredibly informative with such approaches.  

Yet there are always the naturalists, the ecologists, the people who simply like being out in the field and appreciating each species for itself.  It's not that they despise theory or cannot understand it, but like some puff of Romantic spirit that finds itself in expression, they take umbrage with the idea that the diversity they relish is merely noise.  Also with the presumptuousness of people who sit behind desks all day dictating what it is the people in the field must be seeing. 

As such, biology has never quite submitted to the physics paradigm while not yet garnering the scorn that psychology and the social sciences have for their yet greater chaos.  We seem to at least be able to point to something.  So the question in biology goes unanswered: will we know everything when we learn all the principles or study all the organisms?  Is our knowledge to be found in the universal or the particular?  This is obviously somewhat a false dichotomy in practice, as indeed it is always a false dichotomy in practice, since we always need both to make sense of anything in a mysterious epistemological quandary.  But nonetheless, I find its expression in biology particularly illuminating, as both sides manage to be so compelling at once.

It reminds me of history in a way.  Grand theories of history have come and gone, most of them coming to rather swift ruin.  It has happened so much that nowadays it seems to me that historians have resigned themselves to a degree of stamp collecting, of studying only their particular system of events with little hope of applying it to another.  Yet despite it all, I can't help but think Twain has a point:

"History never repeats itself but it rhymes."

Nobody who takes time to study history can miss the immediate similarity of many circumstances to others, especially to one's own.  That is one of its great values is to learn from it; if everything was particular and nothing general, then history by definition would be a science without application.  So how to reconcile this with history's general inability to predict the future?  I don't have an answer, but I have a metaphor.

Fractals Rhyme

I think that everybody who gets a college education, or wants to be educated at least, ought to spend time learning about chaos and fractals.  I believe they offer a sort of avenue out of our conundrum, if we can somehow figure out how, because fractals rhyme too.

Looking at the image above, its self-similarity is self-evident.  You can't miss it.  Yet no part is identically that of any other; zooming in and in and in the same motifs repeat, but none of them are exact copies of any other.  It is the same with the the strange attractors, those multi-dimensional structures which confine the possibilities but due to sensitivity are useless for predicting its precise state long into the future.

I feel there is something here, a version of looking at the world that acknowledges order but admits sensitivity on the particulars.  That there are other forms of order other than the simple symmetry we easily recognize, the simple repetition we easily notice.  I haven't gotten the idea there yet, but just this piece has been enough to tantalize me since I first read about the subject years ago.

In any case, I end this essay with the same inconclusiveness so many others end with, feeling I have somehow said nothing with all my words.  There has to be a way to put the world back together.

Thoughts at the End of a Day - Photography and Fourier Transforms

From: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Four-Fourier-transforms-and-the-links-between-them-In-the-tempered-distributions-sense_fig1_328163000

A day spent reading produced a few thoughts, sketched here and perhaps expanded in the future.  But mostly just for myself so I don't immediately forget them.

The Rise of Photography

"It is tempting to think [Manet] was impelled to create the new style by the challenge of photography.  The 'pencil of nature,' then known for a quarter of a century, had demonstrated the objective truth of Renaissance perspective, but it established a standard of representational accuracy that no handmade image could hope to rival.  Painting needed to be rescued from competition with the camera.  This Manet accomplished by insisting that a painted canvas is, above all, a material surface covered with pigments - that we must look at it, not through it." - p383, History of Art for Young People, 4th Edition

Reading this today it had me thinking about the effect of photography on painting, and I had this strange thought that it was the same issue that scientific report bore to mythology.  When it comes to establishing the world "as it is" the former in both cases cannot be defeated.  We have mastered, or come close to it, creating precise representations of the world.  The goal of the Renaissance in this respect has been fulfilled.  And it has left us curiously empty, as though something is not quite as fulfilled in these forms.  I feel like until we can properly answer what is missing in a way that isn't just something like "the human touch" we're going to keep passing it by.  

Fourier Transforms and Logic

I've been taking a class on mathematical data analysis and so models and parameter fitting have been on my mind.  For some reason the idea suddenly linked up with what I had known for a while about Fourier Transforms, that any wave can be decomposed into a set of sine waves.  The more complicated the wave, the more sine waves needed to describe it... but also the more particular it becomes as a class.  It felt like an equivalent of overparameterization, that it's always possible to get any model to fit the data, the question is whether it can be done in an elegant enough way to be generalizable. 

Utility.  That seems to lie at the heart of so much of our perceptual and cognitive apparatus.  That we cannot ask so much of the world often whether something is true, only whether it is a good way of representing it.  That somehow rationality and logic are the rules of the average, and that 

There is an idea tickling the back of my mind as well, something from Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert, that:

• All quantum objects have a proxy wave
• All waves can be decomposed into members of any family of waves (Fourier transform generalized)
• Each wave family corresponds with some mechanical attribute (energy/time, position/momentum)
• So using a "prism" of your choice you decompose the proxy wave into a given family, which will come out as a set of individual waves.  These waves, when squared, give the probability of their particular related outcome occurring
• Finally, since waveform families come in pairs, attributes come in pairs, limiting what can be measured by any given device (it takes more unrelated waveforms, more possibilities, to construct a wave)

This has something to do with all of it too, I think.  That the nature of reality is to split into opposites on being measured, and there are more and less efficient choices to do so.  If something looks like a sine wave you're better off using sine waves to decompose it rather than impulse waves, but ultimately there's no fully right or fully wrong answer.  Just more or less effective ones.  This simultaneously anchors and undermines truth, and again it seems like this is just a problem yet to be solved.

Adam Bede's Insufficient Sample Size

 

Thoughts on Adam Bede by George Eliot

"...the voices of the Methodists reached him, rising and falling in that strange blending of exultation and sadness which belongs to the cadence of a hymn." - Chapter 2

As somebody who has received scientific training first and artistic... well, not training, but exploration... second, I can't help but fall back on old patterns.  When you read a scientific paper the basic question is always: do the methods and results sufficiently support the conclusion?  Do I buy their thesis in light of the data they have shown me?  My experience in Adam Bede is, "No, but I think I mostly agree anyway."

From cursory notes in the introduction, as well as what is obvious in the book itself, George Eliot wants to prove the reality of morality and the edifying/sanctifying power of suffering.  In the first case she creates characters who may appear virtuous outwardly but possessing great flaws, such as Arthur Donnithorne, or those who may not fit our ideal but are nonetheless quite good, such as Rector Irwine.  Then of course there is Adam Bede himself, through whom Eliot expresses much of what she sees as the qualities of a good man - temperance, self-control, and an internal dedication to his own standards as exhibited by an outward dedication to his craft regardless of pay or importance.  Indeed, this yielded a series of my favorite quotes (in order of character):

"There is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change; for this reason - that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only practicable right." - on Arthur, Chapter 29

"[Mr. Irwine was of] sufficiently subtle moral fibre to have an unwearing tenderness for obscure and monotonous suffering." - Chapter 5

"My back's broad and strong enough; I should be no better than a coward to go away and leave the troubles to be borne by them as aren't half so able.  'They that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of those that are weak, and not to please themselves.' There's a text want no candle to show 'it: it shines by its own light.  It's plain enough you get into the wrong road i' this life if you run after this and that only for the sake o' making things easy and pleasant to yourself." - Adam Bede, Chapter 4

However, none of these characters hold a candle to Dinah, who is easily the most inspiring figure of the book.  Eliot had a falling away from Christianity, but nobody who reads her portrayal of Dinah can mistake her for an abject, nihilistic atheist.  It was perhaps a strange problem for me to contemplate that while I always wanted more of Dinah in the book, I can see how hard it would be to keep such a thing interesting; what is so powerful is Dinah's true dedication, and a chronicle of such a character would lack that tension which motivates novels.  But I digress.

But it is really the second point that sticks: the centrality of suffering in the human experience, even to the point of its spiritual necessity.  The modern world has fully entered a mindset of William James' "once born" spirituality: that evil, while it may be observed to exist, somehow does not play an essential role in the scheme of things.  It is an aberration, an accident, and soon through science, social reform, and general progress we will reduce it to nothing.  I think Eliot saw that coming and was revolted at it and revolted against it.  That it was a step backward from what Christianity had reached.

 

The Descent from the Cross, Rogier van der Weyden, c1435

Religious Insight

"Infinite Love is suffering too - yea, in the fulness of knowledge it suffers, it yearns, it mourns; and that is a blind self-seeking which wants to be freed from the sorrow wherewith the whole creation groaneth and travaileth.  Surely it is not true blessedness to be free from sorrow, while there is sorrow and sin in the world: sorrow is then a part of love, and love does not seek to throw it off." - Dinah, chapter 30

Yet another aside: nowadays Buddhism gets all the credit and Christianity all the blame, it seems.  I think Buddhism appeals to the modern West, at least in its stripped-down version.  It started as a personal philosophy rather than a historically-burdened apocalyptic proclamation, which allows us to skim off the top and avoid its doctrines in favor of its practices.  Also in this form it appeals to our once-born sense and modern hunger for ideological simplicity: once can escape suffering simply by reframing life.  That's it.  We can get to the end goal and we don't have to worry about anything else.  Detachment wins.  Add in the East's syncretic tendencies which, on a surface level, appear an appealing multi-culturalism versus a monothesim's exclusionary nature and a general ignorance of its own strange history, and Buddhism seems like the clear winner over poor, misguided Christianity.

But the above quote captures something that I think Buddhism has always struggled to incorporate naturally, for when simply (and I suspect wrongly) interpreted, the logic of "Attachment causes suffering" -> "Cease attachment" -> "Cease suffering" leads one into all kinds of questions as to why compassion should be a virtue at all.  Why be attached to others?  And why regard any sort of suffering as anything other than a silly accident of misunderstanding?  I think it's why after developing the original Buddha and Arhat concepts, ideals of beings which had managed to entirely transcend this world by focusing on themselves, Buddhism was forced to invent the Bodhisattva: a being of mercy who chooses to stay behind on the Wheel of Samsara until all sentient beings are saved.  Ironically the less-transcended version strikes us as the more profound one, and while I am far from being a Buddhist scholar, I nonetheless find myself always regarding the Bodhisattva ideal as an awkward addition.  It is the result of greater insight trying to find its place in older doctrine.

But Christianity's God suffered.  Its doctrine of Trinitarianism is one that I have always found nonsensical, and from a logical perspective it is.  Any knowledge of its history immediately reveals it to be a doctrinal cludge, and I have long wished that the Arianism had won and established Jesus merely as a deeply enlightened man rather than God.  But as I get older, I'm no longer quite as sure on that, because what it does is enshrine suffering as part of human experience.  If God suffered then suffering is real, and if His suffering led to greater good then so can ours too.  While Buddhism too contains the recognition that suffering may in fact be ineradicable and that Enlightenment is actually to cease to try to change that, it has no equivalent of Jesus on the cross.  Buddha has a habit of always being on a mountain top or a cloud, offering blessings and merit, but not suffering with us.  And as Eliot observes:

"A patronising disposition always has its meaner side..." - Chapter 27

Not that I think the Buddha was patronizing, but that our very habits of thought as humans, reciprocal social apes that we are, finds something depersonalizing in a being for whom we can do nothing but which does everything for us (and Christianity certainly runs into this problem time and again, only to be saved by its image of human Jesus).  

This was a long place-setting, but with a return to Adam Bede I see Eliot striking at something central which Christianity managed to reach and which the modern world has lost: love involves suffering.  That a true depth of spirituality, which connects one to others, will always inevitably lead to caring about them.  And since they often suffer, whether one things that suffering can be theologically explained away or not, one will also experience a sorrow that they suffer.  But as the quote ends, if suffering is a part of that love, then love will no longer seek to throw it off.  It is deeply moving.

"And poor aged fretful Lisbeth, without grasping any distinct idea, without going through any course of religious emotions, felt a vague sense of goodness and love, and of something right lying beneath and beyond all this sorrowing life.  She couldn't understand the sorrow; but, for these moments, under the subduing influence of Dinah's spirit, she felt that she must be patient and still." - Chapter 10

Yet...the book cannot support such powerful sentiments.  It is simply not good enough a piece of art.  As I learned from some notes included with my edition, Eliot had imagined Hetty's redemption in prison as the centerpiece from the beginning.  That was what motivated her: that in the darkest dungeon, with a hard and lost soul, nonetheless the divine love, as exemplified by Dinah, can pierce through.  The second piece was also her image of Adam and Arthur, their relationship, and how Adam would eventually be deepened from boyish goodness to mannish wisdom through his loss.  So she nailed the two together, and after bestowing on Adam all of the keenness of mind and moral strength that she could she then forced him to fall in love with Hetty against all indications that she was a vain, self-absorbed kitten.  That Eliot even feels the need to aggressively defend this choice seems to me a case of protesting too much; it never worked from the beginning, and drawing on her authority after having demonstrated real psychological acumen she papers it over with a, "Trust me on this, I know better" lecture.

With this foundational unsoundness, Adam's suffering could never really reach the depths she needed it to.  This was to be a soul-shattering experience for this man, where his whole being was turned inside out as a result, and he was reborn anew in that furnace.  Instead it just felt like puppy love that wouldn't give up, and which could have no basis for being mortally distraught at the events (let alone the rabbit-from-a-hat quality of Hetty's pregnancy).  Even if I find Eliot's spiritual inclinations uplifting, so much so that throughout the book I was forced to pause and scribble them down, it was not in light of the surrounding passages that I felt so.  

It was also with a distinct disappointment that I watched the last few chapters unfold.  After Hetty's ordeal was over, the life goes out of the book, and Eliot dismally wraps it up with a series of chapters which are only redeemed by a few beautiful passages:

"It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling, if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it - if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness." - Chapter 50

Despite this powerful statement, she cannot help but show Adam much regenerated not a few months after his ordeal.  She must stop and tell us that he is suffering deeply this way, but does not display it.  The same way the final feast has us stop and observe the imperfections of the people at the table, so as to prove that she has not applied a bucolic Romanticism to her poor farmers.  But it is essentially the end of the book, and having neglected it the whole time her ability to address it as the last second is feeble.  

However, my greatest disappointment was centered on Dinah.  Aside from the lukewarm romance that she enters into with Adam as way of giving the characters a Happily Ever After (sorry Seth), Eliot fails to capitalize on one of the greatest conversations of the book: why Dinah won't marry.  If she were to do so, Dinah fears that her attentions to God and serving mankind would be diluted by the requirements of filial devotion.  Adam counters with a haphazard argument that love is love is love, and that therefore expression of love for him or love for her children would not in any way detract from her love of all mankind, and in fact would add to it.

Now, there is a certain logic here I agree with: love of one type can be a gateway to love of another.  We are so natively self-centered that it is often the love of friendship or family or partner which drags us out of ourselves, and for once forces us to value something more than our own wellbeing.  In this I have no objection.  But Dinah was far beyond that; she already exhibited a divine agape toward those around her.  There was no more need to draw her out of herself for she had already progressed far along that path, and the truth is that filial love is by nature exclusive.  

There is an awkward moment in the Bible when Jesus' mother and family are waiting for him, and when somebody tells him this he retorts, "Who is my mother, who are my brothers?"  Now, we take this passage as a sign of his universal love as he goes on to illustrate that he regards all of humanity as his family.  But that is also the point: there is something immiscible, and even inimical, in caring especially for a family and serving all of mankind equally.  That the Buddha also gave up his family seems to me to corroborate this point (although this may be a myth).  Monkish asceticism appears the world over as a spiritual approach, and I cannot help but think it is precisely because one cannot have it all.  

Returning to Dinah, then, I see her final choice to marry Adam as... I cannot say a step backward, but one undertaken with no reflection on Eliot's part.  For we also cannot be it all, and if Dinah truly found the life went out of her without Adam then one could say this was the best compromise.  But emphasis on compromise.  After a book full of the hard reflections of suffering and sacrifice, Eliot seems to lose sight of this and promise us that when it's all said and done, righteousness means we don't have to give anything we truly value up.

So that is my final analysis of the book: a tent with too few poles to hold the canvas up.  It has isolated high points, but the whole does not yet maintain its shape.  Yet in spite of this it is uplifting and thoughtful, demonstrating the quality of mind and sincerity of vision that was behind it.  Eliot just couldn't turn it into a great book yet, and it is with some enthusiasm with which I now eye The Mill on the Floss sitting next to me, intent on following the arc through Silas Marner to Middlemarch and seeing where she ends up by the end.

"It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium." - Chapter 34

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.