Catullus (poem XI):
Furi et Aureli comites Catulli
sive in extremos penetrabit Indos
litus ut longe resonante Eoa
tunditur unda
“resonante Eoa” (“with dawn re-echoing”) has that amazing re-echoing vowel sequence (e-o-a) which Michael Brandon showed me all those years ago. Imagine my surprise when, listening to Sister Sledge’s Greatest Dancer, I heard this:
“He had the kind a’body that would shame Adonis”: “a-body”, “Adonis”: very good.
Robert Herrick:
“By day we live as one; by night we’re hurled,
In dreams, each one, into a several world.”
So Herrick believes, or poetically asserts, that our dream lives are particularly and absolutely individual, that, despite the presence, in both our sleeping and waking perceptions, of other people, one is distinct from the other, that, when awake, other people are “really there”, actually part of our lives, but that when they appear to our sleeping consciousness they are in a fundamental sense not there, not really part of the action, but figments.
The final passage of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man describes, in an extended metaphor, the hero’s falling asleep: sleep is the incoming tide, the hero a creature of the rocky shoreline; when sleep comes the sea lifts us from our rock pools and carries us out into the deep, where we are together; in the morning we are dropped back into our rock pool for another day of individual existence.
Here we have a reverse cosmology to that of Herrick, and yet who does not, when reading either, feel strongly that one is reading Truth? Who does not deeply feel that the writer’s account is (at least metaphorically) True?
Plato is well known for being opposed to literature (at least all literature apart from martial songs), for three reasons: the poor behaviour of the gods in e.g. Homer cannot be true, and sets a bad example; lots of literature encourages vice; and, most philosophically, and most importantly to us, that all art is the creation of images, imitations, not Truth in itself. In the same way that a painting of a chair isn’t a chair, so Isherwood’s hero and Herrick’s “we” are not real, but imaginary, and hence inferior, not as good. We might not be persuaded that this is a problem, arguing that the world of the imagination loses nothing by not being actually physical, and that a painting of a chair might actually communicate something about the artist, or indeed about chairs, which is fundamentally True. In an appendix to a book on Plato, someone [sub: please complete] tries to rehabilitate Plato’s opposition to literature by targeting its semblance of Truth-dealing; he doesn’t use my examples, but the way Herrick and Isherwood make us nod our heads in Recognition of a Truth Conveyed is, he argues, precisely what Plato is attacking. Are we individuals when asleep and together when awake, or the reverse? On a matter-of-fact level, then Herrick gets our vote: the people around us in our waking lives are indeed more “real” than those, created by our minds, who appear in our dreams (for that’s what “real” means), but surely we can allow Isherwood his metaphor? (And we don’t criticise him for using a metaphor per se: it’s fine to represent people and their lives as lobsters, rock pools and the ocean.)
“He who hesitates is lost.” “Look before you leap.” “Too many cooks spoil the broth.” “Many hands make light work.”
It’s surely about context, and what else Isherwood is trying to communicate. The hero in A Single Man is shown at the end of the novel to be someone who ‘by day’ is, contrary to what we’d expect, from Herrick or from our own experience, ‘in a several world’. At night his unconscious ‘lives as one’ with that of the rest of humanity, and, in fact, in Isherwood’s twist, on this particular night he ‘dies as one’, as the ocean fails to return the creature to its pool. Isherwood is not writing philosophy, or psychology, but he is bringing a story about one fictional individual to a close, in a way which makes us learn the Truth about him.
My children, last in the long line of Kadmos’ descendants,
Why have you gathered here before me?
What help do you want?
The whole city stinks of incense;
The whole city rings with chants and prayers.
So, my children, I, the one they call Oidipous,
Known the world over, thought I shouldn’t find out
Second-hand, but have come here to hear for myself.
You – old man – you look like someone who can speak
For the others – you tell me why you’re all here.
Are you frightened of something, or in need?
And of course I’ll listen: I’d be hard-hearted indeed if I didn’t pity such a petition as this.
Yes, Oidipous, ruler of my country,
You see how we who cluster round your altar
Are of all ages: there are some who’ve not long left the nest,
And others heavy with age – priests – I’m the priest of Zeus,
And these are the best of our young people.
The rest of the people are packed in the market,
Either at the two shrines of Athene,
Or where the river Ismenos speaks to us in the ashes.
They’re there because, as you can see,
Our city, like a ship in high seas, is
Unable to lift its prow, is sinking under waves of blood.
Our city’s dying: our crops fail,
Our cattle sicken; our women’s birthpangs
Bring no birth: the hateful god of plague
With his hot torch of fever has fallen on our land,
Emptied Thebes, and paid into Death’s account
Fat deposits of screams and shrieks.
Now, I’m not saying you’re a god, and neither are
These others, but we do think, when things are
Going bad, when we’ve fallen out with the gods,
We do think you’re the best of men.
When you came you released Thebes from the tax
We used to pay the Cruel Singer, and you did all this
Without help from us – we taught you nothing – but
By all accounts you saved our lives.
And now, great Oidipous, all of us here beg you,
Whether a god, or a man, has told you something,
We beg you to find a way of saving us.
(For people experienced in difficult decisions
Find something of interest even in disasters…)
Come, best of men! Save the city!
Come! Be on guard! Don’t forget we call you
Saviour, because of your passion in the past.
A careful and honest writer, Leigh Fermor has above all a serious concern to communicate the truth both of what he observes and of his reactions to it.
He’s most interesting and important when describing his first Benedictine experience – how, as with a recipient of a new liver, attempted physical rejection was followed by blissful acceptance of a new life, particularly wrt sleep – and in his lamenting the English Dissolution – how our ruined abbeys should be offering people today the monastic life.
New words: Ogival. Velleities. Giaour. Villeggiatura.
Thoughts ad loc.:
29 Protagoras began a book with “I have no way of knowing either that the gods exist, or that they do not exist”
30f αθεος normally meant ‘hated by the gods’
48 The idea that all virtue amounts to knowing the right thing to do, thus conflating bravery, holiness, etc. Love?
52ff good on the politics, esp. Andocides’ similar trial in 400/399.
62 Leon of Salamis’ murder: do we know S did nothing to prevent it?
70 Bloom: Falstaff ‘the first human being in literature’
75 Connection between S’s and Spartan asceticism
99 Aristotle: “Philosophy begins with wonder”
108 “The philosopher wears logic as an amulet around his neck, which allows him to die like a man, not weeping like a child for his lost life”
108-118 On how S takes on female roles at death, and prays to Asclepius to thank him for presiding over the birth of his own death.
128f Cato the younger: ‘cicuta magnum Socratem fecit’
132f Inconsistency: did Seneca drink hemlock before or after slitting veins?
158 “prophani” in Erasmus? Correct form? Surely ‘proFani’?
165-169 Montaigne on S as a hero, dying like an ignorant ordinary person, not treating death as special. Dying is not the goal of life, merely its end.
A bit of a surprise. Some disappointingnesses: why does Pullman “explain” the miracles (e.g. the Feeding of the Five Thousand a result of sudden sharing, and the Resurrection… Well, I’ll try and get on to that later)? I did Scripture O Level in 1979, and our commentary on Mark said the same thing then. Perhaps Pullman’s scriptural schooling was more hardline, so explaining the supernatural in this way has the appeal of novelty. To most Anglicans it’s part of the package.
Yet sometimes his insights move: the retelling of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (by retelling Pullman means the “original” version as told by Jesus) is an improvement on Matthew’s version. When the five foolish girls, who hadn’t the foresight to take spare oil, ask the five wise girls to share, Pullman writes, ’And two of the far-seeing ones shared their oil with two of the foolish ones, and all four were admitted to the banquet. Two of the clever ones refused, and the bridegroom shut them out, together with two more foolish ones.
’But the last wise girl said “Lord, we have come to celebrate your wedding, even the least of us. If you won’t let us all in, I would rather stay outside with my sisters, even when the last of my oil is gone.”
’And for her sake the bridegroom opened the doors of the banquet and admitted them all. Now, where was the Kingdom of heaven? Inside the bridegroom’s house? Is that what you think? No, it was outside in the dark with the wise girl and her sisters, even when the last of her oil had gone.’ This version seems much more consistent with Jesus’ other teachings about the Kingdom and the poor, and looks to the cross.
In “His Dark Materials”, interviews, and this book, Pullman attacks not religion, but organised religion; not God or Jesus, but the Church. In this book, there’s a pair of twins: Jesus, the genuinely profound teacher, and Christ, the jealous runt, manipulated by a shadowy figure to record and rewrite his brother’s words. Jesus=Jesus, Christ=Church. This position of “Jesus Good, Church Bad” is surely that of orthodox Christianity. He would offend only the most die-hard beretta-bristling catechism-chanting Mother-Church junky.
And then there’s the Resurrection. Now it’s easy: two brothers, empty grave, morning mist, and the alive brother in the garden, who’s at first mistakenly identified, and then deliberately impersonates his dead sibling, in order to establish the Church in which he believes. Another miracle explained away, another knock at the sky pilots, but Christianity itself remains unassailed.
Unless Christianity depends on the miraculous…
Superstition implies a belief that the physical world has meaning: something knows you chose not to carry a brolly, and decided for that reason to make it rain. The levers of the cosmos respond to the light touch of your thoughts. Idiocentric. So to deny superstition is to deny this kind of meaning, to assert one’s insignificance in the great scheme of things, to be a nihilist. Don’t worry about the brolly – it will or won’t rain regardless.
A brief essay on the importance of truth to man, religiously and philosophically.
One of the Fathers called Poesy: “vinum daemonum, because it filleth the imagination”. Replacing contemplation of the Divine, presumably.
Montaigne: “to say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God, and a coward towards men”. Antigone suffers execution for burying her brother, because she prioritises her (much longer) time in the afterlife than her shorter time among the living. Takes a lot of faith. Steve Jobs: “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there”.
[SPOILER ALERT] Furst’s hero Zannis is hard-working, principled, hunky, honest, pragmatic, successful, respected by Greek and foreigner, and human, yet (significant to our final inability to fuse with him) unflawed. I think it’s the fact that he actually gets away safe at the end, eluding the invading Germans, which makes this clear, although to have him killed would be deeply disappointing. In other respects Furst’s story shares Le Carré’s preference for character over action, but deals differently with the building of tension: Le Carré’s story (or at least the one I read recently) has one situation which we know must end somehow; Furst’s has multiple situations set against the background of an inevitable German invasion. It’s a delightful read, and I feel guilty for feeling slightly let down at the end.
Houyhnhnm 