Tag Archives: ancient greece

Over the past dozen years, since my retirement, I have written and posted some 730 blog entries. But I have started many more than that. Some just get forgotten when something more urgent appears; some end short because nothing longer needs to be said. Some just led nowhere. Others began as lists, but ended as lists, unfilled by full sentences. And still more still wait to be written.

The odd thing, to me, is that there is always something new to write about. With 75 years of life packed into this aging piece of meat, there are endless stories, bits, adventures, ideas, experiences, disappointments and discoveries to draw upon. The well keeps refilling.

But here are a few fragments that never filled out beyond their early inspiration. Maybe I will get around to it, sometime.

What is it that women see in men? Because I am a man, I know what men see in women, but I have a hard time reversing the equation.

I am not here talking of sex or the ardor of the loins — understanding is not required for that; it is simple, direct action — but the desire of women to share company with men. What is the reward for that? Women are so much more interesting, and interested in such a variety of vital issues. Men seem interested only in sports and politics, neither of which carry much import in the lives we live. As I used to say, “Politics answers no question worth asking.”

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2. I was a writer for many years, making my living from putting words against words, hoping to find the best way to express something I hoped would be genuine.

Recently, my old employer, Gannett, made a new hire, and announced it in such a clot of management-buzz that I got a bad case of hiccups. Newspapers used to have editors, now, with middle management bloated beyond belief, while laying off reporters, photographers and copy editors, what they have is a “Chief Content Officer.”

The announcement came with a gnat-swarm of buzz words, which may mean something to other management types, but not anything penetrable by actual human beings:

“ ‘We are thrilled to welcome Kristin to Team Gannett to champion innovative storytelling opportunities and develop strategic content initiatives to expand our audience and drive growth,’ Reed said in a Monday news release.”

“Strategic content initiatives?” You would think that those people who run a newspaper would have some sensitivity to language. If I had written prose like that, I would have been out of a job.

3. The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. Or maybe not so much.

We owe a great deal to ancient Greece. At least, we pay lip service to our debt of democracy, philosophy, literature, science and not least, saving European culture from being overrun by that of Persia. But there are a host of words that describe the part of ancient Greece we would rather forget: Misogyny, xenophobia, pedophilia — come to us dressed in Greek etymology, and descend to us from Greek ideas and practice. We need to address some of the less attractive legacies of that Golden Age.

Such as patriarchy, idealism, imperialism, colonialism, religious intolerance, cults, ethnocentrism, slavery. To say nothing of understanding sex as an exercise in dominance. And while we may think of Plato as the source of all philosophy, remember that he despised democracy and was an ardent believer in totalitarianism.

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4. Columbus Day is a month away. I expect more anti-Columbus newspaper columns, art, a few tracts and manifestoes and perhaps a new opera. Much current art that tries to be political is really just polemical. To espouse any ideology is to strip life of its complexity. Yes, Columbus was a bad man and the evils he brought with him are real. But instead of preaching to us self-righteously, there are real problems to be discussed, such questions as, “What is in the nature of humans that causes territorial expansion, that causes them to make invisible the people they subjugate, that causes them to divide the world into Them and Us? Why does the boundary of ‘us’ expand and shrink periodically? Why is a world once headed in the direction of one-world nationhood, where the ‘tribe’ is humanity — why is that world now constricting so that nationhood is more tightly defined by blood, so that Serb kills Croat, Azerbaijani kills Armenian? The ethnic separatism that is emerging worldwide is, I believe, a source of exactly the same intolerance that the European West has for so many centuries visited on the rest of the world. Will it devolve to the point that Chiricahua despises Mescalero, or Venetian rises to kill Neopolitan? At what point does a coalition of interests grow from our recognition of our shared humanity?”

Questions such as these are avoided by nearly all political diatribes, whose authors prefer to point fingers and whine like grade-school tattle-tales. If a short perusal of the history of the world teaches us anything, it teaches us that war, inhumanity, violence, intolerance are universal. It isn’t only the Hebrews with their God-ordained genocide of Moabites and Amonites; it isn’t only the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia; it isn’t only Hitler killing Jews and homosexuals; it isn’t only Japan subjugating Manchuria; it isn’t only Custer at Sand Creek; it isn’t only the Hopi at Awatovi.

No one gets off the hook. Native Americans are no more righteous in this than anyone else, from Inca to Aztec to Lakota. If artists and writers chose to look a little closer, they could use Columbus as a metaphor for something richer, profounder, truer. They could have seen that Columbus was not sui generis, but rather representative of the species.

As it is, they came off sounding self-righteous. And no one self-righteous ever has much self-knowledge.

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5. Stasis is the enemy. Or rather, because stasis is utterly impossible, the idea of stasis is the enemy. It is the fatal stumbling block of every religion, political philosophy and marriage that has ever existed. Over and over, hundreds, thousands, millions of people die because someone promised them that if we only do things my way, everything will be forever hunky peachy.

It is the lie behind the “original intent” argument espoused by some Supreme Court justices, and behind the infantile promises of politicians — most on the right, these days — that their policies will “finally” fix things and make them good forever. (In the past, it was the left and Marxism that promised a final end of historical change. It is not the sides one takes, but the phantom of permanence).

The problem is that stasis is always temporary, which makes it not stasis. I.e., stasis is a pipe dream.

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6. In America, “no” has become a dirty word. Americans like the positive attitude, the gung-ho approach to things. We feel actual moral disapproval of the word “no.”

It can make your life easier and simpler. It can shake a load of guilt off your back. Although people talk of simplifying their lives, you can never simplify by doing something, you can simplify only by not doing something. Just say no. It is the yang to “yes’s” yin, and the universe cannot function without both.

“Yes” is kind of namby-pamby. “Yes” doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. “Yes” is go-along to get along.

“No” is emphatic, direct, take-no-prisoners. “No” means no. Every change and improvement in life, every revolution begins with a “no.”

In some way, every important historical development starts with somebody or some group saying no. Dissatisfaction, after all, is the great inspirer of humanity. If we were all duck happy all the time, nothing would ever get done.

7. I am 75 and am near death (Oh, I’m generally fine, but old and weak) and I think about non-being quite a lot, but not with fear, but a kind of objective interest in the whole idea of no longer hearing birds or feeling the breeze on my skin. Death seems to me a natural “rounding off” of a life and not something that I need to hold in my mouth like a tough crust of bread.

I saw Carole take her last breath. I felt her turn instantly cool to my touch, like I was touching unfired clay. She ceased being. It was uncanny. My grief was incalculable — and it still is, although worn down — but it felt as inevitable or as natural as the coming of winter. I know the same awaits me — “To die — to sleep no more.” No dreams. Nothing.

I didn’t sense a spirit or soul leaving her body, just her body ceasing to produce her being, like a light bulb blown out. We don’t ask a burnt-out lightbulb “where did the light go?” It ceases being generated.

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8. One of my problems with Rilke is that I have no use for categorizing angels and animals. Angels don’t exist — not even as metaphors for me — and I accept that I, as a human being, am an animal. I am not so fast to accept that no animals know they are going to die. We have no evidence for that assumption. Perhaps they do; perhaps they don’t. I suspect that some, such as porpoises or whales, may very well have some concept of death. I remember when we human beings were so sure that what separated us from the beasts was tool-making. Ah, but then we discovered how many other animals forge tools.

9. It has seemed to me that part of the German soul is to speak in general and categorical terms, in ideas, rather than in things. It leads to mistaking words for reality. Logic has its own logic, but it is not the logic of the world. (Whole rafts of philosophy, including my hated Plato, only seem to work in words. You can prove with logic that Achilles can never catch the tortoise, but that ain’t how it works in reality.)

But I fear that they are much more about language than about experience. And that is my problem in a nutshell. I made my living with language, and I love words to distraction, but the older I get the more I am convinced that language is merely a parallel universe, with an order and meaning of its own, roughly mirroring the world, but never actually connecting, never touching the pulse of reality. I know, it’s all we have, but I still counsel wariness.

10. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Why write at all? It is a question I have wrestled with all my life. Do I have anything worth saying to be value to anyone else? Dr. Johnson said that “nobody but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” Well, I’m a blockhead: I no longer get paid to string words together. But it doesn’t seem to come as a choice. Some may choose to write; I write with the same volition as I breathe.

Early in my life, words were thin and sparse; it seemed as if there were a lack of hydrostatic pressure from within: I needed to fill myself first. But after living a certain time, the inside pressure grew and it had to come out. It became a fountain I could not stop if I had wanted to. And the well was constantly recharged.

Now I am old, and travel becomes difficult, habits become settled, reading more and more becomes re-reading. In retirement I can no longer afford to attend concerts, plays and dance the way I used to. The incoming has slowed, and I suppose the outflow has dwindled in response, but the backpressure is still there. Hoping to cease not till death.

Stuart on world history

November 5, 2015

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Stuart got a job recently. Well, a part-time job — as adjunct faculty teaching a history course. I’m not sure how he got it; he doesn’t have a degree in history. But he said he talked the department head into it by describing his take on world civilizations. He did his Stuart dance for his dinner.

“Well, I said I wanted to teach world history a different way,” he said to me over lunch the other day. “I wanted to look at it through the lens of geography. It explains so much.”

Mostly, he said, he just wanted to try organizing the Big Picture a different way, because looking at something differently opens a subject up for fresh insights. At least, that’s my stuffy way of saying what he was up to.

“From even prehistoric times,” Stuart explained, “human cultures have organized themselves in two ways — either around a body of water or in the middle of a chunk of land. These two societies tend to approach the rest of the world differently.

“You can see this in the signal conflict of the classical world — the Persian Wars. We may think of Greece as a nation, like France or Argentina, but back then, Greek civilization was a constellation of cities and islands around the Aegean Sea. It was built facing the water, so to speak, and like the ancient Lake People of Switzerland, they looked across the pond and saw trading partners. They built ships and launched out across the water to find their likeness on the far shore.

“Rome was built around the Mare Nostrum, the Mediterranean. In the Middle Ages, the Hanseatic League was all about trade.

“But Persia was a continental power, built on land, surrounded primarily by land, where other people may have been trading partners, but they were primarily a threat. All through the Middle East, you have one conquering nation after another invading their neighbors. Their gods told them to. Persia, like the standard model continental power, wanted to expand, to push its borders out farther, absorb the neighbors to nullify the threat.

“These are two fundamentally different ways of approaching the outer world, and those two ways govern so much of what happens in history.”

“And this is what you told the department head?” I asked. “And he bought it?”

“She did,” he said — which explained a bit more about Stuart’s persuasiveness. If you know anything about Stuart, you know he approached the world, not so much by riparian or continental cultures, but through the interaction of men and women.

“And so, now you’re teaching world history to students at a two-year school.”

“It’s great, although class is rather early for me: It starts at 10 every Tuesday and Thursday morning. But I can get up for it; it’s been really fun so far.”

“It’s always fun until the grading starts,” I said.

“I haven’t got there yet,” he said. “But I’ve assigned the first paper.”

I remembered my time teaching, and the surprising papers that were turned in. I used to read the really bad ones at dinner parties for fun; we all had a good laugh. Bad grammar, misunderstood concepts, lazy ideas. Once, in an art history class, I had 16 students and 16 different spellings of “Coliseum,” and not one of them correct — despite the fact there were two acceptable spellings: “Coliseum” and “Colosseum.” I knew Stuart was in for a disappointing surprise when those papers were turned in.

“Think of all the early civilizations,” Stuart went on. “Egypt on the Nile, the Indus River civilization, the Chinese living along the Huang Ho and Yangtze. Later, you have Vikings around the Baltic Sea and North Atlantic. China is interesting, because it starts as a riparian civilization, but as it grew, it turned continental. It gives a distinct flavor to Chinese history.”

“And the continental?” I asked.

“Think of the Mongolian Hordes,” he said. “Or early American tribes conquering each other. Persia, the Ottomans, Moguls.

“If you look at pre-colonial Africa, you see some cultures are riparian, like Ghana, and some are continental, like the Berbers. The distinctions have been blurred over by the pie-slicing of the continent by its colonial powers into supposed nation-states mimicking those of Europe. Quite unnatural. But they were there: riparian and continental ways of looking at the world.

“I thought, this explains a lot about us,” he said. “About America. When we were founded, we were an outpost on the other side of the pond. We looked across the Atlantic and saw our compadres there. Europe and the New World were built around the ocean, whether it was England and the 13 colonies, France and Quebec, or Spain and Latin America. It may be a distortion to consider the interrelation between the Old and New Worlds as trade, considering we didn’t really give the native peoples a choice in the matter, but from the point of view of the colonizers, who really didn’t take the original inhabitants seriously, they saw themselves as Europeans trading with their parent nations.

“And for the 13 colonies, when they were still colonies, they were Englishmen trading with England, later making alliance with France. We began, like China, as a riparian society. There were even laws passed to prevent settlers from moving west of the Appalachian Mountains, to keep it a riparian culture.

“But we expanded anyway and became, over time, a continental power. Expansion was seen as not only good, but necessary, even ordained by God. This change explains the current political landscape.”

“How so,” I said, innocently, while waiting for the punchline.

“Think about it. Where are the blue states and where are the red? By and large, the blue states are on the edge of the continent, both on the Atlantic and and on the Pacific, or around the Great Lakes. The red ones are in the center, where they remain continental in outlook, fearful of foreigners and the core of isolationism.”

“I thought the difference was between the agrarian states and the urban states,” I said.

“Certainly. My outlook isn’t the only factor in this. But it is there, not often mentioned, and is in part also the reason the coastal states built their economies on trade and the interior states on farming and ranching. I’m not making the case that this theory explains everything, or that it is the only thing that made us what we are, but I am saying that it helps explain it, and that you can see the same forces acting out elsewhere in the world. Maoism was continental in China, but the coastal cities of China were built on trade. The new China of Xi Jinping has grown as it has seen its place in the larger world — and as a riparian economy, not a continental one. The burgeoning economy is largely a coastal event. The Chinese poor are largely in the interior.

“And so, blue states look outward to the world, the red states are xenophobic.

“Look at Russia,” Stuart said. “They are a quintessential continental power, hunkering down in the middle of Eurasia. Invaded by Tatars, Verangians, and Teutonic Knights, they came to fear the outside and built a national identity on creating a fortress mentality, and conquered neighboring lands to make redouts to protect the national core from attack. Peter the Great attempted to turn Russia into a riparian culture by building his capital on the Baltic, hoping to become part of the European world of trade. But since then, the country has retreated to Moscow and glowered out at the rest of the world. It’s how the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics accrued, and after a brief period of glasnost, why Vladimir Putin has resumed the essential Russian inwardness, and his need to expand the borders again to build up those protective buffer nations around the national heartland. Lookout, Ukraine.”

I wondered if Stuart taught any of this chronologically, or was the whole course built around this theory. Were there any parts of history unrelated to his bifurcation of world outlooks.

“Oh, I fit all that other stuff in, too,” he said. “But mainly I wanted to explore this idea for myself. Teaching is the best way to learn.”

I couldn’t argue that.

“And your department head thinks this is OK? To use your class for you to explore your ideas?”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you? I moved in with her last week. We’re good.”

So firm a foundation

April 6, 2014

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The Renaissance is finally ending.

That great rebirth of Classical learning sparked the greatest growth of art, science and technology, but it seems to have run its course: Science is now suspect; pseudoscience gains enthusiastic converts every day. Democracy, misunderstanding the dictum that no one is better than anyone else, has come to believe that the lowest common denominator is also the highest possible intellectual achievement and that the idea of learning from our betters is somehow ”elitist” — or at any rate will depreciate our self-esteem.

Listen to the illiterate sentences of bystanders interviewed on the evening news — heck, listen to the local news anchors themselves — and you wonder whether anyone still knows that sentences require both nouns and verbs, and that together they make for articulate thought.

What has changed, more than anything else, is that we have begun losing touch with that Classical learning that undergirded those 500 years of human glory. Another Dark Age is setting in.

The real problem is the loss of the influence of Classics on the general population. For 500 years, art, culture, even technology, were based on a general acceptance of Greek thought. When we lose that, we lose our connection to our culture — and not merely European culture, but the widening world culture. If Asia or Africa once had cultures without roots in Greece, it is no longer true. Sony could not make electronics equipment without the rational, scientific turn of mind made possible by Greek ideals; budding African democracies owe their politics to the same ideals. Not solely, certainly. And we gain from them as they gain from us. But the world culture is at bottom Classical.

It is not merely, or primarily, a body of knowledge that is important, although that has its place. What is more important, and what is most Greek, is a method of approaching knowledge rather than the mere facts of it. It is the Greek skeptical approach that demands rigorous proof. We owe our medicines and our TVs to such an approach.

Multiculturalists — and I usually count myself among them — sometimes denigrate the Greeks, blaming them for racism, sexism and a host of other ”isms.” And the Greeks are guilty. They were not perfect.

But that misses the point. All human endeavor is imperfect.

We should not be so quick to condemn the failings of our ancestors; better to try to learn from those failings.

The critics are themselves guilty of an ”ism,” which is the moral arrogance of ”presentism,” the belief that the current state of morals and intellect is somehow the ”correct” one and that they may judge the failings of the past from their own certainties. The radical feminist argument is not fundamentally different from that of the Spanish priests who burned the Pre-Columbian codices on the grounds that those writings were harmful to ”their” present.

A little humility, please.

What’s more, even the critics use the dialectics of Classical thought to deconstruct what they object to. It is always ironic to hear a feminist use Greek argument to berate the Greeks. Feminists disparage the Classics as being misogynist — and make no mistake about it, the Greeks valued what they considered ”masculine” virtues and often made little place for women in their theory.

Yet, one only has to open Homer’s Odyssey to see a wealth of women — strong women — and feminist virtues. Other plays, such as the Antigone, present strong, thoughtful women. Greek actuality is much less coercive than is sometimes thought. And that aside, even if we take account of some of the cultural peculiarities of the ancient Greeks, inherent in their thought — and more importantly, in their thinking processes — are the seeds of all current thought, including multiculturalism. It isn’t Eastern thought or Third World thought that values diversity: It is the Greeks who gave us that.

There are at least four important reasons for maintaining our connection with Classical learning.

From least to most important, they are:

–-› Knowledge of Classical myth and literature. Losing the Classical references means that our literature will become increasingly undecipherable, and in consequence, we will lose tradition, our connection with our past — all our pasts — and we will be in danger of repeating old mistakes. It isn’t only Milton: We cannot read Derek Walcott’s Omeros without understanding Homer.

–› Clarity and precision in discourse. Greek thought is about clarity of language, if nothing else. Greek (and Latin) language does not easily permit sloppiness. We would be better writers and speakers if we were exposed regularly in grammar school to the Classics and Classical languages. The anti-Classical cabal is led by the trendily popular deconstructionists. The postmodernists and deconstructionists: Why read them, since, by their own argument, what they write is meaningless?

–› Acquaintance with the tragic view of life, which is the true view. Americans are becoming a nation of slack-jawed optimists who seem to think life is perfectible, whether they are liberals and think government can perfect it, or conservatives and think that private enterprise can perfect it. Both are wrong. Life is made up of impossible choices. We can only make the best choices in the future if we acknowledge the worst choices of the past. Choices made from ignorance or denial breed more bad choices.

The tragic view is that life causes pain, that there is no alternative, that you must do your best to make moral choices, knowing that whatever choice you make will turn out in the end to be immoral. People will die, suffer or at least be disenfranchised. You cannot act without injuring someone, yet act you must. The Greeks can toughen our hides.

–› Finally, the Classics can provide us with the deep, satisfying enjoyment that makes life worth living. If we open ourselves up to the Classics, we will find a deep well of pleasure, the powerful aesthetic experience that illuminates our lives. The Iliad, for instance, is the best book I have ever read, and I have read some good ones, including the Mahabharata of India and the Old Testament of the Levant, both of which have their own power.

Still, compared to them, the Iliad is more aesthetically complete. It makes a world from the greatest panorama down to the smallest detail, all filled in by Homer in just the right proportions to convince us of its reality.

In the end, it has nothing to do with dead white males: The Classics include Sappho, to say nothing of the Odyssey, which convincing arguments say was written by a woman. It matters nothing to me. Sappho and the Odyssey have given me some of the greatest pleasure of my life.

Perhaps we must give up the Classics: It is happening de facto if not by choice. But I dread what will replace it: superstition, intolerance, confusion and chaos.

It is a lesson of history: Clarity breeds uncertainty, which in turn leads to humility and therefore tolerance. On the other hand, confusion and chaos tend to invite political takeover by arrogant tyranny: Inclarity in discourse, public and private, masks the sloppy thinking of the self-righteous.

The Classics are not irrelevant.

—Richard Nilsen

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So firm a foundation