Jasper Griffin and Homer’s simile-world

It seems to be of the essence of the Homeric hero to re-collect, even if unwittingly, the images of the cosmos that fashioned him, carrying them to where they stand out most clearly–the dangerous limit of death. Jasper Griffin’s intimate grasp of the Iliad seems to know instinctively that it takes a simile to make its hero appear.

“While the hero lives he is god-like and loved by the gods. In his martial rage, the high point and zenith of his existence, he is compared to a lion, a wild boar, a storm, a river in flood, a raging forest fire, a bright star from a dark cloud; his armour blazes like the sun, his eyes flash fire, his breast is filled with irresistible fury, his limbs are light and active. Encouraged by the gods, he leaps at his enemy with a terrifying cry.”

Arising at a shimmering distance from the heat of the immediate action, such images–”a river in flood, a raging forest fire, a bright star from a dark cloud”–appear as their own reason for being, independent and fresh. The simile-world in which the heroic deed reverberates schools us in a love whose dimensions are cosmic; including not only such pure manifestations of untamable nature, but also the rich and fine textures of labor and craft, and with them intimate details from “unheroic” life. Griffin’s epic catalog of similes (besides sparkling with its own delightfulness) illustrates precisely this.

“Many of the similes are obviously heroic, derived from lions, wild boars, serpents, storms, floods, forest fires; others are drawn from trees, clouds, stars, the quiet sea. Many human activities appear, some of them decidedly practical. There are agricultural tasks of irrigation, ploughing, reaping, threshing and treading out the corn; and such special trades as the smith cooling hot iron, woodcutters at work, the potter’s wheel, tanners stretching out an ox-hide, a carpenter boring a beam, an artist gilding a statue, a woman weighing out wool. We see a little girl crying and pulling at her mother’s skirt, women quarreling in the street, a widow lamenting over her husband’s body, a father recovering from an illness. There are “undignified” similes, as when the slow retreat of Ajax, assailed by a host of Trojans, is compared to the slow exit of a donkey from a cornfield under the feeble blows of small boys, or Athena warding off an arrow from Menelaus is compared to a mother brushing away a fly from a sleeping child, or Odysseus tossing and turning in impatient anger is compared to a blood-pudding seething over a fire (Iliad, xi, 558; iv, 130; Odyssey, xx, 25).”

the beginning of the “was heisst denken?” lectures

“We come to know what it means to think when we ourselves try to think. If the attempt is to be successful, we must be ready to learn thinking.”

In this humblest of beginnings, Heidegger puts something so simply that we could pass it over without a thought.

He has not said something like

“we come to know what it means to walk when we think about walking. If the attempt to walk is to be successful we must learn to walk through thinking.” (And silly as this sounds, isn’t it in fact how thinking is often imagined? as something higher that will provide the abstract pattern for all other activities?)

He has said something like

“we come to know what it means to walk when we ourselves try to walk. If the attempt is to be successful, we must be ready to learn on our feet.”

Heidegger wants to learn thinking, not as an activity on that looks down on walking from some higher plane, but to learn thinking as we learn walking, talking, as the hand learns reaching and extending, receiving and welcoming, signing and designing, and pointing.

“But we are pointing then at something which has not, not yet, been transposed into the language of our speech. We are a sign that is not read. In his draft for the hymn “Mnemosyne” (Memory), Hoelderlin says:

We are a sign that is not read.
We feel no pain, we almost have
Lost our tongue in foreign lands.”

looking for a story

It’s sometimes surprising to me how invisible the story of an institution can be even from within. The UD website proper strikes me as somehow to shamefacedly disregard the weight and beauty, the story of the institution it represents.

When I say “story” I don’t mean a record of development, a cluster of related events, or even the portraits of remarkable characters, although story touches all these things. I mean something more like the manner of speaking that lovingly, carefully, even a little fearfully touches what it tells, so as not to heedlessly disturb great sleeping presences–while it, however obliquely, remembers and honors and learns from them.

Recently, I found this. Off the “official” website, one of our real mages seems to have a story to tell.
http://www.udallasclassics.org/history.html
Wonderful.

reading novels and “the true wonder of it”

A comment rimwell recently made about reading Dostoevsky–

“we’re so used to the “finalized” character or event, or at least the finalized reading of a character that seems to be demanded by non-Bakhtin criticism (even by Ivanov) that we forget that things can be forgiven or that things didn’t have to turn out this way . . . what if someone just recognized?”

–is similar to something lovingly said in one of Wilbur’s poems:

The Reader

She is going back, these days, to the great stories
That charmed her younger mind. A shaded light
Shines on the nape half-shadowed by her curls,
And a page turns now with a scuffing sound.
Onward they come again, the orphans reaching
For a first handhold in a stony world,
The young provincials who at last look down
On the city’s maze, and will descend into it,
The serious girl, once more, who would live nobly,
The sly one who aspires to marry so,
The young man bent on glory, and that other
Who seeks a burden. Knowing as she does
What will become of them in bloody field
Or Tuscan garden, it may be that at times
She sees their first and final selves at once,
As a god might to whom all time is now.
Or, having lived so much herself, perhaps
She meets them this time with a wiser eye,
Noting that Julien’s calculating head
Is from the first too severed from his heart.
But the true wonder of it is that she,
For all that she may know of consequences,
Still turns enchanted to the next bright page
Like some Natasha in the ballroom door–
Caught in the flow of things wherever bound,
The blind delight of being, ready still
To enter life on life and see them through.

something else from Dostoevsky

From Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics:

“In the compositionally expressed dialogues of Dostoevsky’s characters, there are also no separate thoughts or positions. They never argue over separate points, but always over whole points of view, inserting themselves and their entire idea into even the briefest exchange.”

Something reading Socratic Dialogue teaches, whether Plato’s or Dostoevsky’s, is that in human conversation, though often disguised as the arrangement and rearrangement of ideas or theses, something else is always at stake: “whole points of view”–the often disparate positioning, posture, stance of human lives toward ultimate reality, and the possible transformations or deformations of that position. Such possibilities are always difficult to discern beforehand, because one is in one’s position, and to recognize the ways in which one’s position is not self-defining, and might therefore be re-defined, one would have to be somehow outside one’s position:

we might imagine a way of standing that leans beyond its stance, a habit of being-beyond-oneself, a readiness to unfold what unwonted gestures are called for, a readiness to respond to the voice of another.

Shatov appeals to this readiness that is at the heart of all human talking, trying to unsettle Stavrogin’s deeply disfigured and impermeable posture, trying to point with halting, hyperbolic gestures toward “something else“:

“I beg you to treat me with respect, I insist on it!” shouted Shatov, “not my personality–I don’t care a hang for that, but something else, just for this once. While I am talking … we are two beings, and have come together in an infinity … for the last time in the world. Drop your tone and speak like a human being! Speak, if only for once in your life with the voice of a man. I say it not for my sake but for yours…”

the echoing wisdom of the teacher’s teacher’s teacher

I’ve tried, now and then, to read Aristotle for pleasure. I would get the odd, frustrated feeling that there really ought to have been something pleasurable going on, but that some magical thread essential to the activity of reading was consistently eluding me. Well, I’m trying to read the Nicomachean Ethics again. And this time I have been enchanted by the winding path book i traces. I think maybe I used to imagine that Aristotle was like a box, with minute specimens in compartments in compartments, but not alive (I don’t know where I got this idea, maybe I heard someone going on and on about “the categories” of understanding, or some such thing) … and didn’t fully trust or realize that his teaching might itself be “a being-at-work in accord with virtue,” a folding and unfolding in speech, enshrining and embodying an aim at the good: an aim to which the teacher is indeed entirely given, yet an aim too fundamental to be entirely his own.

Here is a small but beautiful example (and also what we call humorous, I think) of Aristotle’s awakening his listeners’ wonder. This is from chapter 4, which begins characteristically–”now, taking up the thread again”–marking the easy meanders of his discourse which nevertheless seem destined, as if attracted by something of great weight, to hit upon what is needful at every turning:

But about happiness–what it is–they are in dispute, and most people do not give the same account of it as the wise. Some people take it to be something visible and obvious, such as pleasure or wealth or honor, and different ones say different things, and even the same person often says different things; when sick one thinks it is health, but when poor, that it is wealth, and when they are conscious of ignorance in themselves, people marvel at those who say it is grand and above them. And some people believe that, besides these many good things, there is some other good, by itself, which is responsible for the being good of all these other things.

One delightful aspect of this passage is how effectively the examples draw one in to the argument. We imagine and try them out for ourselves “when sick one thinks it is health, when poor, that it is wealth” … and consequently, at the next turn, we find ourselves imagining as our own condition precisely what the argument indicates our condition to be … “and when they are conscious of ignorance in themselves, people marvel at those who say it is grand and above them.” We have thus, perhaps, been readied to hear the account of the wise: that “besides these many good things, there is some other good, by itself, which is responsible for the being good of all these other things.” Aristotle will go on to refute various superficial versions of this opinion, at the same time developing the marvellous and at times vexed perplexities it introduces. Yet here he gives this famous opinion of his teacher the place of honor; it is the prize and hope of those “who are conscious of ignorance in themselves”–a phrase we might take as a reverent self-reminder of the peculiar wisdom his teacher’s teacher was possessed of.

The Speed of Verse, II

So, why is speed needed to say poetry? It is the sound of sense waking up the latent agility of the tongue: “speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.” It is attention to sharper contrasts, to multiplying facets, to a superabundant collation of angular things all at once–a big, strange and wonderful world: “whatever is swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.” It is also awareness of and ministry to the ebb and flow, sad and happy, right and wrong, the tangle and loosening of the soul: “and quick-eyed love, observing me grow slack/ from my first entrance in …”

A dream, a mere enjoyment won’t do. In Vergil and Dante, we have poets that gave themselves to the labor of it. Yeats’ wrote of their kind of poetry,

Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler, by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.

Of the works of such laboring poetry, Pound writes: “They are good art in the way the high mass is good art.” They are, in this way, unlike “songs that are apt to weary you after you know them.” Their poetry “must be conceived and approached as a ritual. It has its purpose and its effect. These are different from those of simple song. They are perhaps subtler. They [continue to] make their revelations to those who are already expert.” Nevertheless, as Yeats suggests, all this long labor is to achieve a speed in verse equal to a moment’s gathering or dispersal of things, its climax, anti-climax, or perplexity; equal to “times trans-shifting” … and so, like the mass, able to sing a modulating song to different times and seasons of the heart, to different occasions of speech:

A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
all our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

In Vergil’s poems of “low Italy,” the Georgics, he writes how “human usage, examining itself, hammered out, little by little, different arts” of cultivation, husbandry, care … “searched out a grass with grain, and struck from the veins of flint the hidden fire” that Zeus hid away from men. He writes that without the aid of assiduous labor, “all things rush to the worse, and, let slide, get borne away, just like one who with all his upstream-rowing can scarcely push his skiff along beneath him and, if he relax his arm, the boat will whip him headlong in the sheer stream.” The glory of farmer belongs to one “who having provided tools for every necessity long before will mindfully bring them forth” at the critical time. And it is just the varying crisis of every moment that Vergil’s verse accentuates: “at last, what the late dusk star may bring, whence the wind drives clear the clouds, what the wet west wind is thinking about, the sun will give you signs.” “Rain never brought harm on the unforewarned; either the flying cranes have gone and fled it rising from the deepest valleys, or the heifer looking up to the sky has caught its breezes in her wide nostrils, or shrill sparrows gone flittering about the lakes, and in their mud the frogs croaked out the old complaint. … Not even, at night, girls plucking their measures of wool have been unaware of coming storm, when, on the glowing clay, they watched the oil fizzle, and crumbling snuff collect on the wick.”

At the beginning of our Canto, Dante likens himself to a farmer caught unawares by a false snow-fall “like some wretch ignorant of what can be done,” likening himself, perhaps, to those “rustics ignorant of the way” of the benighted age to which Vergil offered his Georgics. Vergil shows him what it means to “ponder as he labors,” to be

always ready for the step ahead.
So, as he lifted me up toward the summit
of one great crag he’d see another spur,
saying: “That is the one you will grip next,
but try it first to see if it is firm.”

Trying, testing what things are made of as they pass us by, the world gives us its edges and its contours and its cracks. … “This was no path for those with cloaks of lead”: the hypocrites, whose circle Vergil and Dante have just left, wear cloaks that seem gold, but inside are heavy with lead. Caring for and perpetuating the mere illusion of goodness is a thankless and life-sapping labor directly antithetical to the quickening care for what is real; here, there can be no pretending; only an actual, receptive, and bold contact with the surrounding world and the tasks it offers can ascend this path, contact that does not “spare one drop for dreaming.” Nor is it the escape of spirit from the “body’s heaviness,” but the translation of that weight into the life and power that already quickens it. It is as Jesus said, as if to the hypocrites, speaking to the unnecessary weight they carry, “the body is more than clothes.” And, we might add, life (and poetry) always also is and ought to be something more than dreams, which but “leave such vestige of themselves on earth/ as smoke bequeaths to air, or foam to water.”

The Speed of Verse

“What does one need to say poetry, Mr. Stanhope?” she asked.
Stanhope laughed. “What but the four virtues, clarity, speed, humility, courage? Don’t you agree?”
The old lady looked at Mrs. Sammile. “Do you?” she asked.
Lily Sammile shrugged. “O, if you’re turning poems into labours,” she said. “But we don’t all want to speak poetry, and enjoyment’s a simple thing for the rest of us.”
“We do all want to speak it,” Stanhope protested. “Or else verse and plays and all art are more of dreams than they need to be. They must always be a little so, perhaps.”

–Charles Williams, Descent into Hell

In that part of the year when the sun
begins to warm its locks beneath Aquarius
and nights grow shorter equaling the days,
when hoarfrost mimes the image of his white
sister upon the ground–but not for long,
because the pen he uses is not sharp–
the farmer who is short of fodder rises
and looks and sees the fields all white, at which
he slaps his thigh, turns back into the house,
and here and there complains like some poor wretch
who doesn’t know what can be done, and then
goes out again and gathers up new hope
on seeing that the world has changed its face
in so few hours, and he takes his staff
and hurries out his flock of sheep to pasture.
So did my master fill me with dismay
when I saw how his brow was deeply troubled,
yet then the plaster soothed the sore as quickly:
for soon as we were on the broken bridge,
my guide turned back to me with that sweet manner
I first had seen along the mountain’s base.
And he examined carefully the ruin;
then having picked the way we would ascend,
he opened up up his arms and thrust me forward.
And just as he who ponders as he labors,
who’s always ready for the step ahead,
so, as he lifted me up toward the summit
of one great crag he’d see another spur,
saying: “That is the one you will grip next,
but try it first to see if it is firm.”
That was no path for those with cloaks of lead,
for he and I–he, light; I, with support–
could hardly make it up from spur to spur.
And were it not for that, down from this enclosure,
the slope was shorter than the bank before,
I cannot speak for him, but I should surely
have been defeated. But since Malebolge
runs right into the mouth of its last well,
the placement of each valley means it must
have one bank high and have the other short;
and so we have reached, at length, the jutting where
the last stone of the ruined bridge breaks off.
The breath within my lungs was so exhausted
from climbing, I could not go on; in fact,
as soon as I had reached that stone, I sat.
“Now you must cast aside your laziness,”
my master said, “for he who rests on down
or under covers cannot come to fame;
and he who spends his life without renown
leaves such a vestige of himself on earth
as smoke bequeaths to air or foam to water.
Therefore, get up; defeat this breathlessness
with spirit that can win all battles if
the body’s heaviness does not deter it.
A longer ladder still is to be climbed;
If you have understood, now profit from it.”
Then I arose and showed myself far better
equipped with breath than I had been before:
“Go on for I am strong and confident.”
We took our upward way upon the ridge,
with crags more jagged, narrow, difficult,
and much more steep than we had crossed before.
I spoke as we went on, not to seem weak …
–Dante, Inferno, Canto XX

Equality

Friendship creates a kind of equality between persons. Other kinds of friendship may create other and debased kinds of equality, but the noble friendship that is directed toward what is good in itself, what is good for another and oneself, creates a noble equality–an equality that is not a leveling, but a lifting up, a mutual recognition of the immeasurable gift that is given in the intimated unity of one’s own destiny with the destiny of another.

We might hear the word equality as it has been uttered by Socrates, in the context of that potential for community which holds together gods and men, earth and sky. We cannot or ought not imagine our good without making some beginning at imagining the good of the whole, the good of sky and earth, the good of what is unreservedly broad open, the home of flight, of constellating light, of what is closed and sheltered, what is molded in the secret depths, the barrow and treasure house of the forgotten past … and also the weather of this in-between: the dew fall, welter of winds, snow drift, sun shower, rainscape. We must make some beginning at the difficult work of friendship–whether as invitation, conversation, prayer, or simply patience–with gods and with humans … and in doing so we set our hopes on being or becoming, if only in some small way, equal to the destiny of others, to great men even, and to the divine.

For to receive something for what it is, according not only to our good, but according to its own good, we must be equal, somehow, to the gift. It is in this way that I would like to understand Dr. Sampo, when he says that “one of the truths revealed by the incarnation is that equality is part of the good.” If the gift of God is God himself, and God poured out pro multis, for the many, then all are capable of, are equal to his being.

The Humanities cycle at Thomas More was so structured as to express the hope that our reading together, including a kind of accountability to each other in conversation, would be enriched and not diminished by the range of intellectual prowess and different stages of development represented in the members of the school as a whole. The proper response to what is beautiful and good in our history does not belong only to those whom we tend to think of as possessors of intellectual virtue; and we learn from the responses of all, even the flawed or fatal responses of a Polus or a Callicles. What ultimately distinguishes the career of a student is not his or her level of ability, but dedication to the call.

Moreover, I would assert that the work of receiving our cultural and historical heritage, is synergetically linked to the work of understanding and loving each other. … As suggested by the life of Socrates, ideally they become one work.

I think some of my claims I owe in part to the insight of the Cowans. If you will pardon me for quoting Unbinding Prometheus, not as though it were a new Republic, but because it sheds some light on what equality might have meant for the Thomas More College we knew …

Education itself is the best beneficiary of a normal mixture of minds. The concept of a magnet school for special interests or for ‘talented and gifted students’ is a ruse perpetrated by fond parents and bowed to by administrators embarrassed by the quality of their enterprise. Granted the problem they face is vexing: how can a single scheme serve both the best of students and the worst? The curriculum is the center of the solution; it must be the same for all students, but designed for the best—not in its complexity but in its imaginative scope and profundity. Ordinary and even lower than ordinary students respond to good material; they may remain less adroit than their brilliant classmates, but they live on the same plane of understanding. And the superior learners acquire from a mixed community responsibility and respect for their fellows.

Hard and Heavy Questions from Pseudonoma

I’m still considering these questions that relate to the small constellation of quotations in my post below, but thought they deserved a post of their own meanwhile. I’ve been thinking towards a response along a number of potentially fruitful lines. In the mean time anyone else equal (more or less) to the challenge is welcome to step forth:

“How is equality in any ways to be associated with liberal education? Does it characterize the manner in which such an education can be received? Is it an expectation to be set upon the availability of such an education? Does it refer to the manner in which the fruits of such an education are to be distributed or attained? Or is it because liberal education has been all too readily associated with equality that it finds itself yoked with the misbegotten task of rescuing culture, or embarrassingly handed over as an ornament to a political purpose?

I do not intend a merely rhetorical flippancy here, but it seems that what is sacred in this world of its own accord constellates a hierarchy among those who would receive it. Otherwise it is given in a way that this world as such does not yet recognize.”