Back in the retrospectively wonderful days where I had something (anything) to do, a colleague of mine told me about a prototype house in Scandinavia designed with a purpose in mind: to maximise the lifespan of its dweller. Contrary to my initial vision of a light-filled residence equipped with salubrious hot springs, lush gardens and endless stores of Bulgarian super-yoghurt (renowned for its services to long-life), this house is actually the height of uncomfortability. The lounge becomes lumpy and jagged when you settle into it. The toilet administers just-perceptible electric shocks at irregular intervals. The stove emits piercing shrieks as the stir-fry simmers. In short, it is the antithesis of a holiday house: it brooks no form of relaxation whatsoever. This dwelling may not provide the most beauteous of existences (when told about it, I immediately thought of sticking a Romantic poet in there for a few days under the directive 'Celebrate This, Motherfucker!'), but apparently it will provide the longest one. Recreating a constant struggle to survive is the newest technology in the conflict of deferment between life and death. And Scandinavian innovation is once again at the forefront. Pressure-point-poking Armchairs, soon available from Ikea for a meagre 59.95. With some propulsion from smart marketing, we could all be dying extremely slow and painful deaths very soon.
The idea is delightfully counter-cultural. Even if my sources are misinformed, it is the idea (much before implementation is confirmed or not) that raises a host of questions. A core goal of most Western individuals is less work/more leisure, a difficult ratio to change, given that leisure consists not of sitting in a box and gradually moving through a lifetime supply of tin spaghetti, but doing things that cost money and hence (for most) require work: fine dining, travel, entertainment, hobby vices that involve expensive materials (cars, televisions etc). A cross-section of the prescribed lifestyle could be found in any Saturday paper. Lift-out sections cater to the different categories that should interest the comfortable Saturday citizen. Ultimately, the trodden life path of thirty-forty years solid work aims to culminate in no work: retirement floods, and Saturday is every day. Retirement is a holy period, sanctioned and consecrated for all those things we always wanted to do and would have done, had it not been for the trappings of responsible adulthood. A neat symmetry of ring composition seems to govern this pattern of life. The cycle of the working week can microcosmically stand for the cycle of the working life: we're born on a Sunday, put in an honest 37.5 hour week, and have an enjoyable twilit Saturday at the end of it all. Most people would prefer to end it at 12am on Sunday morning, just at the point where they re-descend into the Lord's day of childhood dependence. But even if they live long past this juncture, they can take whatever comfort from the knowledge that Monday morning will never come again. Small consolation in the argument with failing internal organs, I suppose.
The retirement period is a gilt zone for many people, viewed through the lenses of deferment that 'look forward' to the sunny skies of the remote future. Most humans can't help this affliction, a manifestation of the greater disease known simply as 'hope'. Even the direst pessimist can hope things will improve, however bad the predictions the present bodes. Hope can easily grow out of uncertainty, but the zeal with which people look ahead to retirement borders on max-power faith. The statistics of high survival rates in developed nations naturally lead to a very fundamental assumption: that you will be alive for around eighty years in total. And so the likelihood of fulfilling the ideal course - leeching off others for the first quarter, enjoying financial independence for the next two, and rewarding yourself for the last one - is really quite high. Alas, death and taxes. While you're paying the latter, the former could come and transact your vulnerable mortal arse for the last time. Hence the two impulses of consumer behaviour in constant, dynamic tension: to save or to spend. Live slow, die old, live fast, die young, or David Brent's third alternative (hilarious, but to be taken seriously too), live fast, die old. Though coined with tongue-in-cheek, most would admit that this is the golden mean which they are striving for. Maximum quality married to maximum quantity. Our lives should look balanced, like a lovely transaction.
Comfort has always whispered sweet nothings in longevity's ear. The two seem naturally linked; after all, comfort has piles of money to keep purchasing the best chance of survival. But if survival can be improved by reducing comfort, the circuit shorts. It has been observed that long life, as well as bowing to any number of physiological factors, can also be governed by will. Someone who wants to live and still has a clear raison d'etre at an advanced age, all other things being equal, will probably live longer than one who doesn't and hasn't. The constant irritation and vexation employed in this mythical house is as good a reason as any. Life becomes a battle against niggling annoyances; nowhere can a cosy, nested sanctuary be built to insulate yourself from day-to-day difficulties. This is perhaps just another means of extending contact with the 'real', or working, world. Staying in the office an extra ten years may have a similar effect. But it would be a depressing state of affairs if well-off retirees had to resort to buying an expensive palace of anxiety just to satisfy the stress quota necessary for endurance. Why build a gym when you can run in the park? Plenty of opportunities exist for maintaining healthy doses of frustration right to the end, simply by walking out into the street. Deal with the overwhelming bureaucracy and surly public servants, yourself. Fulminate on the poor etiquette of school children on buses, yourself. This is the fun and prerogative of becoming a grumpy old person. Using the dead fruit of your comfort to buy artificial discomfort seems perverse, saltily weird and dystopian. It's also a waste of resources. Discomfort is there in droves, if only you're prepared to harvest it with your own two hands.
Towards the end, in the end (whenever it may come), the discomforts will vary in quality. Small, self-imposed electric shocks in a bubble of other minor irritants I would rate at the lower end of the spectrum; nice acerbic bitterness at the world around I would put towards the top. There is absolutely no joy in living if the only bad elements you have to complain about have been installed by you, questing for life-giving domestic disharmony. Any kind of retraction from the outside world floats the suggestion that death might be a more desirable state of being, and none more than this. Death before dishonour, the dishonour of the incommodious couch. Paying retail price for this Ikea item is one final transaction I hope, indeed trust with full faith, I will never perform.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Why Re-re-read the Classics?
Many (but not too many, on our timeline) years ago, Italo Calvino released a book entitled ‘Perche Leggere I Classici?’ (‘Why Read the Classics?’). Soon after this event, the University of Sydney Fisher Library graciously purchased the product and stowed it on a level eight shelf. Movingly balanced between the exile of the inner aisle and the visibility of the arterial walkway, it has sat in the same or similar position for a long time, gathering dust, thumbprints, marks and references. Books too are hard-pressed to escape the ironies of fate, and this one was no less (tightly) bound: a book which, in its mission to direct renewed attention to other, older books, had forgotten to encourage readers to take notice of itself. During my honours year, I would make sure to walk the level eight thoroughfare at a measured pace, in case some visual bud should shoot through the arid, desiccated air conditions and hit my eye. Repeated experience surrendered, as always, to routine, and I would become used to the spines that would jump out for their conspicuous designs: Aisle One, that thing in German on the second shelf from top, Aisle Twenty-three, an obsolete ‘Spain’ Lonely Planet. One day I felt primed for an ocular revolution. I scanned a shelf never-before-scanned and backpedalled at the text ‘Italo Calvino’; for the walking continued while the mind worked. I had read ‘Mr. Palomar’ long ago, so the recognition was there at least. The title spoke to me more loudly than the author, however. Even in the muted tones of a foreign language with which I could only claim rudimentary familiarity (my mum’s Italian), the project sounded promising. Not least because the title was head-on, almost puerile in its simplicity. ‘Why?’, that most irritating of interrogatives, had been boldly brought back, a word I struggled to keep sheathed in the fun memories of pissing off the parents: ‘But why?’ ‘Because…because!’. ‘Why?’ is a blow-fly of a question, inherently difficult to squash. It is an aggressive confrontationalist. So, ‘Why Read the Classics?’…Why?
Italo, as it turned out, never gave me an acceptable answer. It was all in Italian, which would be my most cogent answer to the question ‘Why did it not give you an acceptable answer?’. What was clear was that Calvino’s range of ‘The Classics’ went beyond my narrow little classical Latin and Greek writings: this was ‘Classici’ in the sense of distinguished members in a literary canon spanning from ancient times to the present day. Homer and Ovid still down the front, but wiped to proportionate importance by twenty other essays on Montale, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hemingway and others I fail to remember. But the question didn’t lose its urgency because of a difference in definition. The book’s bravery in asking set an example I had to follow. So out of storage came that question I had suppressed for a long time. ‘Why Read the Classics?’ is the most intimidating of questions in my case, because it is the individuation of the universal ‘Why do what I’m doing?’. There are a host of prefabricated responses available to the asker of that latter question – Money, Power, Intercourse with Hot Ladies, Serving the Greater Good – but none of them nicely fit the particular in this situation. One of the terrifying things about choosing an oddball day-job is that the vindication process is not available from articles in MyCareer: the feel-better-about-yourself is, unfortunately, all do-it-yourself.
As a classicist, one’s armour is always up for the informal, social phrasing of the question ‘Why?’. The gentle soul at the party will smile enthusiastically when they hear you say ‘I study Latin’, perhaps thrust a ‘Good on You!’ back with the implication that doing something out of the ordinary is risky and therefore commendable in itself. Or sometimes the implication is more of a verbal head-pat and hair-rustling: ‘Aww, aren’t you cute with your little Classics thing!’ But the more challenging/interested interlocutor will ask the doosy ‘Why?’, reasonably expecting a fully-fledged adult doing something to know why they are doing it. And in that moment my heart melts of fraudulence. My inner monologue fires the usual reproach: ‘I told you, you should know this by now!’ I scratch around for something real or novel, swearing at the same time that I will never suffer this mortifying ceremony again. But I can’t extemporise a justification on the existential level. I draw from the bank of tired explanations. I study classical languages because they give me a better understanding of the English language. I study classical thought because it forms the foundation of Western culture. I study classical literature to understand allusions in James Joyce and feel slightly superior.
The reasons sound mechanical, but are sold as a package (apart from the last one perhaps) for educational institutions as well as parties. During my recent experience teaching at a secondary school, I made one of my many blunders not preparing a response for the inevitable question ‘Why Study Latin?’ In the golden days of the cane, a light weapon-brandishing would have put that one to bed. But festering mutinies are not so easily neutralised in this current age; nor should they be. Constant re-examination is good for every discipline, even the oldest. Keep it Relevant, Speak to the Kids and all that. These are the children of the cost-benefit generation. No one wants to put their time into something that won’t yield a profit. So, Sir, what will we get out of it? ‘You’ll tap into the roots of your own language and culture. Now let’s start conjugating.’
Classics, until relatively recently, never had to do this. It enjoyed the backing of curricula worldwide; compulsory inclusion enshrined its value. But when governments abandoned this hitherto protected species, it suddenly became terminally endangered. It is doubtful that any other area of study has ever experienced as drastic and sudden a decline. From universality to near-zero in a few years; public incisors tore through Latin and Greek, taking ravenous vengeance for all those years of mind-numbing boredom as John Citizen was forced to sit through a crusty balding Master’s recitation of the paradigm ‘amo, amas, amat.’ Few people of the older generations with whom I have talked recall the learning of Latin in a positive light. Nevertheless, this Fall rivals original sin. Perceived as a fundamental component of Western education for hundreds of years, the 20th century removed Classics from the centrality of core syllabi to the margins of the ‘electives’, and to the non-essential end of even this remote spectrum. Such a damning, Siberian fate makes justification all the more difficult.
It is a truth (universally acknowledged) then that you don’t ‘need’ to learn classical languages to live, or function as even the most ideal product of State education. And even if my plangent cries for the prelapsarian lost world are mildly over-rosy (we lost Latin and Greek, but we won a democratised education system - I would ungrudgingly call that a good trade), it is clear that somewhere along the line, Classics became no longer integral. Latin ceased to be a Lingua Franca for European intellectuals as they found confidence and verbal wealth in their own native tongues. So the stranglehold that required intimate familiarity with the Latin language, at least, was finally broken. The Church’s power waned in the glare of the enlightenment, and its official language followed closely behind. There are many reasons (all of them reasonable) why Classics began to compel less and less interest, yet Latin and Greek were still must-haves on the curriculum for at least another few centuries. The horse, already dead to some, died for more still by excessive flogging. From an academic standpoint, the question ‘Why learn classical languages?’ would have once been answered with another, scoffier question ‘How can one not?’ Times change, as do the targets of scoffs. It is much easier and more natural nowadays to identify reasons not to learn Latin and Greek (they are hard, they are boring, their literature is available in translation, they are the languages of legitimate paedophilia – the list goes on) than it is to find ones in the other direction. The defence is becoming more polemic. The question is getting harder.
So, again…why? With the automatic validation of institutionalised education gone, Classics left in the lurch, what props can a handful of lingering students and teachers offer in support? What can I, as a small unit of that handful, fling in the face of ‘Why?’? Firstly, I can separate two strands which are, for me, at different stages of settlement. We began with ‘Why Read the Classics?’ I have moved imperceptibly to ‘Why Learn Classical Languages?’ They are not the same thing. To the second question I can confidently answer ‘In order to read the classics.’, assuming cyclically that they are worth reading. To the first I could give the same response. But that would be about as fun for all involved as a child interminably parroting ‘Why?’ back to their increasingly frustrated parent. ‘Why Read the Classics?’ ‘In order to read the Classics.’ – a smarmy little response that begs for corporal punishment.
‘Why Read the Classics?’ is also a step down from ‘Why Study the Classics?’ The first question implies a casual readership, the second a league of permanent full-timers. ‘Study’ is just close reading: the ‘re-re-read’ of the title. This stuttered repetition is perhaps a good way to capture the process of attempting to read texts in their original (classical) languages now. The eye becomes more fluent as grammar retires to second-nature and knowledge of vocabulary expands, but attaining that remote, ever-recessive goal of ‘understanding’ is a far slower operation than most day-to-day encounters with language. The act of reading a classical text is, like a child with learning problems, desultory and disruptive. A row of two lines ticked as ‘understood’ without any recourse to an external reference, dictionary or commentary, I would treasure as a rare creature. One’s eye jumps back and forth in the text, re-re-reading long periods to recall the crucial information in the first part which governs meaning in the second, then jumps out of the text altogether, to the sanctuary of handy co-texts which must be kept unfolded on the desk in circumscription of the central text at all times. The process is painstaking, word by word. But for all that work there is a grand sense of reward. Small intellectual victories are frequent: you remember that word from a parallel usage in Horace, that syntax looks similar to something in Homer. After a slog of effort, the dawn of understanding feels that much brighter, almost as visceral a contentment as stepping back to admire a hole you’ve dug into intractable clay. Then you look up, leaning on your spade with pleasant fatigue, and survey the earth still to be dug-up. It spans to the horizon. And so the head goes down again. The battle struggles on, uphill, reaching lows of hard self-reproach and highs of exhilaration. It is difficult, but this is precisely a reason why I like it. The process feels manual, earthy, like you are really getting down there and fondling the guts of the text.
The study of the classics is far from elitist, even if not quite akin to the picture of toiling the soil above. Its temporal qualifications make it still one of the biggest clubs you can join. The vast tradition of scholarship batters you into humility straightaway; any contribution you might one day make is automatically condemned to relative insignificance. Strangely, I find this comforting – almost liberating. The weight of the past presses, but at the same time exonerates you from having to add any more to it. Few people will notice if you fall off the Giants’ shoulders. Probably even fewer will register it if you make it to the top of their crowns. The odds are against you in doing more; and yet, clearly, there is still more to do. Classics has probably been one of the flagship beneficiaries of the recent interdisciplinary thawing all across the Humanities. The once barbarian-wary gates have been thrown open to new friends: literary theory, linguistics, philosophy, gender studies, anthropology have stimulated a miniature renaissance. The dialogue is, at least in theory, beginning to go both ways (as good dialogues should). Stephen Hinds, one of the most important living Latinists, began his invigorating series ‘Roman Literature and Its Contexts’ in the early 90’s with the following informal programme: ‘We Romanists regularly explore critical and theoretical work produced by Renaissance and modern specialists. Now, we'd like to encourage them to read some of our stuff.’ The newfound open-mindedness is exciting. The ‘ivory tower’ preconception of Classics as a discipline is fast dissolving into a substance much less hardy, and an edifice much less imposing. The mutually beneficial process of learning and teaching alongside other disciplines is a bracing (if not entirely new) idea for Classics; but it also serves to show that we’re not dealing with a closed universe, a form that seems wrongly entangled with the very identity of the classics. The very name suggests closure, solidity, canon. But Classics knows, at least as much as other disciplines, and certainly as much as the most dynamic businesses, that it is a case of move or die. Survival is contingent upon constant reinvention. Even if it is just now becoming critically aware of it, the history of classical study is a wonderful show of the flexibility of reception, of how texts are redeemed to the different purposes of their redeemers. The repossession goes on indefinitely. It is still going on.
So healthy expansion and new direction is a good reason for re-re-reading the classics. The value of the process for the self has been addressed. But can the benefits proffer their tentacles further? How does one cross the mist-laden bridge from studying Classics to philanthropy? These are natural, albeit terrifying, questions for the more socially conscious classicists who worry about the high self-indulgence factor of a pursuit which cannot be directly linked to improving the immediate welfare of humanity. Classics is not social work, aid work, development work. It resembles volunteering only in so far as you are doing voluntarily and for free (as a student) what the majority of people find unpleasant. ‘Why?’ often conceals a ‘What practical/monetary benefit does this occupation have for you or anyone else?’ Why, none whatsoever. But the sustenance of financially unproductive roles is at the essence of civilisation. Artists are paid not in accordance with how much food they produce, but with how much they contribute to culture, that aspect of humanity which intercedes between us and a collective of languid hippopotami. Classicists are not artists; and they are as far from cancer-curers as possible. But they do help keep alive something that is invaluable to the human psyche. Like a gallery, museum, library or university, you may go through life without ever really using it or making contact with it: but it is a wonderful consolation to know it is there. Life would be infinitely poorer without Classics.
Towards the end of Homer’s Iliad, Priam, frail, geriatric King of Troy, makes bold to recover the body of his son Hector from an inflamed Achilles. Priam breaches the Greek camp in the night, finds his way to Achilles’ tent and approaches him. In one of the most remarkable moments in literature, a grieving father bows down as a suppliant before the killer of his son. Achilles spares Priam and accepts the ransom. At the end of Virgil’s Aeneid, the hero Aeneas is faced with a similarly prostrate suppliant, his mortal enemy Turnus. He is on the point of sparing him in the vein of Achilles; but at the last moment he decides to kill him. Virgil draws attention to the fact that he could have imitated Homer and ended his epic with a spared life. But he, like Aeneas, chooses to go in the other direction. There was no more powerful way of saying ‘I depend on you, but now I also own you.’ Homer, a long-dead, dubious figure of a shady poet, signed his soul over to Virgil from the underworld: ‘Now I depend on you too.’ These texts always belong to the present, and hence to everyone. As you read them slowly, sometimes abortively, sometimes successfully, little thoughts of novelty swirl around, carving more conspicuously against the backdrop of thousands of people reading the same thing over thousands of years. Why? After all this – most emphatically – the texts belong to you.
Italo, as it turned out, never gave me an acceptable answer. It was all in Italian, which would be my most cogent answer to the question ‘Why did it not give you an acceptable answer?’. What was clear was that Calvino’s range of ‘The Classics’ went beyond my narrow little classical Latin and Greek writings: this was ‘Classici’ in the sense of distinguished members in a literary canon spanning from ancient times to the present day. Homer and Ovid still down the front, but wiped to proportionate importance by twenty other essays on Montale, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hemingway and others I fail to remember. But the question didn’t lose its urgency because of a difference in definition. The book’s bravery in asking set an example I had to follow. So out of storage came that question I had suppressed for a long time. ‘Why Read the Classics?’ is the most intimidating of questions in my case, because it is the individuation of the universal ‘Why do what I’m doing?’. There are a host of prefabricated responses available to the asker of that latter question – Money, Power, Intercourse with Hot Ladies, Serving the Greater Good – but none of them nicely fit the particular in this situation. One of the terrifying things about choosing an oddball day-job is that the vindication process is not available from articles in MyCareer: the feel-better-about-yourself is, unfortunately, all do-it-yourself.
As a classicist, one’s armour is always up for the informal, social phrasing of the question ‘Why?’. The gentle soul at the party will smile enthusiastically when they hear you say ‘I study Latin’, perhaps thrust a ‘Good on You!’ back with the implication that doing something out of the ordinary is risky and therefore commendable in itself. Or sometimes the implication is more of a verbal head-pat and hair-rustling: ‘Aww, aren’t you cute with your little Classics thing!’ But the more challenging/interested interlocutor will ask the doosy ‘Why?’, reasonably expecting a fully-fledged adult doing something to know why they are doing it. And in that moment my heart melts of fraudulence. My inner monologue fires the usual reproach: ‘I told you, you should know this by now!’ I scratch around for something real or novel, swearing at the same time that I will never suffer this mortifying ceremony again. But I can’t extemporise a justification on the existential level. I draw from the bank of tired explanations. I study classical languages because they give me a better understanding of the English language. I study classical thought because it forms the foundation of Western culture. I study classical literature to understand allusions in James Joyce and feel slightly superior.
The reasons sound mechanical, but are sold as a package (apart from the last one perhaps) for educational institutions as well as parties. During my recent experience teaching at a secondary school, I made one of my many blunders not preparing a response for the inevitable question ‘Why Study Latin?’ In the golden days of the cane, a light weapon-brandishing would have put that one to bed. But festering mutinies are not so easily neutralised in this current age; nor should they be. Constant re-examination is good for every discipline, even the oldest. Keep it Relevant, Speak to the Kids and all that. These are the children of the cost-benefit generation. No one wants to put their time into something that won’t yield a profit. So, Sir, what will we get out of it? ‘You’ll tap into the roots of your own language and culture. Now let’s start conjugating.’
Classics, until relatively recently, never had to do this. It enjoyed the backing of curricula worldwide; compulsory inclusion enshrined its value. But when governments abandoned this hitherto protected species, it suddenly became terminally endangered. It is doubtful that any other area of study has ever experienced as drastic and sudden a decline. From universality to near-zero in a few years; public incisors tore through Latin and Greek, taking ravenous vengeance for all those years of mind-numbing boredom as John Citizen was forced to sit through a crusty balding Master’s recitation of the paradigm ‘amo, amas, amat.’ Few people of the older generations with whom I have talked recall the learning of Latin in a positive light. Nevertheless, this Fall rivals original sin. Perceived as a fundamental component of Western education for hundreds of years, the 20th century removed Classics from the centrality of core syllabi to the margins of the ‘electives’, and to the non-essential end of even this remote spectrum. Such a damning, Siberian fate makes justification all the more difficult.
It is a truth (universally acknowledged) then that you don’t ‘need’ to learn classical languages to live, or function as even the most ideal product of State education. And even if my plangent cries for the prelapsarian lost world are mildly over-rosy (we lost Latin and Greek, but we won a democratised education system - I would ungrudgingly call that a good trade), it is clear that somewhere along the line, Classics became no longer integral. Latin ceased to be a Lingua Franca for European intellectuals as they found confidence and verbal wealth in their own native tongues. So the stranglehold that required intimate familiarity with the Latin language, at least, was finally broken. The Church’s power waned in the glare of the enlightenment, and its official language followed closely behind. There are many reasons (all of them reasonable) why Classics began to compel less and less interest, yet Latin and Greek were still must-haves on the curriculum for at least another few centuries. The horse, already dead to some, died for more still by excessive flogging. From an academic standpoint, the question ‘Why learn classical languages?’ would have once been answered with another, scoffier question ‘How can one not?’ Times change, as do the targets of scoffs. It is much easier and more natural nowadays to identify reasons not to learn Latin and Greek (they are hard, they are boring, their literature is available in translation, they are the languages of legitimate paedophilia – the list goes on) than it is to find ones in the other direction. The defence is becoming more polemic. The question is getting harder.
So, again…why? With the automatic validation of institutionalised education gone, Classics left in the lurch, what props can a handful of lingering students and teachers offer in support? What can I, as a small unit of that handful, fling in the face of ‘Why?’? Firstly, I can separate two strands which are, for me, at different stages of settlement. We began with ‘Why Read the Classics?’ I have moved imperceptibly to ‘Why Learn Classical Languages?’ They are not the same thing. To the second question I can confidently answer ‘In order to read the classics.’, assuming cyclically that they are worth reading. To the first I could give the same response. But that would be about as fun for all involved as a child interminably parroting ‘Why?’ back to their increasingly frustrated parent. ‘Why Read the Classics?’ ‘In order to read the Classics.’ – a smarmy little response that begs for corporal punishment.
‘Why Read the Classics?’ is also a step down from ‘Why Study the Classics?’ The first question implies a casual readership, the second a league of permanent full-timers. ‘Study’ is just close reading: the ‘re-re-read’ of the title. This stuttered repetition is perhaps a good way to capture the process of attempting to read texts in their original (classical) languages now. The eye becomes more fluent as grammar retires to second-nature and knowledge of vocabulary expands, but attaining that remote, ever-recessive goal of ‘understanding’ is a far slower operation than most day-to-day encounters with language. The act of reading a classical text is, like a child with learning problems, desultory and disruptive. A row of two lines ticked as ‘understood’ without any recourse to an external reference, dictionary or commentary, I would treasure as a rare creature. One’s eye jumps back and forth in the text, re-re-reading long periods to recall the crucial information in the first part which governs meaning in the second, then jumps out of the text altogether, to the sanctuary of handy co-texts which must be kept unfolded on the desk in circumscription of the central text at all times. The process is painstaking, word by word. But for all that work there is a grand sense of reward. Small intellectual victories are frequent: you remember that word from a parallel usage in Horace, that syntax looks similar to something in Homer. After a slog of effort, the dawn of understanding feels that much brighter, almost as visceral a contentment as stepping back to admire a hole you’ve dug into intractable clay. Then you look up, leaning on your spade with pleasant fatigue, and survey the earth still to be dug-up. It spans to the horizon. And so the head goes down again. The battle struggles on, uphill, reaching lows of hard self-reproach and highs of exhilaration. It is difficult, but this is precisely a reason why I like it. The process feels manual, earthy, like you are really getting down there and fondling the guts of the text.
The study of the classics is far from elitist, even if not quite akin to the picture of toiling the soil above. Its temporal qualifications make it still one of the biggest clubs you can join. The vast tradition of scholarship batters you into humility straightaway; any contribution you might one day make is automatically condemned to relative insignificance. Strangely, I find this comforting – almost liberating. The weight of the past presses, but at the same time exonerates you from having to add any more to it. Few people will notice if you fall off the Giants’ shoulders. Probably even fewer will register it if you make it to the top of their crowns. The odds are against you in doing more; and yet, clearly, there is still more to do. Classics has probably been one of the flagship beneficiaries of the recent interdisciplinary thawing all across the Humanities. The once barbarian-wary gates have been thrown open to new friends: literary theory, linguistics, philosophy, gender studies, anthropology have stimulated a miniature renaissance. The dialogue is, at least in theory, beginning to go both ways (as good dialogues should). Stephen Hinds, one of the most important living Latinists, began his invigorating series ‘Roman Literature and Its Contexts’ in the early 90’s with the following informal programme: ‘We Romanists regularly explore critical and theoretical work produced by Renaissance and modern specialists. Now, we'd like to encourage them to read some of our stuff.’ The newfound open-mindedness is exciting. The ‘ivory tower’ preconception of Classics as a discipline is fast dissolving into a substance much less hardy, and an edifice much less imposing. The mutually beneficial process of learning and teaching alongside other disciplines is a bracing (if not entirely new) idea for Classics; but it also serves to show that we’re not dealing with a closed universe, a form that seems wrongly entangled with the very identity of the classics. The very name suggests closure, solidity, canon. But Classics knows, at least as much as other disciplines, and certainly as much as the most dynamic businesses, that it is a case of move or die. Survival is contingent upon constant reinvention. Even if it is just now becoming critically aware of it, the history of classical study is a wonderful show of the flexibility of reception, of how texts are redeemed to the different purposes of their redeemers. The repossession goes on indefinitely. It is still going on.
So healthy expansion and new direction is a good reason for re-re-reading the classics. The value of the process for the self has been addressed. But can the benefits proffer their tentacles further? How does one cross the mist-laden bridge from studying Classics to philanthropy? These are natural, albeit terrifying, questions for the more socially conscious classicists who worry about the high self-indulgence factor of a pursuit which cannot be directly linked to improving the immediate welfare of humanity. Classics is not social work, aid work, development work. It resembles volunteering only in so far as you are doing voluntarily and for free (as a student) what the majority of people find unpleasant. ‘Why?’ often conceals a ‘What practical/monetary benefit does this occupation have for you or anyone else?’ Why, none whatsoever. But the sustenance of financially unproductive roles is at the essence of civilisation. Artists are paid not in accordance with how much food they produce, but with how much they contribute to culture, that aspect of humanity which intercedes between us and a collective of languid hippopotami. Classicists are not artists; and they are as far from cancer-curers as possible. But they do help keep alive something that is invaluable to the human psyche. Like a gallery, museum, library or university, you may go through life without ever really using it or making contact with it: but it is a wonderful consolation to know it is there. Life would be infinitely poorer without Classics.
Towards the end of Homer’s Iliad, Priam, frail, geriatric King of Troy, makes bold to recover the body of his son Hector from an inflamed Achilles. Priam breaches the Greek camp in the night, finds his way to Achilles’ tent and approaches him. In one of the most remarkable moments in literature, a grieving father bows down as a suppliant before the killer of his son. Achilles spares Priam and accepts the ransom. At the end of Virgil’s Aeneid, the hero Aeneas is faced with a similarly prostrate suppliant, his mortal enemy Turnus. He is on the point of sparing him in the vein of Achilles; but at the last moment he decides to kill him. Virgil draws attention to the fact that he could have imitated Homer and ended his epic with a spared life. But he, like Aeneas, chooses to go in the other direction. There was no more powerful way of saying ‘I depend on you, but now I also own you.’ Homer, a long-dead, dubious figure of a shady poet, signed his soul over to Virgil from the underworld: ‘Now I depend on you too.’ These texts always belong to the present, and hence to everyone. As you read them slowly, sometimes abortively, sometimes successfully, little thoughts of novelty swirl around, carving more conspicuously against the backdrop of thousands of people reading the same thing over thousands of years. Why? After all this – most emphatically – the texts belong to you.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
The Man and (The Woman and) The Mask
So we've taken our positions in the war against epiphany. Battle lines are drawn, erect. Some of you have rightly slashed at the hot-air-balloon that is my prose; and good, since it's there to be deflated. Others have taken part in the festivities. What a brilliant drama of comments has spawned from the little diatribe that could! All participants in the tussle of ownership, the great territorial conflict of interpretation. The real juice began to flow long after my post finished.
And yet, something worries me about my varied receptions (and whether I've received these receptions correctly). I had hoped a fairly blatant irony would drip out of that 'article', an irony that was indeed recognised (whether as unconscious or conscious): I was writing in a voice which was highly opinionated about the evils of firm opinions. It affirmed modesty, arrogantly. I feel silly attempting to deconstruct my own attempt at humour, but I felt that was a critical current of the whole piece. Sure, the claiming of epiphany does give me (if the me of this post can be aligned with the I of the previous) the shits, but I took care to filter this through an overblown mouthpiece. Satire is an extreme sport, in so far as it demands extremity of opinion. Risky, vertiginous, full of sweeping, flailing swords of generalisation. The ferocity of the satirist's opinion increases at a rate indirectly proportional to his/her knowledge. Less reason, more roar.
What concerns me about many readers (myself included - for my reading at some stage morphed into a lazy scan of quantity over quality) is that they don't seem to be sufficiently alive to the flexibility of the writer's voice. Of course, the contracts between writer and reader are always different, and signed at different times. Text framed as a newspaper article, for example, inherently contains an agreement that the facts will speak, and they will arrive through a transparent mouthpiece, unfiltered by a voice. Fiction, on the other hand, has other programmed expectations: among them, the freedom of the 'writer' to be distinct from the 'narrator', with the former controlling the latter. But we stumble when the text enters cyberspace and leaves the accountability of the heavier, inkier print author. How does one read an unlabelled, unprogrammed Blog with only one post to its name? How does one form the Blogger behind this Blog? Do we need their corporeality to engage with them, or can we grapple with shadows?
To plead the writer's mask may sound like a cop-out; and indeed, it will not always stand as a defence. Somewhere along the line, the writer has to face up to the responsibility of having written. Those figures who inform public opinion especially - Jonesy, Miranda Devine etc - need to back their creations bravely. But there is nothing wrong, even in these most extreme cases of self and opinion coalescing indistinguishably, with remembering the fluidity of voice. A writer approaches a product which is particularly manipulable. And this product can, as a result, be quite beautifully insincere. My favourite authors have mastered the art of skimming across the surface with agility, wielding their voice and mask as lightly and dexterously as a dancer. The loss of insincerity would be a tragic one: and I think (finally, an assertion!) that this applies to blogging as much as it does fiction.
Ultimately, the loss of control a writer experiences when anything is 'published' is an exhilarating feeling. What matter perceived misconceptions when they integrally help fertilise a rich world of readings? And it is in that most democratic of spaces, the net, where readings are perhaps most impossible to pin down. The wonderland of pseudonyms and avatars is a fantastic place to be ripped to shreds and re-sutured, all in the comfort of your own home: who knows whether or not Amenite is really a corpulent Bangladeshi addicted to Tasty Cheese, or whether or not I am really a black finger-puppeteer with three criminal convictions to my name. And, finally, does it matter? Online identity, like all written identities, has a strong hand in governing reception. The important thing is to keep the mask in the back of the mind as you read, a caution against face value; and have it ready to put on, when prepared to play along.
And yet, something worries me about my varied receptions (and whether I've received these receptions correctly). I had hoped a fairly blatant irony would drip out of that 'article', an irony that was indeed recognised (whether as unconscious or conscious): I was writing in a voice which was highly opinionated about the evils of firm opinions. It affirmed modesty, arrogantly. I feel silly attempting to deconstruct my own attempt at humour, but I felt that was a critical current of the whole piece. Sure, the claiming of epiphany does give me (if the me of this post can be aligned with the I of the previous) the shits, but I took care to filter this through an overblown mouthpiece. Satire is an extreme sport, in so far as it demands extremity of opinion. Risky, vertiginous, full of sweeping, flailing swords of generalisation. The ferocity of the satirist's opinion increases at a rate indirectly proportional to his/her knowledge. Less reason, more roar.
What concerns me about many readers (myself included - for my reading at some stage morphed into a lazy scan of quantity over quality) is that they don't seem to be sufficiently alive to the flexibility of the writer's voice. Of course, the contracts between writer and reader are always different, and signed at different times. Text framed as a newspaper article, for example, inherently contains an agreement that the facts will speak, and they will arrive through a transparent mouthpiece, unfiltered by a voice. Fiction, on the other hand, has other programmed expectations: among them, the freedom of the 'writer' to be distinct from the 'narrator', with the former controlling the latter. But we stumble when the text enters cyberspace and leaves the accountability of the heavier, inkier print author. How does one read an unlabelled, unprogrammed Blog with only one post to its name? How does one form the Blogger behind this Blog? Do we need their corporeality to engage with them, or can we grapple with shadows?
To plead the writer's mask may sound like a cop-out; and indeed, it will not always stand as a defence. Somewhere along the line, the writer has to face up to the responsibility of having written. Those figures who inform public opinion especially - Jonesy, Miranda Devine etc - need to back their creations bravely. But there is nothing wrong, even in these most extreme cases of self and opinion coalescing indistinguishably, with remembering the fluidity of voice. A writer approaches a product which is particularly manipulable. And this product can, as a result, be quite beautifully insincere. My favourite authors have mastered the art of skimming across the surface with agility, wielding their voice and mask as lightly and dexterously as a dancer. The loss of insincerity would be a tragic one: and I think (finally, an assertion!) that this applies to blogging as much as it does fiction.
Ultimately, the loss of control a writer experiences when anything is 'published' is an exhilarating feeling. What matter perceived misconceptions when they integrally help fertilise a rich world of readings? And it is in that most democratic of spaces, the net, where readings are perhaps most impossible to pin down. The wonderland of pseudonyms and avatars is a fantastic place to be ripped to shreds and re-sutured, all in the comfort of your own home: who knows whether or not Amenite is really a corpulent Bangladeshi addicted to Tasty Cheese, or whether or not I am really a black finger-puppeteer with three criminal convictions to my name. And, finally, does it matter? Online identity, like all written identities, has a strong hand in governing reception. The important thing is to keep the mask in the back of the mind as you read, a caution against face value; and have it ready to put on, when prepared to play along.
Monday, March 3, 2008
The War Against Epiphany
A negative to start: few things get my goat by the gonads more than someone announcing they have just had a life-changing realisation. Elevating this empty claim with the title 'epiphany' is rarer, but all the more offensive for that. There is something so implicitly self-congratulatory about the paradigm formula 'I've just had an amazing epiphany' and its cognates ('I've just had an incredible realisation', 'I've just come to the wonderful realisation'). On thinking about why this seemingly innocuous claim grates with me to such an extent, I most emphatically did not experience any epiphanies of any sort. If I felt an epiphany scratching in my cerebral recesses, I would immediately suppress it. I can safely posit myself in the camp of the anti-epiphanists.
To claim epiphany is tantamount to saying, in effect: 'I've recently obtained complete access to the hitherto concealed laws of the universe, and you haven't. Thank you, Goodnight.' The subtext wreaks of conceit. In this fantastical moment, special knowledge apparently bundles itself up, brands itself ostentatiously with 'Top Secret' stamps, and delivers itself as a marvellous ad hominem revelation. 'Everything just...made sense.' Well hats off to you, sir. Great kudos, Madam. A legion of sweaty physicists has been clambering for your keys to the cosmos for many years now, but you got there first.
I would welcome the epiphanist to take his/her perfect form and mould other untruths with it before attempting to wield it persuasively against me. My resistance swells when it is faced with any act of intellectual haste, and this is precisely what the epiphany is. As a moment of instantaneous sublimity, the idea has its use in constructing the myths of progress which console us every day: history lurches forward in fitful leaps as Albert chalks out e=mc^2, or Edison materialises the light-bulb, once confined to his comic-book thought-bubble, into the real thing. But the run-of-the-mill epiphany is far more dangerous, even though it can be seen as an individualisation of this 'history is summed from pivotal points' model. Epiphanies, for the most part, are tools used by confused people to delude themselves into thinking they've succeeded in resolving their heavily pixellated life. They bring the comfort of closure, but it is a rushed, forced variety of closure. I'm convinced that many of the worst decisions ever made first tempted their deciders in the seductive form of the epiphany.
Epiphanies do not menace solely because of their swiftness and freshness (note the integral involvement of recency in the formula, the word 'just': 'I've just had an epiphany.'). Danger also lies in their ready-made nature: the fact that, like nuggets of conventional wisdom, they are 'always already' constructed. For some unfathomable reason, the epiphany is dignified to a sphere in which it is rendered immune to regular criticism. Once I pluck out an epiphany from the nethermind, that's it. Pointless disputing revelation, the highest form of truth, right? The epiphany carries an 'Undisputed Canon Amusement Park - Free Entry' ticket with it at all times. But the ticket is a forgery. The problem is, the epiphanist is so busy toothlessly guffawing at his own good fortune that he/she forgets to check the verification barcode. 'Come right in, epiphany, my faculties will be glad to have you. You're extremely good looking, aren't you?' Epiphanies tend to effortlessly slip past the useful systems of check and balance we have installed, designed to filter the good counsel from the bad. I will leave you to conjure yourselves the horrors that would arise if the thought 'I really want to put frozen chicken on a wooden stick and lick it like an ice cream' were pampered with the special treatment reserved for the epiphany.
These benign realisations seemingly working in our favour are actually the germs of extremism. Moderation (and, in my view, good living) requires that everything which passes through our minds, frivolous or profound, should be subject to the same laws of scrutiny. Confusions, obfuscations, wading through the mud - these sensations should be part and parcel of an unending process of self-examination, enjoyed in themselves, rather than slighted as tiresome preludes to the moments when 'it all comes together'. Progress is a sloth of an animal, and its quicker, more glamorous agents should be treated with suspicion. Renouncing the charm of the epiphany is a liberating act. I noticed the other day that my most widely used conversational mannerism is 'I don't know.' Even when spouting comfortable facts securely placed within my field of knowledge, 'I don't know, but...' often remains the introduction. The quirk functions not so much as an admission of ignorance as a signal to one's interlocutor: 'This is what I say now, but it could very well be otherwise, and my thought is eager to play with its companions even before it's been verbalised itself.' Hesitation is a wonderful, heady aeration of a thing. So the next time you feel the urge to tell me about your moment of insight, dear epiphanist, consider whether your nugget might not be better left in the flighty realms of possibility, untethered in the ether. The world repays second thoughts. And if it is still importunate enough to demand a trip down to earth, worry not: myself and my mustered army of anti-epiphanists will be more than happy to suffocate it with the gentle prods of uncertainty. 'I don't know, but people who have epiphanies are usually wankers.'
To claim epiphany is tantamount to saying, in effect: 'I've recently obtained complete access to the hitherto concealed laws of the universe, and you haven't. Thank you, Goodnight.' The subtext wreaks of conceit. In this fantastical moment, special knowledge apparently bundles itself up, brands itself ostentatiously with 'Top Secret' stamps, and delivers itself as a marvellous ad hominem revelation. 'Everything just...made sense.' Well hats off to you, sir. Great kudos, Madam. A legion of sweaty physicists has been clambering for your keys to the cosmos for many years now, but you got there first.
I would welcome the epiphanist to take his/her perfect form and mould other untruths with it before attempting to wield it persuasively against me. My resistance swells when it is faced with any act of intellectual haste, and this is precisely what the epiphany is. As a moment of instantaneous sublimity, the idea has its use in constructing the myths of progress which console us every day: history lurches forward in fitful leaps as Albert chalks out e=mc^2, or Edison materialises the light-bulb, once confined to his comic-book thought-bubble, into the real thing. But the run-of-the-mill epiphany is far more dangerous, even though it can be seen as an individualisation of this 'history is summed from pivotal points' model. Epiphanies, for the most part, are tools used by confused people to delude themselves into thinking they've succeeded in resolving their heavily pixellated life. They bring the comfort of closure, but it is a rushed, forced variety of closure. I'm convinced that many of the worst decisions ever made first tempted their deciders in the seductive form of the epiphany.
Epiphanies do not menace solely because of their swiftness and freshness (note the integral involvement of recency in the formula, the word 'just': 'I've just had an epiphany.'). Danger also lies in their ready-made nature: the fact that, like nuggets of conventional wisdom, they are 'always already' constructed. For some unfathomable reason, the epiphany is dignified to a sphere in which it is rendered immune to regular criticism. Once I pluck out an epiphany from the nethermind, that's it. Pointless disputing revelation, the highest form of truth, right? The epiphany carries an 'Undisputed Canon Amusement Park - Free Entry' ticket with it at all times. But the ticket is a forgery. The problem is, the epiphanist is so busy toothlessly guffawing at his own good fortune that he/she forgets to check the verification barcode. 'Come right in, epiphany, my faculties will be glad to have you. You're extremely good looking, aren't you?' Epiphanies tend to effortlessly slip past the useful systems of check and balance we have installed, designed to filter the good counsel from the bad. I will leave you to conjure yourselves the horrors that would arise if the thought 'I really want to put frozen chicken on a wooden stick and lick it like an ice cream' were pampered with the special treatment reserved for the epiphany.
These benign realisations seemingly working in our favour are actually the germs of extremism. Moderation (and, in my view, good living) requires that everything which passes through our minds, frivolous or profound, should be subject to the same laws of scrutiny. Confusions, obfuscations, wading through the mud - these sensations should be part and parcel of an unending process of self-examination, enjoyed in themselves, rather than slighted as tiresome preludes to the moments when 'it all comes together'. Progress is a sloth of an animal, and its quicker, more glamorous agents should be treated with suspicion. Renouncing the charm of the epiphany is a liberating act. I noticed the other day that my most widely used conversational mannerism is 'I don't know.' Even when spouting comfortable facts securely placed within my field of knowledge, 'I don't know, but...' often remains the introduction. The quirk functions not so much as an admission of ignorance as a signal to one's interlocutor: 'This is what I say now, but it could very well be otherwise, and my thought is eager to play with its companions even before it's been verbalised itself.' Hesitation is a wonderful, heady aeration of a thing. So the next time you feel the urge to tell me about your moment of insight, dear epiphanist, consider whether your nugget might not be better left in the flighty realms of possibility, untethered in the ether. The world repays second thoughts. And if it is still importunate enough to demand a trip down to earth, worry not: myself and my mustered army of anti-epiphanists will be more than happy to suffocate it with the gentle prods of uncertainty. 'I don't know, but people who have epiphanies are usually wankers.'
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