A notebook in many hands

 A notebook kept by an illiterate sharecropper in Italy in the 15^th century has captured my imagination. The book recorded sales, dowries, rent and purchases. Since the sharecropper, Benedetto del Massarizia, could not write, he relied on others. Craftsmen, notaries and priests made entries. The book is written in more than 30 hands.

I could empathize. I, too, would find a way to make a record, even if I couldn’t write.

The wonderful detail is in Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. If you keep a notebook, journal or diary, you’ll find it wonderful, although you’ll pick a few quarrels along the way.

Orange Crate Art’s review mentioned three conspicuous omissions: Joseph Joubert, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Arthur Inman. I missed Eric Hoffer, whose remarks about how he worked through notebooks and index cards are the most helpful things I’ve found on how people think on paper.

I think The Notebook is stronger as a history than as an account of how we think. But Allen made me think, time and again, about a tool I use every day. I’ll come back to this book.

• Sources and notes: Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper; Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2024. The account of the notebook in many hands is on p. 62.

A quibble: Does anyone else think the account of Sir Thomas Browne’s daughters (pp. 134-5) puts them and their father in the wrong century?

Michael Leddy’s review in Orange Crate Art is here:

https://mleddy.blogspot.com/search?q=Roland+Allen

What we notice, what we ignore

 When John Graves, the Texas writer, was young, he went to live in Manhattan, at least partly to get away from people. He was writing.

And while many, many people could be seen from his sixth-floor window, he didn’t have to notice any of them. He didn’t have to pay attention to people or noise or commotions.

He wondered whether people in rural places, like his part of Texas, were more likely to pay attention to small things than people who lived in big cities. He thought that unlikely, but he was interested in what and how different people notice different things.

In his essay “Noticing,” Graves talked about how some rural people would break up dirt daubers’ nests to see what the wasps were preying on.

My grandfather was one of those people. He’d remove a mud nest from a corner of the tin barn and grind it to powder in his hands. He said you’d be surprised how many dead or paralyzed black widow spiders you could find in those old nests.

• John Graves essay “Noticing” is in From a Limestone Ledge; Austin, Texas: Texas Monthly Press, 1980, pp. 153-63.

The philosophy of baseball

 If I were fabulously wealthy, I would endow a university center dedicated to the philosophy of baseball. The research faculty would include philosophers, statisticians, a psychologist or two and some baseball players.

The center’s project would be to study the gap between what we know and what we think we know. That question is too large to get a wrench on. I think we would do better if we confined ourselves to baseball.

The interest in baseball statistics is barely believable. We have statistics on launch angles and barrel rates of batters. 

I got interested belatedly, when the St. Louis Cardinals acquired Jhonny Peralta to play shortstop in 2014. Peralta did not look like a shortstop to me. He looked like a slow, but surehanded, third baseman. He had no range.

In trying to understand the Cardinals’ thinking, I discovered an online community of mostly young, tech-savvy, data-driven fans. Some of them explained that range was no longer relevant in considering the defensive abilities of infielders. So much was known about positioning that the fact that Peralta could not move to his left or his right was not a concern. The Cardinals had data on where their opponents were likely to hit the ball and would put Peralta in the right spot.

Defensive statistics were — and still are — in their infancy. After watching ground balls go through the infield for a couple of years, the Cardinals moved on.

But the passion for “data-driven decisions” about baseball has accelerated.

I think the Philosophy of Baseball Center could help. We humans use concepts in thinking about the world, and concepts have their own logic. Sometimes the assumptions underlying one concept conflict with those underlying another. More often, we are not aware of what the underlying assumption imply until we start to lose money on bad predictions.

If the experts at the Philosophy of Baseball Center could demonstrate why conceptual problems lead to flawed thinking about a fascinating but trivial subject, we might learn some lessons about how to think about serious problems.

But I’m not fabulously wealthy. Humanity and academia are spared.

A scene in Euripides

 In The Trojan Women, the chorus is made up of women who’ve been captured when their city fell. They are waiting to be assigned to the enslavers and wondering what fate holds for them. Will they be forced into drudgery? Will they be forced to have children by men they hate?

The opening scene, which says so much about the kind of suffering inflicted on women by men, was written by a man. It was written by a Greek about the sufferings the Greeks inflicted on others.

I tried to imagine an American version of that story, of a group of Africans, captured, waiting to board ships. And I tried to imagine which of America’s famous writers — I started with Hawthorne — might have written it.

I won’t say that reading Euripides is always a pleasure. But sometimes, in reading the literature of other cultures, you see what’s missing in your own.

MacCaig: “Ineducable me’

 Norman MacCaig’s poetry is full of wonders. This wonderful poem seems to have been written for me.

I don’t learn much, I’m a man

of no improvements. My nose still snuffs the air

in an amateurish way.

 

I went to college, not really looking for credentials, but hoping to find an improved me. I can go on at length about my love of learning, but when it comes to pointing out all the improvements that have piled up as a result, I have to admit the pile is modest.

On the other hand, not improving much has its consolations. I haven’t outgrown early interests and passions.

 

When I love

a person, a place, an object, I don’t see

what there is to argue about.

 

It must be a law of nature: Every family of teachers must have one of my kind.

• Source: Norman MacCaig, The Poems of Norman MacCaig; Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005, p. 355.

A lesson about bees

 With the cold front, I wasn’t expecting to blunder into a bee. The bee seemed offended by my clumsiness and pursued me across the garden. Maybe it just wanted to see an old man run.

I couldn’t identify what kind it was. Even had I gotten a good look, I am ignorant about bees.

Terry W. Johnson, a backyard wildlife expert, says Georgia has more than 500 species. Most are in rural areas. But researchers in Athens, the university town about 60 miles east of Stone Mountain, found more than 100 in backyards. The greatest diversity was in backyards that are next to forested habitats — backyards like ours.

I blundered into the bee, not knowing how many species were in Georgia. I still can’t identify more than a handful of them. And beyond the bees are myriad species of plants and animals I know nothing about.

“Know yourself,” the ancient Greeks said, and in knowing yourself you’ll find you place in the cosmos.

I know little about the cosmos. I know little about what’s in my own garden.

Euripides: ‘Rhesus’

The straightforward way is to take the hard questions first.

Did Euripides write Rhesus?

Modern scholars disagree, and so did ancient critics. The official lists credit the play to Euripides. But some ancient critics thought it might be the work of a minor poet. 

Is the play good?

H.D.F. Kitto doesn’t mention it — except for parenthetical clause in an account of another play. He calls Rhesus“wretched.”

Richmond Lattimore, who translated the play, said the author “made a book of the Iliad into a drama, but the story did better as an episode in epic than as a self-contained tragic action.”

That seems to me precisely the kind of thing that the audacious Euripides might do — trying something that everyone else believed shouldn’t be attempted.

The play deals with a peculiar idea of fate — everything rides on one fateful day. After 10 years of fruitless battle, the fate of Troy rests not on Greeks and Trojans but on a Thracian king, Rhesus. He’s the son of one of the nine Muses. Infuriatingly, Euripides doesn’t say which.

Rhesus is powerful, and Hector, leader of the Trojans, has been pleading with him to come to Troy’s aid. Rhesus has had to put down an attack by the Scythians and has been delayed. He arrives, bone tired, at night.

Hector awakened by the guards who saw fires by the Greek ships, is convinced the Greeks are about to flee. He plans to smash them at dawn. The arrival of Rhesus and the Thracian army, just when the spoils are about to be divided, strikes Hector as awful timing.

Rhesus replies that Hector has been trying to drive the Greeks away for 10 years. He asks his friend to give him one day.

It’s the idea of the fateful day. As the goddess Athene tells Odysseus and Diomedes, who’ve been sent to scout the enemy camp, the fate of the war depends on what happens to Rhesus.

 

For if he survives the night and is alive tomorrow,

not even Achillies, and not Ajax with his spear,

can keep him from destroying all the Argive fleet,

smashing, demolishing your walls and storming in

to fight with level spears.

Kill him, and all is won.

 

I like those lines. 

But I love the asides in Euripides’ poetry, and I love what he says about candor: how a straightforward approach is best. These lines are spoken by Rhesus to his friend Hector, who is mad at him:

 

I have a path

straight through arguments. I too have no diplomacy.

 

 

• Sources and notes: Rhesus, translated by Richmond Lattimore, is in Euripides IV in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 1-49. The quotations are on pp. 4, 32 and 24.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto’s dismissive remark is in Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954, p. 421.

If the idea of the fateful day sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of Sophocles’ Ajax.

On the audacity of trying to turn Book 10 of the Iliad into a drama: Two audacious American writers, Guy Davenport and Bernard Malamud, took material from historical records and made short stories. Those stories aren’t smash hits. But if I were compiling an anthology, they’d be among the stars.

Euripides: ‘The Cyclops’

 The chorus, a herd of satyrs, bounds into the orchestra, doing high-energy dance steps while herding a bunch of sheep. Each chorister is naked, except for a little goatskin jacket. Each wears a belt, with an enormous phallus in front and a horsetail in back.

A satyr — half man, half horse — is a lewd, obnoxious, untrustworthy creature. When Odysseus and his crew land, starving, the satyrs don’t want to hear about courage and tragedy; they want to know if Odysseus’ crew raped Helen after the fall of Troy. Nothing about a satyr is morally edifying.

The Cyclops is a satyr play, the only complete one we have. They are ribald and impious. The Cyclops’ argument against the existence of gods is that his farts are louder than Zeus’ thunder.

Satyr plays are also short. This one is about half the length of the usual tragedy. In each competition, poets were commissioned to write a trilogy of tragedies with a satyr play at the end.

Scholars disagree about how, exactly, the satyr play fits in with the other dramas and with the festival in honor of Dionysus. You have to remind yourself that the dramatic competitions were part of a religious festival.

William Arrowsmith, in his introduction to The Cyclops, points out that the play is a farce, but a farce of ideas. The notion of civilized brutality gets the playwright’s treatment here.

A political community is based on rules, and underlying the rules is enforcement. If the threat of violence doesn’t work, government uses violence. Euripides’ question is whether that kind of violence is better than the kind of violence that the Cyclops believes in. The Cyclops holds that the strong have every right to eat the weak.

In Homer, Odysseus lands in Sicily, desperate for food and water, and finds he’s in the land of the cyclopes. One, a grizzly character named Polyphemus, bashes the brains out of some of Odysseus’ men and eats them. Odysseus, a clever, civilized man, uses his wits to blind the one-eyed monster, allowing the survivors to escape.

Euripides likes to reverse sympathies. He builds sympathy for one character and then has that character do something so outrageous we begin to sympathize with his enemies.

We sympathize with Odysseus, helplessly watching his men being eaten by a powerful, bullying monster. But as Odysseus gets the Cyclops drunk, the Cyclops is transformed. Instead of a monster, we see a drunken buffoon. And we see in Odysseus’ plan to blind him a kind of cruelty that makes us squirm.

Euripides also likes to put great lines in the wrong mouths. In many of his plays, moral truths are spoken by villains. Recipes for ruin are recited by heroes.

This play, produced in honor of the god of wine, has a lot of good lines about the dangers of alcohol. The best, I think, is spoken by the Cyclops to his sidekick, Silenus, the chief satyr:

 

Watch out. You love the wine; it doesn’t love you.

 

• Source: The Cyclops, translated by William Arrowsmith, is in Euripides II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 1-42. The quotation is on p. 34.

Georgia Piedmont, late autumn

 The latest cold front looks like it might stay a while. It chased off the rain with 25-mph winds. Temperatures dropped into the 30s. We covered the tropical plants in the garden, but the tomatoes vines are still producing.

To a person who did not grow up in the Southeastern forests, the leaf fall is spectacular. The maples and sumacs are red. The sweetgums and hickories are yellow. After the front, the leaves in the gutter were 5 inches deep.

A month away from the solstice, nature is shutting down. But you still see blooms. I passed a groundsel bush, Baccharis halimifolia, that was covered with the gauzy white flowers that reminded me of cottonwood fluff. Goldenrods never seem to die. And if you look closely, Mexican clovers, in genus Richardia, are putting out tiny white flowers under our feet.

Five weeks ago, we visited the stand of ironweeds, dogfennel and beggarticks that I’ve been watching along Yellow River. In warmer months, it’s a magnet for bees, butterflies and wasps. The ironweeds had stopped blooming in October. The dogfennel is now gone, but the beggarticks are still flowering. 

Graeber: ‘Dead zones of the imagination’

 I have been trying to imagine this: A taxpayer goes into a library and takes a book without checking it out. He reasons that he helped pay for the book, he’s honest, he’ll return it, and there’s no need to go through the effort and expense of the administrative process. He just takes the book.

What happens? Do the librarians eventually call the cops?

David Graeber, an anthropologist who thought about such things, said that the state enforces its rules. Graeber said the emphasis is on force. Enforcement is a euphemism for violence.

In Graeber’s view, bureaucrats are the enforcers of rules. Cops are bureaucrats with guns.

I think library rules makes sense. But, having grown up in the Navy, I am aware that sometimes rules that are enforced with draconian discipline make no sense at all.

Graeber says that when we live in a system where the rules don’t make sense, we are prone to become confused and behave foolishly as we try to persuade people who have power over us to help us solve problems. While the rules may be detached from reality, the problems are sometimes a matter of life and death. 

Graeber is one of those writers I’ve heard about but have not seriously read.

I found his essay “Dead zones of the imagination” to be an interesting introduction.

• Source: David Graeber, “Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor”; Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2): 105–28. This was the Malinowski Memorial Lecture, 2006. It’s available here:

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau2.2.007

Euripides: ‘The Bacchae’

 What kind of wisdom does it take to confront one of those powerful forces in life —  so powerful that it’s unavoidable and so in some sense necessity?

Death is like that. So are sex and grief. Some forces are so strong that the ancient Greeks personified them as gods.

Euripides held that extreme religious experience is like that. The Bacchae is his attempt to portray how a wise person would respond to the religious impulse that is within most human beings.

Dionysus has brought his new, ecstatic religion to Thebes. He wants people to embrace the new rites. When they resist, he drives all the women mad with religious ecstasy. All of them, including King Pentheus’ mother, Agave, go to the mountains for a frolic.

Pentheus is a boy, maybe 16 or 17. He’s appalled by the irrationality of ecstatic religion and tries to suppress it.

Dionysus appears to him in the form of a devotee of the new religion, not as a god, and tries to persuade him.

If you size this up as a fight between rational and irrational forces, it doesn’t work. As Dionysus tries to persuade him to accept the new religion, Pentheus quickly becomes unreasonable. He can’t imagine rites that violate the traditional ways. He’s so sure he’s right, so full of hubris, that he gets angry and violent. He can’t imagine being wrong, and since his imagination is limited, he can’t imagine what it’s like being in the stranger’s shoes. He feels no compassion for this stranger and throws him in jail.

The play turns when the god gives up trying to persuade Pentheus and decides to destroy him.

In Euripides’ mind, you can argue about whether it makes sense to personify forces as gods and goddesses. But only a fool would question whether those forces have power over humans.

William Arrowsmith, who translated the play, points out that Euripides contrasts sophia, the usual word for wisdom, with amathia, which is the kind of willful ignorance that we might call being unteachable.

To the ancient Greeks, wisdom began with a knowledge of oneself, which led to an understanding of one’s place in the universe. The wise person accepts that.

But wisdom has a range of meanings. Old king Cadmus, who turned the throne over to his grandson, accepted the new religion not out of conviction but because it’s the politically “wise” thing to do. Some versions of wisdom simply mean being shrewd, in a cunning, self-serving way.

People accommodate religious impulses in many ways, some wiser than others.

This is a stunning, powerful play. I marked many passages on the gods and wisdom. I like these best:

 

Far in the air of heaven,

The sons of heaven live.

But they watch the lives of men.

And what passes for wisdom is not;

unwise are those who aspire,

who outrange the limits of man.

 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on The Bacchae is on pp. 392-404.

The Bacchae, translated by William Arrowsmith, is in Euripides IV in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 141-228. The quotation is on p. 170.

Banville on the novel

 In an interview, the novelist John Banville said: 

I don’t like fiction. I don’t like the novel. It is not a very interesting form.

 

I do like fiction but don’t like the novel as a form — although I like many books that are called novels.

I’ve made a couple of attempts to talk about it, but the notes come off as grumpy and unhelpful. 

I’m making a note of this because Banville is interesting and he sounds even grumpier.

• Source: “In Conversation with John Banville,” an interview by Chris Bibsby, is here:

https://www.newwriting.net/2011/12/in-conversation-with-john-banville/

Christopher Bigsby, professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, has compiled a series of interviews called Writers in Conversation. This is from Vol. 3.

For more on this line of thought, see “Give me fiction, but hold the novel,” Nov. 5, 2022.

Euripides: ‘The Heracleidae’

 In myth, the goddess Hera hated Heracles, the son of her roaming husband, Zeus, by Alcmene, a princess of Mycenae.

By Hera’s machinations, Eurystheus, king of Argos, was given control of his cousin Heracles. Eurystheus ordered Heracles about, forcing him to do one labor after another.

After Heracles died, Eurystheus persecuted his children. Wherever they went, Eurystheus found them and bullied the local folks into denying a home to the refugees. Argos was the dominant Greek city in those days, and no one would stand up for the children. Finally, the refugees got to Athens.

The Athenian version of the myth is about the sacred responsibility to stand up for the weak and oppressed.

Euripides’ play starts with the two old people taking care of the kids. Iolaus was Heracles’ running buddy in the heroic past. But now he’s old. He’s almost a parody of an old man — a force only in his dreams.

When Eurystheus’ army shows up to take the refugees by force, Iolaus insists on putting on armor and joining the fight. He’s barely got the strength to stand up under all that weight.

While Iolaus is funny, Alcmene, Heracles’ old mother, is surprising. In myth, the Argives were defeated, and Eurystheus was killed in battle. In Euripides, the bully is captured and dragged before Alcmene, who shocks the Athenians by demanding they execute the prisoner on the spot.

As Ralph Gladstone, the translator of this play, said: “Euripides knew that brutality brutalizes; people who have been injured or abused too long become worse than their tormenters. …” It’s a recurring theme in Euripides. 

Before the battle, the Athenians consulted oracles, which decreed that a girl must be sacrificed for the just cause to prevail. Demophon, the young king of Athens, doesn’t think it should be his daughter. He doesn’t think he has the right to ask the Athenian citizens to sacrifice one of their daughters.

Who pays the price for standing up to a bully and protecting refugees, strangers, underdogs? The ethical debate spreads into the streets.

One of Heracles’ daughters — she’s unnamed in the play but is Macaria in mythology — volunteers to die. She lectures the adults on the role of women, the nature of duty and the art of dying with dignity. Here’s what she says about the afterlife:

 

Afterward: is there

An afterward? I hope not. If there’s then

No end to all our troubles, where do we

Go on from there — since death itself, they say,

Supplies the cure for everything that ails?

 

The best lines in the play, I think.

• Source: The Heracleidae, translated by Ralph Gladstone, is in Euripides I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 110-55. The quotation is on p. 137.

Thinking, media and the First Amendment

 When I was a young reporter, I wrote about a sweetheart deal in a town in East Texas.

If you were an important person in town, you could go to the garage that the police department ran to maintain its patrol cars and get your oil changed. Depending on your standing, you might get a flat tire fixed. If you were really somebody, you might get a new set of tires.

Some taxpayers were outraged that public money was paying for perks for insiders.

But no one was as mad as the police chief, who said I should be prosecuted. I had accounts of the expenditures, and he wanted me charged with the theft of records from the police station.

He said I was a troublemaker, belonged in jail and did not support our officers in blue. 

The newspaper’s attorney had to go to the city council meeting with me to keep me from being arrested.

I thought I had done something for the public good.

But at the corner store, the woman behind the counter looked up from the National Enquirer, with a story about a flying saucer on the cover, and recognized me. She mangled my oft-mangled name, said I was a troublemaker and belonged in jail. She said I should be ashamed of myself for not supporting our officers in blue.

I learned that given a choice about what to believe, a lot of people will make decisions without bothering to think. They will repeat what they are told. They will swallow propaganda. They will choose unreliable sources of information.

I can’t pretend to be surprised that in this election, many people swallowed the propaganda. I spent my life in Texas, a place that will give anyone a healthy skepticism about politics.

If you are dismayed by the country’s sense of direction, I have a suggestion: Exercise your rights under the First Amendment. Do it responsibly.

It’s important for thinking people to think out loud — in public.

We need people who think seriously about serious things: about vaccinations, climate science and disparities in levels of income.

We also need people who think about things that are fun: baseball, natural history, music, books, art.

Mainly, we just need people who think.

If people who like to think lose heart and go into hiding, we are going to lose what makes this country bearable, despite its faults.

Donald Trump was a horrible president and probably will be worse this time. But I do not think it’s the end of the world.

And I do not believe that the situation will improve if all the people who are capable of thinking for themselves abandon hope and crawl into a hole.

Let’s keep the lights on. Instead of searching social media for sites that terrify you, look for a few that make you think.

This whole line of thought was prompted by a blog — Michael Leddy’s Orange Crate Art. I read it because he makes me think.

• Sources and notes: Orange Crate Art is here: 

https://mleddy.blogspot.com.

I also follow Julian Girdham, an English teacher who puts out a newsletter called The Fortnightly, at https://www.juliangirdham.com/the-fortnightly.

I tend to move around. At times, I’ve read psychologist Paul Bloom’s blog, Small Potatoes, at  

https://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net

Recently, I’ve been going through the site of the poet Kim Stafford, which is here:

https://www.kimstaffordpoet.com

Many friends say I’m making a mistake by avoiding other social media. Good thinking — and bad — can occur anywhere. Perhaps it’s my imagination, but I find more of the good stuff on blogs and personal websites.

If you have a site you’d recommend, leave a comment or email me at hebertaylor3@gmail.com. I might follow this up.

Asides

 I repeat myself: Greek tragedy is filled with wonderful lines that don’t have much to do with the theme of the play. They are just surprising asides.

I quoted a few lines from Euripides on Election Day. One character hoped that reason would prevail, while another doubted it would. Those lines seemed relevant on Election Day — and in the aftermath. In Euripides’ play, the Greeks chose disaster over reason.

Often lines from those ancient plays seem like timely advice on matters before us now.

I had a list of chores to do. As badly as I wanted to do them, I had to take a nap first. I thought of old Iolaus, wanting to fight his enemies but being so old he could hardly lift a sword. His attendant tried not to laugh.

 

Attendant

If only you could do what you dream.

 

Iolaus

Hurry! I can’t afford to miss the fight.

 

Attendant

You are the dawdler, though you think it’s I.

 

On Veterans Day, when those who once wore uniforms sometimes become insufferable, I thought of how Antigone, viewing the Argive army from the walls of Thebes, was amazed that her old pedagogue could identify soldiers by their togs. He replied:

 

I know them by their harness.

 

If old people spoke of their time in “harness,” rather than their service in “uniform,” the country might get more truthful war and sea stories.

I hear some lines from the Greek dramatic poets in my father’s voice. My father, an old newspaperman who became a teacher, used to read items in the paper, smile wanly, and say:

 

Spoken with more truth than kindness …

 

It took me a long time to realize he was quoting Euripides.

• Sources: The quotation on old age is from The Heracleidae, translated by Ralph Gladston, in Euripides I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, p. 144.

The quotation on uniforms is from The Phoenician Women, translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff, in Euripides V, p. 77.

The quotation my father liked is in Orestes, translated by William Arrowsmith, in Euripides IV, p. 118.

Sounds of the house

Since I do not live alone, I sometimes hear classical music coming from the piano or R&B coming from the stereo. It’s the Wise Woman at work.

The other day, when the news seemed bleak, I heard, over the television, her voice:

 

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

 

It’s the opening stanza of Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise.”

• Source: The full poem is here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46446/still-i-rise

Sarah Orne Jewett: ‘Deephaven’

 I can’t seem to call Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven a novel, though just about everyone else does.

Maybe it’s just my ear, but “novel” seems to imply at least the promise of a page-turning plot. Deephaven doesn’t have that. This isn’t a complaint. I usually prefer books whose authors are after something else.

I marveled at Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. It’s fiction, but if it had a plot, I missed it.

I loved W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. But if you read fiction for suspenseful plots, you’d be disappointed. Sebald said he tried to write prose fiction. The novel, he said, was alien to him.

Willa Cather said Death Comes for the Archbishop was not a novel.

I think Deephaven belongs in this crowd. Reading it was a bit like subscribing to a small town’s weekly newspaper. You learn the characters, the personalities, the philosophies of the residents. You learn to appreciate the local characters — the stalwart citizens, the eccentrics, the lunatics.

The two young women at the heart of this story are from Boston, and Deephaven, Maine, is a small town that was left behind economically when President Jefferson declared an embargo in 1807. It would have been easy for young women from Boston to have found Deephaven dull. Instead, they found it an adventure.

People in Deephaven found their lives interesting, but assumed that life in the even smaller community of East Parish was dull.

When the young women went to see what East Parish was like, they paid a social call on a woman who was insane. The visit wasn’t dull. 

• Sources and notes: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven was published in Boston by James S. Osgood and Company in 1877. Project Gutenberg published it in 2005 here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15985/15985-h/15985-h.htm.

For more on this line of thought, see “Give me fiction, but hold the novel,” Nov. 5, 2022.

Euripides: ‘Iphigeneia at Aulis’

 Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis is hard to read because it’s cruel.

Agamemnon, leader of the Greek expedition against Troy, was stuck in the harbor of Aulis. The fleet, lacking favorable winds, couldn’t move. A prophet told the king he’d have to sacrifice his daughter to the goddess Artemis.

Agamemnon wavered. He summoned his daughter to Aulis, promising to marry her to the hero Achilles, thought he planned to kill her. He finally thought better of it and wrote a letter telling her not to come. But Agamemnon's brother Menelaus intercepted the letter. Menelaus’ had lost his wife, Helen, to a Trojan prince and wanted recent. He thought his brother owed him.

The brothers quarreled. Astonishingly, Menelaus changed his mind. But it was too late. The soldiers were restless and angry at the delay. The treacherous Odysseus was sure to tell everyone about the prophecy. 

Agamemnon saw no way out: his daughter must die.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, points out there’s really no tragedy in this play.

 

There is no tragedy of Agamemnon, not is there a tragedy of Iphigeneia. From her point of view the incident is nothing but a cruel blow of fate.

 

Meanwhile, Agamemnon is “drawn as a man who has levered himself into importance by unworthy means, a crafty, indecisive character, undeserving of our serious interest.”

Kitto said that in the old conception of tragedy, a play was just a record of suffering. The suffering was used to create something of meaning.

Euripides abandoned the idea that suffering that's portrayed on the stage had to mean something. This play is a record of the suffering endured by people who couldn’t or wouldn’t do something to save themselves. In this respect, it seems like a contemporary play.

Some of the best lines in the play are dripping with irony. The daughter who loved her father the most arrived, excited by the marriage he’d made for her, and in her ignorance had some heartbreaking things to say about the new home he’d planned for her.

I like these lines, spoken by the chorus as a prayer to Aphrodite:

 

Keep modest my delights

All my desires lawful,

So may I have my part in love

But not in passion’s madness.

 

The text of the play is corrupt. Charles R. Walker’s translation ends with Iphigeneia resolving to die for the good of the Greeks and headed for the (sacrificial) altar. An alternate ending has a messenger reporting that the goddess Artemis swooped down at the last minute and substituted a deer for the girl. Euripides liked to bring in gods and goddesses in the final scene, and there’s some evidence that the original play ended with Artemis descending from the machinery above.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Iphigeneia at Aulis is on pp. 371-83. The quotations are on pp. 386 and 385. Iphigeneia at Aulis, translated by Charles R. Walker, is in Euripides IV in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 209-307. The quotation is on pp. 241-2.

Captain Sands of Deephaven

 Captain Sands, an old seafarer, is “a great hand for keeping things.” His wife doesn’t mind all his clutter — as long as it stays out of the house. So the captain has a “stow-away place,” an old warehouse down on the pier. That’s where he likes to be — among his treasures.

The captain strikes me as one of the great overlooked characters of American literature. He’s in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven, a book I admire.

The book, published in 1877, is a collection of sketches of the people of a small town in Maine.

Two young women, Kate Lancaster and Helen Denis, spend the summer there, keeping house in a family home after the death of Kate’s grandaunt. Helen, the narrator, tells how the young women went to examine one of the treasures of the captain’s collection, a sword-fish bill attached to a wooden handle.

 

Of course we went close to look at it, and we both felt a great sympathy for this friend of ours, because we have the same fashion of keeping worthless treasures, and we understand perfectly how dear such things may be.

 

I think some of the most interesting things that happen on this Earth happen in small towns. Some of those interesting things involve collections.

Collections are interesting because they involve questions about why one person becomes interested in one thing and not another, why Captain Sands includes one thing in his collection and not something else.

A collection is a reflection of an individual mind. I think writers should be especially interested, because collections are related to stories in roughly the same way rosary beads are related to prayers. The captain tells the young women some tales.

I’m interested in storage sheds, barns, curiosity cabinets and miscellaneous drawers. I loved spending a half hour in the captain’s warehouse.

• Sources and notes: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven was published in Boston by James S. Osgood and Company in 1877. Project Gutenberg published it in 2005 here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15985/15985-h/15985-h.htm.

I heard about it from Michael Leddy’s blog, Orange Crate Art, https://mleddy.blogspot.com. Thanks, Michael.

Improving Euripides

 The idea that anyone would tamper with Euripides’ poetry is just too much for me. I can’t comprehend it and probably shouldn’t even bring it up.

Euripides’ contemporaries didn’t revere him nearly as much as I do. The judges of the drama competitions often thought his plays were second-rate. They thought that other poets, unknown today, produced better plays.

When Euripides’ plays were revived in the 4^th century BCE, the producers added scenes and cut others. 

As Elizabeth Wyckoff, translator of The Phoenician Women, said, “it is obvious that a play handled so freely in the gross would probably be tinkered with in detail.”

In the case of most of the ancient Greek writers, we don’t really know what we’re missing. Few manuscripts survived. In some cases, what we know of an important work rests on a single manuscript.

The exception is the New Testament, where we have thousands of manuscripts, ranging from complete texts to fragments. The variations within those manuscripts should be interesting to those who think that the text is infallible. I always wonder which one they’re talking about.

• Source: The Phoenician Women, translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff, is in Euripides V in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 67-140. The quotation is from her introduction on p. 69.

Euripides: ‘The Phoenician Women’

 Capaneus, one of the seven Argive champions who tried to storm the gates of Thebes, boasted that even the god’s terrifying fire couldn’t stop him.

He was on a ladder, scaling the wall, when lightning struck. The armored corpse was burning when it hit the ground.

The Argives, who were storming the city in overwhelming force, couldn’t help taking Capaneus’ end as an omen. Zeus didn’t seem to be onboard with the team effort. The Thebans, who had been worried about being massacred, read the same message and took heart.

Euripides turned the traditional story of Seven Against Thebes on end in The Phoenician Women. He made Capaneus’ end the turning point in the battle.

In the traditional telling, the focus was on Oedipus’ sons, Eteocles and Polyneices. Oedipus had cursed both sons, prophesying they would kill each other. The sons were so afraid of their father’s curses they wouldn’t stay in the same polis together. They agreed to a power sharing arrangement: one would be king for a year, and the other would go into exile. At the end of each year, they’d switch roles.

That was the deal. But Eteocles went first. After a year in power, he wouldn’t let go.

In the traditional telling, fate rules. Seven champions on each side met at the gates. By fate, Eteocles and Polyneices met at the final gate and — as Oedipus predicted — killed each other.

In Euripides’ reworking of the material, it’s not fate. The two decide to settle their quarrel in single combat.

In the traditional telling, their mother, Jocasta, killed herself when the truth about Oedipus was revealed — when her sons were just boys. In Euripides’ version, she is alive and tries to mediate the quarrel between her grown sons.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto says The Phoenician Women is yet another type of drama developed by the inventive Euripides. The old conception of tragedy was gone. With no need to make a moral point that conveyed the human tragedy, Euripides experimented with making art for art’s sake: he just wanted to make a good show.

He moved to tragicomedies, such as Ion, and then to melodramas, such as Orestes. The Phoenician Woman and Iphigenia at Aulis are something else. Kitto said they don’t rely heavily on either plot or character-drawing but instead are a kind of pageant: one dramatic scene after another, working through all the material of a myth. In this case, Euripides packs all the material about the doomed house of Cadmus, the royal house of Thebes, into one play.

The play is almost like a contemporary movie: the form is one scene after another. As long as members of the audience are on the edge of their seats, the playwright doesn’t worry about cohesion between the scenes.

The Phoenician Woman has a lot of wonderful poetry. The so-called “Sphinx Ode,” a kind of aria sung by the chorus, is justly famous. It includes these lines:

 

You who snatched the youths from Dirce’s plain,

crying your Fury’s shriek,

the song that knows no music,

you brought, you brought sorrows upon our land,

bloody ones — and bloody was the god

who brought these things about.

 

The Greek text of this play is notoriously thorny. Maybe that’s worth a short note tomorrow.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on The Phoenician Women is on pp. 371-83. The Phoenician Women, translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff, is in Euripides V in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 67-140. The quotation is on p. 113.

An analysis I'd like to read

 If you are reading the news, you might get the impression that Donald Trump got far more support than he did four years ago. He got a little less.

The Trump performance was not a steamroller. It was flat.

I wish people who wrote opinion pieces for national newspapers were better at grounding their readers in numbers.  Nothing fancy — just the kind of numbers you’d put on the back of an old envelope to understand a business deal.

Here are the vote totals for the past two presidential elections:

Democrats

2020 — 81.2 million

2024 — 69.3 million

11.9 million fewer votes, a drop of 14.6 percent.

Republicans

2020 — 74.2 million 

2024 — 73.6 million 

0.2 million fewer votes, a drop of 0.2 percent.

Had they had lost 5 percent of their voters from 2020, Democrats would have won the popular vote.

I’ve been reading the papers, looking for an explanation for why so many people who had voted Democratic did not this time. Some of those voters switched parties. But far more simply stayed home.

I’ve been looking for a convincing explanation and haven’t seen it.

A small delight

 Brian Doyle’s old blog is still on The American Scholar’s site. Doyle, who died in 2017, was a fine essayist. 

The Complete Epiphanies, described as “a blog about the stories that nourish and sustain us, and the small miracles of everyday life,” includes wonders.

I was surprised to learn that the poet W.H. Auden had briefly been a major in the U.S. Army Air Forces. Auden was not an American citizen at the time, but he was commissioned to study the effects of Allied bombing on German civilians.

Like Doyle, I just couldn’t picture Auden in uniform. I had to search for a photograph, just to make sure, before I could go on with the day.

• Source: You can find the table of contents here:

https://theamericanscholar.org/brian-doyle/

The item on Auden is here:

https://theamericanscholar.org/major-auden/

Consulting a poet

 If you are drowning in grief and despair, it’s important to realize that you’re lost. You don’t know where to turn.

I’d suggest consulting a poet.

Consider these lines:

 

Agenda in a time of fear: Be not afraid.

When things go wrong, do right.

Set out by the half-light of the seeker.

For the well-lit problem begins to heal.

 

Those are the opening lines of “Citizen of Dark Times” by Kim Stafford, one of the finest poets working today.

I copied the poem onto a notecard and carried it around in my pocket, reading it as some people read scripture. 

It lifted my spirits when the country seemed to descend into madness in the year before the 2020 election. That poem was a bit of light in the darkness. I shared it with friends.

I think poetry can be powerful stuff. It can be good medicine for wounded souls.

Many people feel lost and think there is nothing they can do. Actually, there is.

Instead of deciding that you’ll resolve a divided country’s social and political problems tomorrow, resolve to find a poet — or some other artist — who speaks to you, who sparks a light in you. Share the light with others. Keep it burning.

• Source: Kim Stafford, Wild Honey, Tough Salt; Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2019. “Citizen of Dark Times” is on p. 44. It’s also available on a sample page at Stafford’s site:

https://www.kimstaffordpoet.com/_files/ugd/14c3c8_d0a7f6af06b3451495c1724f725b6918.doc?dn=Sample%20page%20from%20Peace%20Warrior.doc

After the election

 People who are disappointed by elections ought to be careful about what they say — not out of fear of tyrants but out of concern for spreading despair.

Citizens who wallow in despair are not good defenders of their own rights or of the rights of vulnerable people.

If you’re tempted to don sack cloth and ashes, don’t.

Some people are circulating W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939.” It was written when the lights went out in Europe. The poet might have been afraid, but he took heart in the sparks generated by folks he called “the Just.” Here’s the ending:

 

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

 

I hope the Just will keep exchanging messages and will let their dissenting lights shine. I hope they will not lose heart.

• Source: W.H. Auden, Selected Poems; New York: Vintage Books, 1979. “September 1, 1939” is on pp. 86-9. You can find a copy here:

https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939

Euripides: ‘Orestes’

 Like Electra, Orestes is a melodrama, not a tragedy, based on character drawing, not plot. That’s the verdict of Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies.

His point is that the play has no tragic conception, no tragic point. It was made not to impart a high moral lesson but to be a rollicking good show. The chief character, Orestes, is mad, pursued by the Furies who are enraged that he’s killed his mother. He and his sister Electra are waiting to hear their fate from the Argive Assembly: death or banishment.

The play begins in hopelessness and goes downhill from there.

From hopelessness, Orestes descends into folly. He identifies possible allies and picks quarrels with them. He goes before the Assembly and provokes them, converting those who had argued for banishment into death-penalty advocates.

From folly, Orestes descends into “criminal recklessness,” as Kitto puts it. One plot leads to another. The fates of Orestes, his friend Pylades and Electra are intertwined, and they are all thinking badly. Since Menelaus failed to come to their aid, they decide to make him suffer by killing his wife, Helen. Better yet, they decide to take Menelaus’ little daughter Hermione hostage. Better yet, if all must die, why not burn down the ancestral home? Why go out in a metaphorical blaze of glory when you can have the real thing?

It’s a descent into nightmare.

Orestes blames everyone but himself for his predicament. The succession runs from the god Apollo to his uncle Menelaus and then on to his grandfather Tyndareus and his mother, Clytemnestra. Orestes’ reasoning is so ironic, his lines appall you while making you laugh.

There are wonders in the play.

With no tragic conception to emphasize, the chorus no longer has a role and is nuisance. Euripides makes it a nuisance — a chorus of women, who are threatening to awaken Orestes with their singing and must be hushed by Electra.

And there’s the breathless speech of the terrified Phrygian slave, reporting on the attempt to kill Helen, given in the broken Greek of a barbarian. Here’s a sample:

 

Into palace

a pride of lions, Greekers, twins;

One of general Agamemnon, son;

other Pylades, man of plots, evil, bad;

loyal, yes, and bold, bold,

skills for war, and killer-snake.

God darn him dead

for plotty sneaks,

I hope.

 

It’s marvelous. I could imagine a genre of poetry in that style.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Orestes is on pp. 366-71. Orestes, translated by William Arrowsmith, is in Euripides IV in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 105-208. The quotation is on p. 191.

Rooting for reason

 Greek tragedy is filled with wonderful lines that might or might not have a bearing on the theme of the play. Some are just surprising asides. In Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis, Achilles tried to reassure Clytemnestra that everything would be all right. 

Achilles

Reason can wrestle

and overthrow terror.

 

Clytemnestra

My hopes are cold on that.

 

I’m rooting for reason today. I think Donald Trump will go down in history as the person who urged an attack on the American Capitol, trying to stay in power after losing an election. He never did — and will never do — anything more significant than that.

If you haven’t voted, now’s the time.

• Source: Euripides, Iphigeneia at Aulis, translated by Charles R. Walker, is in Euripides IV in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 209-307. The quotation is on p. 240.