The Wood between the Worlds
Thursday, November 27, 2003
P.P.S. Do you think it's acceptable to put Oxford Classical Texts on a wedding registry? Those bastards are expensive; I think the five volumes of Livy would come to nearly $400, while Homer is over $100. It'd be better than something nancy like silk shelf liners or jewel-encrusted egg spoons or whatever it is people usually choose. It's not even selfish, since (until she realizes what she's gotten herself into) I've got the world's finest fiancee, with the Greek and Latin options package factory pre-installed.
P.S. I'm going to make another cauldron of coffee, to drink all by myself. I may make another one just to bathe in, or at any rate I would, if I bathed.
Quick story before going back to paper writing.
So I don't have cable TV; not so much snotty point-making (I have watched far too much TV for that) but an attempt to save money and time. The thing is that the thrones and dominations of cable TV don't like such independence.
When I set up my TV I hooked it up to the cable outlet on principle (the principle being, the more cables that are plugged into a guy's electronics, the more manly he is) and noticed that I had some limited cable reception. It's pretty common for cable companies to fail to turn off cable reception when someone moves, and it looked to be just the first 20 channels, so I ignored it.
About a month later a woman from the cable company knocked on the door and rousted me at some awful time like 9:00 AM to ask whether I knew I was getting cable reception. I told her I didn't care and that she should turn off whatever she found, which seemed to take care of the problem.
A few weeks after that the cable company checked its books, saw that there was still a splittist in the area, and sent a couple of extremely large black men to pound on my door in the early morning again. These guys were huge; just one of them would have filled the hallway, but they managed to cram in and loom at the threshold. They were very jovial, very much in a "We'd hate to see dis place maybe burn or somefin" way and kept going on about how odd it was that I wasn't a cable customer.
The senior Huge Guy (or so I gathered from his doing most of the talking--he badly needed a small black bowler hat) also reminded me every few sentences that he was authorized to "grant an amnesty" if in his "audit" (seriously) of non-customer households he found one that needed it. He had much too delicate a touch to mention why a person would need to take advantage of an amnesty, but after the third or fourth time I just told him, "Look, I don't have a pirate cable box," which I think amused him in its baldness, because he chuckled paternally and, of course, jovially.
I realized afterward that he was looking over my shoulder at, naturally, the 29" Sony TV that looks completely implausible for a non-cable-watching household. He had earlier tried to talk his way into the apartment on the grounds of his "audit," but I had crankily refused, forgetting that he could see it all anyway. At least it made some kind of point, I guess, even if the point was that I am enormously absentminded.
Anyway after I piled up enough demands that he just turn off everything he found in the cable closet, he eventually went away, still trailing promises of amnesties and a special $20/month rate for customers coming in under the amnesty, and giving off a powerful air of not believing my pathetic but amusing honky lies.
I should mention I got sales calls from the cable company every couple of weeks until I told enough of their departments (I guess) not to call any more, and even so I get junk mail from them weekly. They're very persistent.
But the punchline is that, from having just basic cable gratis before, I have now leapt up to full blown 60+ channel cable, still free. I guess when they tried to turn it off they enabled everything; I have no idea. If they come by again I fully expect to start getting the pay channels too.
Only problem is, even though I'm out of the habit of watching TV, it's still a temptation. Good thing I only just found out about it; I'll definitely make some use of it over Christmas break. Maybe in January I'll try to get them to turn it off for real, although I'm a little afraid of what might happen--either my door will be kicked down by the cable SWAT team or I'll start receiving Cinemax in my fillings. Just what I need, to be kept awake at 3:00 AM by Showgirls playing in my molars.
Flory
Sunday, November 23, 2003
Another short, or at any rate vapid and unthinking, post. Following on four successive days of triumph in the Squared Circle against the contemptible bean (whose women are weeping for him), and consequently pretty much some kind of caffeine-fueled funny car, I decided to widen my culinary onslaught to frying eggs.
Some will say this is madness, and I understand, my brothers--I too doubted the truth of the Egg; but if God did not mean man to fry an egg, He would not have put eggs, a frying pan, and cooking spray in a man's kitchen. Or had a man's girlfriend put them there, neither.
So, armed only with a complete modern kitchen, I committed a gross outrage against animal dignity. Four times. And I'm not going to get parole because there's no way I'm going to express my regret for the emotional damage I caused chickenkind everywhere. Fried eggs and toast are just about heaven; with ketchup (and there is always ketchup), I think they may actually be heaven. I realize this is going to require some hasty recalculation on the part of the queen-of-the-scientists.
Does anyone know how to make proper greasy sunny-side up diner-style eggs, though? Mine were ridiculously wholesome and I couldn't figure out how to make the egg white cook properly without turning it over.
Also, now I want to grind and fry everything in the apartment. My cat's been hiding for hours now.
Flory
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
All right, this has got to be the coolest thing ever. My electric kettle, coffee grinder, and French press came today and I just made my first ever very own cup of coffee. Well, actually 24 ounces of coffee, too much being never enough.
I read all the directions with ridiculous care (noting that the electric kettle listed "Don't use this kettle in ways contrary to those described here" twice, something like numbers 7 and 15 on the nanny list), put on my nightvision goggles and commenced to grinding. Coffee grinders are terribly fun, and it's just as well the instructions warned not to grind anything but coffee, because I want to grind everything now. It's the electric drill effect.
The grinder will grind approximately a gadzillion pounds of coffee at once; I seriously wonder who could need it. I filled it to the lowest line and still got a bucketful of coffee out of it.
The electric kettle is also great; it replaces an aged monstrosity that an old roommate left me in, I think, 1996, so the inside (which cannot be cleaned) must be spectacularly nasty. The new one, I made sure, can be opened and cleaned. It has this amazing triple filter thing in the spout made out of some magical material that is as fine as gauze but can survive boiling water for years. Unlike the old kettle, I'm happy to note, the electric cord doesn't get painfully hot during the boiling, which, as much as it diminishes the chance that I'll get to meet a Dalmatian, is probably better all around. And the kettle turns itself off when it reaches boiling or if some idiot turns it on when it's empty. And it chimes to tell you it did so. The Future is Now.
I'm going to go refill my cup (which is one of those So I Married an Axe Murderer giant cups); I left maybe a quarter of the coffee in the beaker, although not before carefully swathing the beaker in a towel, as if it were mine only child.
There, back now. I should mention that I actually had milk around the house, and for whatever reason two packets of sugar, which I sent in as though two tiny coracles in a stormy sea of coffee. And it tasted good. It is wrong, how good it tastes. In a few years here, when some judge finally declares that "If you love it, why don't you marry it?" implies a legal precedent for marriage to inanimate/abstract/incorporeal objects, I am going to get this coffee a ring. Well, not this coffee, but some like it. And we'll honeymoon in Columbia, the part with the coffee, not the part with the FARC and the coke and all. That comes later.
All right, but I didn't mean to drink it all in twenty minutes, but now I'm done so I may as well end the post. I still can't believe I just used all these kitchen appliances and things (even a measuring cup!).
I'm feeling so domestic my ovaries hurt.
Flory
Monday, November 17, 2003
NPR is pretty well a swamp of idiocy overgrown with error, but I have to give them credit for an interview they did today. It is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Jonestown murders, when the happy philosophy of the People's Temple cost more than nine hundred people their lives. (I feel compelled to add "many of them children;" news cliches are horribly contagious.)
I doubt that it is reasonable to call a self-murder committed under the influence of a cult leader a suicide, but even if it is, a great many of the cultists were murdered, compelled to drink poison at gunpoint. The murders were not limited to Jonestown; a cultist in Georgetown, Guyana's capital, slit the throats of her three children, then killed herself, when the word was given.
To mark the anniversary NPR interviewed one of the surviving cultists (about two hundred survived, apparently through being away and not receiving instruction). The guest was a Ms. Johnston Kohl, sniffly, vapid, and unrepentant--in fact in her voice was full of longing for Jonestown. She spoke rapturously of the Guyanan jungle and of the attempt to make a "better world when everyone outside is trying to stop you."
The interviewer, Melissa Block, gently but insistently pressed her on all the right points, about culpability especially, and always called it, rightly, the "Jonestown mass suicide and murder." Ms. Kohl suggested that "different people in the leadership" could have kept Jonestown going, if only Jim Jones had somehow been forced to retire. Later she added that "95% of the time it was just this normal, aggressive community trying to make a utopia, and 5% of the time it was totally insane." She did not mean "utopia" as a criticism.
Flory
Saturday, November 15, 2003
All right, not all of the research is boring. Artemidorus wrote, about AD 130, that "to dream of eating a book is good for people in education, sophists, and all who make a living from lecturing on books" (2.45). The author, Fox, connects this with Revelation 10: "And I took the little book out of the angel's hand and ate it up . . . and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey."
I have not yet descended (or ascended) to eating books but may soon choke on them.
Flory
The end of semester panic is well under way. So much so that I haven't had time to think about anything but my Greek paper, or read anything else for that matter. So even though I'd like to take a few minutes to post something, I don't have any ideas. It's a bit lame to resort to this already, but if anyone has a topic he'd like me to tackle, I'll give it a shot. Otherwise, I'm sure I'll think of something here.
If only this paper weren't so wretchedly boring; the research is so dull that the university had to import pig dullness by the shipload from Dullistan to make it. My next two papers will be interesting, though. A couple of different ideas in the general topic of Christianity and the Roman world.
Flory
Sunday, November 09, 2003
Friday there was a lecture on modern Greece, from a Greek professor who, as he said, grew up in the shadow of the Parthenon. He was supposed to talk about the usefulness of modern Greek to the classicist, but soon digressed into the question of the classical legacy and modern Greece. Although he tried to show Greece in a good light, the sad fact is that little enough classical scholarship comes from Greece. American, English, French, and German classicists come to extract the raw material of scholarship, which they ship back to their wealthy home institutions to be refined and processed into finished merchandise. Each foreign scholar-miner hopes to gain a little polished gem of kleos mined from the great veins of ancient glory, the only fossil fuel unashamedly loved by the readers of the NYT.
Modern Greeks, I gather, are a little ambivalent about this relationship. The excavations of the Agora in Athens have involved the sale, under compulsion, and destruction of all the modern buildings that once covered the 30 acres now stripped of 2,400 years of Greek history to lay bare that golden century. Moreover, development and even repair of existing buildings is forbidden throughout the entire district. It seems a little doubtful that modern Athenians could be enthusiastic about this stranglehold of the past on the present, although the small businessman whose property is devalued and expropriated is not lucky enough to receive learned discussion of his marginalization. In fact at another lecture I heard a room full of intellectuals chuckle as the lecturer urbanely mocked the property owners who demanded high prices from archeologists--after all, he said, they had to know that the historical zoning made their property all but worthless.
And the break between modern Greek and classical Greek means there is no natural continuity between the modern man and the illustrious men who once lived twenty feet below the modern surface. In the 19th century the Greek nationalists struggled to create an idealized continuity through a revival of classicism, including a classicizing revision of the modern language, but again apparently without much success. Once the language of daily life drifts far enough that its speakers cannot understand the old language, unless they study it separately in school, the path from now to then is interrupted by a chasm. Excursions into the past are limited to scholars and the new culture loses a wealth of thought and skill.
This is why boring old grammar, spelling, and diction matter. I saw The Merchant of Venice Friday night, for the first time, and as always with Shakespeare found myself sliding along the tops of the words for the first few minutes, before finally catching hold of the pentameter and grammar. It is true that I have read all too little Shakespeare, but it's probably fair to think that if his language is difficult for me, after all this schooling, it is very close to breaking loose from the modern world entirely. Everyone will know that Shakespeare was gay, especially when the Shakespeare's Lovely Boy Act of 2008 legalizes sex-change operations for teenage boys, but that will prove, I expect, a cultural resource of limited value compared to the plays.
Flory
The Poseidonians forgot the Greek languageC. Cavafy, trans. E. Keeley and P. Sherrard
after so many centuries of mingling
with Tyrrhenians, Latins, and other foreigners.
The only thing surviving from their ancestors
was a Greek festival, with beautiful rites,
with lyres and flutes, contests and wreaths.
And it was their habit toward the festival's end
to tell each other about their ancient customs
and once again to speak Greek names
that only few of them still recognized.
And so their festival always had a melancholy ending
because they remembered that they too were Greeks,
they too once upon a time were citizens of Magna Graecia;
and how low they'd fallen now, what they'd become,
living and speaking like barbarians,
cut off so disastrously from the Greek way of life.
Poseidonia, on the western coast of Italy, south of Naples, became Paestum in Roman times, was abandoned in the 6th century AD, and rediscovered in 1750. The 25 October Spectator has a short article on it (not online).
Wednesday, November 05, 2003
Monophysitism and Monothelitism came up in conversation yesterday. Happens all the time, I know. Even so, it's worth pointing to the disputes over those ideas as rare and delicate blooms of word-drunk loopiness.
The Apostles' and Nicene Creeds deal as sensibly as possible with the doctrine that Christ was equally the Son of Man and the Son of God. The Apostles' Creed is the oldest (2nd century, probably) and is admirably plain:
I believe in God, the Father Almighty,The paradox is allowed to be latent and isn't dragged out to be tortured in the name of reason. I like its simple, robust narration, in fact, and think that apart from its spiritual value it ought to be a model for anyone writing public prayers, oaths, statements of belief, etc. If it's not too profane to say, company mission statements would benefit from more study of the creeds and less of the latest circular from the management consultants. But now I'm really off the point.
the Creator of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our lord:
Who was conceived of the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
...
The Nicene Creed (325) elaborates, as a result of the Arian doctrine that had tried to eliminate the paradox by separating the Son of God and God, saying that one had an origin and the other did not. It's awkward for infallibilists that Pope Liberius in 358 swore to a milder form of Arianism, in order to be permitted to return to Rome and regain his see. The line appears to be that he didn't really mean it. He probably didn't, if Jerome is telling the truth (no guarantee with him, unfortunately): "Liberius, taedio victus exilii, in haereticam pravitatem subscribens Romam quasi victor intravit." "Liberius, overcome by the weariness of his exile, by signing his name to a heretical perversity entered Rome as, so to speak, a victor." It's still a pretty lousy defense. In any case, the Nicene Creed went into more detail about Christ's divinity:
We believe in one God,Even after elaboration, the relationship between divine and human in Christ is not explored.
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
The Athanasian Creed (falsely called Athanasian; probably written between 450 and 550) is much wordier and deals almost entirely with Christ's divine and human natures, so I won't quote it at length. Now a creed specifies in detail what was left undefined before:
Furthermore it is necessary to everlasting salvation that he also believe rightly the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.As the specificity increases, the language suffers; the powerful motion of the Apostles' Creed is entirely lacking and it seems to me just as likely that Liberius was suffering multorum taedium verborum as taedium exilii. And even with this level of elaboration, still there was a reluctance to press too hard to explain how the two fully real natures united, except by the analogy of body and soul.
For the right faith is that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man.
God of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; and man of substance of His mother, born in the world.
Perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.
Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, and inferior to the Father as touching His manhood.
Who, although He is God and man, yet He is not two, but one Christ.
One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of that manhood into God.
One altogether, not by confusion of substance, but by unity of person.
For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ;
I don't know what, exactly, would make a person think that he could confidently define yet more precisely such a bafflingly mystical idea. Madness seems as likely as anything else. Because of course a great many people did try to specify it further. And here Monophysitism and Monothelitism come back into it. Monophysites (splitters!) believe that Christ's human and divine natures formed a single united nature. Well, fine. It still makes not a bit more sense than it did back in the Apostle's Creed. It's hard to see just why Monophysitism should be a heresy (still alive, too, in the Coptic church), but the case of Monothelitism is even worse. Here the unity is not of nature but of will, with the logical idea one person, one will behind it. Logical, that is, by Plato's standards, who never hesitated to wander off into unintelligible mysticism; otherwise bonkers.
Poor Pope Honorius I started Monothelitism (638) and consequently was anathematized for centuries by every succeeding pope. Another good one for the infallibilists, except that for once my sympathies are with a pope, for being beaten down as a heretic for adding one more feather-light peripheral specification. And to this day people are feeling the heresy keenly:
The Catholic doctrine is simple, at all events in its main lines. The faculty of willing is an integral part of human nature: therefore, our Lord had a human will, since He took a perfect human nature. His Divine will on the other hand is numerically one with that of the Father and the Holy Ghost. It is therefore necessary to acknowledge two wills in Christ. . . . the Divine will, which is the Divine nature, and the human rational will, which always acts in harmony with and in free subjection to the Divine will. The denial of more than one will in Christ by the heretics necessarily involved the incompleteness of His human nature. . . . Yet this omission [of a separate human will] prevents our Lord's actions from being free, from being human actions, from being meritorious, indeed makes His human nature nothing but an irrational, irresponsible instrument of the Divinity--a machine, of which the Divinity is the motive power." (The Catholic Encyclopedia--who else?)Golly, is about all I can say. A machine with Divinity the motive power--for one thing, that sounds rather like
One altogether, not by confusion of substance, but by unity of person. For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ.but I suppose that observation is disallowed. After all "Flesh with a soul as the motive power" is completely different from what we're talking about here. No, this here is a machine with a two-stroke engine and a divinized fuel intake system. Kill the heretic!
It is hardly worth trying to find the words to point out how haywire the thinking of the good folks at the Catholic Encyclopedia has gone. Poor wretched Honorius was obviously loopy too, but he was at least trying to find a compromise to settle some dispute or other, which is a noble goal. And all these centuries later the Catholic Encyclopedia oiks are still putting the boot in. Still, you have to prize a dispute like this as a precious efflorescence of humanity's marvellous intellect.
Flory
Sunday, November 02, 2003
I've fallen ill and behind again, so (as is obvious) I'll be updating less. Still, I wanted to say some more about the last post, even if I can't say as much as I had hoped. One long post will have to do.
First, what may be unnecessary to say, none of this is meant to be a theory. Only in the loosest possible sense can it be a theory to say that before an elaborated system there come many individual experiences that are the ground of the elaboration. Only philosophers speaking strictly within their field consider it a theory to say that solid experience of the world precedes reflection on that experience. All that needs to be added, as Santayana did, is a recognition that the five physical senses do not exhaust man's primary experiences. Besides the more complicated physical senses of motion and space, there are many primary experiences. Hunger, in its aching hollowness, nausea, and lassitude, is infinitely harder to deny than any sight or sound. I have no doubt that hunger has created far more theories, and even gods, than any sight or sound. Fear, too; hatred; anger; desire; love; even good and bad. (In this sense, because it precedes elaboration and refinement in moral systems: good, that act which in itself draws you to a person; bad, that act which in itself causes revulsion; so obviously Good and Evil are larger categories than good and bad.) Moreover, the physical senses are not as viewpoint-independent as they are assumed to be, but instead are shaped and altered in the same way that other senses are; yet no one thinks to extend the confidence he has in his five senses to the others. Although, of course, many extend their doubt about the others to doubt about the five senses; Stove quotes one academic who calls the Pacific Ocean a socially constructed entity; that is a theory, all right.
Nor, apart from that one, do I mean to belittle what I've been calling theories, for lack of a better word. Even a prosaic word like "love" ordinarily means a kind of theory, in addition to being used as a name for each of the associated particular experiences. To reduce love in the ordinary sense to nothing but experiences would be a mistake; man is a rational, language-using animal and he is always building on his experiences; moreover, what he builds has value and can be true or false. Especially, theories have value because they guide a man's actions and refine his experiences. When someone says, "I love you," he includes, albeit implicitly, a tremendous amount of inherited understanding, as well as a specific understanding of the way that inheritance is continually altered and added to by the lover and beloved themselves. The general and specific not only give a context to past experiences, set like diamonds in gold, but also make a kind of prediction about the future. At the least, by prediction expectation and suspense add a great deal to the weight of experiences.
The specific understanding is preceded by particular experiences, in other words, people fall in love, developing over time an explanation; that the explanation is separate from the experiences can be seen every time knowledge of love comes as a sudden realization. The general understanding derives from watching others, from experiencing other kinds of tenderness, and from stories, written and heard. At this point everyone who says "Yes, so love is socially constructed," has to go write "A kiss is as real as a stubbed toe" five hundred times. It may, of course, be true that all kinds of things are socially constructed, maybe even the Pacific Ocean—the point is that only a madman perceives his experiences as socially constructed. In other words, each of us has to take his experiences as simply true in themselves, because he cannot help doing otherwise, and then make of them what he can, given his many limits.
I do wonder why so many people rush to an explanation, like Dawkin's selfish gene, that withers the delight of experience. The greatest delight, after all, is in memory, through which all good things are always at hand—if they are allowed a place and are not dissolved in acid reductionism. More than that, good theories build on memories, sweeten the good and ameliorate the bad, and satisfy without doing harm that strange appetite of man, for explanation. It is my faith that the goodness and the truth of a theory are related, so that the most true theory does the most good; it is enough, though, to have a good theory, and a bad theory is worthless whether or not it is true. For what is the worth of truth if it destroys what is good and exalts what is bad, if it destroys reason in the name of reason, if it attacks even experience itself, if, in the end, it cannot even really be believed?
Besides being an antidote to reductionism in all forms, this acknowledgement of the immediacy of experiences also lends some sobriety to thought. It is nothing but a temper tantrum for a man to say that if his theory is false, his experiences are worthless and in fact were not truly experiences but something else misidentified. A temper tantrum, or, I suppose, a broken heart, like a lover who finds that the "I love you" he heard in reply was false, so that his theory is smashed like a windowpane. Each remembered experience now becomes a goad, and in his pain he denies the experiences themselves, or so he says. Yet soon enough, if he has any good fortune, he believes exactly those kinds of experiences again, and builds a new theory as firmly as before. All I have been saying is that he is sane to do so, that if he is sane, he must.
Even if your theory of God and the universe is torn apart and nothing is left at all of what seemed good and right, it is only sanity to understand that there is something left, something real and good, and to trust that a good theory will grow up around it, from the same roots that grew the earlier. With that as the worst, there can be confidence in the examination of theories and a limit to fear.
Flory
